Post by Timmeh
At L30, you should aim to use revenge whenever it's up, sunder armour whenever it isn't and use heroic strike if you find yourself with more rage than you can get rid of. For AoE, use thunderclap whenever it's free and cleave around mobs.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#LZZMItMx should see you fine.
Post by Hyperspacerebel
3040506070Once you get you 80, you'll want to respec a bit to a standard tanking build
Post by CoolzInferno
I'm levelling a Prot Warrior at the moment and am currently at L73 and I'd tend to disagree slightly with some of the advice given thusfar. Like perhaps it works out differently because I have Heirloom shoulders, chest and weapon but I'm not exactly sure how valuable 10% armour boost is early game/levelling.
Shield Block is IMO borderline broken for levelling as with a semi-decent shield, your block value is generally higher than what a standard mob and most elites are able to hit for. It's essentially a 10 second invulnerability with a 30 second cooldown against melee mobs.
Casters who are what I find cause me the most grief wouldn't be helped with extra armour anyway so I put the 5 points allocated there in some of the other builds into an extra 2% damage from One-Handed specialization and into Gag Order and Improved Disciplines.
This would be my Prot build before eventually putting points into Arms/Fury. Essentially, it's somewhat of an AoE build. You round up melee mobs (probably no more than 4-5 until you get Shockwave), Thunder Clap, Shield Block, get en masse rage and spam Cleave and Clap/Revenge/Shield Slam when their cooldowns are up. Single target is none too shabby either with the Revenge/Free HS combo, Shield Slam and
Devastatingly-Sinister Strike/Sword and Board Procs.
For general grinding though, as of about L60, if I do an AOE pull, everything is generally dead by the second Shockwave cooldown. 4 second stun + 10 seconds of Shield Block invulnerability means you only have about 6 seconds of getting-hit-time and I personally think the damage boosts to Shield Slam from Gag Order and 2% boost to all damage outweighs the armor boost.
It's really up to personal preference in the end, you can't really go too wrong depending on whether you want the extra utility from silence/shorter cooldowns versus a fixed reduction in damage. I can see the potential benefits for soloing elites if they hit less hard. You probably won't live 4 minutes solo for Shield Wall CDs to work twice in a fight anyway.
Just make sure you avoid the clear levelling trash talents like Puncture and Safeguard (and possibly Improved Spell Reflect) and you can go wrong with very little with levelling talents in the Prot tree.
Post by Hyperspacerebel
I'm levelling a Prot Warrior at the moment and am currently at L73 and I'd tend to disagree slightly with some of the advice given thusfar. Like perhaps it works out differently because I have Heirloom shoulders, chest and weapon but I'm not exactly sure how valuable 10% armour boost is early game/levelling.
Shield Block is IMO borderline broken for levelling as with a semi-decent shield, your block value is generally higher than what a standard mob and most elites are able to hit for. It's essentially a 10 second invulnerability with a 30 second cooldown against melee mobs.
I've said this elsewhere and I'll say it again: If you're leveling as prot and not panicking by the end of the pull, urdoinitwrong. If you're not putting the survivability of the prot spec to use you might as well be leveling as Arms or Fury.
In my early 70s I was aoe farming the rhinos in BT. I'd pull 2-3 groups (8-12 mobs), aoe till they were about half dead, charge into another group, aoe till they were half dead, and continued until I had literally no hp left. That's what made leveling prot so fast.
On your point of Shield block...25% melee damage immunity is borderline? That means you can pull 25% more mobs lol. The same goes for armor value.