This first one is a Pally tanking the three bosses on the bottom floor of Heroic Mech (Capacitus, and the two mini-bosses) all at the same time. Craziness!

And this second movie is from Black Morass. You know how you have to go clear the spawn points before you start? You know how that’s kind of annoying and usually takes about 10 minutes? Yeah…

I love it when she comes back to the group (1:55) and at first you think she only got about 5 mobs aggroed… and then ZOMG!

OK, that’s all I have for today. If you’re good, there’s a chance I’ll have a real post up for you tomorrow.

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Also, I’ve decided to stop posting videos every Tuesday morning. After having done that for a year, I’ve grown to dislike feeling that I had to post something every Tuesday. I will, however, continue to post great WoW vids as I come across them, so feel free to keep sending me the good ones that you find.

My Top 5 Favorite Non-Coulton Videos

The Device Has Been Modified

Here Without You

Gadgetzan Hardware Store

Crystal Water and You (2nd vid)

Big Blue Dress

My Top 3 Favorite Coulton Videos

Skullcrusher Mountain (2nd vid)

RE: Your Brains

Code Monkey

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At the time, I was just getting back into WoW from my six month vacation that started shortly after BC was released. I rolled a totally new character on a totally new server and wanted to start a WoW blog to be able to share my thoughts and insights on WoW-related things. A year later, I have 2 70s, 3 more 60+ characters, and I’m still enjoying WoW and my blog immensely.

Since today is my one year anniversary, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite articles from the past year, and tomorrow I will highlight some of my favorite videos that I’ve posted. So here we go, in no particular order, some of my favorite blog posts.

My Gold Guide - Designed to help people be able to afford their mount at 40. This post was a lot of fun to write, and is a great example of one of the reasons I wanted to start a blog. It’s difficult to help people like this in the game - sending whispers back and forth for long conversations gets old quickly. Starting a blog allowed me to have a much better platform for sharing knowledge like this.

One of the changes coming in the next patch is that mounts are going to be available at level 30, and for a greatly reduced price, so I expect I’ll need to make some changes and updates to that guide.

Ironeye the Invincible - One of the first of the Rare Spawn articles, I enjoyed tracking Ironeye down and killing him. Having that Blue sword drop wasn’t too bad either.

Gurubashi Arena Guide - Lots of fun to research and and write. And by “research” I mean “hang out in STV”.

Get a Ravager Pet for your Lowbie Hunter - Another guide that was a lot of fun to research and write as well. It’s also been one of the most popular articles on my site, so I’m glad it’s been helpful.

The (Mostly) Naked Story of McGraken - Transferring my dwarf Warrior to Shandris was definitely an interesting experience, since I had sharded and sold nearly every item in my inventory just before I quit WoW the first time. Killing mobs with no weapons and no armor was not something I really care to repeat in the near future.

Win At All Costs? - I do enjoy me some drama.

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This morning we’ve got more trance, WoW, flying Draenei and fishing night elves. =D

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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.

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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…

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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?

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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.

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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!

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<3 Shadow Priests.

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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.)

Blazeguard

• Stamina - 25
• Avoidance - 0.56%
• Mitigation - ~0.10%

The Sun Eater

• Stamina - 22
• Avoidance - 1.44%
• Mitigation - 0.22%

King’s Defender

• 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.)

Blazeguard

• DPS - 91.3
• Hit - 1.08%
• Crit/AP - .51% / 0

The Sun Eater

• DPS - 83.4
• Hit - 0%
• Crit/AP - 0% / 0

King’s Defender

• 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?”.

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Here we have the sequel to the first Orcs in Space. Once again, the intro music is cracking me up.

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Well, if your realm is anything like mine, then the crafting thread on the forums hasn’t been updated in 6 months, and finding someone with the recipe is more difficult than losing an AV game on Alliance. So how about this idea….

As an addition to the Armory, Blizzard adds a page that lists all of the BoP recipes that your character has picked up and learned. Given the level of detail that the Armory has already, I don’t think it would be too difficult to flag all of the BoP recipes so that they automatically show up on your character page online. Then they can simply make the database searchable by realm and recipe, and presto! You have a list of everyone on your server that can do the enchant/craft the item that you want.

There are a couple of issues that I foresee arising. First off is the fact that you can pick up the recipes before you have the necessary skill level to use them. I got the Savagery enchant on my warlock when I was about 15 skill points away from being able to learn it (and those were 15 expensive skill points too; it took a while to get there). So the database would definitely need to track the recipes learned, not picked up.

Also, there is the potential issue of people not wanting everyone on their realm to know that they have a certain recipe. Progression raiding guilds that get a nice recipe to drop sometimes prefer to only make that item for people in-guild until the recipe becomes more common. Also, some people simply don’t want to be bothered by other people wanting them to make stuff. My response to this would be “You’re playing an MMO. Stop whining.” However, I can already see the QQs about this, so Blizzard could give players the option to opt-out of the database, or perhaps give them the ability to edit their page so it shows only the recipes they want to be contacted about.

What do you think about this idea? Any other problems you see? Incidentally, I need +12 Sta on my bracers, so if Blizzard could get this done in time for my next raid, that’d be awesome!

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