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Would it be worth it to equip the Empowered Deathbringer(232 version) over the Tankard O' Terror for an enhancement shaman? I am unsure because it has no stats but does have a proc and higher weapon DPS.

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I can't pin down an exact number for you, but in general practice any reasonable 226 item is going to be better than the 232 statless Ony weapons. I just went through this on my rogue. I thought I wanted a higher ilvl, slow, dagger for Mutilate PvP. So, I replaced a fast 1.4 speed dagger with the slow 1.8 speed ilvl232 dagger from Ony. The stats are immediately noticeable.

What we don't seem to realize is that as we've been upgrading our weapons over the tiers, we've been increasing/decreasing stats somewhat minorly. So what, this item has .8% more crit and loses .4% hit, ok, but it's more weapon DPS! Generally, the rule of thumb works out that if it's higher ilvl, the stats don't matter much. But that's only really the case where the weapon does indeed have stats.

Think about this, in "upgrading" from the Tankard to the Deathbringer you:

  • Gain 7 weapon DPS
  • Gain a damage proc on a 45s internal cooldown (maybe worth 50DPS a la Merus?)
  • Lose 1.194% crit
  • Lose 0.82% haste
  • Lose 113 AP (roughly 8 weapon DPS)
  • Lose 370 health (400 with Blessing of Kings)

You basically get your lost weapon DPS back from the AP alone. So that puts the weapon proc up against ~1.2% crit, .8% haste, and a non-negligible amount of health. While I can't put a number exactly on which is better and by how much, I would contend that you'd be better served in almost every circumstance with the Tankard. Arguably it's possible that in PvP the Deathbringer would give you more burst potential which is possibly of high enough value to use the Deathbringer, I would doubt that the overall loss of DPS stats and stamina would prove to be a meaningful upgrade.

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An excellent answer. – Merus Nov 6 at 6:58
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The tricky bit is working out how much the proc's worth in terms of raw DPS - this thread here suggests that it's not particularly exciting (they're claiming about 50dps naked on a dummy - real DPS is likely to be more, and there are logs in there you could comb through to see how often it procs in reality).

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