WoW warrior talent builds

Once upon a time, when World of Warcraft was young, choosing a talent build for my first character on the European servers, a warrior, was easy. While there were three branches of the talent tree, only the arms tree had an extra attack top talent, mortal strike, and the other two branches had very bad top level talents. So nearly every warrior put the majority of his talent points into the arms tree, and so did I: 31 points in arms, 5 points if fury, and 15 points in protection. I leveled up all the way to 60 being mostly arms spec'd.

Then patch 1.60 did a complete revamp of the warrior talent tree, and gave a good extra attack talent to every branch of the tree. So because protection now had shield slam, I just put 11 points in arms to get tactical mastery, 5 points in fury, and 35 points in protection. At that time I was in a small guild, and often served a tank for guild groups to 5-man dungeons or 10-man raids, and being protection spec'd was perfect for that.

But then my warrior semi-retired, because I got sick and tired of always standing around unable to start a group because there was no healer available. I made a priest, and that one became my "main". Later I changed to a raiding guild, and they invited me as a priest, having too many warriors already. Especially as a tank there was no future, because like in many raiding guilds there was a limited "tank list", because it is so important to have a few very well equipped tanks instead of lots of mediocre ones for a raid.

If you don't tank anywhere, a protection build is pretty bad. So I changed to a dual-wielding fury build, to get into the occasional small raid as dps warrior, for solo grinding, and for a bit of PvP. It soon became obvious that I didn't enjoy being a dps warrior in a raid, so I didn't do it very often, but I kept the build.

Patch 2.0 again totally revamped the warrior talent tree, plus made it a lot easier to achieve epic items by PvP. So now I went back to an arms build, with mortal strike again, and the new top talent endless rage. This worked pretty well for PvP, and I grinded my way up to a High Warlord's Bludgeon, an epic one-handed mace with nearly 60 dps. I kept this spec when Burning Crusade came out, and picked up a Hellreaver polearm in Hellfire Ramparts. I soloed quests a bit using that weapon, and now I'm level 61. In the few Hellfire Ramparts runs I did, I used the epic PvP mace and shield for "tanking".

But somehow tanking without a protection talent build doesn't feel right. I like tanking, and I like 5-man instance groups, even if you can't do those all day. And so I'm thinking of changing specs again, moving towards a build with the majority of points in protection. The problem with this plan is that I'm a bit worried that by making myself a great tank I'm gimping myself for soloing. I'll need to play around with a talent calculator to find a good build. I'm sure I want to take protection at least until shield slam, but I'm not sure whether I should take focused rage and devastate as well, and then have very few points left for arms and fury. Anybody here tried a build with 41+ points in protection and can tell me whether leveling up soloing is still viable? Which low-level arms and fury talents would you consider to be essential? Right now I'm only level 61, so I only have 52 points to spend.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link