Hey guys, hope everyone had a nice Hallmark holiday!
Anyway, I've been playing my prot warrior for about 2 years now, so I'm pretty competent on how to play the class, even with all the changes that came with Cataclysm. Unfortunately, as i've been perusing the forums, i keep seeing prot warriors saying they have been posting numbers up in the ranges of 8k-12k DPS on a regular basis. Now, my warrior (you can click the link in my sig) is fairly well geared, with basically all of the best gear I can get pre-raiding (aside from BoE drops from trash runs -- i don't have the money to spend 30k on a Soul Blade), but even with this, i'm normally only pulling around 4k-5k in heroics unless it's an AoE pull (such as the ones in VP with the millions of little elementals that come with the Cloud Princes -- i can pull up to 20k on those).
Now i know that I'm prot, and that keeping threat is my main focus over doing high DPS, but i've run into a few heroic pugs with highly geared players (who can pull upwards of 17k on a single boss battle such as Rajh) pulling off me as if i'm not even there. Is there anything I can be doing better in order to up my DPS so that my threat can keep up with these sorts of players?
Usually I open up with a Commanding Shout > Heroic Throw > Charge > Shield Block+S-Slam > Revenge > Rend > Devastate (till S-Slam > Revenge come off CD). On top of this, i have Inner Rage macro'd to Heroic Strike, and will use Heroic Strike almost on spam if i have the rage generation to support it. Even so, I usually can only pull about 5k on bosses. What should I be doing differently?