I'm glad you commented, DragonFire, because I was going to ask Safeguard. My fledgling warrior is still enjoying old Azeroth at level 59 and Safeguard has never been a part of my leveling talent build plans, but it sounds useful later.

Why is it so widely denigrated? Is it simply because it's a situational talent that takes points which might be better spent elsewhere on threat or avoidance talents? As a baby warrior, I'm genuinely curious. Will it be more useful in Cataclysm? I'm curious what Mr. Rossi (and the WoW Insider community) think, especially about the latter question.

My impression is that it might be looked on more fondly in an environment where healers need bolstering and everyone is a little more responsible for their own survivability.

There IS a reason to use Safeguard in Lich King: Intervene makes the obvius to the Soul Reaper (I have even seen some parrys to it) and the damage reduction from Safeguard protects your buddy from that haste buff that Arthas gets. No one has to use a cooldown and can use it for other things. Ever. Don't have to do complicated plans concerning agro, cooldowns or positioning the boss. I cannot understand how that can be considered useless or "god awful". And taunting makes you take the Soul Reaper anyways.

And that part of "(yes, I said "viable for raiding")" about Arms is ridiculous. Not by a long shot that Arms is that crap lots of people want to make of it, but it takes a lot of effort to get decent results (and that fury is a broken and overpowered facerolling spec). The word is not "viable", is "overcomplicated". And that's a different subject.

Believe me, I don't want to be the troll here or question your authority in the matter, but that simplistic and simplified point of view is not something I would expect in this kind of articles. =(

@Matthew:

Taunting for Soul Reaper means they still take the full hit. Intervene knocks 30% off the damage (and also picks up one or two of the LK's hasted blows, depending on whether you have the glyph). Is it worth having for 99% of fights? No. But if you're working on Heroic LK, it may very well be worth your while to respec just for that fight, because it means that you now have an external damage reduction cooldown that can be used *every 30 seconds*. That means that if you time it properly, you can hit *every single Reaper* and allow the LK tank's CDs and other external CDs like Pain Suppression to be reserved for other situations.

@Matt

If your Lich King tank is an equivilently geared DK, Druid, or Paladin, at the moment, They'll take less damage than a warrior due to WotN, Ardent Defender, and savage defenses. By taunt trading, you you create the oportunity for confusion amongst healers as both tanks will be getting hit hard when the soul reaper ticks, and then exposing a tank who will take more damage to the Lich King. Meanwhile,Valk'yrs snatch up your friends, and require stuns and snares, which is a prot warrior's stock in trade.

The other option is to have you hit one button, and the Lich King tank has another set of damage reduction to keep him secure.

I understand, as a fellow tank, the irritation that comes with getting talents that pigeonhole you into a certain role. But this has given all tanks, except DKs, added functionality when they are not tanking the boss. And you will spend time not tanking the boss. While I understand your concerns from a tanking perspective, as a raid leader,I know it is the job of a raid leader to get players to set aside their egos and idiosynchracies in favor of maximizing performance and utility. I force my pally tanks to take Divine Sacrifice and my ret pallies to take aura mastery for the same reason. They don't like it, but it allows us to kill bosses.

@Feldring

Safegaurd is a talent that modifies intervene. Intervene,on it's own, it a fairly lackluster ability in the current raiding environment, used mostly for movement purposes, rather than the melee intercept. It's nice to get out of novas and shockblasts with panache, rather than running like those lesser melee dps.

Safegaurd turns intercept into an external cooldown. I don't know if you've raided on other characters, but there are some fights where a boss ability will outright kill the tank if they don't have a CD up. Sarth 3D, Steelbreaker, Mimiron, Vezax, Gormak, and the Lich King are examples from across the spectrum of wrath content. Warriors only have two active CDs, both need to be glyphed down to two minutes, and Paladins only have one active and one passive. On those fights a paladin or warrior must have CDs from other players to stay alive. Divine/hand of sacrifice from a paladin and Pain Supression/Gaurdian Spirit from a priest are the only viable options. Safegaurd turns intercept into a warrior's Hand of Sacrifice, and opens up new options with both raid composition, and rotation options.

In short, safegaurd doesn't have much use until you're raiding hard content, but when it does, expect your raid leader to demand it.

Rossi: Taunt trade Soul Reaper? Why, when I can intervene the other tank, vigi him, and use his constant damage to taunt the vile spirits away from the raid? Makes a lot more sense to me than passing the boss back and forth.

yeah it's really stupid to just flat out say it's awful like that. safeguard got me my first LK kill, and it's been in my spec since. i like the idea of there being more ways to protect someone than by yelling at monsters so they hit you instead.

While Rossi's comment may have been a bit harsh, and Safeguard can be used in certain fights, I think the main point in his article that he was making is that compared to the other talents in the tree, its a no brainer. Trying to find talents that you don't want/need is really difficult, and Safeguard is just really lackluster compared to all the others.

As far as the LK fight goes, I was recommended to use pick up Safeguard for the fight, but I found that I'd normally be on the other side of the platform chasing a Val'kyr when it dropped, and our main tank would normally die. Rather than taunting once the debuff is on one tank, so that one tank takes the shadow damage and the other takes the hasted attacks, we found the easiest way around it was just have one tank pop a cooldown each reaper, and then switch tanks. It meant we only have our cooldowns for those parts of phase 2/3, but you shouldn't really need them at any other point.

Hvaing a DK and warrior setup may have made it easier, as we had a fair few cooldowns, but it meant we always had either chains of ice or charge/shockwave/conc blow for val'kyrs, and I didn't have to try and get around defiles to get back to the tank in time.