Talk: Warrior talents

Best/worst discussion (outdated mostly)[]

- Requesting permission to delete almost all of it as it is preTBC discussion and all the talents and builds have been changed dramatically since this was posted. --Necoia 16:26, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I guess we need some discussion as to what the best/worst talents are. My list was:

"Best"

Tactical Mastery is the least controversial. It provides flexibility. Without flexibility you're predictable and, as a correllary, dead. And without Rage a warrior is just a guy with a sword.

Improved Intercept is costly but it follows my other line thinking: a warrior who can't catch their opponent is useless. It counters [Blink] and allows you to recover faster from rooting, fear, polymorph... anything which is designed to keep the warrior away from the target. For this same reason I like Piercing Howl. I'm very open to debate on this one.

I would not put Mortal Strike on the list simply because it costs too much and restricts what sort of warrior you are building. This is not to say its not a good talent, but when drawing up a generic list of good/bad talents one should consider that not everyone is a crit build. Its obviously good, its at the end of the tree. Discussions of the end-of-tree talents should probably go in a separate section.

Cruely and Deflection I cannot find any argument with.

"Worst"

All these "improved" versions provide negligible improvements to non-critical abilities for far too many talent points. And unlike Improved Demoralizing Shout or Improved Rend, they're not prereqs for a more important ability.

Booming Voice just seems an utter waste, especially when you can get Cruelty instead. Battle Shout and Demoralizing Shout last long enough and don't cost much rage anyway.

-- Xwrn

I disagreed with the original since it made a lot of presumptions. Improved Intercept, for example is hardly a "best" talent since it requires a very large expenditure into the Fury tree to even think of taking it, for a very specialized use; PvP. Improved Intercept is virtually purposeless outside of a PvP environment and requires a specific build to even have the opportunity to take it. Given that specialized role, I don't think you can justify calling it a "best" talent.

I took issue with several of the "improved" versions because they, from my perspective, seemed to have very little to do with a practical assessment of the feats value. Take Improved Sunder Armor for example; at that stage in the Protection Tree all you have are choices from various "improvements". Considering that sunder armor is a workhorse skill while instance tanking, and the fact that in order to advance up the protection tree you need to take some kind of "improvement", its questionable to call it a worst talent.

The difference between Improved Thunderclap and Improved Sunder Armor (for example) is that the latter will be used once, maybe twice in a given encounter. You'll save a minimal amount of rage. Considering that Sunder Armor can be used as many as 10 or more times in a given fight, however, they aren't really comparable. 3 rage saved is 30 rage, which is a decent boost for three measly talent points.

Improved Hamstring is also not comparable because it is neither an expensive investment nor negligible. At the highest level, hamstring reduces speed to 40%. Improved Hamstring cuts their speed down to 30% for two talent points. Why is 10% slower negligible, while those same 2 talent points in Two-Handed Weapon Specialization providing a measly 2% damage increase are not?

My point is that there are genuinely useless talents in the warrior tree which we can identify. These talents are so useless that no one takes them, that Blizzard is choosing to improve some of them in the next patch; talents like Iron Will, Improved Cleave, or Anticipation. Labelling something a "worst" talent just because it fails to fit into your playstyle or because you've never had a chance to use it isn't really helping someone looking to build their character.

Finally the reason I included Mortal Strike is because it is simply the most powerful single-point talent in the warrior tree. Period. No other talent provides such a bang for buck. It is the best 30 point talent available to warriors. It is also in the most popular and powerful warrior tree. It isn't just restricted to "crit builds" - any build which spends any amount of time soloing or doing PvP will find the talent to advantageous. Isn't that practically the definition of a top-notch talent - one which, if given the option, is _always_ the right choice? Are you telling me someone might want to sit at 30 points in the arms tree and not take Mortal Strike?

Thanks for starting the discussion page, BTW. I've never used wiki so I wasn't sure how.

Ultimately, I think this page is probably going to need to be expanded into something more reasonable then "this is good" and "this isn't", so I don't think its really worth fretting over trying to shoehorn talents into black-and-white categories like that.

-- ZugzwangZeitgeist

My best/worst list is a reaction to my frustration at trying to get helpful commentary about what talents to take and getting almost entirely "this is my build". What I'm looking for, ultimately, is per-talent commentary. What its good for, what its not good for, what it works well in combination with... information to allow me to make a build rather than just picking an existing build.

Which is to say, we're having a violent agreement.

-- Xwrn

After seeing the Amazon Basin's stunningly comprehensive section on warrior talents in their wiki, I'm really wondering if there's any point in developing this into a talent-by-talent analysis. Indeed, it seems in the spirit of wiki to just collaborate with them and post a link to theirs. Also, with the constant changes to the warrior talent tree it seems a bit early to try to put anything down insightful about talents. That being said, I'm so sick of "debating" with people about the various parts of this game that if you want to develop this page, go right ahead. I'm not going to directly modify it without putting up something on discussion first.

-- ZugzwangZeitgeist

I took both Improved Rend and Improved Heroic Strike off the "worst talents" list as they hardly fit there. I also updated their pages to reflect my experiences using them. If you want any of the information that was there back, feel free to add it. --Arandmoor 00:16, 5 Dec 2005 (EST)

I edited the description of Mortal Strike on the page. You said it's one of the "most efficient" damage dealers when it pales in comparison to good 'ole Heroic Strike...especially with 3 points in Improved Heroic Strike when you've got a mess of Rage to play with. --Arandmoor 00:22, 5 Dec 2005 (EST)

Heroic Strike Rank 9 increases next swing damage by 157. Without the Imp. HS talent, this is about 10.5 damage per rage; with the talent, it's about 13.1. Mortal Strike, which costs 30 rage, therefore only needs to deal approximately 393 damage to become more efficient than Imp. HS, and anyone who uses it at level 60 can tell you that reaching a 393 damage MS or higher is no problem, even with terrible equipment. You could be in full level 50 or probably even 40 green equipment and surpass that mark.

With that said, HS DOES do an excellent job of burning off excess rage and turning it into damage, since MS can only burn off (30 rage/6 second cooldown) 5 rage per second. I kinda wish there was another version of HS that didn't generate extra threat since it's hard to spam this and not pull hate off the tank (and obviously, if you're trying to go for max DPS, you don't want to be generating extra hate). --My0p1c

The "best" and "worst" talent discussions above are opinion and dont belong on the wiki. Ask a protection warrior whats "best" and hell tell you imp heroic and imp sunder. Im sure a furry warrior will say something different.

Warning: Two cents worth ahead. I am also a fan of Mortal Strike, not only for the large amount of damage dealth all at once, but also because of its reduced Healing effect. The Wiki's praises seem to be highest for talents that scale with the owner, but this one scales with the target, which seems better in a way.

But you need to go pretty much all-Arms for that one. I'm not entirely sure that there is such a pigeonholing of Warriors as people would like to think (Arms is PvP, Fury is solo, Protection is group). I used to run an Arms warrior, but got hit hard with the nerf bat in 2.3. Since I now want to be main tank, I'm going Protection.

What the "best" and "worst" discussion ignores, though, is the fact that you have to take some of these talents to be able to buy your preferred ones. An example: In my prototype build I took two levels of Improved Thunder Clap because it was that way that I could afford the more useful Impale. Similarly, though I seldom disarm (for better or for worse), I took two levels of it so I could get to Shield Slam and Devasate.

Sometimes you have to consider what will be least useless in order to get a talent that's most useful.

I'm also not a great fan of Tactical Mastery. My patch history is incomplete, but at the moment (2.4.1), you do retain some Rage when switching. I don't really trust that "up to" in the description either. That "up to +15 Rage" works out to +8 on average. Not bad, but not three points' worth of good.--ClemSnide 00:36, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

You retain 10 rage while changing stances normally. With the talent you retain 25 rage. No average nothing, if you have 25 rage or more you will have 25 rage after stance shifting. --Necoia 16:09, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Commentaries on talents in tables[]

I went through and removed all this commentary, as in a partial review of other class talent pages only Shaman talents had similar commentary in the tables; the other classes I checked all had simple descriptions of the talents in the tables. Hunter talents had brief commentary on specific talents in a tree after that tree's tables, if there is a strong desire to reinstate this commentary I would suggest that this model be adopted.

There were two reasons for this. First of all, some of the commentary was misleading due to its briefness. Talents far down in a tree would be called essential, even though many builds would not be able to take them. Second, and more important in my opinion, is that all of these talents should have (more in-depth) discussion regarding their usefulness and usage on the individual talent pages and/or on the Warrior builds page. (I didn't do any work on correcting this page for the 3.0.2 patch, as I imagine there's a project working on that and I don't want to step on their toes.)

I want to mention also that I didn't disagree with most of the commentary; some of it was completely spot-on. And I understand what the editor who wrote about meant about wanting a place that had some brief information on each of the talents. Unfortunately, though, talents are both a critical aspect of playing WoW and a very personal one (as so much of the above discussion shows). Providing a brief sentence or two really does not do most of them justice, and leading newer players into thinking that talents can be discussed in such a manner really does them a disservice, as does bloating up a table that experienced players may refer to only for basic information about each of the talents. The only way to really understand any talent is as a part of a build, and for that you are going to get into 'this is the build that I like' situations, unfortunately, and that means that you have to spend some time unpacking the builds. Looking at talents from a reductionist perspective oversimplifies them.

Finally, I added a link to the elististjerks.com protection warrior guide. This site is such a wealth of information about talents that I think it should be linked to here, but I only know about the protection warrior info, if anyone knows of a better or another page of theirs to link to from this page please do so.--Scrotch (talk) 16:02, 19 October 2008 (UTC)