Number Crunching Mongoose

As I wrote about Blade Ward the other day, the turn has come to Mongoose. I've chosen to compare these two specific enchants as they are similar, compared to Blood Draining which really has a whole nother mechanic. Blade Ward and Mongoose provide with a procable stat. Blade Warding gives parry rating and Mongoose gives agility (a third option I sometimes see tanks use is Exceptional Agility which gives 26 agility straight off). I concluded in my post about Blade Ward that the enchant gives about one extra parry per combat minute. Doesn't sound like much, but under the right circumstances it could be quite valuable. Now let's compare that to Mongoose.

So what does Mongoose do?
"Teaches you how to permanently enchant a melee weapon to occasionally increase Agility by 120 and attack speed slightly. Requires a level 35 or higher item."

First of all one has to find out exactly how often "occassionally" is, and then how useful 120 agi would be divided over that time. It doesn't say in the tooltip, but the duration is 15 seconds and the "slight attack speed" is by 2%.

120 agi is 240 armor (which reduces a neglible amount of physical damage, around 0,15% or so). According to wowwiki.com, a paladin needs about 60 agility for 1% dodge, druids 50 and warriors and DKs about 85. That means 120 agi is 2% dodge to a paladin, 2,4% dodge to a druid and 1,4% dodge to a DK/Warrior. It also gives about 2% crit (differs somewhat depending on class).

Now I have collected these data on a paladin, by doing five or six instances (can't recall if I did the last one on my warrior or paladin <.<). The instances were randomly chosen by the lfg-tool, but turned to be good for collecting data. They were Nexus, VH, HoL, HoS and OK (and maybe Gundrak). The only instance which might spoil the data somewhat is HoS, where the Brann event makes you stay in combat but not hit much mobs. I have also let my paladin autohit a dummy for 10 minutes for comparison data. Since paladins only actually have one attack which affects their weapon (Hammer of Justice), I thought this would simulate "real" combat enough. I used a level 80 dummy so that my non-capped hit wouldn't affect the data too much (I have 5,5% hit). I might've been affected by haste buffs while doing the instances, depending on what classes where in my group, but I had no such effect when fighting the dummy. Unlike when collecting the Blade Ward data, I could luckily enough use an addon to collect these data. I used Proculas, which I had to help me keep track on the Blade Ward procs. It does collect data for procs, uptime and ppm as well, but didn't for Blade Ward for some reason (which is why I had to do it manually instead). Therefore these numbers are based on what Proculas have told me, and I hope it isn't bugged or off somehow. Fortunately, the data didn't differ much between instancing and dummy fighting, but was within what you'd expect considering the difference in combat situations.

Instances 1,04 ppm - 22% uptime (40 total procs) 20 sec inner cd
Dummy 1,10ppm - 25% uptime (11 total procs) 20 sec inner cd

From this we can conclude that it seems to have a 20 sec inner cd and little over 1 ppm (slightly more than Blade Ward, but not by much). Proculas calculates it to have about 22-25% uptime. 25% is optimal combat situations (no stop to the attacking while in combat). I'll use that number since it's most true to "real" uptime, but in combat you don't always have the possibility to hit your opponent, so keep this in mind.

So, 120 agi and 2% attackspeed for 25% of the time, how much is that really? Well, overall that would be 30 agility and 0,5% extra attackspeed (60 overall armor and 0,5% overall crit). As we have seen, different tank classes have different gains from agi. This means Mongoose is the most useful to a druid, second most useful to a paladin and thirdmost to a DK/Warrior.
Druid gains: 0,6% dodge
Paladin gains: 0,5% dodge
Warrior/DK: 0,35% dodge

To conclude I'd definitely say that Mongoose is better than Blade Ward to a paladin and druid (well druids can't parry anyway! *chuckle*). For a warrior/dk the choice is between a small, but still decent amount, of dodge (and some other stats) as compared to 1 extra parry per minute (assuming my other data collection was about correct). Not a huge difference... but if I -had- to choose, I'd probably go with Mongoose, out of these two. That also means that Mongoose is definitely better than the third choice, exceptional agility which gives 26 agility.