Blazeguard vs The Sun Eater vs King’s Defender
Right now, I am in the interesting position of having three excellent tanking weapons that I can go after on my Warrior. It’s a good problem to have. 
I’m currently using my trusty Fireguard (Blacksmithing recipe, available to Master Swordsmiths), but I’ll soon be upgrading it to the Blazeguard. At the same time, I can also go after The Sun Eater (drops in Heroic Mech) or King’s Defender (drops from the Chess Event in Kara).
There’s a good chance that I will see all of these weapons at some point - H Mech is a great dungeon to run for Badges, I see the Chess Event just about every week, and I’ll upgrade to the Blazeguard regardless of the other weapons I have - so I wanted to do a comparison of them (from a Warrior tank perspective) so I’ll know which one is best to use in a given situation. I’ll be looking at damage avoidance and mitigation, threat generation, and which enchants are best for each weapon.
Damage Avoidance and Mitigation
The first thing that tanks need to consider is how well their gear is helping them stay alive. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, if you are getting two-shotted by trash mobs, then you’re not going to be an effective tank. The relevant stats here are Stamina, Defense, Armor, Agility and Dodge/Block/Parry.
(Note on Avoidance and Mitigation: Avoidance is stats that help you completely avoid being hit, such as Dodge and Parry. 1% Avoidance lowers your chance to be hit by 1%. Mitigation is stats that help you mitigate the damage you take, such as Armor and Block. 1% Mitigation lowers the amount of damage you take by 1%. All things being equal, Avoidance is far superior to Mitigation. In the comparisons below, I’m going to skip the “Boring Math Happens Here” parts, and just post the relevant numbers.)
- Stamina - 25
- Avoidance - 0.56%
- Mitigation - ~0.10%
- Stamina - 22
- Avoidance - 1.44%
- Mitigation - 0.22%
- Stamina - 28
- Avoidance - 0.44%
- Mitigation - ~0.60%
As far as Avoidance and Mitigation are concerned, The Sun Eater is the clear winner, giving you almost 1.5% of Avoidance and .25% of Mitigation. Blazeguard comes in 2nd place, but just barely - even though King’s Defender has higher Mitigation and slightly higher Stamina, the better Avoidance of Blazeguard puts it in the lead by a small margin.
Threat Generation
The next thing to consider as a tank is your threat output. To be most successful in raiding, your DPS needs to be able to go all out as much as possible. If they are having to back off of their DPS so as not to grab aggro from you, then you are not being as effective a tank as you can. The stats that affect Threat Generation are White Damage (DPS), Hit, and to a much lesser extent, Strength/AP and Crit.
(Note on Threat Generation: 1 DPS equals 1 TPS, so the higher the white damage, the better. Increasing your Hit reduces your chance to miss, thereby ensuring that more of your threat generating attacks will land. Expertise is also a great threat generating stat, but since none of these weapons have any of it, I’ve left it out of the comparison.)
- DPS - 91.3
- Hit - 1.08%
- Crit/AP - .51% / 0
- DPS - 83.4
- Hit - 0%
- Crit/AP - 0% / 0
- DPS - 87.5
- Hit - 1.08%
- Crit/AP - 0% / 0
For Threat Generation, Blazeguard wins first place quite soundly. The highest White DPS, half a percent of Crit, and over a percent of Hit puts it solidly ahead of the others. King’s Defender comes in second with an equal amount of Hit and slightly lower White DPS. The Sun Eater hangs its head in shame and comes in third.
To Be Continued: Enchants and “OK, So What Does All That Mean?”.
Table of contents for Tanking Swords
- Blazeguard vs The Sun Eater vs King’s Defender
- Blazeguard vs The Sun Eater vs King’s Defender Part Two
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I’d pick the Sun Eater just for the quotation and text ;p
Yeah, I like the quote a lot too. TSE also looks the coolest. =D