WotLK Talents

The lovely team over at wowhead recently put up the new warrior talents from WotLK to play with. Now seems a good time to give some initial thoughts and speculation (bearing in mind these talents will no doubt change beyond recognition before the release, therefore rendering all such thoughts mute, and making you wish you'd spent these 5 minutes of your life reading about something useful. Like the global economic crisis. Or shoes.):

Stalwart Protector: Mother of god YES! At last us warrior tanks are no longer punished threat-wise as our gear improves.

Improved Shield Block: Hmm, 10 seconds reduction on cooldown? This must mean shield block is being changed to having a much longer cooldown (anyone have some info on this? whaddya mean I should be researching?). There's a few implications to this - it could mean shield rating is promoted from its position as "alright I'll take him, but only cause there's nothing else" in Team Tanking Stats, with chance to block becoming a much more useful stat both mitigation- and threat-wise (as it activates revenge). It may also be a sign of crushing blows dissapearing....

Anticipation: Great change. Who doesn't like dodge?

Improved Revenge: Mixed feelings about this one. The increased damage on revenge is awesome, the chance to stun not so. The fact is, warrior tanks usually don't want their target stunned, as it reduces rage and therefore threat. For emergency action, we have concussion blow. Taking this talent could conceivably mean: more threat on bosses (immune to stun), less threat on trash mobs (rage starvation).

Improved disarm: The additional damage a target takes could be a very nice raid buff - however again most bosses are likely immune to disarm/shield break, and so this may only be of use against trash. In which case, it's turned into a decidedly "meh" talent.

Concussion blow: Nice buff to threat, can't be a bad thing.

Improved Shield bash: Improved shield slam more like. Super!

Vigilance: Veeeery interesting. Imagine casting this on a pally tank when he's having aoe-fun - taunt will never be on cooldown. In fact, any raid instance where this is cast on a tank buddy, you'll pretty much always have taunt available. Renders improved taunt much less useful. And hey, warriors get to buff someone!
...And another possible situation comes to mind. Try slapping this on the rogue that keeps over-aggroing in your heroic. Not only does he have more chance to dodge when he gets the mob's attention, but when he does get smacked in the face, you know you can immediately taunt off him. Of course the downside to this is the rogue never learns the harsh lesson of controlling his aggro... maybe let him die after all, then.

Safeguard: Potentially a very nice off-tank talent. Imagine a gruul-like fight, where the MT is taking a hell of a beating. Then imagine you being able to not only absorb a hit for him, but also reduce all damage by 60% for 6 seconds. Could be hugely good.

Sword and board: Nothing but niceness.

Shockwave: Warriors can't aoe tank huh? *shockwaves the faces of all doubters* hah! One slight grumble is that I'd like to have seen an ability useful against big ol' single target raid bosses as the top talent, but you can't have everything.

Stalwart protector: It has to be said again. Yeeeehaaaa!!!

All in all, exciting times ahead. For a masachist (mathacist?) like me, the fun will be in the new stat balancing - who knows how the mechanics of tanking will be changed in WotLK? Will AP suddenly dominate? Will we become dodge-addicted rage monsters? A whole new era of brainaching headscratching mistakeandwipingtheraidmaking is in store for us, an era where we may hear ourselves saying: "that epic headpiece is nice... but I'm keeping my old blue for the block rating and strength".