Hey! I have been wanting to roll up a tank to run dungeons. I really like warriors, but from what I have been reading it’s better to use go fury. I want to be able to go sword and board. Am I going to have a bad time if I do that?
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You might want to have a look at the talent tree and see what the talents are to determine whether they are useful for you or not:
Keep in mind that Defensive Stance increases threat generated and decreases damage taken, regardless of talent point allocation.
While leveling, even if mostly tanking dungeons, warriors will put points into the Arms tree, and swap between a two-hander and 1hander/shield while tanking. This is typically because the added armor or block from shields is sometimes useful, as is being able to shield bash early on, but the added damage of a two-hander is often more helpful for threat.
Damage mitigation isn’t often the primary concern, but whenever a shield is of use, you can simply hit your weapon swap macro keybind and swap, because you can switch weapons in combat.
Stance dancing isn’t uncommon, especially while leveling (Charge, for example is usable in Battle Stance, so it’s common to open in Battle Stance with charge), and the arms tree gives you access to Tactical Mastery which helps preserve some rage while switching stances, and later on opens up Sweeping Strikes, which is great threat with a 2 hander.
I’d have a look at Elite’s Warrior tanking guide, which is aimed at newer warrior tanks for WoW Classic. Maybe you’ll find some decent pointers.
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You will not have a bad time at all. Play what you like, don’t be a meta slave. My first alt has always been a sword and board warrior tank and it’s quite fun.
Contrary to popular belief, the game was designed for warrior tanks to use a shield and it works quite well. The aversion to shields comes from sweat raiding guilds where they have trouble with threat in raids vs BiS dps popping all world buffs and consumables. In dungeons and while levelling you’ll do just fine. Nobody is unbooning and popping consumes in Blackrock Depths.
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The most fun you’ll have tanking is sweeping strikes with a big 2H tab cleaving. Tons of damage, lots of threat and you aren’t dependent on the dps being good.
You just go fury and bind defensive stance, sunder, and taunt.
That’s it.
Literally not rocket science.
You only throw on a shield if your healer sucks or the boss hits hard.
Shields are actually terrible against mobs that don’t hit hard and hit you often.
Tanking is very simple process:
- Taunt skull mob
- Sunder skull mob
- Tab target and sunder adds
- Taunt mobs that DPS pull threat on
- Repeat
If you have mages it can be rough because the mage is going to always pull threat with AOE no matter what you do.
Vanilla is not designed for AOE. SoD has broken people’s brains.
The best spec for leveling a Warrior is 31/20/0 (Arms), and you can use this spec all the way to 60 and to tank dungeons for your pre-raid gear. The Arms tree has the best utility talents that Warriors have, and will make your life far better outside of dungeons than if you took another spec. Train a ranged weapon early, pulling with a ranged weapon is better than charging in at least >= 50% of the time in a dungeon.
Fury under performs because you don’t have any hit rating until you start getting those pieces in the 50s. 2-H Fury isn’t too bad, but it isn’t better than Arms for leveling.
Protection is not great until level 60 because to make it really shine you need Tactical Mastery, Anger Management and Impale from the Arms tree and Defiance, Improved Revenge, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and Shield Slam from the Protection tree - basically level 60 to get the key talents that make the build work. Warrior leveling is already a slog sometimes solo in the world and Protection just won’t have killing power needed to make it fun.
Here is what an Arms build would look like as you level that would work fine for tanking.
Level 20:
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/02305001
Level 30:
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/0430502130201
Level 40:
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/053050213325100001
Level 50:
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/053050213325100001-055
Level 60:
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/053050213325100001-05500005005
What people are calling “Fury Prot”, or a tank that usually does not wear a shield except on certain bosses and is raiding spec really meant for maintaining a threat lead against world buffed Fury DPS Warriors with healing spam. It is basically a Fury DPS Warrior with the same gear requirements (+hit, +weapon skill) wearing plate and in Defensive Stance. Totally unnecessary for 5-mans and will under perform compared to Arms or Deep Prot in a 5-man dungeon.
That spec looks like this.
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/-05500005505010051-502501105
Here is a version of “Deep Prot”, which is a very solid tanking build in general at 60. It is probably the best tanking spec at level 60 for making smooth runs in dungeons and should work fine in most raids as well if the DPS are not really pushing it with world buffs, consumes and really good rotations. The threat this build is capable of is actually very high because Shield Slam does a ton of TPS and so does Revenge. If you wear threat heavy plate pieces it is an aggro machine build - if you get some pieces with Block Value on them (e.g. https://www.wowhead.com/classic/item=230736/styleens-impeding-scarab) Shield Slam can do ridiculous threat. This will be the basics of how Warrior tanking is done in TBC where the other builds no longer work, so keep that in your back pocket.
https://www.wowhead.com/classic/talent-calc/warrior/03305001302-03-50250113500001251
As far as tanking with a 1-H and Shield goes it’s fine. Wearing a Shield allows you to liberally use Shield Block on cooldown which is a guaranteed proc for Revenge.
Revenge does very high threat and you basically can tell if a Warrior tank is any good by the number of Revenges they got out in a fight. Revenge the kill target, Sunder the others, fill in with Battle Shout and Demoralizing Shout which both help in an AOE situation to get mobs to stack on you.
I like Daggers as tanking weapons, but what is important while leveling is to get the highest DPS 1-H weapon you have available to you - ignore the other stats on it - if the weapon DPS is high(er) than what you have it is an upgrade. Fast weapons are good for tanks but the reason is Heroic Strike spam - you won’t be doing that for a good long while so don’t worry about it until you literally cannot spend rage fast enough to stay under +/-80 rage.
Hope that gave you a couple ideas. If you have more questions I’m sure someone can answer them.
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So wrong on so many different levels.
AOE is my best tanking method
I don’t Taunt
I don’t sunder
I do tab
I don’t taunt
Over and over
I don’t raid 
You are a paladin you can’t tank.
For vanilla you can probably tank dungeons as fury with a shield for some fights, if you are 2 levels at least until you can afford dual talent purchase. Which is a bit of a problem but I think for level 1-50 you should be fine tanking in fury.
I went into the Prot tree just enough to get Defiance and Last Stand. After that, I put all my points into Arms, mainly for Tactical Mastery, Anger Management, and Sweeping Strikes.
I use a 2H for small pulls and switch to sword and shield for larger pulls or when melee mobs are hitting too hard, using macros to quickly swap between weapons. It’s also a good idea to check with the healer if they’re comfortable with you going 2H.
It’s probably not the most optimal way to play, but it’s fun, and I haven’t had any issues tanking so far.
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As long as your warriors aren’t queing,
I’ll take it