Originally Posted by
Gandrake
people who will tell you that you need to switch to arms are funny
a warrior who wanted to provide you with the best leveling experience would tell you to play prot, because there is no point in being warrior dps until you get colossus smash and nice trinkets. Protection Warriors will do more or equal DPS and have the better survivability.
but as a DPS Warrior you should be in Battle Stance, no matter what level you are. You switch to Berserker if there is large damage that is consistently dropped on the group or specifically on you and you will easily recover from. Defensive Stance is to pop cooldowns and avoid dying to damage that would otherwise kill you.
Honestly, TG looks cool and all but at low level it's like ninjas with katanas on their backs - cool, but impractical (the reason behind that is that a ninja could not easily unsheath a katana from the back). I leveled my second Warrior and SMF was the way to go. The amounts of strength you will need for TG to outweigh SMF's passive damage bonus won't be available to you for a long time, probably not until Cataclysm zones.
SMF is what I'd recommend up until you start doing level 90 heroics, where it will then be a matter of preference concerning performance.
Low level warrior dps is shit, it does not matter what kind of player you are (you could take warriors from top 5 guilds and get them, to play them at low lvl and they would still do crap non-gimmick dps lol). You should not worry about it, and if you are, you should just play protection for free dungeon queues and superior dps for most of your experience as a Warrior.
You can play a DPS spec if you really want to, but I play on a PvP server and the sheer lack of survivability the specs have to other class specializations just feels blatantly slanted, like Warriors are pigeonholed into tanking. Not to say that you can't play a DPS specialization and if you are on a PvE server, then more power to you. But I strongly believe that playing protection will offer an optimal leveling/class experience until 81+.