I was thinking of playing a Cloud warrior, going battle and taking up the defender path. My picks on weapon specs are, sword/polearm or sword/mace. For the sword/polearm combo to work out I would need to take landslide and the last time I played a landslide warrior it felt that landslide was tweaked, it did not work as well as in the past. For me I think sword/mace would be better, you get cranial and boneshatter. My legacies would be whispers/soul or whispers/riddle. Is soul redundant on high con races? is there a better pick for a village defender? any tips and feedback would be great.

You will find examples of successful Battleragers that deviate from any of the following advice, but I think they're good guidelines in general:

As a Battle warrior, I want to have:

A) A way to be a good tank. Sword, pole, and spear/staff specs are all pretty good for this. It's good to be able to get your item back solo in the mid 20s if you need to. It's good to be able to raid an undefended cabal solo at hero. It's good to have a tanking spec or mode to go into when you're far from the Village, too beat up to win a fight, and running for your life.

B) A way to lag someone with flight and a protective shield. Cranial, pincer, misdirect, etc. You won't want this option in every fight but sometimes you'll really want it.

C) A plan for how to get HP back faster than just normal resting. Defender is probably the best way to do this, but it comes at the opportunity cost of not being berserker or scout. Legacies and edges can help here too. (When I'm playing a warrior that isn't Battle or Outlander, my plan for covering this case is usually "gold".)

Sarien is correct in that pairing a giant with a defender will be brutal. You will always struggle to have enough mana. Even then, I'm not sure why you would want to be a defender AND take whispers. You are stacking so much regen that it's almost overdoing it.

Anytime I approach a build, I first determine what features of the build I want "locked in". The first choices I lock in are the ones that are what I really want to play. I then keep narrowing down choices until I have a final build.

In your case, lets lock in cloud warrior battle.

Based on that, you want either berserker or scout.

If you want to lock in scout, I would aim to use the strength of cutoff while being able to critical. I would likely pair it with something like hands so you aren't useless when you get disarmed. So we are locking at polearm/hands. Now with those two in mind, what are the best legacies? Do we want to shore up weaknesses, add to our strengths, what? You may want to be able to get back into fights quickly, so I could see doing whispers/riddle here. (As to your question, there isn't really anything that can make soul redundant, it is just flat hp add). You may want to add more lag and want to drive people into the village and take landslide. Making legacy choices at level one and assuming they will stick is kind of silly.

If you want to lock in berserker, I would lean more towards your sword/mace combo. Good defense/offense/lag. Lock those in, and then the same question: do we want to add to our strengths or take away weaknesses? I see Riddle as a little wasted as you can call bloodthirst and get back to weapons. Maybe take Trapping to better hit through defenses as you can get your heavy weapons back up potentially without many problems. Maybe you want soul here to flat outlast people. There are just too many options to easily lock in one.

Anyways, I hope that helped.

All great points! I like to have an idea of a warrior build before I make one and 100% of the time its no where near what I envisioned when I hero. As for the defender part I know its a huge draw back with the mana, I guess I'm a sucker for punishment. Another build I always like was a dark-elf/duergar dagger/hand spec. Like I said before just trying to get the brain back into CF mode.

n/t

Defender path on any giant is going to suck - field dressing costs a lot of mana, as does poultice. You need mana for these in ADDITION to resist/spellbane - which are difficult for a giant to keep up by themselves. They will have terrible mana regen from abysmal int as well...even with meditation.

If you truly want to play defender, I recommend you consider a race with much more mana from a higher int. I had good luck with an arial, but found dark-elf to be way better.

If you are hellbent on a giant, I strongly recommend you go Berserker, or Scout.

I've played 20+ ragers in my time, so I'm also not talking out of my butt.