Mongoose really is that good a tanking enchant

The bad news is in: the +75 or +50 stamina enchant to weapon is really gone from 3.0.8. Why? Basically, because it'd be too good. The usual QQing has followed but I'm not going to cry. Blizzard's good at game balance and I trust them.

The good news is Mongoose is a great tank enchant. We have three tanking weapon enchant options for avoidance: Mongoose, +35 Agility, or +26 Agility. Irritatingly the first two are rare drops in Outlands, but the last is a trainer recipe any enchanter should have.

I'd been skeptical of Mongoose despite Kalon's advocacy for it. It's a proc for 120 Agility (and 2% attack speed) that lasts for 15 seconds. But I'd never found any reliable data on how often it procs and naively assuming the usual 45 second cooldown it'd be at best +40 agility, or just about the same as good ol' reliable +35 agility.

I was wrong about the cooldown. I put Mongoose on my tank weapon and wow is it great. It procs a lot, apparently with no cooldown. I've seen it be refreshed so often it stayed up as long as 90 seconds. I've seen it proc off of white damage, Lacerate, Maul, Mangle, and (crucially) Swipe. I'm not quite prepared to say it's always +120 agility, but it's up an awful lot of the time. I'm still not clear what the actual proc rate is (the Wowhead nerds are confused because it's weapon speed normalized). But the fact it has no cooldown clinches its greatness.

Between Mongoose and my Darkmoon Card my unbuffed Agility can go from 940 to 1360, or 6.5% more dodge and 1000 more armor.

Comments

[Karthis]

What bothers me about weapon enchants is we have nothing worth taking from WotLK, and are stuck with the old TBC enchants.

[Flyv]

Yeah, it's disappointing they haven't added anything. Even worse that the two enchants we need are rare drops from instances no one will ever run again. It took until patch 2.2 or so before they made some of the old classic enchants like Subtlety available for purchase. Hopefully they'll either add new tanking enchants or make the BC ones more easily available soon.

It's not the end of the world for a tank to take a non-avoidance enchant. Particularly something with hit on it.

[Plummet]

Awesome post, I wondered about this myself.

[Ashj]

Thanks for this. My assumptions had been identical to yours and this really helps me make some decisions on gearing up.

[Stan]

I will definitely get that enchant. I never thought about it but the uptime you are reporting sounds interesting. Then again, with DR hitting us like a freight train it doesn't add as much dodge as it should.

And I echo my brethren who lament the lack of a good bear enchant in Wrath. The Hit/Crit one is a good cat enchant if I can just get a different cat staff than my bear staff... :(

[Paulo]

i enchanted my two hand staff with moongose about 2 months ago, but it never proc in bear form... so i put agility.
anyone else had this problem?

[Ian Alexander]

Tryed using mongoose, works fine and the proc is a very nice boost of,crit (savage defense), dodge and armour. but as a big boss tank, i preffered +35 agi - so not having to rely on a proc for more avoidance. seems to be workin well for me so far. but its a matter of opinion. :))

[Ashyne, the friendly druid.]

As someone who doesn't really do raiding, I think Mongoose is really optimal for me. Since I am swiping a LOT (tanking in 5mans), this thing procs all the time. I don't know what the numbers look like for single target tanking, but for someone like me who doesn't really tank "end game" bosses, and uses the same staff for cat form, Mongoose is a good all around choice, which is a bit sad, given that the enchant is about 2 years old now.