What builds do prot wars like so far?

[Unix]

IMO shield spec gives a lot more rage than battle trance.
Shield spec gives an abundance of rage when you AoE tank. Reflecting a spell (lots of them in dungeons) fills up your rage bar as well.

[Kojiyama]

Brage, most people take Shield Spec because it is simply overpowered. It's basically infinite Rage when you use Shield Block and is the largest source of Rage through talents by a massive amount. It makes Heroic Strike and Inner Rage very easy to use.

(To be fair, I've argued on the beta forums that it is too strong, but GC had replied that he doesn't see why people view it as a semi-required talent. Unless they somewhat nerf it, I don't see many other talents being as strong. Battle Trance gives much less Rage per point, for instance, Shield Spec is controllable via Shield Block, and its power scales with our Mastery.)

About Thunderstruck, it's hard to get a feel for it. I'm not convinced that Warriors will actually be the ones keeping up Thunder Clap on bosses--as our version of the debuff is easily tied to the lowest TPS and highest opportunity cost of applying it.

In a single-target rotation, the biggest issue with the buff is that it only lasts 20 seconds. Thunder Clap lasts 30 seconds. So in order to get the Shockwave boost on a single target, you have to use Thunder Clap considerably more often, which probably negates any TPS boost from the Shockwave portion. So, sadly, I don't really see this being a single-target thing to do.

So, not sure I will pick up the talent or not. Perhaps if the passive bonus was a little stronger. 6% is a bit low. The only upshot is that if you get both AoE talents, Thunderstruck will boost the value of Blood and Thunder due to the Rend increase--however, I really don't like spending that many points on AoE talents unless we find out it is really needed.

[Brage]

Concerning Shield Spec: Yeah, doing the math i've noted how much rage you can get by our mastery and shield block. My thoughts were more in the line of it's necessity. I keep getting mixed reports on rage income; some say it's not an issue at all, others claim to be starved constantly and if the latter is the situation, then ofcourse Shield Spec is essential. But if we can maintain a solid rage flow while still having Inner Rage going, i don't see the point in getting Shield Spec.
My own experience from PTR stretches as far as 2 hours in a none-heroic and frankly, that didn't give much impression.

Concerning BnT: I find it to be quite a good tool actually. It's not a huge ammount of AoE threat, but then again it's not supposed to be. It's more of a convenience when AoE tanking, keeping up abit of threat on several mobs. But naturally you're not supposed to ignore actually tanking adds.
For singletarget tanking however, the talent is not worth the points for obvious reasons - uptime and tps.


Personally i'm gonna go with 2 prot builds while lvl'ing atleast - 1 for single target and another for multi target. I lvl'ed as prot in live and never had any issues. And come Cataclysm we're gonna see a vastly increased DPS output, so lvl'ing should be even easier than it is now.
Once we get a feel for heroics/raids and an idea of the tanking requirements, a single build might be viable.

[Kojiyama]

Well, as Inner Rage is a 50% increase in Rage costs, it's next to impossible to maintain it without some Rage-increasing talents. Shield Spec is the easiest way to maintain a high level of uptime, as the Rage intake is both large and controllable. (It also has nice synergy with Heavy Repercussions, since it means you can always afford Inner Rage when your Shield Slam will hit the hardest.)

[Unix]

@inner rage
Inner rage also boost the rage cost of non-damaging abilities such as shield bash and demo shout which really annoys me.
So to settle this I decided to bind a /cancelaura inner rage to all the skills that I do not want to have inner raged such as shield bash and demo shout.

[Brage]

Hmm, i wasn't aware that Inner Rage effected none-hostile skills aswell. That's changes shield spec's usefullness quite abit.

[Beleriond]

@Koyi: question from someone not (yet?) playing on PTR here. You keep mentioning the Shield Spec. Would that be the proposed single target spec you posted at the start of this thread?

[Kojiyama]

Specs have changed a little bit due to restructuring.

Probably something more like this:
Single Target/Boss: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LMZhbZIcGdRRozbu
AoE/Trash: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LMZhb0oZcfGdRRobbu

The Trash spec you could probably pull 1 point off of Shield Spec for Vigilance to make it more all-purpose.

Dunno, not many ways to spec anymore honestly!

[swelt]

You have hold the line in both of those specs. It's one I've been ignoring. Any particular rationale? (Just that it's a survival talent?)

Agree that there don't seem to be a lot of real choices, and I think that's part of the design (i.e. there is enough room to make choices just on personal preference without feeling you have done something 'wrong'). One that I wonder about is blood craze/field dressing. It seems like a no-brainer to get them, they will obviously increase survivability, but they do come at the expense of some fairly decent threat/rage talents. I wonder if we'll see 'threat builds' that drop blood craze for battle trance.

Until we see the encounters, it's all speculation of course. Piercing howl could be 'mandatory' or 'useless'

[Brage]

Field Dressing atleast might only be "mandatory" for the earlier stages of Cataclysm. Once healers are settled and gotten used to the new healing system and overall gear has gone up, we could probably move those points elsewhere. Atleast i'd like to, because i agree, there are some potentially god talents further up the trees.

[Kojiyama]

Just using Hold the Line because it's one of the few survival talents. In its current form, it's pretty skippable though. But survival is survival, I suppose.

Provided healing is tuned to be difficult in Cata overall--which will scale with content and gear--I don't see Field Dressing ever becoming optional. As long as healing and mana are a signficiant issue for healers, such a large passive seems like a no-brainer.

There may be a point when it isn't needed, but it's likely to be a long way off.

[Unix]

In AE tanking situations (3 mobs), Hold the Line has a rather high uptime. 10% crit and crit block for only 2 points isnt anything to sneeze at.

There are a lot of interruptable mobs in heroics so I am testing a build with rude interruptions.

Gag order is most likely where I would drop some points from if I want a boss tanking spec. It is nice to have heroic throw silences in instances but is usually pretty pointless in boss fights. In its place I can get safe guard or rude interruption: now that I can use safeguard on the other tank it may really save the day.

(wonder if they fixed the self-intervene bug yet)

[Onyxhorn]

I was reserving judgment on Hold the Line myself until 4.0 drops, but at this point I think I'll take it. Its usefulness will scale with both our Parry and Mastery scores, and as Jayde pointed out, it's survival, and we don't get many talent point options to increase survival. I was originally going to spec PVE Prot/Prot and still may end up doing so if one catch-all prot spec is deemed insufficient. However, I also plan on doing a lot more PVP on my warrior in Cata so at this point I'm going one PVE spec & one PVP:

PVE: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LMZhb...Rdbu:oV0casM0k
PVP: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LRbbZhZcfhdRRR0ruV0baookz

I want to test IV first hand. I agree the paper math on it is sketchy, I wouldn't use it on a trash pack...maybe on the last mob or in a DIRE emergency, but not likely. I think it has strong boss fight potential. By the time you get a raid boss to 20% you're typcally going to be in the final phase of the fight, which is when mechanics can get really crazy. With the glyph and FD, that VR is giving 9% of my total health, equivalent to Blood Craze, though unlike BC it does require a GCD. It's probably more due to the fact that we've been so self-heal starved for so long that the idea of getting it from anywhere seems too good to pass up to me. It'd be different if there was something I felt I was depriving myself of by not having IV. But in the end those 2 pts will probably end up in Incite, War Academy or Battle Trance... none of which are particularly awe-inspiring (to me, anyway. If someone else loves em, more power to ya!)

[Vorge]

My current test build at the moment consists of this spec: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LGZZIfGzRRodbu

The final three points are having a hard time finding allocation. 3 in Blood Craze could be nice for AOE tanking, however the healing is a pittance compared to the incoming damage on top of ticking HOTs on single-target boss fights. 2 in Gag Order might be nice for TPS adding Heroic Throw into the rotation consistently. 3 in Deep Wounds may increase TPS with ticking damage threat to stack on top of the rends you will have ticking on packs, cleave crits applying Deep Wounds will make it even nicer. Battle Trance sounds nice on paper, but I am skeptical to it's actual value in practical application, you never know, SnB procs may make it a worthwhile pickup.

Any thoughts?

[Tiny6701]

http://wowtal.com/#k=IeasuO1Z.a5o.warrior

Is the prot build I will be going with for cata. I guess the 2 points i put into Booming voice could go into rude interruptions or battle trance. Personally I really don't get why I see specs with people putting points into Incite and Impending Victory. Blood Craze and Field Dressings should more than enough make up to help out the healers in Cata. With Heroic Strike being added to the GCD I don't think we will be using it all that often we have enough to worry bout with our other TPS abilities. With Thunderstruck and Blood and Thunder those 2 talents should help us keep threat on 3 mobs 4 would be pushing it. Then again I'm a Tauren warrior and have Battle Stomp and I am also an engineer and use my Global Thermal Sapper Charges and we still have Challenging Shout. We have plenty of talents and utilities at our disposal to hold AoE threat on 3 mobs while still finding plenty of single target threat in our builds.

I don't see blizzard making us choose a AoE or single target build. They don't like that. They want every tank to be able to do every situation no matter what. I don't want to hinder myself or my guild by being able to do only one thing. My other spec is a fury spec. I do get to occasionally DPS. For those out there that do nothing but tank and want 2 separate specs for AoE and for single target there's no problem with that. I just don't think it will be very efficient.

[Dots]

PVE: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LMZhb...Rdbu:oV0casM0k

I've been using exactly the same spec on beta. Impending Victory certainly could be improved, but it is not totally useless. The main problem is that it is only available for such a short part of the fight, but it's pretty nice when you get to use it. Hopefully it will still be changed at some point to make it available before 20% (but also less often of course).

With Heroic Strike being added to the GCD I don't think we will be using it all that often we have enough to worry bout with our other TPS abilities.

Heroic Strike used to be on the GCD at some point, but it is not anymore. There is a 3 second cooldown shared between itself and Cleave, but they are both off the GCD. Still, I don't like Incite much either because single target threat is just not a big deal.

[Kojiyama]

I have nothing but terrible things to say about Impending Victory, honestly.

My personal feeling is that it's just a total waste of talent points that only leads to a huge TPS loss for negligible, inconsistent, and generally useless amounts of healing.

I also don't totally see why one would spec into all the AoE talents but not get Piercing Howl. If you're getting AoE talents you're AoEing snarable mobs in almost every case, thus the single point is going to provide some pretty huge advantages in those scenarios. It's almost certainly more useful than Impending Victory.

As for why people would put points into Incite? It's a pretty massive TPS boost and Protection Warriors use Heroic Strike on cooldown most of the time. With 3 points, I believe it's something like a 20-25% crit chance increase on Heroic Strike. It's a lot better than Thunderstruck and Blood and Thunder--both of which provide zero benefit on single-target boss situations.

But, again, I think one of the reasons you see various builds is because so much is hypothetical and people see things as looking more or less interesting than they actually are. Once raid testing begins, I'm quite certain you'll see 1-2 dominant specs emerge and the weak talents will be exposed quite rapidly.

[Arterius]

For 5 mans/AOE tanking:

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LGbZhZcfGdRRobbu

Didn't bother with Vigilance since it's only useful in raids now. 3/3 in Blood Craze could go into Deep Wounds but I went for the extra bit of survivability since Cat. mobs hit harder.

For pure raiding/single target boss tanking:

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LGZhbZIcGdRRozbu

No need for Blood and Thunder or Thunderstruck. Points in gag order are filler in this spec.

For offtanking/add tanking:

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LMbZhb0oZcrhdRRodru

Situational spec if you're mainly off tanking and having to go around picking up ads. Piercing Howl could be real useful here. 2 points in Shield Spec are basically filler.

All purpose tanking:

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LGZhbZcfudRRodbu

This spec should pretty much work for all situations, although the other 3 I posted above are probably more optimal for their specific situation. 2 points in Cruelty could go into Deep Wounds, not sure how the numbers work for that one.

[Kojiyama]

I do kinda doubt that both AoE talents will be needed unless it is really a very heavy AoE situation, therefore an 'all-purpose' build can probably get away with either Blood and Thunder or Thunderstruck rather than having both.

Blood and Thunder, despite sounding cool, is actually not very good. The extra GCD it takes to apply it gives it limited application, and Rend for Protection Warriors is pretty weak since it's based on weapon damage. Rend is like doing a Devastate on all the targets over its entire duration of 12 seconds, which is not all that impressive when you think about it.

So, personally, I would consider only taking Blood and Thunder if it was a significant AoE tanking scenario. That said, Incite is awkward with only 2 points due to the proc mechanism, so Blood and Thunder is a lot easier to take than Thunderstruck. So, that definitely makes Blood and Thunder the easier one to take if you want a single AoE talent--even though I like Thunderstruck more.

[Kahadija]

So, personally, I would consider only taking Blood and Thunder if it was a significant AoE tanking scenario. That said, Incite is awkward with only 2 points due to the proc mechanism, so Blood and Thunder is a lot easier to take than Thunderstruck. So, that definitely makes Blood and Thunder the easier one to take if you want a single AoE talent--even though I like Thunderstruck more.

Since I know theorycraft suggests that Hold the Line is a weak talent, and the all-purpose build has only one point in it in any case, could the point viably be moved to finish Incite like so:

http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#LGZhbZIchdRRodbu

Or would it be a mistake to sacrifice a survivability talent, however poor?