New 4.0.1 Talents

Fury:

Executioner – Your Execute hits have a 50% chance per point to improve your melee attack speed by 5% for 9 sec. This effect stacks. (2 points)

Protection:

Bastion of Defense – Reduces the chance you'll be critically hit by melee attacks by 3% per point while in Defensive Stance. In addition, when you block, dodge or parry an attack you have a 10% chance per point to become Enraged, increasing physical damage done by 5% per point for 12 sec. (2 points)

Incite – Increases the critical strike chance of your Heroic Strike by 5% per point, and gives your Heroic Strike criticals a 33% chance per point to cause the next Heroic Strike to also be a critical strike. These guaranteed criticals cannot re-trigger the Incite effect.

Heavy Repercussions – When your Shield Block is active, your Shield Slam hits for an additional 50% damage per point. (2 points)

New Active Talents:

Arms:

Deadly Calm – For the next 10 seconds none of your abilities cost rage, but you continue to generate rage. Cannot be used during Inner Rage.

Throwdown – Knocks the target to the ground and stuns it for 5 seconds.

Fury:

Raging Blow – A mighty blow that deals 150% weapon damage from both melee weapons. Can only be used while enraged.

New Passive Talents:

Arms:

War Academy – Increases the damage of your Heroic Strike, Victory Rush and Slam abilities by 5% per point. (3 points)

Field Dressing – Increases your self healing abilities by 10% per point and all healing effects on you by 3% per point. (2 points)

Drums of War – Reduces the rage cost of your Hamstring, Shield Bash, Pummel, and any shouts which cost rage by 50% per point. (2 points)

Lambs to the Slaughter – After dealing a Mortal Strike, your next Execute, Overpower, or Mortal Strike will cause 10% more damage per point. (3 points)

Fury:

Battle Trance – Your Bloodthirst, Mortal Strike and Shield Slam have a 5% chance per point to make your next special attack that requires more than 5 rage consume no rage. (3 points)

Rude Interruption – Successfully interrupting a spell with Shield Bash or Pummel increases your damage by 5% for 15 sec / 30 sec. (2 points)

Meat Cleaver – Dealing damage with Cleave or Whirlwind increases the damage of Cleave and Whirlwind by 5% per point for 10 sec. This effect stacks. (2 points)

Die by the Sword – Increases your parry chance by 100% for 4 seconds per point whenever you are brought to 20% health or less. This effect cannot occur more often than once every 2 min. (2 points)

Single Minded Fury – When you dual-wield one-handed weapons, you deal 15% additional damage and Slam hits with both weapons. (1 point)

Protection:

Hold The Line – Improves your critical strike and critical block chance by 10% for 5 seconds per point following a successful parry. (2 points)

Blood and Thunder – When you Thunder Clap a target affected by your Rend you have a 50% chance per point to affect every target with Rend. (2 points)

Shield Mastery – Reduces the cooldown of your Shield block by 10 sec per point, your Shield Wall by 60 sec per point and your Spell Reflect by 1 sec per point. (3 points)

Thunderstruck – Increases the damage of your Rend, Cleave, and Thunder Clap by 3% per point. In addition, your Thunder Clap improves the damage of your next Shockwave by 5% per point. Stacks up to 3 times. (2 points)

Impending Victory – Using Shield Slam on a target with 20% or less health has a 50% chance per point to allow the use of Victory Rush but that Victory Rush only heals for 5% of your health. (2 points)

Analysis:

Warriors thus far have made out better than most classes. Arms will still be their dedicated PvP tree replete with what will now be undisputedly the most powerful Wound effect in the game (Mortal Strike) now that the Hunter version is being changed to a poison. Unrelenting Assault has been changed which was a significant blow to the spec, but they were compensated well for it. Throwdown, the 5 second stun plus knockdown effect is the most powerful piece of new crowd control that has been added to the game with the possible exception of Solar Beam.

The general theme for Arms is an increased amount of options in terms of ability use. Overpower will remain the mainstay ability for the spec, and with pummel potentially being active in Battle Stance the class will be a force to be reckoned with. With the additional snares and CC being given to other classes (particularly casters) Warrior mobility via charge and intercept will be more powerful than ever. Deadly Calm is another extremely powerful ability that Warriors will sacrifice anything to pick up.

Fury hasn’t changed a whole lot. Right now it’s regarded as the most powerful PvE DPS spec in the game, so it really didn’t need a whole lot of modification. Fury Warriors will get a bit of additional flavor with the Raging Blow proc-based ability and will now be the go-to class for PvE interrupts thanks to the utility gained by Rude Interruption. The big unknown here is how much Fury damage will be hindered by the rage normalization mechanics being introduced in Cataclysm. Only time will tell how that will play out, but Fury will now be more about managing rage and procs than spamming every available ability on cooldown.

Protection is widely regarded as the most well-designed tanking tree. This isn’t surprising given that Warrior tanks have existed since Vanilla (when they were in fact the only tanks). As such, they didn’t do a lot of tweaking to the protection tree other than adding some much-needed area of effect threat abilities in the form of Blood and Thunder and Thunderstruck. These abilities will give the Protection Warrior much better AoE threat control and will act as a facsimile of the Paladin’s Consecrate ability with a few additional perks (AoE attack slow, and bleeds on every target).

4.0.1 Change Analysis

Warrior were relatively unchanged from their state in early Beta, which is a testament to how popular and effective the basic design of the class is. Arms Warriors have proven to be one of the more dangerous classes on 4.0.1 live servers, and insanely powerful at level 85 on the Beta. Throwdown, as well as the other knockback effects, is untrinketable making it bar-none the most powerful individual crowd control ability in the game. Arms plays very similar to how it used to, but has more tools in its arsenal. Minor changes, like the change to Drums of War have upped the utility of the spec – Drums allows you to spam demo shout making you essentially immune to stealth and will be an absolute nightmare at 85 when it also effects Piercing Howl.

Fury also recieved little in the way of changes. Blizzard is tweaking numbers trying to establish a good dynamic for Warrior PvE damage now that rage normalization is a reality. They're going mostly in the direction of adding more weapon haste to the class making them more similar to Rogues.

Protection has recieved the largest amount of changes of all the trees. The removal of Damage Shield was frustrating for many Prot Warriors, but they've been compensated well with great damage and threat. Vengeance, the new tank mechanic, has ensured that they're having no problems with single target threat in the current game. Unfortunately, AoE threat is still a significant issue for Prot Warriors. Cleave is doing great damage (Cleaving trash can net you 25k+ DPS in level 80 gear), but they're still falling behind the other tanks since they lack a reliable large AoE threat builder like Swipe, Consecrate, or Death and Decay. Prot Warriors remain one of the most powerful tanks versus straight physical damage, but have not really got much in the way of spell damage protection which was an issue many Warriors had complained about in Icecrown Citadel. It's a mixed bag, but the spec is still very powerful and well worth using going into Cataclysm.