Patch 3.2 Warrior Guide
To be honest, there are lots of changes to
Warrior talent builds in
patch 3.2 beyond expectation. There simply weren't that many changes to Warrior talents and those that were changed were ones that were being taken anyway. In this patch, only four talents and three abilities say any change. Armored to the Teeth now grants 1, 2 or 3 AP for every 108 AP, but it's unlikely that anyone who wanted the talent wasn't already taking it at the old value of 180 armor per AP. Bloodsurge will now notify the player in floating combat text when a slam is instant, but again, if you weren't taking Bloodsurge before it's because you weren't fury specced, this change won't get anyone to take it.
As such, while Devastate has been buffed and Shield Specialization is better now if you aren't heavily invested in the protection tree you're not going to take them, and if you are, you probably already have them. Shield Specialization is the only talent change that might get people to change their specs around to get it, but even then it's fairly low on the prot tree, which means that overall builds are fairly likely to keep the same basic look and merely shift a few points around at best.
Bloodrage gets buffed to give 20 rage immediately and another 10 rage over 10 seconds. The health costs didn't change and many Warriors have this glyphed, so with the talent Improved Bloodrage and the glyph we're looking at 30 rage initially and 15 rage over 10 seconds. That's a nice change all told.
Execute is changed to take at most 30 rage, folding the current Sudden Death change into the baseline talent and removing those changes from Sudden Death itself. This will most likely work out to be a slight DPS increase since it will keep warriors from bleeding out all of their rage when they hit execute range, although the days of massive execute crits are over.
As part of the change to block value on items (block value items having double the value they currently do in patch 3.2) Shield Slam has been changed as well. The benefit from additional block value this ability gains is now subject to diminishing returns. Diminishing returns occur once block value exceeds 30 times the player's level and caps the maximum damage benefit from shield block value at 34.5 times the player's level. This is basically to prevent Warriors trying to assemble rigged block value sets to push their shield slams up into ridiculous amounts. Time will tell if it hurts or helps Warrior tanking threat.
We'll be seeing a new five man and a new 10/25 man raid with heroic modes for each raid size. As you can expect, this means gear for everyone from the new 80 to the jaded raider who's just killed his way through Algalon naked using a spork. Apart from this, the entire emblem system is seeing an overhaul with all current that drops emblems of heroism or valor switching to emblems of conquest, while emblems of triumph will be available via daily heroic quests and the new raids. We're also likely to want to save up our badges from our current heroics to pick up as many epic gems as possible once those go live in 3.2 with the exception of all of this.
It is for sure that there are going to be a lot to do to get geared and properly outfitted once the new content drops, although Warriors themselves won't really see a lot of direct changes in
patch 3.2.