When to Use a Slow Weapon  

There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst warrior tanks about when to use a slow weapon, versus a faster one. So I am going to give you what you want, the simple answer and then the math.

The answer to the question is pretty simple:


Use a slow weapon on fights where you won't have enough rage to use your Heroic Strike ability.

Use a fast weapon on fights where you have plenty of rage to use Heroic Strike often.

For many of you the above answer is enough, but if you're like me and you want to understand the math behind the mechanics then
you'll want to read on.

Let's look at two nearly identical weapons, our imaginary weapons have identical stats and are both 100 dps. One has a 1.6 attack speed and the other has a 2.6 attack speed.

Multiply the dps of the weapon by the speed and divide in half since Devastate does 50% weapon damage. (For simplicity we are going to leave out armor's effect in all of this) So the 1.6 weapon does 80 damage and the 2.6 weapon does 130 damage.

Now lets add in Heroic Strike damage. Heroic strrike causes 176 extra damage per swing and has 196 added innate threat per swing. So if we divide that by the weapon speed we can get a TPS of 232.5 for the 1.6 weapon and 143.1 for the slower.

End result? The faster weapon does 80 TPS from Devastate + 232.5 TPS from heroic strike which is a total of 312.5 TPS. The slower weapon does 130 damage from devastate + 143.1 TPS from heroic strike which is only 273.1 TPS.