One handed weapon threat generation.

All the way back before Wrath of Lich King, I believed in using one handed spell damage weapons to generate threat, most have stamina and sometimes intellect which is hard as a pally to get into my gear. Spell damage weapons got me through nearly all the TBC Raids with decent threat generation since i have Righteous Fury turned on giving me 90% extra threat from all holy damage i cause. At the moment, i have a Titansteel guardian (soon to be nerfed i hear) that gives 490 spell power with +50 spell power enchant. My threat is good enough to get me through Vault of Archavon heroic and bits of Naxx that i have been able to pug.

My question: Is using a spell power weapon, such as Titansteel Guardian viable as a Paladin tank?

Lots of people ask me why i use it and i don't really understand how the alternative (Extra damage on the weapon im guessing) would work, so any input would be fantastic :o

From what I understand Paladins can perfectly get away with useing a normal tanking weapon (aka defensive stats like +defense, avoidance, stam) instead of a spelldmg weapon which is just pure threat, threat generation is pretty much a non-issue these days (bar maybe Malygos in extreme situations).

Tanking paladin's have been changed to benifit from AP (if memory serves). Find a good 1H AP or Str weapon and see how that works for ya.

Yeah, some spells gain power from AP but another good part about using a AP or rather tank wep(for def and avoidance) is that hammer of the righteous does 3x wep dmg and tanking weapons have higher damage than spell power weapons. Also, with the block value you get from strength your shield of righteousness dmg is increased.

Personally I'm using the red sword of courage and my threat is fine and usually far above dps.

All of your tanking abilities scale by 2 ways, AP and spellpower. AP is cheaper on the item budget than spellpower is. For single target threat, a 1 handed "dps" weapon, ie AP and high dps stats will out threat a spell power weapon. With that said when tankign 4+ mobs, the spell power weapon will give more equal threat gen across all mobs than a "dps" weapon. You no longer need/want to stack int or spellpower, its just not economical for the item budget unless your always going to tank 4+ bosses at a time :P

And for the math Maintankadin :: View topic - (3.0.3.9183) WotLK TPS Weapons Spreadsheet

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Originally Posted by shaya

another good part about using a AP or rather tank wep(for def and avoidance) is that hammer of the righteous does 3x wep dmg

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wrong.

it does 4 times the weapon's DPS as holy damage.
So say you have a 2 speed weapon with 100 DPS, it will do 400 damage (without multipliers etc etc) regardless of speed :P

But like many said: the threat lost from HotR doesn't comare to the threat gained from a SP mainhand.
That plus the fact that a tanking weapon has awesome mitigation stats!