As a TBC protection warrior, when I run Best in Bags, it greatly prefers a Warp Spliter’s Thorn, a dagger with 1.30 speed and hit rating. This is shown as better than the epic The Sun Eater, a sword with 1.60 speed and defense and dodge that seems made for protection warriors.
The only explanation I can think of is heroic strike. If you use that on cooldown it does a lot of threat, and a faster weapon allows you to do even more. But when tanking heroics I rarely have enough rage for a few heroic strikes, let alone using it on cooldown.
I would need to see more about your specific character to answer. Easiest way is to press the green “help” link next to the big Best in Bags section header and copy the generated 32-digit code here. Then I can try your specific setup and comment further.
Thanks – I’ll ask Swol who wrote the TBC warrior code to take a look.
If I had to take a guess off the top of my head… it is because a higher DPS weapon will generate more rage, and that just barely edges out any of the specific properties of the weapon (like stats or attack speed).
For tanks, we are assuming you are taking damage as if you are in a raid. This gives you an excess of rage to use, thus allowing almost every main hand auto to be replaced by heroic strike. We optimize for threat per second, not damage per second when looking at tanks. Heroic strike adds a flat amount of threat per use, so a higher quantity of heroic strike is better than each one doing more damage. Even if you say you want to optimize for “all toughness”, we include some value for threat per second, so we can make choices about items like weapons.
