I’ve been doing a lot of research and I think that with all of the changes to the class as a whole my brain has imploded.  After my fifth of sixth iteration of a tanking spec, I have decided that this is the build I’m going to be using for main tanking at level 80.

Titan’s Grip with Last Stand and Shield Mastery.  Awwww yeah.

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With the 3.0 patch looming on the horizon I am looking at my talent spec and thinking, “what am I going to do?”  I’ve have a pretty solid idea of what my level 80 spec is going to be, but my level 70 spec is another matter entirely.  The truth of the matter is that there are so many amazing new talents in the Fury and Protection tree that I end up going crazy and pulling my hair out trying to decide which ones I want.

• The Defensive Build (5/3/53). Since I’m the main tank for my guild and we’re going to still be taking on new content once the patch hits, this is definitely the spec I’m going to be taking.  I’m giving up five points in Cruelty to pick up five points in Parry and thus keep my avoidance up but I still get the myriad of excellent threat and survivability talents in the Protection tree.  I purposefully left out Vigilance, Concussion Blow and Improved Spell Reflect.  While these are talents I really want to pick up as I level, I want to see how the gave has changed before putting points into them at level 70.

• The Offensive Build (0/8/53). The same as the defensive build above but dropping the five points in parry to keep five points in Cruelty.  I imagine this being the build for OTs until the release of the expansion because of the higher threat that could be generated via the additional critical strike chance.

What’s your level 70 tanking build going to be like and why?

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I said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a good day to be a Protection-specced Warrior. Blizzard is giving us so much love that I hardly even notice the nerf to Vigilance.

This was a post about the Glyph of Resonating Power which in past builds was going to double the amount of targets Thunder Clap would hit from four to eight and I was excited but this is something else:

It’s not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that’s another topic.

Ghostcrawler here is telling us that it’s been changed to increase the radius of Thunder Clap and seems to be eluding to the fact that they are going to be removing the target limit from Thunder Clap.  This is amazing news!

This next post is about the fact that no one seems to be using Revenge anymore in tanking rotations on the Beta servers.  Apparently Devastate procs Sword and Board so much (and Revenge’s damage hasn’t been buff enough) that Revenge, previously our best threat-to-rage ability, is sitting around not being used.  Blizzard solution:

We will probably add Revenge to S+B to make sure it gets used more (and might buff it’s AP coefficient a tad).

Revenge possibly proccing Sword and Board for even more Shield Slams!?  Finally we’re going to be bashing stuff with our shield continually.  I love it!

All of these changes are really making me excited to stay Protection-specced in the expansion.

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Note: This post will be obsolete come the next beta build. Armored to the Teeth has been changed from Strength to Attack Power, making a decent threat talent but no longer giving any of the previous survivability bonuses.

With all of the changes coming out in 3.0 and the expansion, it’s a great time to be a protection warrior.  We’ve gotten a lot of buffs, tons of our old problems are being solved and we’re getting some neat tricks to use.

Recently we’ve seen the addition of Armored to the Teeth which is a talent that all warriors, regardless of spec, are now drooling over.  With 3/3 points in the talent, we’ll be getting three points of strength for every 400 points of armor.  Since strength is going to be on all of our gear and nearly every single tanking ability will scale with attack power, this could mean huge gains for us protection-specced warriors!

If you look at my armory page you’ll notice I have 18,415 armor unbuffed.  If you take 18,415 and divide by 400 you get 46 (rounded down), multiply that by three and you get 138 added strength!  That’s more damage absorbed during a block, more attack power which means more threat and more damage output.  Keep in mind this is only looking  level 70 T5/T6 gear levels, T8 and T9 are going to get down-right ridiculous.

If we look at the armor difference between the Tankatronic Goggles and the new level 450 Engineering goggles, the Armored Titanium Goggles, you’ll see that there is a 71% armor increase between the two.  Now, if we assume that this is the normal armor increase from level 70 gear to level 80 gear then we’ll see an approximate 236 stength assuming the warrior is in gear equivalent to what I’m wearing now.

Those are huge increases, it means great things and for a measly three talent points?  Yes, please.

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