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Ahh, talents. The things that separate people of similar
gear. The points that define our intended role in a group or
raid. The skills that enhance our ability to make stuff bleed,
attack faster, and block more often. Choosing now is a lot
harder than it used to be. With the coming of patch 3.1, Arms is now back in action and brings even more pain to the table to challenge Fury for the DPS crown. With this guide we'll take
a look at a few
key talents for each that no build should be without.

 

Arms





Arms is the two handed school of bleeding. You'll be attacking
slowly and relying on opportunistic instants with most builds in Arms. It's imperative you pay full attention at all times to
not miss an opportunity since all of your unique instant bonuses
require you to pay attention for the skill to be ready. Rage generation
is not a problem with Anger Management, Tactical Mastery, and Endless
Rage, but whiffing on a white hit or two may put a serious dent in your
damage for a few seconds. A potent charge can lead to a lot of
fast instants at the start of a fight.  Juggernaut makes you a lot more mobile and puts anyone on the receiving end of your charge in a world of hurt with your next Mortal Strike. Some of the special talents of Arms that
separate builds of it from the rest are as follows:



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62276" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Deep
Wounds - Since the talent now cycles its damage much
faster, it spends less time refreshing itself and more time doing
damage, accounting for a lot of our output when geared. It is necessary
for any build that goes this deep in arms. You pick up Impale
along the way to this, which helps create the following...



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62285" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Taste for Blood, Improved
Overpower, Unrelenting Assault - This is our setup for 5
rage big yellow critical hits. The Overpower Glyph will help
create even more opportunities to lay into your opponent when fighting
melees.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62284" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Sudden Death -
Great synergy with Mortal Strike for creating a big gaping hole in
someone in less than two seconds when it ticks up as available. It's
not necessarily worth an execute glyph either, unless you're raiding
often, where you'll see more use for it under normal circumstances.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62287" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Trauma - Deserves
special mention for the fact that Feral Druids will love you forever if
you have this, which you should have anyway for the increase in your
own output.



Hall of Shame Talent



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62282" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Improved Heroic Strike
- It simply has no place for anyone who goes relatively deep in the
school until you start to raid. All of our special arms attacks are instant or near instant in the case of Slam, and our rage
generation is dependent on our 2h swings landing white
damage. With the amount of rage lost from the normal attack
factored into the cost, you can find something better to do, can't you?



Fury

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Fury is the blender. You're more gear dependent to make the
most of your talents than the other schools, but you have the most
reliable rage generation and can boost your damage output to dangerous
levels on command. You don't contribute very much to a raid or
group setting aside from chopping down someone as fast as you can. You
are a two-handed dual wielding rogue in plate with no utility, but who
cares? You didn't specialize in this school to entertain people with
fancy debuffs and raid bonuses. You picked this school to spin
violently and attack nonstop. Some of the talents that power a
Fury-school Warrior are listed below.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62275" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Cruelty, Armored to the Teeth
-  I don't care what school you end up specializing. 
You need 8 points here when you finish in your tree of
choice. These talents for 5% higher critical, and bonus attack
power based on our wild plate armor AC assists in every thing we do.
The more damage we do, the faster stuff dies in offensive schools.
Higher critical means more rage generated to do whatever we need to
do.  These are essential talents, no matter how you look at
them.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62277" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Enrage - Only take
this if you are leveling or playing solo a lot. In any other setting,
you will likely not be hit, or taken out before the effects can be
felt. However, this contributes a lot when soloing for providing a
steady, always on, damage boost that you could consume for a quick
heal. It's no longer the PvP talent of choice, unfortunately.



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though it was taken down to 3 swings, Flurry still remains a mainstay
in our Fury tree.  You might feel that with the depreciating
critical rating, you'll never be able to be keep it always on, but keep
in mind that with Rampage, Berserker Stance, and Cruelty alone, you
have +13% chance to critical. Flurry will be on.



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-  Keeps us alive in raid settings through area of effect
encounters barring Sapphiron. Does potent damage and heals quickly now
that it's down to 3 attacks for maximum healing return. This is the
main attack of Fury, and does serious damage with Impale.



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Behold! We now have 2 two-handed weapons worth of stats, massive
whirlwinds and Slams, and larger rage generation given enough hit
rating.  If you plan to go more than 20 points in this tree,
it's for this.



Hall of Shame Talent




src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62280" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Heroic Fury - This
talent is way too far down the school for too little gain. Its
main potency is in duels; in arenas you will likely have someone
capable of dispelling most standard immobilizations. Furious Attacks is
absolutely necessary for you to be viable in PvP, and this is totally
optional. Warbringer blows this out of the water for dispelling ANY
movement issues.



Protection





Protection has come a long way. As someone who actually played 1-60 as
protection with a group of friends at launch, I know how painful it
used to be. Fully going down this line will give you untouched
survivability, but to be honest you NEED the attention. If you are not
getting hit, your rage generation is pathetic. With defensive stance
now having a built in 45% boost to hate generated and several skills
that can basically hold monsters by themselves you shouldn't have that
problem. If you really need help there are several talents in
the tree, as well as the Revenge glyph to give you offense at little to
no cost. There are a lot of gems in this tree.



Every single damn talent that enhances your blocking skill is worth
your time. Blocking is the most solid form of mitigation there
is, with no diminishing returns issue. We can activate it on
call for 10 seconds, every 40, to endure Enrages to buy time to scream
at our healers to wake up. To top it off, blocking generates
rage with the talent so that your mitigation does not hinder your
threat and damage output. If you skip these, I hope you're
doing a crazy PvP protection build. Good luck with that.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62283" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Incite - This is a
big personal preference skill simply because Shockwave's cooldown is
lacking.  A cleave glyph to follow up a
shockwave will do wonders with this skill, more or less
guaranteeing someone is getting crit. Thunderclap doesn't do a lot of
damage to begin with, even talented, but bonus hate is great! 
Right!?



Shield Slam
- It's not a talent anymore obviously, but talents from this tree now
make it so it's stronger, has a high chance to critical, and even free
fairly often! For as long as we have this skill on cooldown, no else is
getting a boss's attention.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62288" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Warbringer - This
gets special mention for making the entire idea of Protection PvP a
possibility. You are a highly mobile annoyance with this, and
are generally unstoppable. Use a Charge Range minor glyph if
you're going to use this to help engage that much quicker in
PvP. If this talent also granted a healing debuff to your
shield strikes, I'd go so far as to say it is the best PvP talent in
the game.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62279" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Gag Order - This is
important because it gives us a way to ranged pull casters in wide
rooms where we don't have a pillar or something to halt line of
sight. Admittedly, these situations are rare, but the PvP use
is again fantastic compared to other PvP talents for that ranged
silence on command to buy time for you to get in there and introduce
that priest or mage to your shield.



Hall of Shame Talent




src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/62281" hspace="3"> style="font-style: italic;">Improved Disciplines
is simply not enough.  A 10% cooldown reduction per level on a
panic button, and two other five minute disciplines that will hardly
see any use as this school is sad, to say the least. I guess
this is Fury's revenge for having a mediocre PvP talent, but a
fantastic cooldown reduction talent by comparison.



Perhaps I got a bit long-winded about Protection.  It's
exciting, to be honest.  Even after months have passed since
3.0, I'm still smiling at the fact that protection can PvE solo, PvE
tank anything, and with a little talent mix-up, PvP.



It's great seeing your character's talent schools evolve over time into
three schools that can each fufill a PvP and PvE role, and do so
well.  Gone are those days of looking over a school and saying
to yourself  "Who the hell would take Improved Rend?" Now, we
must plan carefully and weigh a lot more solid talents into
consideration.  A lot of builds are for maximum output
in PvE, but each one has extraneous points in another school for you to
fool around with should you want to be a main tank for your guild, but
still have Warbringer to not be an easy target. It's all
personal preference as usual, but my preference is to stand out as the
best.