4.0.1 Protection Warrior Build at level 80

 
Here what I'm currently thinking for 4.0.1 at level 80: 2/3/31.

Firstly, with the new 31 point trees, I only have 5 points to spend outside of the protection tree. Given that the self healing talents are new, I just had to pick up Field Dressing in Arms and Blood Craze in Fury. If threat is more or an issue than survivability, I'll add a second protection spec to test out the threat talents.

In the protection tree, aside from the fairly obvious talents, I chose to spend points in:


Blood and Thunder: even on a single target I think this will be good bang for buck threat wise, and should keep threat ticking on multiple mobs quite nicely.

Hold the Line: While the uptime on this talent is dependent on a successful parry, hopefully it will be a promising threat and mitigation talent, increasing both critical strike and the critical block chance. Of course, once the talent is activated, you just get the extra critical strike, but for the critical block chance, you need to actually block something. It will be interesting to look at the logs for this talent and discover just how many blocks are "landed" while this talent is up. The other big plus is that the wording of the talent makes me feel like a stalwart defender, so the name alone will appeal to warrior tanks everywhere.

I could have moved those points into:

Incite: I keep reading that incite is mediocre with rage normalisation and therefore not needing to spam Heroic Strike. However, if rage is plentiful and threat is an issue, I'll definitely give this talent another look.

Impending Victory: Additional self healing while the boss is under 20% health is appealing, it just doesn't seem worth the points given it is only available for a fifth of the fight. I'll wait and see what feedback this talent gets before getting to excited about it.

Glyphs

Unfortunately the prime glyphs are set in concrete. There are only 3 viable glyphs. Now I know prime glyphs are supposed to be obvious direct improvements... but if I never change them, they might as well be baked into the abilities themselves.

For Major glyphs I have gone for Long Charge, Cleaving and Thunder Clap. It is important to note that the old Glyph of Taunt is no longer.

Shield Wall now reduces damage done by 40% with a 5 minute cooldown [2 minutes when talented], and its glyph actually increases the cooldown as well as the damage reduction. Depending on fight length and particular mechanics, the Glyph of Shield Wall might be an attractive addition.

Glyph of Heroic Throw applies a stack of sunder armor, so it might have some interesting applications at some point as well.

For Minor glyphs I have Demoralizing Shout, Command and Battle. Battle is for pure convenience when Commanding Shout is not required so could easily be replaced with Berserker Rage if rage is an issue.

The nice thing about glyphs from this point forward is that once learned, you can swap them willy nilly. I'm hoping that blizzard have built an API for glyph exchange that allows all glyphs to be changed at once [out of combat, with cast time - I don't mind] so that addons like Outfitter can add a glyph profile to sets of gear. It is easy to think of a set of gear for tanking trash... how about a set of glyphs, too?