Blizzard has shared their goals with the Protection Warrior talent changes that will go live in Patch 11.2: Ghosts of K’aresh.
- There will be fewer locked-in picks and more talent points to experiment.
Challenging Shout will be baseline, which frees up a talent point for utility or damage.
Enduring Alacrity and 
Focused Vigor will have less raw power, but now compete with new, situational ptions.- Builds can now pick more magic / physical reduction, our double down on Execute damage when needed.
- The total power should stay the same, these changes are not meant to be nerfs for Prot Warriors.
Welcome Protection Warriors! There are a number of changes to your talents and talent tree coming in 11.2. We’d like to share our goals for these changes and how we approached them.
Many of Protection Warrior’s talents in each gate provide either key capabilities or extremely powerful bonuses that make those talents “locked in.” As a result, Protection Warrior builds don’t change much in different situations or based on personal preferences.
In 11.2 there are still many key, high power talents in the Protection tree, such as Strategist, Shield Specialization, Shield Charge, and Shield Wall. But in this version of the tree, we tried to ensure you have some points left after taking the “must take” talents in each gate. We did this by rearranging the tree to remove some bottleneck talents, making Challenging Shout baseline, and reducing the power of some current “must take” talents so they’re at a comparable power level with optional or utility talents.
The best examples of this type of power equalization are Enduring Alacrity and Focused Vigor, which granted lots of defensiveness and stats. The new versions are still broadly useful boosts, but more specific alternatives are more competitive with their power now. Where talents lost power in this way, we gave it back in other talents or abilities so your overall power level remains similar.
Once we freed up some flexibility to choose more talents based on situation and personal preference, we wanted to add some options to let you lean in to different aspects of your kit or customize your defenses . You can opt for more physical or magic damage reduction based on the needs of an encounter. There’s a more accessible suite of Execute talents if you want to emphasize that source of damage. Tough as Nails is a more useful tool for holding AOE threat. Bloodborne is easier to take if you’re looking for more passive damage. And so on.
We are excited to see the builds you try and will be watching this thread for feedback!
