Post by Porcell
Spec First:
- Arms: Drop Iron Will (it's not a tanking talent) and switch those into Imp Heroic Strike. It is safe to drop Anger Management; it's not really good.
- Prot: Pretty much spot on. I would drop one point from Shield Spec, which leads me to...
- Fury: Take the one point from Anger Management and one point from Shield Spec and put them both into Armored to the Teeth.
Okay, spec's good now.
Professions: Good selections with Mining/BS. You need to get up to 400 blacksmithing so you can add sockets to your gloves and bracers. You are at 331 right now, and you need to get to 350 so you can start crafting Cobalt items to skill up. To get the last points from 331 to 350, you should:
- 331-340: You should make either Adamantite Cleavex9 (72 Adamantite Bars) or Adamantite Daggerx9 (63 Adamantite Bars and 18 Knothide Leather), depending on if you have access to cheap leather or not.
- 341-345: You should make Lesser Ward of Shielding. You can buy the pattern from Rohak in Thallamar, Hellfire (Horde) or Mari Stonehand in Wildhammer Stronghold, Shadowmoon Valley (Alliance). The Lesser Wards are yellow at 340, so you may need to make 7-9 of them to get to 345, but they are only 1 adamantite bar each!
- 346-350: You have some choices here. You can either go back and make Cleavers, which will be yellow; you can keep making lesser wards for really cheap, but the pattern is green; or you can make Adamantite Breastplates for 12 Adamantite, 4 primal earth, 2 primal fires. Adamantite Breastplates are more expensive materials wise, but it's an orange recipe and you will only have to make 5 of them. [My suggestion would be to burn up some Adamantite on Wards, and then knock out the last couple of points with breastplates so you don't need as many primals.
Once you do that you'll need to start burning up Cobalt and get your skill up to 400.
Now for your gear. You said you don't have a lot of money, but you can farm up mats for the titansteel stuff (and pay like 15g for cooldowns from people if you want). The helm, boots, and shield are all good, but I would recommend getting the helm first. The helm with the Meta will be the biggest upgrade for you (use Austere metagem for the 2% armor). Get the other titansteel items as you can. Also look into the tanking gun. Except for one gun that drops out of Ulduar, the Engineering gun is best in slot.
Wyrmrest Accord has several nice rep items that can be good for starters. Honored has a cloak which is a little better than the cloak you currently have, and at revered there are good boots.
Argent Crusade is the rep you need to get in order to buy your helm enchant at revered. They also have leg armor at honored which are better than your Daunting legs; you are honored right now so you should go pick those up.
As for heroics you should run, you should definately run Heroic VH every day for the epic legs that drop there. Once you put some defense enchants on your gear you should be defense "capped" for heroics (535 defense skill) and you should be able to tank it. Heroic AN has a stamina trinket which is a tanking mainstay, so get that too. There's a defense trinket in regular Halls of Lightning which is handy to have. Heroic Culling of Stratholme has a shield that is comparable to the Heroic Badge shield and slightly better than the Titansteel shield. Heroic Drak'Tharon Keep has a great tanking ring (but it doesn't have defense on it, so make sure you can manage without a defense ring). Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle has the Red Sword of Courage, the entry epic tanking sword.
That's about all I can think of off the top of my head without actually searching for things. However, the above should be a good start, and there's plenty there for you to work on...