Getting the best dps out of non tanking prot pally

[Calgacus 0]

No name for this that I know of

Holy Pallys doing best damage used to be maybe still are shockadins which I'm told are no longer viable and pally healing is not that hot anymore

Im trying to create a prot pally that can kick out some serious dps not in the role of a tank just for soloing really and maybe the odd dungeon as dps

First question I'm usually asked is why?   Why not ..its a challenge and a change and I already have a ret pally

Im guessing it will not be as simple as getting a prot pally and applyin g all the ret advice to it as the talents are different

 

Ideally Im  looking for all the advice icy-veins gives for characters being played in their intended roles

any and all constructive suggestions will be appreciated.

 

 

[magicman 0]

The short answer is that you can't really build a tank spec as a pure damage dealer.  I mean with the right legendary and covenant choices, prot pallies are capable of doing a lot of burst damage... for a tank class anyway.  However, Prot Pally is never going to be something you can really use just for DPS in a group PVE scenario of any kind.  Your maximum possible DPS will be far, FAR lower than ret spec, and since you are a tank, you have massively increased threat generation. This effect is baseline for all tank specs and can NOT be disabled (in the days of old, Paladins used to be able to "turn on" and "turn off" their extra threat multiplier at will by enabling or disabling their Righteous Fury buff, but this is no longer a useable ability and all the extra threat is just baked in to being a tank spec toon).  

This increased threat means that even if somehow you were able to do a great amount of damage, it would ensure that you would end up pulling threat constantly off of your actual tank.  You will end up tanking all the enemies yourself, at which point you will need to be able to survive and not just think like a DPS, because the other tank is unlikely to be able to consistently hold threat on the enemies with you constantly pulling aggro with your ~500% increased threat. 

So the long answer is that the more DPS  you do when in a tank specialization, the more likely that you are actually going to be tanking the mobs you are fighting.  When you have 2 tanks the one doing more DPS takes all the threat eventually.  In order to not do so, you'd have to do less DPS than your main tank.  And if you are doing less DPS than the tank, then you aren't being an effective DPS player at all.  

So its just something that you can't really do in group PVE content.  Cool idea in theory but in practice it is just not possible.  It would only work for soloing; when doing solo content, playing a tank spec that can do a lot of DPS is actually very powerful because you just faceroll everything you fight and never take damage no matter how many mobs you pull.