Back to the future with Mongoose
One of my aspirations in TBC was to have enough threat that I could get away with tanking using a Sun Eater enchanted with Mongoose. Unfortunately, that day didn’t come until 3.0 when my trusted Merciless Gladiator’s Gavel was retired. But the dream lived on!
Last night in heroic ToC-10 (hopefully the last time we run that as current content), I scored the heroic Ardent Guard. Such an awesome weapon. As for enchanting it, I am terribly bored with the thought of Blood Draining on yet another weapon, so I decided to take a different route: finally giving Mongoose some time in the sun.
I’ve done a bit of poking around on weapon enchants, and what really piqued my interest was this threat sim run by Theck which shows Mongoose as being our second best (practical) threat enchant, only trailing Accuracy by a tiny margin. Combined with the armor and dodge granted by the proc, it seems worthy of a trial.
Update: Some actual numbers would be nice, eh?
- It’s been calculated that thanks to the change in how SoV is handled, Mongoose’s proc time has jumped to 52% since 3.2 (why it’s good all of a sudden)
- This means that the enchant is worth ~62 “constant” agility (120 agility x .52 = 62.4)
- That’s a “constant” 124 armor and 1.04% dodge and 1.19% crit
- In reality, when it procs, you get 240 armor and 2% dodge and 2.3% crit
Not too shabby!
I probably won’t get a decent test of it until Icecrown on Tuesday (crossing fingers) so I’ll let you all know how it goes.
Armory Feed
Mongoose! Wow! I’d never have guessed. I’m only just starting this tanking business (after almost 5 years of healing, healing, and more healing), and found your blog via a Google search for appropriate gems for tankadins. Really enjoying it; I have so much to learn! Thanks for the posts!
@Rhidach
3 December 2009 at 10:49 am #
No problem, thanks for reading! :)
Blood Draining may be boring, but it’s still our best survival enchant, imo.
I’ll be sticking with Blood Draining on Crusader’s Glory, and Accuracy on Silverwing Defender, personally.
@Rhidach
3 December 2009 at 12:11 pm #
Yeah I agree with that. I’m not finding survivability an issue right now (aside from TotGC which we’re not really doing) so I have some wiggle room to experiment. If I find I’m having health issues in ICC I might go back to the old standby.
I find myself being a guild main tank now after healing for quite a while. I have the 232 version of Crusader’s Glory but just threw regular old agility on there, because I was only going to be tanking heroics.
Now that I am actually tanking where it matters, I haven’t heard a clear cut answer to best tanking enchant. I favor survivability right now over threat.
It sounds like you are a pretty clear believer in Blood Draining. What about Blade Ward? It seems to be more popular in my guild. I theorized that it might be more useful with the avoidance nerf in ICC, but I’m still way too new to this to trust anything I theorize.
Thoughts?
As a tank, I have always stayed away from enchants with procs considering survavibility. Take Blade Ward, it’s a nice proc, giving a lot of avoidance, but there’s now way you can be sure it is up when you most need it, and in my experience, it will always be NOT up when you most need it (Murphy’s Tanking Law :p).
As a tank I want to be certain of what I have, I don’t like to gamble with 4/9/24 other players, because that is the feeling I have when I use proc-based-survavibility-enchants.
Now if you enchant your weapon for threat, it doesn’t matter, snap-aggro will only be affected a little by your enchant, and here the long run matters.
Blood Draining became much more effective after the AD buff made it non leapfroggable. It basically works as a free HoT tick when you get low.
Blade Ward has a mediocre proc rate, and is consumed upon next parry, regardless of if it fell on the extended parry zone or not. Digren said it best
“Blade Ward is like Mongoose, except it procs less often, provides less threat than Potency and no benefit to taunts, and is consumed by regular parries (i.e. those caused by other parry rating) and thus gets worse as your gear gets better”
Mongoose averages out very nicely, but I’m not a fan of proc based things. But it does look super badass. I’m torn…
Accuracy is nice on fights like Anub add tanking where your holy wrath needs to hit, or Gormak, where your taunts need to be high enough that the odds of two misses is extremely low. It’s also the best damage, and ergo threat, enchant you can get.
Potency works nicely with passively block capped sets for threat and mitigation.
Exceptional Agility is the best survival enchant in terms of pure statistics, as Blood draining is a little nebulous at times.
The moral of the story? Weapon Enchants for us are situational, but Blade Ward sucks in all situations.