Protection Warrior Talents Guide

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The Warrior class tree has a lot to play with now. You have an abundance of talent points to move around, and below you will find a layout of all the options available to us in the Class tree.

Notable talents:

Battle Stance and Defensive Stance - With Dragonflight we saw the re-introduction of stances for Warrior. It added a fun element to our gameplay of stance swapping, allowing you to swap to defensive stance to bolster your durability, or to battle stance to increase your offensive output. In The War Within that’s unfortunately been adjusted, and there is no reason to be inside anything other than defensive stance. You no longer lose damage done for being in it, nor do you gain much offensively for being in battle stance, it’s a strictly defensive stance world now.

Impending Victory - This is one of few of our self healing abilities. It resets when you deal the killing blow on a mob, and can be pretty handy to help sustain yourself in times of need. It’s not a game changer but it’s something when your options are limited.

Stormbolt - A solid single target stun with a short cooldown. Can be very useful in M+ if you understand what mobs are dangerous and can be CC’d, and paired with Mountain Thane you can hit 2 additional targets.

Intimidating Shout - A 5 target fear that breaks almost immediately due to damage. It’s a worthwhile extra form of mob control in dungeons with smaller pull sizes.

Spell Reflection - One of our most iconic abilities. Knowing what spells are reflectable will not only drastically increase your survivability, but your damage too! The 20% damage reduction remains for the full duration whether you reflect a spell or not which is quite nice.

Rallying Cry - One of the few pieces of group utility Protection Warriors have to offer. It received nerfs during Dragonflight, reducing its effectiveness, but it can be crucial to helping your group survive some of the most difficult encounters in both raids and Mythic+.

Shockwave - Our best form of AoE crowd control. This ability has a surprisingly low cooldown for an AoE stun, and with the Rumbling Earth talent you can reduce it even further.

Wrecking Throw / Shattering Throw - Wrecking Throw has the occasional use here and there where breaking absorb shields is very important. The 45 second cooldown is kinda meh, but it does its job. Shattering Throw is almost a strictly PvP talent at this point.

Seismic Reverberation - A mandatory talent in any scenario where there are 3 or more targets. The amount of damage this talent provides is immense.

Thunderous Roar - Throughout Dragonflight this capstone was the go-to for all forms of content, and it’s still very strong in The War Within. With the buff to Uproar making it an even shorter cooldown, it’s very powerful. It also lines up extremely well with Colossus’s Demolish ability.

Champion’s Spear - In The War Within this has very good potential once again. It’s damage is fairly high and you get some very nice Rage generation when you talent into Piercing Challenge. It’s particularly synergistic with Mountain Thane.

Immovable Object / Unstoppable Force - Disregarding the top quality names for these talents, this node is strictly an Unstoppable Force option. Immovable object is just far less value than Unstoppable Force and it’s not close.

Fight Through the Flames - A solid defensive option that just reduces your magic damage taken by a flat 6%. Nice.

Bloodsurge - Bonus rage generation from your bleeds. It has some good synergy with Thunderous Roar.

Disruptive Shout - An AoE silence that can be pretty powerful in certain scenarios. The talent point trade off does feel a little bad if you spec into this but it’s definitely an option, especially in Mythic+.

Thunderlord - Makes Thunderclap provide massive cooldown reduction to your Demoralizing shout. This has big synergy with Booming Voice and provides quite significant damage reduction over the course of an encounter.

Spell Block - The ability to block spells for 20 seconds on a 90-second cooldown is incredibly powerful. With how blocking works and the Critical Blocking mechanics, Protection Warriors can mitigate up to 99% of damage from magic spells while Spell Block is active. When used correctly, it can make the player nearly invincible.

Into the Fray vs Heavy Repercussions - Typically at the start of expansions, Heavy Repercussions seems more ideal as our haste values are lower, hurting our shield block up-time. However, as we go into The War Within, it doesn’t seem to be the case, and you can make do with Into the Fray perfectly fine. The haste increase is much more desirable, pairing this with the many other talents that provide Shield Block uptime, you’ll find it easy to maintain the buff now and even with minimal allies providing value, the gain is still better than Heavy Repercussions.

Ravager vs Battle-Scarred Veteran - This is your typical offensive versus defensive talent choice. I’d almost always recommend Battle-Scarred Veteran over Ravager in any meaningful and challenging content as the sudo cheat death effect is extremely powerful. However, Ravager does do a very large amount of damage on AoE pulls.

As of right now, the two Hero Talents are fairly close in performance in all types of content. Colossus pulls ahead slightly with their throughput in raid, whereas Mountain Thane pulls ahead in Mythic plus for both its Multi-target damage and superior rage generation. You can play both in anything, so I recommend identifying what feels the best for you and go with it. However, below is my recommended set-ups for each of the hero talents in all forms of content.

Mountain Thane

Mountain Thane puts a greater emphasis on our already normalized rotation loop. If you ever played back in the expansion Battle for Azeroth, it’s very reminiscent of that. You’re essentially putting more priority on Shield Slamming and Thunder clapping to generate as much rage as possible and do as much damage as possible.

There are a handful of notable feedback loops throughout the Mountain Thane tree which create very nice synergies, and it all revolves around Lightning Strike procs.

1. Crashing Thunder and Thunderblast empowers our Thunderclaps
2. Flashing Skies is how we ensure lightning strikes
3. Ground Current makes our Lightning strikes hit multiple targets
4. Thorim’s Might provides additional rage when lightning strikes proc and our execute it also empowered by 15%
5. Burst of Power has a chance for lightning strikes to give us 2 free Shield Slams which help us get Thunder Blast procs.
6. Avatar of the Storm provides us with an immediate 2 charges of Thunder Blast when we enter Avatar and resets the cooldown of Thunderclap

Colossus

Colossus provides us with an entirely new ability called Demolish. The entire tree revolves around this ability, as well as buffing our Shield Slam and Revenge damage by a sizable chunk. Due to the cooldown and nature of this ability, it does create interesting new talent loadouts. Dropping things like Unstoppable Force as you’ll only ever be Thunder clapping as a filler/to refresh your Rend DoT. And instead of Champion’s Spear you’ll want Thunderous Roar due to the timing synergies with Demolish. This Hero talent leans more into the damage side of things, casting Revenge a significant amount more than we are used to, while also not having as much rage generation as Mountain Thane.

Outside of the flat buffs to our damaging abilities like Shield Slam and Revenge, there are a couple feedback loops worth mentioning.

1. Colossal Might makes our Shield Slams and Executes provide stacks of this buff, increasing our Demolish damage up to 100%.
2. Dominance of the Colossus makes it so that when we are at the maximum stacks of Colossal Might, our Shield Slams and Execute instead provide cooldown reduction to Demolish, as well as consume Colossal Might stacks when you Demolish, to buff our damage by 20% for 10 seconds.