Season of Discovery Protection Warrior Tank Talents and Runes

As the current maximum level in Phase 3 is 50, you will be able to have a fleshed out talent build missing only 10 talents when compared to the end game 60 builds.

Due to the high amount of player power given by Season of Discovery runes and the available gear also being much better than would usually be possible to obtain before Level 60, skipping the Protection tree entirely for the massive damage gains of Death Wish, Flurry, and Deep Wounds is the play in this phase.

In fact, you will be able to do damage close to that of a pure DPS Warrior while using these talents and the new Gladiator Stance, potentially carving Tank Warrior a new niche as the top DPS and threat tank option.

• Gloves — Devastate
• Pants — Consumed By Rage (ST) or Furious Thunder (AoE)
• Chest — Flagellation (damage) or Warbringer (mobility)
• Waist — Focused Rage
• Feet — Gladiator Stance (giga damage) or Enraged Regeneration or Rallying Cry for extra defensives
• Head — Shield Mastery (damage) or Vigilance (infinite Taunt)
• Wrist — Wrecking Crew

Devastate is a great rune for single target tanking, adding significant damage to your Sunder Armor routine. As you want to continually

Consumed By Rage can have almost permanent uptime if you manage your Rage carefully, making it a great damage and threat increase, but Furious Thunder is stronger for tanking multiple small enemies, such as the ones found in dungeons.

Past Berserker Rage unlock, Flagellation has fantastic uptime and is a great DPS and threat multiplier, but Warbringer provides great quality of life for quickly moving during a battle and picking up stragglers, especially as Taunt is melee range in WoW Classic.

Focused Rage allows you to use Devastate even more freely, while also enabling spare rage for utility and Heroic Strike dumping.

Gladiator Stance provides a new stance which can be swapped to at will for higher damage, but which also reduces your defensive power in the process. Alternatively, Enraged Regeneration is a rare Warrior self-heal ability and Rallying Cry can help your group survive high damage mechanics.

Unfortunately none of the three new head runes matters much for PvE damage as using Rend for the Overpower proc from Taste for Blood is a DPS loss in the simulation tool.

On the new head slot Shield Mastery is a straightforward damage increase and Vigilance can potentially provide infinite Taunts, for fights where that matters. Finally Wrecking Crew is a simple passive buff, which is much easier to take advantage of than Rampage.

More Engravings are likely to come out as we reach higher level caps, so make sure to keep a tab on our general Warrior Rune guide below to learn what they do, and where to find them:

Cruelty is a staple of all kinds of Warriors, as trading one talent point for 1% extra chance to critical strike is usually a good deal.

Unbridled Wrath adds a small contribution to your passive Rage generation from white hits.

Piercing Howl can provide a reliable source of soft crowd control in an emergency. Whether it is because the tank lost aggro on some enemies or because you need to run away to recover health, Piercing Howl will make things more manageable.

Improved Battle Shout is a nice damage boost for a full party of melee players. If you are able to provide it at little cost to your performance, it is a good idea to do so.

Improved Cleave is not quite as impactful as it sounds, since the damage increase only applies to the extra damage applied by Cleave and not the whole attack.

Enrage is mostly taken to reach Flurry, as you should rarely, if ever, be hit with critical strikes while tanking.

Flurry increases your damage substantially, as long as you are dealing critical strikes regularly. With good enough gear, you will eventually be able to keep this up nearly 100% of the time.

Death Wish is a large damage increase cooldown which also makes you more vulnerable. While this can be dangerous as a tank, with good healers and appropriate timing it should be usable, or even desirable for the increased Rage intake from taking higher damage during the start of a fight. Use it as many times as possible within a fight, but try to save your final usage for the Execute phase, as long as its effect ends before you run out of targets to hit.

Anger Management generates 1 Rage every 3 seconds, which is not clear at all from reading its tooltip. This makes it a decent Rage generating talent, but we will not have enough talent points in Phase 3 to pick it up.

Deep Wounds is especially powerful in Season of Discovery as multiple critical strikes will all contribute towards making the debuff tick for more, rather than just refreshing an existing debuff. This makes it one of the top damage contributors in the current level bracket!