Bolshka's Required Warrior Reading

Bolshka:
I recently quizzed a fellow Warrior about some tactics, specs, and skills. His advice is some of the best I've read on this class. Without further adieu, I give you the words of Diesseits:

The difference is that Mortal Strike is an instant attack, whereas Heroic is on-next-swing. In effect, when you MS you get a whole extra swing for damage of white damage + bonus damage, whereas for heroic strike you only get bonus damage (you would have taken that swing anyway, the white doesn't count). So MS is radically more extra damage, plus it happens when you want it to happen, not every 3.5 seconds or whatever. Then you also don't sacrifice rage generation on the next white swing.

The same general idea applies for bloodthirst in the fury tree, and whirlwind (it can even be worth using hamstring instead of heroic if you have things that proc off swings like crusader, flurry, helpful shammy with windfury).

So to do damage as an arms warrior you should be in beserker stance as much as possible and use MS and whirlwind whenever the cooldowns are up, and only heroic strike when you have more rage than you can use any other way.

As for Slam, it's primarily used for Fury builds which use slow 2-handed weapons instead of dual weilding. It's another rage dump like Heroic strike except instead of superceding a white swing, it interrupts and resets the swing timer. Untalented, it's a bit crap since it'll add 1.5 seconds onto your swing timer.

With talents it's only 0.5 seconds and it can give some of the most intense damage a warrior can do when starting with a full rage bar since it has a low rage cost and bonus damage comparable with mortal strike. It requires good timing and latency to get the most out of it since it needs to be used right after a white swing to minimise the delay in the next one. It's a bit like hunter shot weaving, but more annoying.

Bolshka: And more, in regards to my spec (See Bolshka's Armory Profile):

By way of refinement in the arms tree, i could only really suggest taking improved thunderclap instead of improved heroic - it's an awesome boost to a powerful debuff for both tanking and grinding. I'd question the need for improved disciplines - 1 of them is pretty useless (retaliation), 1 is just a throwaway IWIN button (recklessness) and 1 is an emergency button only. The difference between a 20 minute cooldown and a 30 minute one is not substantial enough to warrant it when instead you can take weapon mastery for extra crit/aggro generation/disarm immunity, and go 2/2 Second Wind which is PvP oriented, but incredibly powerful. When I say not substantial, it is substantial, but not enough to transform the moves from special occasion uses to routine use. It's nice to have shield wall back more quickly when tanking though, so that's a reasonable call to make.

In the prot tree, you could reprioritise a lot. 3/3 tactical mastery is something most warriors take by default, though 2/3 is fine. Generally I only take 2/5 anticipation because getting enough +def gear to hit the defence cap (495 at level 70) is really easy anyway. That gets you to the second tier where you want to take 5/5 shield spec, which then gets you to the third tier.

On the third tier it is an absolute must to get imp. shield block before anything else - this is because it doubles the effectiveness of shield block, which prevents crushing blows while it's active and is thus the be-all and end-all talent for warrior tanking. With imp. shield block you can block all attacks from a slow swinging, hard hitting boss so that - assuming you've got enough +def as well - you'll never take spike damage be it crushing or crit.

After that, 2/3 defiance at least and then its a tossup between last stand or 3/3 defiance, depending on whether you feel you have more difficulty surviving or holding aggro. I'd tend to get last stand as it's useful for grinding (free health pot for a short while). (you've got 42 pts in arms so only 14 pts to work with in prot, but you can get 3/3 defiance as well if you free up another point).