Tankard Woes

Wait, am I really complaining about having a weapon that looks like a beer mug and has DPS stats to burn? Did I just do that?

Well, kind of a little.

For the uninitiated, the Tankard o' Terror is a very nice 1H mace for several classes. It was a drop during Brewfest 09, and is BoE, so you can still get them from the auction house (on my realm, they're going for 1200g or so, which is a very reasonable price if you could use it). As an iLevel 226 mace, it's statted out pretty well. 2.6 speed, 171 DPS, with Agi, Crit, Haste and AP. For someone who is just fresh to 80, it's a ridiculously good BoE to pick up. Your other options include things like a Titansteel Bonecrusher, or an equivalent from the Argent Tournament. Any way you look at it, the iLevel 200 starter epics all have 143 DPS and are less-well itemized (the bonecrusher, for example, is a 2.5 speed weapon). You'll have to wait until ToC-10 or higher to even think about replacing this thing, and probably not even then. For 1,200g, to have that worry out of the way for months is worth it.

Here's the problem.

An enhance shaman or frost death knight could probably dual-wield these guys. But a rogue can't - it's way too slow for an OH for a combat rogue (and this is really just a combat weapon, since assassination rogues need daggers and subtlety rogues need to respec). A librarian's paper cutter or a fang of one thousand truths is a better offhand for a combat rogue. But those are not maces. As it happens, the choice for your offhand weapon to go with the Tankard is VERY limited. Here's the list. In that list, most of those maces aren't even available anymore (they're from old arena seasons), and some of them are terrible. You're left either trying to get an arena weapon (which I might eventually do, but it's a long slog to get arena-worthy on a new character), hoping for an ulduar-10 drop, or just sucking it up and equipping a non-mace offhand.

It's not the end of the world - a combat rogue primarily uses his offhand for Combat Potency procs (hence the need for speed) and for stats on the weapon. Since poison application was changed to a PPM system a little while back, offhand weapon speed doesn't actually affect your poison DPS. So for now, I've got a point in Close Quarters Combat and was using the paper cutter, but have also been experimenting with a Fang of Truth as well (which has better DPS stats and a higher pawn value according to my simcraft weights, but lower weapon DPS and is slower). This makes the combat spec kind of inelegant - that floating one point could go into close quarters combat or Endurance for a 2% stam buff, but you can't get any Hack and Slash points without pulling points from Weapon Expertise.

The real bummer is a more subtle motivational one. I'm not likely to ever see a good offhand mace. Period. But the escalation of armor penetration as a top-end stat means I'm likely to want a MH mace for a long time (especially once I start picking up t9 gear, even if there are other MH options at that point). So I'm going to be dealing with this problem forever - constantly hemming and hawing over whether I want a point in CQC, if I can afford the loss in expertise to get two points in hack and slash (offhand HnS procs will proc your MH mace strikes, I believe), and so on. I really like specs that are Elegant and Compact, and those floating points in the combat tree are like a little wiggle in my tooth that I have to keep tonguing.

Anyway. I'm doing good DPS and rogues are awesome. Trust me to find a way to QQ about that.