Tanking Warrior Guide
For a Warrior Talent Guide for 1 - 70 click here.
Warrior Tank Guide by Cardaxar
Originally posted on the Official WoW Guide Forums on 8-24-2006
This is older but still applicable to Warriors as a class guide.(continued)
# b) Talents
Arms Talents:
# Deflection: Increases your parry by 1% for each point. This is an excellent talent for mitigation, and if you are heading that way, you really should get this. Your base parry % is 5, and this doubles it. Parrying 5% more of hits is really nice.
# Improved Heroic Strike: This talent can be very good if you have the points to use it. Reducing your HS per 3 rage points may not seem like a lot, but at the start of fights or while killing trash it becomes quite clear that it has a great function. Remember that there is absolutely no fight with unlimited rage other than Vaelastrasz, and as you reach more mitigation through gear, it becomes harder and harder to obtain rage off trash mobs. With this talent, every 4 Heroic Strikes that you perform you would gain a "free" HS, although this is not the most important thing from the 12 rage Heroic strikes, but is quite a nice bonus. In my opinion, what makes this and Improved Sunder Armor good talents is at the very beginning of fights, where you need to create threat as quickly as possible to not lose it to a "lucky" rogue who just ambushed for 2200.
# Tactical Mastery: I would not recommend maxing this and then not getting Anger Management, but once they decide to fix Anger Management, you will have to reconsider your points. Right now I have this maxed and got Anger Management, and it's a nice talent where you'll probably want to keep a few points even without Anger Management. Switching stances is necessary in some fights, whether OT or MT (as MT mostly just for Berserker Rage) and having some rage left to do something with is usually good. I would probably put at least 3 points in this just so you can use Sunder Armor after switching stances.
# Anger Management: In it's current form, this talent is great, you'll love it, and for now, I'll just explain how it works in it's current form. To make it easy, you know how rage decays when you're out of combat in bumps of 3 or 2 rage? Well, During combat, your rage still decays, simply those bumps are reduced to 0 so it looks like it's not decaying. What this talent does is reduce the decay by 1 point, so in combat the bumps are not 0 anymore, but actually 1, and your rage will INCREASE every bump. So, before it is fixed, as in it's current form, this talent is really worthwhile and you'll be using it a lot, especially while the raid leader is explaining strategy or groups are getting buffed. You can simply lock yourself into combat with bloodrage and use this to not lose any rage and even increase it before you go.
Fury Talents:
Before going into the talents themselves, there are some good talents in this build which will help you maintain more threat. The problem with fury is, that it needs gear to work well, and to tell you the truth, when you're tanking you're also trying to mitigate damage. Enrage should never pop on you, you shouldn't get critted. Your critical strikes will be around 10%, so Flurry won't trigger that much ( Sunder Armor can't even crit either, although white hits can). Death Wish is a difficult card to play and won't be useful in all situations, because again, you're trying to mitigate as well as maintain threat. Personally, I will stay Protection for tanking, it offers more mitigation, and someone skilled can hold threat perfectly with a Protection build.
# Cruelty: Increases your critical strikes by 1% per point. Very nice even for a tank, because not all that you'll be doing is mitigating damage, you need to hold aggro as well. This is not a breaking talent, you can pass on it and I've used builds that didn't have it in and worked just fine, but that's because Skill > Talent Build. IT is a nice bump, and those crits will help every now and then, not to mention that they will give you extra rage, so I'd use it.
# Improved Demoralizing Shout & Unbridled Wrath: If you decide to go deeper in the tree, whatever you pick, Unbridled Wrath or this, it won't matter much. This, I guess, would be the mitigating talent, and Unbridled the Threat talent, but the bonuses of each are quite slim, so you won't notice huge differences whichever you pick. Unbridled can give you an extra point of rage for the start of fights if it triggers, which can be quite useful at those points, but that's about it.
# Piercing Howl: Causes all enemies near the warrior to be dazed for 6sec. Useful for certain fights, like Razorgore, depending on the strategy of your guild. I don't have this anymore and I don't really miss it, but it's not a bad talent.
