Thursday, October 7, 2010

Protection Warrior builds

I've been having some trouble deciding where I want to put my final talent points in my Warrior's Protection tree. I've decided on glyphs and after having done research and critical thinking of my own, this is what turns out to be my cookie-cutter spec:

That leaves me with 4 points left to spend.  The choices are:

Originally, the first 3 seemed like no-brainers to me. Why wouldn't I get them? Then after further thought, I realized Concussion Blow would be totally useless against both bosses and trash.  Bosses can't be stunned, and one stun won't help me against trash packs - Shockwave is the tool to use there.  I guess it might be useful if I needed some time to recover threat from one lone mob pounding on my healer or DPS, but that would be pretty situational, and 2 of our 3 charges have stuns already.  The main reason to pick up Concussion Blow would be for the access to Vigilance.

But - how useful is Vigilance? It's entire purpose is to help generate more threat. At this point I don't know how well I'll be able to hold threat at level 80 and so I can't get a full grasp on its limitations. The Taunt cooldown refresh seems useless, though, as I don't see myself needing to use it more often than it comes off cooldown in the first place. I figure if I'm a good tank, the DPS wouldn't come close to my threat anyways, and that extra 10% will be negligible.

Improved Disciplines is simply for the reduced cooldown on Shield Wall, dropping it from a 5-minute cooldown to a 4-minute one, which is situational at best. In truth, this talent confuses me a little. Recklessness and Retaliation are only usable in either Battle Stance or Berserker Stance, neither of which I will be using while tanking, which leads me to think this is a PvP talent more than a PvE one. However, the talent is pretty far down the Protection tree, and I don't imagine Arms or Fury Warriors going that deep into it to pick it up. So my conclusion is that this talent is purely in favor of PvP stance-dancing.

At this point, however, I've decided I would skip Deep Wounds in favor for the other talents, giving me a temporary spec that looks like this:
Warrior (12/3/56)

Once I have geared some more and have become more comfortable with my threat-generation and damage mitigation, I will switch to Deep Wounds for this final spec:
Warrior (15/3/53)

PvP
PvP's obviously a different story, and I have been having trouble deciding whether I want to spend my remaining points in the Arms tree or the Fury tree.  This is the spec I am leaning toward:
Warrior (15/3/53)

But, there is an alternative spec that has also caught my attention.
Warrior (2/14/53) with 2 floater points.

The main reason for this last spec is Blood Craze.  Being a class without healing capability except for Enraged Regeneration every 3 minutes, I feel like this ability should be a must.  However, I cannot help but wonder how much of my reasoning is affected by my experience as a Moonkin.  I'm used to being dependent on constant healing for survival, and on my Warrior I often find myself at a loss when my health is dropping, having no way to regain it, except by using Intimidating Shout and bandaging - though this is useless if there are any DoTs on me.

I'll have to see when I'm level 80 and have PvPed for a longer amount of time.  I will start with the first spec, and switch to the second if I feel I am not surviving as much as I should (though that seems a little contradictory seeing as I am a Protection Warrior).

In the meantime.. I should get my ass to 80, now shouldn't I? ;)

Cheers.

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