Not tanking - how to maximize dps?

So during certain encounters, such as Gruul for example, I do not mt and have to contribute via dps. (We have enough heals and I just overheal the mt when I am put into the healing people).

My 2 questions are:

1) how do I maximize dps - is it through spell damage, attack power, and/or strength?

2) should I equip a 2h weap or (because of our 1h talent spec which I have maxed) a 1h weap?

Are you horde or alliance?

if you're alliance, I have no idea. Probably doing interleaving of SoV/SoR, but I can't imagine that'd work well for Gruul. You'll likely have to go max spelldamage and do as much as you can.

If you're horde, it's grabbing your ret gear and a big sword and using SoB.

You could try wearing ret gear and a 2 hander but you wont be doing much dps and you would need to be healed by the cave-ins or taking time healing yourself. On gruuls I find I'm much more usefull healing the melee dps and the healers that are close to me, they can relax knowing that someone is looking after them as they heal the tanks. With good healing gear you make a better healer than a DPS when speced as prot.
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There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that do not.

[Nightfall]

Step 1) Craft a Nightfall two-handed axe from Thorium Brotherhood rep, or have someone craft it for you. Warning: It requires Molten Core materials.

Step 2) Strap on your ret set, maximize your strength/AP.

Step 3) Equip Nightfall, judge Wisdom, and seal Crusader.

Step 4) Swing Nightfall with abandon, refresh seal every 30 seconds.

Step 5) Laugh at your pitiful personal DPS.

Step 6) Marvel at the spell damage buff and mana return your caster DPS get.
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I am the shield that guards the realms of men.

Anyone have any hard numbers on the proc rate of nightfall?

We normally run with around 8 spell casters in our raids who are doing around the 800-1k DPS mark.

So just working it in my head, the overall caster DPS increase per debuff uptime / min is roughly:

* 60 secs (100%) (12 ppm) = 1200 DPS
* 30 secs (50%) (6 ppm) = 600 DPS
* 15 secs (25%) (3 ppm) = 300 DPS
* 10 secs (16%) ( 2 ppm) = 200 DPS
* 5 secs (8%) (1ppm) = 100 DPS

So does anyone have an idea of the number of PPM with a pally using say SotC (40% haste effect)? I'm trying to decide whether to seriously consider farming MC/auction house for the mats.
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[url=http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Khaz'goroth&n=bubblecannon][/url]

wouldn't BC bosses be immune to this effect?
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End of the day, I figure as prot spec pally in dps gear I could maybe average 300 DPS on a long fight with this weapon using SotC? (would really need to check it out)

If I'm in tank gear, I'd get what maybe 150 DPS?

However, I'm only losing say 50 or so flat DPS using this over using Gorehowl (again just gut estimates, I'll have to check the numbers out). So if sacrificing maybe 100 DPS for me, generates at least twice that it's a win. Especially as I'll be providing either a JoL or JoW as well (our ret pally is still gearing up).

If the debuff is up for more than 10 secs > min, it's a clear win if I'm in tank gear.

If the debuff is up for more than 15 secs > min, it's a clear win if I'm in DPS gear.

If the debuff is up for 20+ secs > min (ie. 4 ppm) then it's simply uber.

However, as this was designed for 40 man raids back when there was a lot more casters, I find it hard to believe it procs that often.

If nobody has any hard numbers I'm going to farm the mats and get one made to test it out. It certainly has potential, and on world bosses could be quite uber.
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[url=http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Khaz'goroth&n=bubblecannon][/url]

was seriously thinking about this the other day, any moore ppl with experiences on the Nightfall matter?
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I use Nightfall basically any time I'm not tanking. That includes on trash pulls after my mob is dead or if we don't need anything offtanked.

I don't have any raw data to base my perceptions on, but it seems to proc fairly frequently. It definitely procs more than twice per minute on average with SotC up. It also has no internal cooldown and can proc again while Spell Vulnerability is still on the mob.

Sometimes I get lucky streaks and it's up for almost half the fight (this is usually where the shadow priest pulls aggro and dies). At other times, I can go over a minute with no procs. However, it usually procs at a fairly reasonable rate that makes the sacrifice of my personal dps well worth it.
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oh dear what are the odds of getting someone to craft nightfall...
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This is what I do as an Alliance pally.

Spec
I'm doing the vanilla 0/49/12, except that I took out a point from improved judgement to put in SoC. My threat output is barely affected since I just need my judgement+reseal to be 1sec earlier than holy shield cooldown to maximize threat cycle. Being 2 sec earlier only gives me bigger margin of error with GCDs. You can look at my spec too, but I have moved 2 points from my usual spell warding into stoicism to resist some stuns during Hyjal trash waves.

Gear
After I got myself the Jin'rohk 2h sword from Zul'Jin, I went a bit crazy with ret gear collection which netted me a set of all epic ret pieces, badge libram, a mix of some s1 gear, craftables, and off-set DPS plates from raids. I gemmed and enchanted them as well since I do arena as ret with friends on off-raid days.

Execution
Use item rack to switch to DPS gear for fights that you don't need to tank when you are out of combat. Swapping only the weapon and libram in combat is not going to get your DPS anywhere, so you can forget about doing it "ad-hoc" feral druid style. Judge wisdom or light, and keep it up with SoC DPS. You will do comparable DPS of a prot warrior duel wielding and DPSing. When you are DPSing in full DPS gear, be ready to swap to your item rack set of tanking shield+weapon+libram if things go messy and you need to pickup something to tank.


Feedback
Is it more efficient than healing? Not really, a prot pally backup healing in full epics is still more efficient (i.e., closer to performance of the correct spec "real deal") than DPSing, especially if the boss is not fully on farm yet and you still need to worry more about survival than farming the run faster. A prot pally in full healing gear spamming FoLs and occassional HLs does help out your healers a lot. But is DPSing more fun? Hell, yes. Nothing makes you feel more like a "paladin" than wacking away at something with a huge 2h hammer, swapping through librams (TBC opening movie style), and throwing flash heals here and there.
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