The Care and Feeding of Warriors: If you build it...

Every week Matthew Rossi brings to life The Care and Feeding of Warriors, a column meant to help our friends and even sometimes our enemies, the women and men who don't know which end of a prayerbook is which, couldn't backstab you if you turned around and wore a target on your spine, and who think Arcane Brilliance really should make them glow in the dark.

Last week, we talked about builds. This week, we'll look at a few first hand. I do think, in general, that many warriors are feeling the pinch between speccing for as much tanking viability as possible and having talents and abilities that allow them to grind and solo/quest in a timely fashion. I definitely think there's an entire column to be had in discussing this factor, but for now I'll just say that I am attempting in selecting these specs to err on the side of overall viability. I may have skipped a few obvious talents for ones that I thought helped provide more general ability, and I especially welcome commentary and suggestions.

This build is a tanking build aimed at trying to maximize AoE tanking. It's heavy in protection, but goes up eight points in arms to get Improved Thunderclap. Back before The Burning Crusade, a main tank would often have to request that one of the arms or fury warriors in a raid could switch into Battle Stance from time to time to keep a heavily-melee oriented boss like Chromaggus or Garr slowed, helping to reduce his damage. One of the more recent and more welcome changes was to make Thunder Clap work in defensive stance. As a result, improved TC now generates significant multi-mob threat on up to four targets, almost as good as Sunder and hitting more at once. Combining properly timed thunder claps with the tab-target sunder method and eventually Shield Slam, Devastate and Revenge can allow a tanking warrior with this build to more effectively glue mobs to him or herself. I find it works best on three mobs or less - juggling four mobs with this strategy requires very patient DPS and healing, but it can be workable. You could move points out of Cruelty in fury in order to get full Toughness or Improved Heroic Strike if you felt it was necessary, everyone's taste varies in these matters. Overall I find it to be a fairly effective build for tanking Heroic Shattered Halls and other instances with large trash pulls.

This build, on the other hand, is a much more subjective one based on three different builds I've seen used. It's a fury/protection hybrid build that aims for tanking in non-heroics as well as soloing/questing viability. It's not a good PvP build nor is it maximized for raid dps, although with points in Imp DW, Imp Berserker Stance and Rampage it should be capable of producing good DPS if geared properly. Any experienced warrior can probably tell you several different ways to tweak this build, from dropping points in fury to get deflection over in arms for better tanking to picking up Unbridled Wrath for more rage generation when dual wielding. (I personally don't care for UW, it never feels like it generates enough rage, but lots of other warriors disagree with me and I felt like I should respect their view enough to mention it.) A fury/prot tank is often underestimates because he lacks Shield Slam and other really nice high-mitigation talents later in the tree, but in my experience a fury warrior with Last Stand and Defiance is a capable MT in non-heroics and a good off-tank otherwise. It may demand more skill, but it certainly does work and has the added advantage of allowing for a lot more DPS when soloing.

Finally, we have a build suggested by several readers over the past week or so in comments and email. I tried it out on my tauren last week and while I really missed Blood Frenzy and Second Wind, it does seem to do what its partisans suggested it would do, namely allow for good PvP with decent tanking. Admittedly, my tauren's gear is pretty haphazard at this point, but I still did reasonably well in AV and Eye of the Storm and managed to tank Steamvaults afterwards. 31/5/25 is interesting because you don't get any of the 41 point talents, but it allows you to go deep enough into two trees to help increase your general viability. I went back to a full prot spec after, but if I PvP'd more I might keep this one.

Okay, that's enough on builds for one week, I think. I'm thinking next week we'll talk about how tanking has changed for warriors in The Burning Crusade.