Chefs Oliver and Otto asked me:
Ulu, could you possibly post up your thoughts on the epic tanking weapons and shields in WotLK sometime (if the topic is worthwhile)?
My main point of question is surrounding the Broken Promise as it is kind of slow, but on WoWhead they said this is no biggee for prot pallies these days. I was wondering if you agreed!
Anyhow I hope you are recovering well and I do enjoy visiting your blog. Thanks!
I'm afraid I don't have hands-on experience of Broken Promise since it drops in Naxx25 and I'm pretty much 10-mans only. That said, Ulu did a lot of his levelling and early heroics with the Crescent of Brooding Fury which is slower.
Paladin Tanking is pretty much weapon speed-agnostic. AFAIK, Warriors like a fast weapon because they want their swing time to be as close to the global cooldown of 1.5secs, so that their melee swings don't interfere with their other abilities too much.
With Paladins, the melee swing is a smaller part of our overall threat. There's two things you should look at when picking a weapon:
Weapon DPS: Hammer of the Righteous is the reason you're using a high-DPS one-hander in the first place. It doesn't care about the speed, only the overall DPS.
Secondary Stats: If you two weapons with the same DPS (ie: Red Sword of Courage and Slayer of the Lifeless), then pick whichever one has the more favorable stats. The Red Sword will help more with the Defense Cap, the Slayer has more avoidance.
And that's really all the mystery there is to tanking weapon choices. Pick the one with the highest DPS first, failing that pick the one with the more favorable stats, failing that, pick the one that looks coolest.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Hey,
Just to clarify, warriors like fast weapons because most of the threat that Heroic Strike does is innate threat, and not based on damage, thus, while harder-hitting heroic strikes are not an inherently bad thing (as you get with slow weapons) it does mean you get less of them, which is an overall drop in heroic strike threat, a gap which is not made up for by harder hitting Devastates, as Devastate also mainly relies on innate threat (5% of AP).
However, with the current itemisation, the only two times you truly make an equal choice between fast and slow is with the Zul'Drak questline, where all of the weapons have ~110 dps but one is a slow one, and between Infantry Assault Blade from heroic Utgarde Keep, and Eternally Folded Blade from Halls of Lightning.
In every other case, the slow weapon is either clearly inferior or clearly superior, for example, Broken Promise, despite being very very slow, is still the second best tank weapon behind Last Laugh for anyone, warrior or paladin.
Thank you for the clarifications Ulu!!! :)
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