The Scorned Forums

Yesterday I thought about the fact that a fury warrior with Titan's Grip would look really cool as an offtank: a big shield, accompanied by a big two-hander in his mainhand. And because all tank gear has strength now, he can do some decent Bloodthirst damage when in tank gear as well. But I just had another look at the Titan's Grip talent and its description reads:

Allows you to equip two-handed axes, maces and swords in one hand. Also reduces your chance to hit with damage-dealing abilities that require a weapon by 12%.

Does that mean that you also have a 12% extra miss chance (or actually, it was reduced to 5% in the last patch), when you are equipping a one-hander in your main hand and either a shield or another offhander in your offhand?

If you would have that penalty, Fury warriors would suddenly be terrible 5-man tanks again. Of course they get 3% back from Precision, but this talent clearly doesn't help for it.

You are supposed to tank with a 1H when you are Fury, you might be hurting yourself too much if you tank with a 2H in your hand. However, as you say the miss chance penalty will be reduced to 5% in an upcoming patch (probably 3.0.3), which isn't that bad, and then it might be worth it.

Currently however the miss chance penalty is 15% (the 12% never made it to live realms), so trying it right now would probably result in a very frustrating experience. Then again, if you want to know if shield slam is affected by the penalty, now is the time to try when it's easier to tell what the answer is

My concern is that the talent doesn't say that your hit chance is only reduced when equipping a two-hander. Logically, this would be the case, but the talent doesn't say so. Of course there have been laods of differences between tooltips and actual functionality, but I wonder if people actually tested this or not.

If you would have the miss chance for two-handers only, you could check if it's worth to equip a one-handed offhander instead. Your Whirlwind damage would be lower, but if you have 5% extra hit on your offhand, that would compensate a lot.

I hopped on the beta realm for half an hour to test as an L70. Here are the results so far against L70 target dummy in IF (who you should have 5% miss chance against)

* 2H + 2H (80 hr, 5.07%): white + yellow miss both observed frequently. yellow misses were observed for BT and HS at least]
* 2H + 1H (92 hr, 5.83%): white + yellow miss both observed frequently. yellow misses were observed for BT and HS at least
* 2H + shield (92 hr, 5.83%): no white miss ever observed over the course of at least 15 minutes of trying. in contrast, several yellow misses observed on BT, WW and HS, but never on SS. The SS result could just be a very freak accident, but considering the rate at which the rest were missing, it's interesting to note.
* 1H + shield (92 hr, 5.83%): no misses (white or yellow) observed, but I didn't try this combo long enough for it to be satisfactory

edit: The 2H + 1H had the 2H in main hand. It's worth trying the other way around as well at some point.

Hmmm, interesting.

Back to the tooltip again:
Allows you to equip two-handed axes, maces and swords in one hand. Also reduces your chance to hit with damage-dealing abilities that require a weapon by 12%.

Shield Slam doesn't require you to have a weapon in your main hand, so that *might* be areason that it's excluded.

No misses on white attacks but a lot on yellow attacks seems strange though.