Paladins...is it as bad as they say?

[Kevin]

While heroic strike damage may be pretty minimal, I never use it solo, ever because it's so horribl rage inefficient.  It takes almost as much rage as shield slam but does 1/5th the damage or less.  Pretty much ANY other skill is a better rage dump than HS, mostly because everything else gives an additional chance at triggering overpower. 
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So I wanted to test. I was down in Un'Goro beating on fire elementals while hunting Rich Thorium. I would do my best to have a 2:1 Herioc Strike:Shield Slam ratio on each mob (generally not hard to do) so that armor and level difference would even out. Using recap here are the numbers. I was in Battle stance for everything (generally opened with a charge for the 15 rage).

HS: 56 hits, 15410 damage (0 misses). 14 crits (25% crit rate).
SS: 29 hits, 11531 damage (0 misses). 7 crits (24.2% crit rate)
Normal attack: 289 hits, 44016 damage (15 misses), 48 crits (16.6%)

So HS average damage is 275.2
Slam is 397.6
Auto-Attack is 152.3

So HS does 122.9 more damage than AA. That is 8.2 damage/rage for me.
SS does 13.25 damage/rage

In all that time I got 7 overpower hits and 1 overpower miss. No crits. I took an overpower whenever I could. I always tried to keep 5 rage, but I would burn rage as soon as I cound on any attack.

So overpower as extra damage is really pretty much not there for me, like I suspected. I did 55% of my damage from regular melee attacks, 19% for HS, 14% from slam and 10% from execute. 94.8 DPS over all the fights for those who care, sword and board the whole time.

So yeah, not using Heroic strike is a good idea which pretty much all warriors know, but shield slam is still only moderate damage per rage and while all warrior attacks are more consistent damage than a paladins (and I've never tried to contend otherwise), I don't think a retribution/holy paladin's average damage is that far behind a protection warriors average damage. My paladin is still only L47 so I can't really do a fair test. Of course my test above had nothing to do with damage I could put out. It was a test of HS vs SS on my build. Improved HS would have put me up to 9.45 damage/rage on it, not a huge improvement either. :)

I would need to use my 2 hander with swaps to sword and board for a slam to see about what my real average DPS would be when really trying to do damage. I can't really see any other skills to dump rage in that would have much of an effect on upping my damage other than execute and since most farming mobs don't have that my HP saving for 100 rage executes doesn't look to be the best way for maximizing damage. A 15 rage execute on the last 20% of most mobs HP is generally good enough to finish them, or get them to a point where another swing will do it. I would also want to try and have 2+ mobs by me all the time for cleave and whirlwind extra damage but I don't have tactical mastery or anger management so my damage will be slowed compared to some protection builds. Of course the extra down time of the multimob pulls might counter the higher DPS of my multi target attacks. I may test that later. I just wanted to get some numbers from my build for heroic strike vs sheild slam was all. Wasn't really trying to prove any points with this test. Just confirming what most warriors know. Heroic Strike sucks. :)