New Eighty: Spec

As any warrior tank who's done even the slightest bit of research will notice, our class is unique in that we have two distinct paths to go down when speccing to tank: threat or survival. The highest threat builds will go deep enough into the arms tree to pick up Deep Wounds while survival builds keep the majority of their points in protection. The benefits of both have been discussed at length across the interwebs where raiding is concerned but what about for the new, poorly geared tank?

My belief is that you should spec for survival. A tank sporting crafted blues is going to have to work hard to maintain threat, yes, but look at it this way: a tank sporting crafted blues is also going to be particularly flimsy. Your threat can be boosted by the party with Misdirection or Tricks of the Trade. Threat-related issues can also be reduced through careful aggro management on the part of your damage dealers. Your survival, however, is entirely down to you and the healer, and while a well played, well geared healing character may be able to keep you up through some frantic spamming, even the best healer cannot outdo their global cooldown. By this I mean that as long as you aren't utterly incompetent, low threat can be dealt with. Dead tank cannot.

With this in mind, my first spec shaped up like this: 5/10/56.

While some of the choices - such as Deflection, Anticipation and Toughness - need no explanation as to why they help to bolster a tank's survivability, some of the others only occurred to me as I was peering through my potential talents.

The first is Improved Thunder Clap. This should really be taken in any build as the rage cost reduction and increased damage are brilliant for AoE tanking and boss fights alike. From a pure survivability point of view, however, it reduces the damage you take by improving the debuff your Thunder Clap applies to enemies around you instead of buffing your mitigation directly. The slower attack speed obviously reduces how many times a mob will hit you before your damage dealers take them out and also provides a sliver of extra time for a heal to reach you between swings.

Similarly, Booming Voice and Improved Demoralizing Shout reduce damage done to you by lessening just how hard mobs are hitting when Demoralizing Shout is up. While Booming Voice is more about reducing how frequently you have to refresh Demo Shout, I found it usually meant I only had to use the skill once per trash pull, allowing me to focus entirely on my threat and positioning.

Gag Order, meanwhile, reduces caster mobs to melee swings thanks to the silencing effect. It also makes it easier to cluster mobs correctly when a caster might have made it more difficult, hence reducing any time in which your back would have been turned.

For the most part, when speccing a new eighty prot warrior you need to consider which skills will come in handy most often in a heroic instance. While Improved Revenge, for instance, might provide some manner of threat boost when fighting a raid boss, in a heroic a lot of your work is in moving groups of mobs around. An uncontrolled stun proc can actually make this more difficult for you. Improved Spell Reflection, on the other hand, lets you protect party members from randomly targeted spells like Novos' Frostbolt in Drak'Tharon Keep or Paletress's Smite in Trial of the Champion, while also providing protection if a caster stands in Grauf's breath while you're doing Skadi's gauntlet event. A lot of what you can find on raid-centric sites does still apply to speccing for heroics, I just feel it's worth keeping content in mind when making decisions between extraneous talents.