Friday, July 30, 2010

Some prospective Clysm Warrior Talent Builds as of 7/30/2010 (build 12644)

Ok, this is mostly a mental excercise, as I know full well this will not hit live as is, but every time they adjust this, I like to go through and work on builds I hope (or might like) to have on myself once I hit max level.

I'll start with the one that just gets juicier the more they have played with it.

Protection Self Healing Talent Build (4/3/34) (main tank, probably)
I debated a lot about how to spend these talent points, but here's what I decided.  Since Heroic Strike may or may not be something I hit as often come cataclysm when I tank, I just don't know if the new Incite is worth even considering for Protection (in case you can't see the link to MMO Champs, the text reads: "Increases the critical strike chance of your Heroic Strike by 5/10/15%, and your Heroic Strike critical strikes have a 33/66/100% chance to make you next Heroic Strike also a critical strike. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds.").  However, some moves in other trees have made some tasty decisions.

Arms: For example, I now have taken 2/2 in both Field Dressing and Blitz in the Arms tree, but since I'm still dubious about the utility of HS now that the mechanic has changed (although they still say it will be off the gcd) I don't feel taking even one point of War Academy is justified, and there is no "vital" talent on Tier 2 in Arms, so we'll turn instead to Fury.  Although, I reserve my right to change my opinion once I can actually try some of this.

Fury: With the loss of AttT, I can only assume they're going to be tweaking Attack Power some other way, and once again, I am faced with a choice of either improving some damage from a couple talents or taking Blood Craze.  Now, I don't know about you, but I can't think of anything better for a tank than if he does take damage, there is a chance he could auto heal.  Add to that the improvement from Field Dressing in the Arms Tree and you're looking at a chance to recover 10% of your health automatically every so often.  With health pools being larger in Clysm (some tanks already have nearly 80k health raid buffed) that could be a pretty sizeable hot.  There are some other tasty threat talents to be found here, but I think I'd rather go back and get more from the Protection tree.

Protection: Ok, no lie, pretty much there are only two talents I'm not thinking of taking here.  Incite, as written now, seems like it may not have as much all around utility.  It may prove me wrong once I test, but right now I'm "--eh".  The other one is Safeguard.  IMO, not really that great of a talent.  I do use intervene in battles, but I work pretty hard to make sure it's not necessary 90% of the time, so this falls into the "probably a PvP oriented talent" area.  As an off tank, this could be used by the OT to give a mini-shield wall to the MT occasionally, except that if you target the MT it will also taunt the boss off them.  It could be done, but it would requre that both of you were ready at exactly the right time, and even vent lags by a couple seconds.  Everything else is pretty nice, I like the shield block mechanic now, and I'm working to put as much into my shield block as I can, so talents like Hold the Line, Shield Specialization, Shield Mastery, and the old Damage Shield all make shield blocking fun.  Now, if it turns out that I will need more threat from this build, I would be most likely to take a point out of Shield Specialization and two points from Hold the Line and invest those three into Incite.  Again, I'll just have to wait and see.  The only other talent I'm not 100% certain about it's necessity is Impending Victory.  Mostly, I'm taking this because of all the constant posts warning us that healers mana will be an issue again, and damage will be bad, etc. etc. etc.  This is the reason I took Blood Craze and Field Dressing.  The combination of these talents will give me some constant self healing to help the healers out as I go, and will also give me a situational heal I can use towards the end of a battle once mana is becoming scarce.


Furious Stance Dance TG build (9/32/0)
There is a part of me that wants badly to invest 3 points into Incite with this build, and I may go back (especially if the glyph of Heroic Strike stays with the same wording it has now).  But for now, let's assume that we will want to maybe stance dance to apply rends, or whatever.  For this, I don't think you can beat the overall utility here.

Arms: I really want to get to the second Tier here, so I've taken full ranks in War Academy and Field Dressing.  I think they'll both serve some purpose, so no loss there.  The reason I wanted to get to the second tier is for Deep Wounds, which hasn't changed (including it's cost, meaning the price has doubled, but at least you don't have to take Impale to get it).  I've also spared one talent point for Tactical Mastery, which should give me up to a 35-50 rage cushion when I stance dance.  With that kind of a cushion, it could actually make a SD Rend macro something that might not make you angry every time you press it (and not in a good way).  I only invested one point, because I wanted the other point to go somewhere else.

Fury: Ok, so besides the decision about Single-Minded-Fury vs Titan's Grip (I've chosen Titan's Grip because I wasn't ever as enamored of the single hand DW prior to WotLK, but to each their own.  If it turns out to be more dps, I'll switch too, but for now I already have 2 excellent 2 handers, and not a single good single hander to my name.)  the other things I've included here are 1/2 Rude Interruption (I chose 1/2 because Pummel still has a 10 second cd, and most of the time I'm on interrupts I interrupt pretty much 2/3 to 1/2 of the time Pummel is off cd, so at worst we're talking 20 seconds between them), Piercing Howl, Heroic Fury, Furious Attacks (if you have an Arms warrior, and we're assuming that Arms dps is competitive in some way unlike presently, you can drop this and take 3/3 Blood Craze instead of 2/3) and 2/2 Skirmisher.  I've passed up Die By the Sword which to me seems like an amazing PvP utility talent that could also help out in a crunch if the tank goes down and someone needs to be tanked quickly (since sword and boarding will be virtually impossible still now that gear has 0 defense).  Essentially this build should give the mobility for PvE, it adds the debuffs (even if they're rng and not specified) and gives optimal excuse to use your shouts/pummels during combat.


I think that for a more damage intensive design, I might swap Furious Attacks and Heroic Fury into Improved Execute, especially if you're not void in Arms dps.

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