DrainingSouls.net

Some links for a lovely Saturday.

Tobold was cracking me up Thursday when he wondered where the standard Tank, Heal and 3 DPS group makeup came from.

Imagine you and 4 friends want to go out in the woods to hunt a bear. […] One of you is wearing his best quarterback armor, one of you has a medical degree and a first aid kit, and the other three are armed with swords and bows. The guy in the armor is telling dirty bear jokes to the bear to taunt him, the guy with the first aid kit heals him, and the other three are trying to deal maximum damage to the bear.

If you picture it you’ll immediately realize that this would never work in the real world. You can’t “taunt” a bear, he’d probably attack the person closest to him trying to stick a sword into him. You can’t heal somebody during combat either. The bear will not just hurt one of you after the other, but thrash around and all of you that are close. It’ll be difficult enough to use a sword without hitting the others in the group that are close by, and firing an arrow into the melee combat is more likely to hit one of your own guys than the bear. The whole tank, heal, dps system is completely unrealistic.

***

Lassirra had a great post on the Lament of the Casual Raid Guild.

The particular situation to which I am referring involves allowing a member of a casual raiding guild to sign up and participate in “progression” raids (content not necessarily on farm-status, or just barely so), against the leadership’s better judgment and contrary to reasonable expectations for successfully clearing progression content…

***

Monique from Girls Don’t Game had an excellent post up on gaming addiction that I think all WoW players should read. Having gotten burned out on WoW once before from playing too much, I can tell you it’s remarkably easy to start caring more about this game than real life. And that’s bad, mmkay?

***

Blogroll

I’m adding a couple of new WoW sites to my Blogroll.

Lootables

Lootables has a WoW item database similar to Wowhead, but what I use it for the most are the great Profession powerleveling guides they have. Links are down on the bottom left of the front page.

Warcraft Mounts

Warcraft Mounts has an extensive database of every single mount available in the game. It’s great for checking out what your potential mounts will look like before you buy one.

 Subscribe in a reader

So What Does All That Mean?

The first thing to note about these three swords is that they are all excellent tanking weapons and any T4 Warrior Tank would be well served by any of them. If you have only one of the trio, there’s no need to think that you absolutely must get the other two. That said, since most T4 tanks will have the chance to get at least two of the swords (and three if they’re Swordsmiths) let’s look at the strengths of each sword and what situations they will shine in.

Blazeguard

The Blazeguard is, as we’ve seen, an excellent threat generating weapon. It would be a great choice to use in fights where you might be rage-starved (to ensure that more of your threat-causing attacks hit) or in fights where you need to establish aggro quickly. Attumen the Huntsman in Kara comes to mind. He’s untauntable and hits pretty hard - if you lose aggro, chances are good that your healer is going down.

The Blazeguard would also be a great Heroic tanking sword. 5-man bosses generally don’t hit hard enough to necessitate tons of Avoidance, so being able to put out a bit more threat will allow your group to proceed more quickly through the dungeon.

The Sun Eater

The Sun Eater is geared more towards Avoidance and Mitigation. It is an excellent weapon to use in fights where threat is not really a concern, and simply staying alive is more of an issue. The Curator fight in Kara is a great example of this: you’re going to have plenty of time to establish a huge amount of threat on Curator while everyone else in the raid is beating on the flares. So having The Sun Eater to increase your survivability will definitely help things go more smoothly.

The Sun Eater would also be a good weapon to use for any content that you’re not familiar with, or that you might be a bit under-geared for. In situations like these, you will help the raid more by increasing your survivability rather than increasing your threat output.

King’s Defender

The King’s Defender is essentially a poor man’s Blazeguard. The two swords are very similar, and geared towards the same things, but the Blazeguard is a little bit better in each area. If you’re not a Swordsmith, or don’t have the Blazeguard yet, use the King’s Defender in the situations we discussed above for the Blazeguard.

Enchants

So now that we know the strengths of each sword, let’s take a look at how to enchant them to amplify those strengths. There are three weapon enchants that are geared towards (or at least very helpful for) tanks: Mongoose, Battlemaster and Executioner.

Mongoose is a fantastic Avoidance/Mitigation enchant. When it procs, it gives an additional 4% chance to Dodge and and extra 240 Armor. Battlemaster and Executioner both give additional threat when they proc, with Executioner being the superior one of the two.

If you only have one sword, and don’t foresee getting any of the others, slap Mongoose on that puppy and go to town. It’s the best all-around enchant, and making sure your gear helps you stay alive is a Tank’s first priority.

On the other hand, if you’re like me, and there’s a good chance you’ll have all three swords at some point, then you have an interesting dilemma. I believe that I would do this: put Mongoose on The Sun Eater to enhance its Avoidance/Mitigation. Put Executioner on Blazeguard to make it even more of a super-duper threat generating weapon. Then put Battlemaster on King’s Defender. (All of this is dependent, of course, on your being able to afford the mats. Also, if you’re planning on upgrading Blazeguard to Blazefury soon, it’d probably be best not to put any enchant on it just yet.)

Here’s my reasoning on the enchants: if you have all three swords, King’s Defender isn’t going to see much action. The Sun Eater and Blazeguard will handle 90 - 95% of all the fights that you see. Putting Battlemaster on King’s Defender will allow it to be helpful in healing intensive fights - fights like Shade of Aran in Kara, and the gauntlet event leading up to Akil’zon in ZA come to mind. Having an effective party-wide AoE heal for those fights would be a significant help to your healers, and would allow King’s Defender to see some sunlight every now and then.

Final Thoughts

So there you have a rundown of the three best T4 tanking weapons. I hope this has helped you figure out which sword is best for you. Any of them will last you well into T5, if that’s where you’re heading, or until WotLK comes out, if you don’t plan on going into the 25 mans. Enjoy!

 Subscribe in a reader

On Tuesday Mornings, I fill some of the maintenance downtime void in your life by spotlighting some great aspect of the WoW community. Sometimes it’s great machinima, sometimes it’s skilled gameplay, sometimes it’s just plain silly. If you know of something out there that deserves a mention, be sure to let me know.

<3 Shadow Priests.

 Subscribe in a reader