Protection warrior self-healing (or lack thereof).

There is one thing that marks the role of a tank more than any other - the ability to grab, maintain and survive aggro. As a warrior, we have no shortage of tools with which to make ourselves take less damage. Thunderclap slows attack speed, Demoralizing Shout weakens blows landing on you, Disarm guts the physical output of an enemy and Spell Reflect is great for returning a blazing fireball from whence it came. When you toss in the fact that warriors are one of only two tank classes that can dodge, parry AND block, then you should be looking at a class that is very difficult to kill off.

Funnily enough, that's generally true; if a new warrior complains that he's taking too much damage, you'll invariably find that he's forgetting to use half of the arsenal available to him and merely assuming that all he has to do is turn up with plate armour and a shield. He's probably also omitting his mitigation cooldown Shield Block, or his major cooldowns of Shield Wall and Last Stand.

The problem, of course, is that warriors are now comparatively weak when our mitigation is compared to our shield-toting brother, the Protection paladin. Their attack speed and power debuffs are applied passively, saving precious GCD's, while our "flavour" abilities Disarm and Spell Reflect rarely work when it matters. Add this to weaker major cooldowns and one less mitigation cooldown, we're already at a disadvantage.

Our biggest problem, however, is our complete inability to heal ourselves outside of Enraged Regeneration.

Before moving on, I have to be careful. Warrior self-healing should never be equivalent to the death knight, or even the paladin when you consider his ability to hard cast. It's also worth being mindful of how horrendously unwieldy Word of Glory really is before calling for something roughly equivalent (just remove Holy Power, Blizzard... Seriously). The druid, on the other hand, has Frenzied Regeneration which is a direct equivalent, but gets significantly more healing from Improved Leader of the Pack than warriors will ever get from Blood Craze; and that's not mentioning the hefty investment of three talent points.

The good news, however, is that Blizzard have an open net with regards to a fix.

The talent Impending Victory can be reworked to provide more widely available access to Victory Rush. The talent, as it stands, is one I stood up for at the launch of Cataclysm - in a game that had started to lack "feel", the idea of a warrior becoming harder to kill as victory beckoned was something I could relate to. As for the utility of the talent itself, I thoroughly supported the idea of two points that could help the healers when they were running on fumes during the hardest part of most encounters.

Alas, that's just not how it turned out. The talent has been widely ignored because healers have other tools to avoid running out of mana, not least powerful raid cooldowns that have almost become mandatory for execute phases. As a result, Impending Victory has pretty much bitten the dust as two talent points that can be better spent elsewhere.

Essentially, there are two directions the talent could be taken:

a) It buffs Blood Craze by 7/15% (or something similar).
b) It causes Victory Rush to be available outside of the execute phase.

Buffing Blood Craze is something that would make that particular talent more enticing for tanks, while ensuring it's out of reach for DPS warriors. It would be easy to balance. The most significant problem with it, however, is that five points is a MASSIVE investment just for some passive self-healing, which is hardly compelling gameplay anyway.

Making Victory Rush more available is something I'd love to see, though. As it does less damage and threat than Devastate, it becomes something of a trade off if hit and due to no blood shield mechanic, decision making becomes a part of its successful use - hitting it when it lights up is rarely going to be the best strategic use. On the other hand, saving procs for when you're getting lower or the healer is otherwise tied up, marks a far more interesting gameplay dynamic that addresses a major weakness with Protection warrior survival as it currently stands. This is how I'd like to see it lining up in a talent tree of the future:

"Enduring Victory

Using Devastate or Revenge on a target has a 2/5% chance to allow the use of Victory Rush, but that Victory Rush only heals for 5% of your health."

There's no real reason why they couldn't buff Blood Craze via the talent too, because going for as many survival orientated talents as you want would be fun. I would just like to see something that a warrior can make a serious consideration out of with regard to talents, playstyle and glyph choice (there are two that have an effect on Victory Rush).

Warriors struggle with self healing at the moment which contributes to their perception of fragility, something that could relatively easily be addressed through talents at no wider cost to balance. At the moment, Impending Victory is treated with neglect by the vast majority of warriors and Blood Craze is simply too weak for a three point investment. In a set of talents that are otherwise pretty damn sweet, these are the only two red-herrings for tanks.