Protection Warrior Midnight Talents Guide

Talent Builds for Protection Warrior vary from content to content; as a result, it’s easy to get lost in the sauce. Below, I’ve gone ahead and listed what I’d recommend for each form of content.

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In Midnight, we have some talent point flexibility at our disposal in the Class tree. With the current state of the last third of the tree, however, that’s fairly rigid and doesn’t see much shift. Listed below are what I’d consider interchangeable nodes, with explanations of what they do.

Fast Footwork - Grants 5% additional movement speed. A solid talent for all forms of content.

Storm Bolt - Very powerful, low cooldown single target stun that can be cast from ranged. Great in Mythic+ and certain raid encounters with stunnable adds.

Intervene - Let’s you dash to a nearby friendly target, and makes any physical attack redirected from them to you. It’s mostly used as a movement ability, but it does have niche use for the defensive portion.

Shockwave + Rumbling Earth - A short cooldown AoE stun, great in Mythic+ or specific raid encounters. If you talent Shockwave, you almost always talent Rumbling Earth; there’s no reason not to with the spare talent points.

Overwhelming Rage - Increases maximum Rage by 30. This is a nice quality of life talent that can help to reduce Rage overcap during cooldowns.

Field Dressing - A nice healing that received an increase of 3%, and all self healing increased by 10%. This works with Leech, making it a very nice point to pick up, particularly in Mythic+.

In this section, I’ll talk about some of the flexible talents specific to the spec tree.

Disrupting Shout - Reduces the cooldown of Challenging Shout to 90 seconds and makes it an AoE interrupt on top of its taunt effect. Very good in M+, useful in very niche raid encounters.

Instigate - Additional rage generation with your auto attacks, as well as a damage increase to Devastate. This is a very good talent in any form of content.

Bloodsurge - A chance for Rend to grant Rage. This talent scales with target count, making it much better in M+ than Raid if you find yourself needing even more Rage generation.

Thunderlord - Amazing CDR talent for Demoralizing Shout. It’s great defensively, and in combination with Booming Voice, it has the bonus of giving you that damp amp more often, but outside of AOE, it’s typically not a damage increase to use it off cooldown, so the value diminishes on Single Target. It’s still amazing defensively.

Deep Wounds - Execute now inflicts Deep Wounds. Additional damage during the execute phases of encounters.

Shield Specialization - Amazing defensive bonus. Reduces damage taken from blockable hits by a decent margin. Not necessary if you’re maximizing damage, but it’s a solid point to pick up.

Massacre - Increases the Execute threshold to 35%, up from 20%. A purely offensive node that will increase your damage substantially on Single Target.

Heavy Handed - Increases the number of targets hit by Execute to 3 at a reduced amount. Great on council bosses for extra damage out-put.

With Midnight comes the introduction of Apex Talents. These are additional talent nodes that are separate from the specialization tree. You have 4 points available to use with these Apex Talents to gain powerful effects and benefits, or you can simply use the 4 talents elsewhere in your spec tree.

Protection Warriors Apex Talent is called Phalanx. It revolves entirely around our Shield Slam, and listed below are the effects provided:

• Phalanx - Thunderclap causes your next Shield Slam to deal additional AoE damage and reduce the damage they deal to you by 5% for 8 seconds.
• Phalanx - Increases the damage dealt by Thunderclap and the Phalanx Shockwave.
• Phalanx - Enhances Shield Slam to deal even more damage while Shield Block is active and has an additional 20% chance to crit.

Protection Warrior talents got quite a shake-up in Midnight, but ultimately, they play very similarly. Your choice is still very much narrowed down to Mountain Thane in most content, simply due to the damage and increased rage economy making you more durable, too.

Mountain Thane

With Midnight, Mountain Thane didn’t really receive any changes. This Hero tree still offers more Rage economy and rotational flow than Colossus at the cost of nothing. On top of that, the added utility in the form of Stormshield is nice in certain scenarios, adding on to the list of reasons why Mountain Thane is set to outperform Colossus.

Mountain Thane has been nerfed slightly, simply due to the reduced access to Avatar in Midnight, but it’s still very powerful nonetheless.

Colossus

Although Colossus is struggling to compete with Mountain Thane, it actually does offer a considerable amount of niche utility and damage.

Colossus has added utility in the form of Earthquaker and Boneshaker, buffing Shockwave a fair amount to increase its CC, on top of a very potent damage potential in mass AoE. You also have the ability now to immune knock-backs and similar effects with the timing of Demolish, although you will lose a large amount of damage any time you aren’t pressing it on CD.