Based on some feedback here, I attempted dual wielding again.

The spec I went with was a pretty basic 10 | 54 | 7

As far as my gems / gear, I’m too broke at the moment to stress much about swapping ‘em around. My stats are suffering a bit (hit’s horribly low for example), but I’m not ready to fully commit to dual wield tanking just yet. The biggest dilemma has been weapons – which ones to equip and how to runeforge ‘em.

Weapons

With two hands and two kinds of weapons, I have four possible choices:

1. Two fast tanking weapons
2. Two slow DPS weapons
3. Fast tanking weapon in main hand, slow DPS weapon in off-hand
4. Slow DPS weapon in main hand, fast tanking weapon in off-hand.

Keep in mind, I’ve never raided on Artie, so my toolbox contains crusader seal rewards or heroic instance drops. My best one handed tanking weapons are: Teldrassil Protector (I have two of ‘em purchased back in 3.2), Peacekeeper Blade (only one so far), or the Red Sword of Courage (pretty sure I just need to sell that sucker – not a big fan of it).  My best slow one handed weapons are the Ghoul Slicer and the Hate-Forged Cleaver.

Runeforging

Initially, I thought that the rune choices were a no-brainer…. You had to go with Rune of the Nerubian Carapace (RoNC), right? The thought of tossing a Rune of Razorice on the main hand weapon so that frost vulnerability was in the mix is appealing, but so is a Rune of the Fallen Crusader.  I’ve done neither yet and I’m going with RoNC.

Results

First Run: Thursday

Using Ghoul Slicer in MH and Peacekeeper in OH (option4).   Get Utgarde Pinnacle… Shammy heals and pally / hunter / warlock DPS. DPS was okay (pally was tops was 2.5K, hunter was 3rd with 2.0K and ‘lock brought up the rear with 1.8K). Neither the ‘lock or the hunter had been before and they didn’t know to run away from Skadi’s whirlwind of death (beauty spot to pop an Icebound Fortitude by the way!) so 3 manned Skadi. Bit frustrating after a /readycheck before starting the event and asking if everyone was good to go…. but I digress.

Threat?  No issues.  DPS?  About the same as 2h frost, around 2.1K. Survivability?  Didn’t seem to be an issue. Heal check — no worries, shammy was happy… take that as success.

Second run: Friday

Equip the 2 slow DPS weapons (option 2), Ghoul Slicer and Hate-Forged Axe (RoNC on both).  Get Drak’Theron Keep. Freshly dinged 80 holy priest heals, mage, shammy and warlock DPS.  Shammy was having lag issues and pulled 900 DPS for most of the run. Lock was having AFK issues and pulled 2K.  Mage pulled 2.1k.  I topped DPS charts at 2.3K…. so uh, the slow weapons made a nice DPS change.  With the low DPS, the bosses died slower, but they still died.  Only issue we had was when priest got feared at the end into the 2nd pack of undeads on the way to the Prophet, but we still pulled it out (was a nice test of staying power, actually).

Bottom line, I’m digging looking like a rogue in plate and it doesn’t appear to have gimped me other than my +hit stats…  So I may have to stick with it for a bit!

Thanks to those that encouraged the retry!  If I can get the Rimefang’s Claw or Lucky Old Sun to drop, then I’ll gladly change over… Same thing for the Black Icicle. ‘Till then, I’m kinda digging it!