What I'm ultimately getting at is that playing with your talents is fundamentally part of playing the game. Yes, your guild is going to require you to be dependable for the role you're expected to play: you shouldn't show up to tank your raid's first attempt on Rage Winterchill in a wacky DPS spec you just made up to see if it works. But experimentation on your own time is valuable to give you a sense of the nuts and bolts behind what you're doing, even if it takes leveling four warriors to 70. Okay, no, not really, only a total maniac would do that.
My warrior is relatively cookie cutter (there's a limit to how much creativity you can show at level 30 ;)), but I have run a number of non-cookie cutter specs on other characters that would get flamed into the ground if posted publicly. I don't raid, so I don't need to stack hit rating and talents to reach the hit cap (and am free to spend points on things that raid bosses are immune to). It's unfortunate that so much of the game revolves around heavy min-maxing, because there's actually a lot of fun talents and abilities that don't see much use because they suck for raiding and/or high end PVP.
The last time I checked, this was an online video game and the point is to have fun. If fun to you is attempting to tank "outside the box" spec-wise, then go for it and don't let other people tell you how to play. Very very few talents are completely useless. I've tried out some wacky talent builds on my tankadin when I hit 70. The weirdest was having ZERO points in anticipation (+20 defense skill) and ZERO points in deflection (+5% parry) while still staying uncrittable and uncrushable through careful gearing. That gave me 10 extra talent points to play with. I successfully tanked a bunch of heroics that way without problems. Eventually, once I hit Kara and started getting gear without as much defense on it, I couldn't maintain that spec and stay uncrittable and uncrushable while using my stamina trinkets.
This has relevance since we are ramping up toward the next expansion. We're in the middle of the soft gear reset, there are rumors about beta pages seeing clandestine activity... This means that the cookie cutter specs of today will be no more than the control groups for the further experimentation that leads to the cookie-cutters of the future.
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