Warrior Skills and Talents

Skills and Talents

Arms
Most of your most basic, yet useful abilities will come from the Arms family of skills: Charge, Hamstring, Rend, Heroic Strike, etc. You’re going to be using these abilities a LOT during your adventuring career, so get their lowest ranks as soon as you level up and become familiar with how they work. Some have more circumscribed abilities, such as Overpower, which isn’t of much use against run-of-the-mill enemies, but which can quickly devestate rogues for dodging your blows.

So far as the talent tree goes, Arms talents are usually either Improved versions of normal skills or weapon specializations. If you’re willing to emphasize one sort of weapon above all others, then the weapon specializations are going to be quite useful, but they will make it painful for you to switch over if you find a great weapon that you don’t specialize in.

The most noteworthy talent here is Mortal Strike, which allows you to deal double damage every six seconds, and which will reduce the effectiveness of healing on the target by half. It’ll chew up around a third of your Rage bar, but is a great reward for sinking 30 talent points into this tree.

Fury
The Fury set of skills focuses on increasing your damage output, with many of the skills focusing on simply adding damage to a successful attack, or on allowing you to strike multiple foes simultaneously. In addition, Fury is the home to the Shouts, which can convert your rage points into short-term buffs for yourself and your party, or to debuff or distract your enemies. The classic here is Battle Shout, which pretty much every warrior will want to keep constantly refreshed. It only lasts two minutes, so you’ll need to keep an eye on its icon and recast it when it’s flashing, but if you can keep it up, you should be able to boost your attack power by a significant amount.

Fury talents are, again, mostly focused on giving you improved versions of the skills that you have access to, but there are also a few unique talents, such as the incredibly useful Cruelty, which will give you an increased chance to deal critical damage on each blow. If you’re willing to build up towards a weapon specialization in the Arms tree, you can combine this with one of the critical-building specializations for some devestation with your weapon of choice, or you can combine it with the Flurry talent to increase your swing speed.

Protection
Protection is oriented towards tank players, or warriors who mostly find themselves in groups. If you focus on Protection, especially when it comes to your talents, you’ll sacrifice some of your offensive capabilities in exchange for better aggro management, reduced damage, and improved use of shields.

So far as the skills go, the bedrock of Protection is Taunt, which is often going to be the only thing standing between your party’s mages and priests and a quick death. When you cast Taunt on an enemy, you’ll build up a significant amount of threat, which should normally either prevent that enemy from changing targets, or will help you encourage that enemy to switch back to you if it does start pursuing one of your casters.

Talents here are useful for getting passive bonuses to your stats or Protection skills. These are really ideal for warriors that use one-handed weapons along with a shield, as there are specializations for both of those.