Druid tanking weapon enchants

The details of the level 85 weapon enchants are now available and there are some interesting choices. The ones that jump out as appropriate are:

• Mighty Agility
  Permanently enchant a two-handed weapon to increase Agility by 130.
• Windwalk
  Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes increase dodge rating by 600 and movement speed by 15% for 10 sec when striking in melee.
• Mending
  Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes heal you when damaging an enemy with spells and melee attacks.
• Avalanche
  Permanently enchant a weapon to often deal 463 to 537 Nature damage to an enemy struck by your melee attacks.
• Landslide
  Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes increase attack power by 1000 for 12 sec when striking in melee.
• Elemental Slayer
  Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes disrupt elementals when struck by your melee attacks, dealing Arcane damage and silencing them for 5 sec.
• Hurricane
  Permanently enchant a melee weapon to sometimes increase haste rating by 450 for 12 sec when casting spells or dealing melee damage.

The following two enchants are clearly caster ones and of no interest to a tank:

• Heartsong
  Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes increase Spirit by 200 for 15 sec when casting spells.
• Power Torrent
  Permanently enchant a weapon to sometimes increase Intellect by 500 for 12 sec when dealing damage or healing with spells.

So which enchant to use?

From the list of new enchants there are some that are purely defensive and others that are threat enchants. During Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King the best enchant in most circumstances was Mongoose (+120 Agility proc and slightly increased attack speed), with the attack power enchants coming in second.

Given that we are going into the first tier of raiding it will be important to stack defensive abilities. In further tiers this could change when there are more defensive stats on gear. As a result that rules out the purely offensive enchants: Hurricane, Landslide, Avalanche.

That leaves Mighty Agility, Windwalk, Mending and Elemental Slayer.

First we need to look at the effect of the enchants at level 85. I’m going to refer to a post on elitist jerks for some numbers. The benefit gained from the enchants is:

• Mighty Agility
  +260 Attack Power, 0.4% crit, 0.53% dodge
• Windwalk
  +3.4% dodge, faster movement speed for 10 seconds. Internal cooldown and proc rate currently unknown. Mongoose procs at 1 per minute, so it could be something like that. In that case this comes out to +0.68% dodge averaged over a minute.
• Mending
  Looks like it heals for 744 to 856. Here’s the spell. Raids and heroics will be healing intensive, but this will probably go the same way as Lifeward. It’s a good idea, but will probably not see too much use.
• Elemental Slayer
  I can’t find the damage this does at the moment, so it makes it difficult to analyse. Given that many enemies in Cataclysm will be elementals this could be useful – silenced elementals will not be shooting fireballs or lightning bolts, and that could be a lot of damage mitigated. I think it will be situational, and could be useful on a secondary weapon for some fights.

To start with I was leaning towards Windwalker, but after looking at the details Mighty Agility wins out. Constant threat and avoidance stats are better than a proc that cannot be controlled, and the difference is small anyway.