Warrior is a great class but also a tough class in Classic for someone with a job - especially if you want to experience all the great content Classic has to offer. I’m planning to go Orc and am theory-crafting some talent builds.
My activities will be scattered between PvP, farming dungeons for the first few months, “casual” raiding, and solo farming for epic mount, etc. I want an all-in-one build that has the flexibility to be an Offtank in raids and also a force in PvP. Here is the idea:
classicdb.ch/?talent#LMGxdAio0zVZxbto
With this, you’d have the foundations of a good PvP MS build, as well as the trappings of an excellent raid Offtank. The most notable sacrifices are Enrage and Piercing howl.
But you gain Iron Will for PvP (Orc 25% + 15% = 40%), Imp. Bloodrage, Last Stand, and Imp. Shield Block.
Have you ever tried a build like this? Are there any refinements you might make to the talent spec? Is damage not high enough to be a threat in PvP without Enrage? I also never ran PvP without Piercing Howl, which worries me. I assume it would just be a “getting used to it” thing, but I am wondering whether anyone has experience with this. Would love to hear your thoughts and get a conversation going about this concept.
To offtank raids, you don’t need any prot talents, so your 14 pts into Prot tree will largely be a waste. However, the talents you lose from the Fury tree will make you weaker in PVP. Last Stand does not make up for losing them.
It’s simply not worth it. You can try it, it’s not unviable. Just pointless
Interesting, alright, thanks for your feedback.
Hey man, by all means try it out. Hybrid specs were tried in vanilla, including ones with Last Stand. Just understand that to tank dungeons and offtank raids, all you need is a shield and you don’t need Prot talents. Last Stand is great in PVP, but it’s CD is too long.
31/5/15 was a pretty standard mixed warrior build back in vanilla. Those early prot talents are quite useful when tanking. It really depends on what you’re tanking, though…like if you really are just an “off tank” in raids (i.e. you might tank a Garr add or a Domo add but that’s about it), you’re not really tanking enough to matter.
The one thing I wonder about is threat. Threat was SUPER easy back in actual vanilla, but when I tried playing a private server a while back, threat was much harder to hold. I’m not sure if that’s because they borked the threat calculations on the private server (an entirely possible outcome), or because people were actually better players and doing more DPS. It’ll be interested to see what Classic is like in this regard.
True - from a threat perspective, Enrage and Imp Battle Shout is much more useful than those Prot talents I selected.
I suppose a large part of this idea comes from stacking Orc stun resist with Iron Will. This was a PvP consideration. But even then, an Orc with Enrage is potentially a lot more deadly.