Weapon Speed a big impact on tanking?

Post by 103911

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Post by 78077

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Post by Sakkura

All it means is your rage generation isn't as "slick", but there's not much difference nowadays. Certainly, weapon speeds used to be all important for threat and rage generation but the expansion has changed that slightly.

It's perfectly possible to tank with a slow-ish weapon, but perhaps not advisable. I'd guess that that sort of weapon (the one that drops from UK is the one you're referring to maybe) is designed to be used by Dual-Wielding Death Knights, but I don't know for sure - it's just speculation.
It means a lot more than that. Rage generation is only a very minor part of the decision between fast and slow weapons. Far more important are the implications for skills like heroic strike, devastate and deep wounds.

The reason fast weapons have basically been preferred since forever is that they allow you to use heroic strike more often and at a lower rage cost.

Now, things like devastate do work slightly better with a slow weapon, but the effect has generally been overshadowed by the heroic strike effects in most cases (notable exceptions would include offtanking on bosses like Gruul etc.).

The main novel factor in WotLK is that speccing for deep wounds has become feasible for tanks. Deep wounds tends to work better with slow weapons, particularly for AoE-tanking. For single-target tanking, the deep wounds effect is not enough to overcome the heroic strike effect, which means that a fast weapon is still generally preferable when tanking a single target.

Post by Sakkura

Title says it all. Will I be making a big mistake getting say a 2.60 speed weapon, which has more dmg output than a 1.70? I believe with the faster weapon I can strike more, which theoretically means I can do more threat. Right?
Not really. A slow weapon will hit less often for more damage, so the average threat generation from your basic autoattacks will be the same with different weapon speeds as long as the weapon DPS is the same.

Post by 182958

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Post by Sunderhorse

It doesn't really matter, because rage is usually never a problem which makes threat never a problem as well. When you get hit, you'll generate close to 15 rage, if not more. So if you get a fast weapon, you'll do less damage with spamming Heroic Strikes, but hit more often, while if you use a slower weapon that swings harder, you'll generate more damage and possibly more threat. Plus, all tank abilities are instant save Heroic Strike so it's just a matter of what you can pick up as a tank weapon.

Post by marklartank

bottom line - a fast weapon is still king for raid bosses. a slow weapon will do fine for everything else, and will be superior in any multi-mob situation.

Weapon Speed a big impact on tanking?

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