A thought on a peculiar item....

The Sigil of the Unfaltering Knight is a strange item. The stats read as follows:

Sigil of the Unfaltering Knight

Binds when picked up

Unique

Sigil

Classes: Death Knight

Requires Level 80

Equip: Your Icy Touch has a chance to increase your defense rating by 53.

Ok, so you're either thinking "hooray that's a lot of defense" or "WTF is that in this game for?"

I tended to feel confused about why this item was included. This being for various reasons.

One, Death Knights are generally considered to be optimized when tanking with a two-hander. I find this to be true not only because a nice slow 2H weapon reduces the frequency of having our swings parried (which give enemies a free hit on us) but also because of the Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle which gives 25 defense (NOT defense rating) or the equivalent of 125 defense rating. That's a lot of defense rating, making it hard for me to understand why someone would want to waste a perfectly good dps sigil slot for this defense sigil.

The second reason I was confused about this item is that "chance to increase" doesn't sound reliable enough to me. Times where I would be losing out on the 53 defense rating would not be good for my uncritability. Even if I was only using this item to go over defense cap (which is something I can't find a good reason to do) it's still too unreliable to be used in conjunction with any ability.

My confusion however has been resolved since I realized something about this item: it has 100% chance on icy touch to increase your defense rating by 53.

Pretty good news isn't it?

I agreed.

With the advent of this new information it occured to me that this item would go perfectly with dual wield tanking. The amount of defense you'd lose by not affixing a 2H weapon with the stoneskin gargoyle runforging makes using two one handers a hard decision to make. You'd end up losing a decent amount of parry and dodge from certain tanking armor because you'd have to use some of the armor that comes with higher amounts of defense but not extra parry or dodge. Using two decent one handers with defense and this sigil would put you close enough to the 2H weapon with the runeforging to balance things out.

Or so I keep telling myself.