Warrior duel wield tanking......possible?Follow

Personally I only use a shield as a Warrior on raid mobs when defensive discs are all used up and/or out of endurance, and a few other times. Dual Wielding is the way to go in general as the main tank warrior, as you get faster swings and more procs to help with aggro which is generally the key factor. Also with AAs such as Slippery Attacks that reduce enemy ripostes of offhand attacks completely when maxed leveling out the main reason to use a 2H (other than the riposte disciple). I generally save 2Hers for when I'm not main tank, but you can also tank with a 2Her, it will likely be slightly tougher (but not by alot with good procs and low delay and good ratio) to keep aggro.

Most would say in general fights not to use the shield as a War, for the loss in aggro, dps, and since group mobs aren't that tough. Personally, I try to keep Anger and Enraging Blow proc augs in my dual wielding weapons, and low aggro / dps procs, in my 2Her and just use dual wielding the majority of the time, and 2Her when playing a dps ('cough) or assist role, and the shield as I mentioned only versus very hard hitting raid mobs. Just to clarify, I'm not saying using a shield isn't great, but rather is just not required for most fights.

EDIT: By far SKs are the best soloers, and also have the best AE aggro of the tanks, along with a nice line of spells that make them very versatile, and incredible soloers at higher levels when they can life tap from weapon damage. Warriors are best versus single hard hitting mobs. Paladins of course rule against undead. With a merc though, all will do fine. See this thread for a good comparison of all the plate classes.

Yther Ore.

Edited, Jul 12th 2011 4:12pm by Yther

I'd love to duel wield on my warrior, but the fact is the shield gives higher DPS right now.

Perhaps it is different with some real high end raid weapons, but with the shield AA's max'd and T4 quality loot the shield beats duel wield in damage.

It's completely crazy that it does, but that's how it is now.


You do lose some agro, but it's not enough to cause any real issues that I've seen.

There is a good thread on the Steel Warrior about dual wield (DW) versus sword and board (S&B).

Look into the AA Shield Specialist (SS) and Improved Shield Specialist (ISS). The number crunchers on the Steel Warrior have tagged the DPS scale where S&B starts beating DW is around SS 8 to SS 10.

Before that, DW DPS is better than S&B in terms of DPS.

The flip side of the coin is the aggro portion of it. Most number crunches have shown that DW is still better aggro until you get the first couple levels of ISS.

For me, sitting at SS 10, occasionally my rogue can take aggro from my warrior in S&B mode. I will admit that my rogue isn't going all out. For normal trash clearing, I just stick with DW. If a named pops, I will start off with DW for the better aggro, then I will switch to S&B for the balance of the fight. For me, it appears that I need a couple ticks of the aggro abilities to kick in to maintain the aggro lead.