2.1.0 Patch Notes

[Concillian]

I didn't run Kara w/ the Prot build. I ran most of last fridy morning as a 5/15/41 build. I was doing about 400DPS duel-wielding in instances with WF totem. I swapped back to 0/43/18 in the afternoon and was doing near 500DPS with the same crew of people. At the time I had about 1370AP, 10%Hit, 19%Crit and I use Vindicator's Brand Main Hand and Latro's Shifting Sword Offhand.

Sorry, I was confused, I thought you meant Kara when you talked to me before. It should be noted that raid DPS will generally improve just from having more time with more sunders than in a normal 5-man. The difference between 0 sunder and 5 sunders is about 90DPS in full devastate spam mode (35 per sunder * 5 /1.5 = 117 * 0.75 (armor) = 88 DPS

Fury should also have similar "wind up" issues though, as you need time to get rampage maxed, though 250AP is probably more like 40 DPS instead of 80-90 that 5 sunders is, so it's a little better "right off the bat".

In my DPS gear, the change to devastate would bring 5x sunder devastate damage for me from 550 (before armor) to 812 (before armor) if you go with 5/5 DW spec, 5/5 commanding, and the DPS talents in prot. This is ~175 DPS improvement... though less in actuality due to armor.
As a comparison, in the same gear with rampage and imp berserker stance AP buffs put BT damage at 1063 per 6 seconds... a TOTAL of 177 DPS... though my weapons are pretty much ideal for this kind of talent usage (MH 2.7 speed epic macecrafter mace / OH 2.6 speed epic Aldor reward).
Anyway you slice it this change is pretty huge. I was on the verge of switching prot just for the added utility anyway. Now I can't help but switch. My DPS should be equivalent or better to what it is now and my 5-man usage should be much, much more flexible.

And yes, with WF totem, the prot build will have more rage than they know what to do with, while the fury build has a few more options on where to spend it. The prot build is very rage efficient, with much better rage per damage than bloodthirst, but it takes 2 GCDs before you get damage equal to 1 bloodthirst, so you run out of GCDs and then Fury starts pulling ahead. With the devastate change, prot gets better scaling with AP and maxed cooldown usage. I'm working through some of the changes now to figure out how much the effect is. Fury also receives a flurry nerf in comparing the two directly.