I’m leaning towards a build such as this one for my warrior at 70. Warrior (11/0/50) – World of Warcraft. (Almost) everyone swears by Cruelty but I’m not really willing to spend the 5 points there. I may play around with builds that include it at 70. I would consider dropping two points in One Handed Weapon Specialization for the Improved Taunt.
On a side note, I did some solo questing on my warrior yesterday trying to catch up to the rest of the group. Dang but solo questing on a protection warrior sucks. I don’t think I’ll level a protection warrior again. With my protection specced paladin the ideal situation is to round up a half dozen or so mobs at once and have them beat themselves to death against my defenses. With my protection warrior fighting the same mobs as those I beat easily on my paladin I can beat one – if another shows up, I’m toast. My paladin also has a number of “Oh Crap” buttons – bubble, lay on hands, even just a plain heal or a potion. My warrior has one potion and that’s it (unless my half-hour cooldown happens to be up and I remember to use it).
Warriors beat paladins on flexibility when tanking – my warrior can move mobs around for best positioning, easily pick up any mobs headed for the squishies, briefly neutralize casters, and so on. Given equal skill levels and gear, I would prefer to have a warrior for tanking a boss and a paladin for tanking trash. For questing, there no question that a prot paladin beats a prot warrior any day of the week. If I decided that I HAD to have a warrior for endgame again, I would level my warrior down the arms tree and respec at 70.
EDIT: I might also go for a build like this one Warrior (14/0/47) – World of Warcraft dropping Tactical mastery for improved heroic strikes. Or get improved one handed weapons with only 1 point in the heroic strikes? There’s also the possibility of swapping out the improved heroic strikes for cruelty. This comes after reading You’ve got talents – though I love my silencing shield bash for maneuvering caster mobs.
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#1 by Rochelle on 1/7/2008 - 3:49 pm
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First off, I can’t actually look at that talent build since I am reading this from work so I can only guess and go on what your comments are. That said, “(Almost) everyone swears by Cruelty” because it really is that good. If you are tanking, you #1 job is threat. If the boss isn’t hitting you, it doesn’t matter how much HP or armor or avoidance you have. One handed specialization is vital for the same reason.
Re: shield bash. The reason improved shield bash is awful depends entirely on caster cooldowns. Get a priest alt or a priest friend to mind control some mobs that are casters. You will see that whenever a mob has spell it almost always has a longish cooldown. The way interrupt mechanics work with NPCs is that once the spell starts casting, the cooldown triggers whether the spell finishes or not. So if you interrupt a spell with a shield bash, you get a 6 second silence plus however long the cooldown on that spell is. But if you try to preemptively silence with Imp SB, then the spell never got cast in the first place and never went on CD so that the instant the silence ends, the mob is going to start casting and now you can’t interrupt it because your SB is on CD. So really, trying to use Imp SB to silence a mob leaves you worse off in the long run. If you want to silence, just get better at timing regular SB.
Like I said in the beginning of my article, my discussion of talents was really how they pertain to raid bosses. But getting things like cruelty and 1-hand spec will help you wil everything. Your spec might be good for whatever it is you are doing, but I gaurantee that with 5/5 Cruelty and 5/5 1-hand spec you will be better.
#2 by Joel on 1/7/2008 - 6:52 pm
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Wow, I didn’t expect a response – mostly I was making notes for myself. I keep trying but I just can’t spec with cruelty. Due to bad childhood experiences playing Risk with my brother, I have a distrust of probabilities. “One-in-a-million chances crop up nine times out of ten.” I know the whole game is random numbers, but Cruelty crosses some kind of tolerance threshold for me.
Here’s the closest I can come. http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LAMczZZbEtoI0zfIst A rereading of Rochelle’s post has convinced me that I should be able to get away without the improved shield bash. I’ve dropped Improved Heroic Strike and Improved Shield Bash to top off my One Hand Weapon Specialization and get 3 points in cruelty. I’m currently level 65 so it’ll be a bit before I get there. I’m running 5 mans with a mage/hunter/warlock/holy paladin group so I need lots of rage for my threat generation.
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