Hi all,

it's my first post here, so I hope I don't spit out useless stuff or topics already covered in the past (and I really hope my profile has been updated, I swear I clicked submit!).
I rerolled to a warrior from hunter and I'm still levelling up, currently 52. I think I have a pretty good grasp on WoW mechanics, but the warrior world is still quite new to me when it comes down to crunching numbers and finding optimal solutions. I know that it's possible to do 5 men instances even with just greens, but I'm always trying to get the best out of my characters, level by level, so in the hope this is not a "too newbie to answer" question, I'd like to hear what more experienced warriors can tell me.

The core of my question is: which is the optimal speed for a tank weapon?

I currently have in my bags a set of weapons which I'm trying to rotate to find out the best one, but aside from "personal perception" on my toys performance, I'd like to have some insight for weapons I may get in the future.

I currently posses a Thrash blade - 2,7" speed, Hand of Antu'Sul also 2,7" speed and Hanzo sword 1,5" speed. All weapons have a +damage enchant. Unfortunately there is a lack of 2.2“~ speed weapons around this level range as that is something I'd have tried if available.

It seems to me that the Thrash blade and Hand of Antu'sul excel on single targets or small groups of 2-3 mobs, while the Hanzo showed to be a good choice for mass fights with lot of mobs, like the event at the temple in Zul'Farrak. Hanzo sword generates 3 and sometimes only 2 rage per hit, while the other weapons are around 5 rage per hit on average. Slower ones tend to be more annoying when you engage and get a couple of miss, parry and dodge in a row, which doesn't happen often, but maybe it's to be considered.

I often use the sword over the mace due to the sword specialization I still sport in my talent tree (for a few more levels), coupled with the thrash blade proc, I get some big burst of rage gain sometimes. The mace for those who don't want to look it up or don't remember it at all, it's the "mini-thunderfury" one, basically procs thunderclap and on paper is not that bad (if it procs).

The rest of the gear is fairly good for the level and rage generation is my major concern right now, so I'd take any advice you may offer.

Thanks.

At your level it's hard to say, although every tank has their preference in regards to how their playing style generates agro. A lot of my guys are very keen on Eskhander's at the moment, however they're all terrible at grinding money so don't have access to QS.

Somebody else here can help you with exact number crunching though, although the optimal tanking weapon in game at the moment is still Thunderfury.

Weapon speed mainly boils down to its interaction with heroic strike.

When you queue a heroic strike up it procs on your next attack using the rage, 15 i believe. That attack gets bonus damage which is not normalised so slower weapon does not make heroic strike hit for more once time is factored in. However the heroic strike hit generates no rage so you are losing either 2.7 seconds or 1.5 seconds of rage generation depending on which weapon you use.

In cases of excess rage the equation tends to change from how much rage you lose per heroic strike to how much of your excess rage you can convert to threat in a given time period.

Ive never seen than Antu'Sul before, thanks for mentioning that. :)

I would lean to Antu'Sul for mitigation, Hanzo Sword for aggro and Thrash blade for damage without running numbers. All three of them seem to have a valid role.

The only fight that speed will make a noticeable difference is Vaelestrasz.

The people here will look at 1.5% dps increase as significant, mini maxers will mini max anything :P

Personally it depends on the fight and the build but something too slow definately hurts when you have rage to burn and you can't get those HS's out more often.

The proc on the Thrash is actually a fairly decent aggro boost, all other things being relatively equal. Like was mentioned above, the speed of a tanking weapon does not matter for most fights. The only time it does is infinite rage situations where you are looking to maximize your threat output. Normal tanking situations, you will not have the rage to spam heroic in between all the other things you can and should be doing to generate threat. In 5 man situations, which I assume is what you are currently doing based on the weapons you listed, weapon speed does not matter in the slightest.

Generally, the DPS of the weapon is going to be the biggest indication of what will be easiest to hold aggro with. The more damage you do, the more rage you generate to do the other things which really matter. Procs, depending on what they are, can also add a significant amount of threat. Other stats on top of that are also decent to look at, but, at least in my opinion, should be secondary to the aggro potential of the weapon. A weapon which makes you unkillable means nothing if you are unable to hold aggro with it, and everyone else in the group dies because of that.

A couple things to consider:
With rage generation, speed is meaningless unless you are Horde. A 35 DPS 1.5 speed weapon will generate just as much rage as a 35 DPS 2.7 speed weapon. The mobs will hit you just as hard no matter what, so you'll get the same rage from them as well.

If you're getting hit hard enough that you can heroic strike every swing, use the Hanzo. If not, then Thrash for single targets, and Antu'sul for multiple targets since the majority of your threat should be coming from revenge/sunder. As you level, you'll definately want to upgrade, something like a Dire Nail, Serathil, Phase Blade, or a bashgudder.

Don't forget Timeworn Mace. One of the best tanking weapons out there pre-Quel'serrar/Bloodlord's Defender.

I used a spineshatter for ages, its more than adequate... up until thaddius, and aside from trash, itll work more than fine if you're maximizing health. edit: 2.6 delay. And this was before Shield slam was adjusted.
In Naxx youll probably want something faster than 2.0 for the 1 or 2 aggro dependant fights. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking speed is overly critical... managing your rage properly is #1... and you'll soon find out HS spam is only needed is extreme cases.

Even when you cant HS with every swing you still gain 1.2 seconds of white rage generation per HS. That is .04 lost rage per white dps.

So if your doing 100 white dps your HS's with a 2.7 are costing you 4 rage more than HS's with a 1.5 would.

So if you plan to use HS to increase DPS+Threat in a 5 man it can make a big differance. And depending on group setup you could be one of only three people doing damage to mobs so the amount of damage you did could be significant.

First, thanks everyone for the inputs, very helpful.

Boevis a question for you: I'm alliance (thanks to my buddies... sigh), so this is not a concern, but do you mean that Horde warriors have to keep Windfury into consideration when rating a weapon or is there something else I'm missing?

At this level range, mobs don't hit me that badly and I have pretty good mitigation vs equal level (53%~ on tooltip) or at least I think it's good ;)
When I tank a pack of mobs, rage generates fast only if many or all of them are elites as it'll be me mantaing agro on all of them (hopefully), in case there are some non elites in the mix, it's usually 1-3 mobs only that focus on me, the rest will turn to the AE'ing mage pretty fast and trying to keep them on me is an exercise in futility most of the time.

I have absolutely no experience of raiding content in wow except from a mage point of view (my girlfriend), so I have no clue on how much rage x received hit a warrior gets and how easy/hard this makes the tanking job.
In raids such as ZG/MC and BWL, is still an option to tank multiple mobs or it's gonna be 1 tank x mob only? (non-boss of course)

I'm going off topic, again thanks for the replies everyone.

in most of mc/zg/bwl/aq20 its pretty much one mob one tank. there are some minor exceptions but its rare. Obviously once you outgear instances (T2 tank in ZG) you can tank a ton of trash but you won't be at that point for a while I assume.

yes the battle shout aggro is pretty much the best (and most broken) aggro mechanic in the game, its what many guilds use to kill nef P1, twin emps, etc. for every person in range of BS a fixed amount of threat is generated, you can just spam it all day on AOE fights and usually hold aggro. Alternatively swing a 2h, zerk stance, and use ww/cleave.

Optimum? 0.1 speed would be great. Imagine how great that +5 weapon enchant would be.. +50dps omg!

Seriously though, feel free to check out my heroic strike calculator at http://www.rcsolid.com/poseidonguild/HeroicStrike.xls Threat per rage can be increased by about 10% and maximum 'burst' threat per second by more than that with a faster weapon. These are both important in some fights but certainly not all.

If you are horde, windfury would make slower weapons a bit better of course but Im not so I like my silithid claw unless I really need the mitigation from my QS.

How is windfury not linear with weapon speed?

Special attacks used in defensive stance shield bash, revenge, shield slam, bloodthirst and MS can also proc windfury. When they crit they also proc flurry. This causes slower weapons to do more damage in the windfury case or have a higher flurry up time than expected in the flurry case.

And remember that windfury strikes are not normalized. Rage gained through inflicted damage is much better with Windfury, and slower weapons will do more damage with windfury. While I do not have a link for it, there was a thread on Windfury vs. Rockbiter that has all the needed math showing windfury scaling better with slower weapons.

Profile before Kaubel gets you!

For alliance, the faster the better for HS spam, although you're really rage limited in pre raid instances when tanking. For horde, the windfury calculations make it harder and it's too late for me to crunch the numbers, but slower weapons give you a better boost to your rage generation and threat than faster ones when you factor in instants. As an alt tank I tend to start off with a faster weapon so an early parry doesn't screw me completely, then switch to a slower one once things are more established. Honestly at your level rage is really the issue, so HS spam doesn't factor in - you'll burn most of it on a sunder/revenge/31pt-instant cycle.

Oh yeah, if you're MS, take the slow weapon.

Sword spec too? Thrash blade. The instants for static tanking fights are great. Also, switch to zerker and whirlwind with a slow weapon when grabbing adds is wonderful too.

The faster the better usually, at least in my opinion. Getting improved heroic talent is really easy, be it in a 31arms build or even a fury build(and obviously a prot build).

Rage generation is smoother early in fights(it works out over time but if you miss 2-3hits with a slow weapon early on it'll be more annoying than if you miss 3 with a faster weapon, cause you'll hit once or twice during the same amount of time), threat generation is better with a faster weapon once you attain 5sunders because you can convert more rage into HS, which doesn't matter for the damage part of it but adds up with the set threat bonus you get for each HS.

That's why I was debating about Iblis going to tanks, even tho it's definitely not a tanking oriented weapon. I still think it's decent for a main tank if you're upgrading from QS or worse, and you're not advancing thru naxx very fast. Many guilds kill raz but not faerlina so well. And yea faerlina because the very best tanking weap, thunderfury aside, is Widow's Revenge. The stats should tell you what's a good tanking weap. Fast speed, 1% hit, armor.

Use the weapon with the best dps/stats you can find, and against +3 mobs weapon skill is useful (as an Orc I tank with Crul over Widow's). Heroic strike spamming is a great tactic but delay a lot less important than people claim, especially with the higher-end tank gear.

Speed is an important consideration, but I always consider the weapons stats first, and then worry about how fast it is. I was going for a Spineshatter for a long time, never did get it. I'm using a Pugio for tanking now, doubles as my offhand for dps, and I like it more for the +hit then the fast attack speed.

However, this is changing a bit, since there are fights in Naxx where the MT has basically unlimited rage, and needs to be able to maximize his threat, Thaddius and Loatheb are 2 good examples. You might notice a difference here in threat generation with slower weapons, since your HS spam will be less then those tanks who use the fast weapons.

Ele - What Flubber said is essentially correct. Because Windfury Totem has a +AP built into it and is not normalized in any way, a slower weapon benefits more from it. Not nearly as much as weapons with procs though. (Slow + Procs ex. Deathbringer on an Orc is amazingly good with windfury) I wouldn't say that windfury makes slower weapons better for tanks, but it certainly allows a wider range of speeds, though I can't see if making Spineshatter better for tanking than either Quel or Bloodlords Defender.

Enshula - The actual calculation is Incoming Damage/(Level*1.5) and Outgoing Damage/(Level*.5) Otherwise low level warriors would only be getting rage through charge/bloodthirst. :)

Weapon skill is extremely important for Tanking, yet another area Alliance have a major advantage over horde with Humans getting +5 skill with swords (Bloodlords Defender, Quel'serra, Thunderfury, R14 Quickblade, Blackguard, Maladath, Iblis, Widows Remorse, and Lord Blackwood's Blade) and maces (Anubisath Warhammer, Timeworn Mace, Spineshatter, Blessed Qiraji War Hammer, Cruel Hand of Timmy, Bashgudder) Not to mention the very long list of Swords/Maces for Human Rogues. Compared to Orc's Axes (Serathil, Ancient Hakkari Manslayer, Sickle of Unyielding Strength, Crul'shorukh, Dooms Edge, Annihilator)

There are different aspects to this problem depending on the situation.

For pure tanking worrying only about aggro, speed is meaningless, i'd rather look at stats, weapons like Spineshatter are enough, you generate rage through other skills, and HS critics for 1K+ give good aggro as well.

Now, when you aren't tanking but 'fighting for aggro' or trying to optimize dps while tanking a fast weapon is very good for that, as it allows you to do a lot more heroic strikes. For these, legendaries asides, Widows is probably the best tanking weapon at the moment.