Each week over at The Blog Azeroth Forums, the community comes together around a shared blog topic – interested WoW bloggers can pick up the topic and make posts on their own sites to respond to it, and all of the responses are collected and linked at TwistedNether.net. “What Is Your Favorite Weapon?” is this week’s topic!

This week’s shared topic over at Blog Azeroth was a particularly fun one to think about. Kallixta asked the group:

I was comparing a new upgrade to my older item when it struck me how much I liked my old item. Like is wonderfully subjective and I hope others will explain their measure.

Is your favorite weapon something with strong memories for you? Is it something that just works well for RP purposes? Or maybe the balance of abilities meshes better than normal to your spec and play style?

Admittedly, I don’t do much RP, and I’m not exactly an endgame high-end raider who doesn’t have time to think about the looks and story behind a weapon because he’s too busy min/maxing to care, so I think I’m right there in the middle with those players who have fallen in love enough with a couple of his items that they simply won’t ever leave the bank. Here are a couple of them.

First of all, shown above, the inimitable Sul’Thraze the Lasher. To get this weapon – a fantastic purple that’ll carry virtually any 40-45-ish warrior well through their mid 50s. Okay, I’m being too kind, and the character on whom I loved this weapon so much was actually a hunter, so it got limited use. Back in the day though, it was an amazing 2-handed weapon, well worth the trouble you had to go through to get it. But it’s not the stats on Sul’Thraze that make it wonderful, it’s the story around it.

First, you’ll need two blue swords from Zul’Farrak, both with their own abysmally low drop rates: Jang’Thraze the Protector, and Sang’Thraze the Deflector. The two are both one-hand swords that are pretty decent weapons on their own if you have a class that can wield them both at the same time, but if you combine the two of them, you cast Call of Sul’Thraze, the spell required to fuse the blades together and call forth the mighty sword, Sul’Thraze.

It was – and to my knowledge still is – one of the few quests in the game that allow you to do something like this: collect a couple of useful weapons and then combine them to make an even more useful weapon – as opposed to collecting a ton of reagents and unique items and then a weapon and smash them all together to make a superweapon. It also doesn’t hurt that the two swords: the protector and the deflector – both blades with names that imply defensiveness – combine to create a purely offensive weapon that’s not only far higher in level and damage, but also does shadow damage, implying some dark forces afoot involved with creating it.

This is where the lore-loving RP fan in me takes hold. I see ancient troll legends around the forming of the sword, and its incredible power and it eventually having to be shattered into two blades designed to protect, as opposed to a single blade designed to destroy. I see a character who fuses them back together and takes hold of the blade only to hear the voices of ancient magics in his head urging him to kill and fight on long after the battle is over, a creeping darkness implied by the shadow abilities of the blade that the wielder will have to either fight off and master or allow him or herself to be consumed by.

Yeah, Sul’Thraze was definitely one of my favorite items, and it gave me plenty of room in my head to play with the story around the blade and how my characters “felt” while wielding it. Like I said, I don’t RP much, but it is an RPG, and I like inserting myself into my characters sometimes.

Now this – this is a weapon I picked up much later in the game, was far more useful to my class specifically, and that I carried through the end of Burning Crusade and well into Wrath of the Lich King, partially because I loved it and I performed well with it, but also partially because it looks awesome and – if you haven’t noticed – I tend to don the moniker “phoenix” in many places.

This, my friends, is the Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix.

Yes, yes, it’s a recolor of another bow found earlier in the game – but it’s colors are why I love it. I also love it because it’s the best ranged weapon of its level, it drops from the last boss in Karazhan (which admit it – if you were playing TBC, you know was the most fun part of the game, even including a lot of the endgame raid content,) and there are – as said at WoWHead – very few upgrade options after this bow, none of which are really that significant unless you’re min/maxing.

Aside from all of the love I got from friends who know and refer to me as “phoenix” when I was wielding the bow, and the ability it gave me to further insert myself into my character when I was raiding, running instances, or just fooling around doing dailies or pushing back enemies on the isle of Quel’Danas, it was actually pretty damned good loot and helped me put out some pretty good damage during the end of what I still think has been my favorite expansion to date.

So – what are some of your favorite weapons in WoW? Are they the ones that put out the hurt and get the job done, or do you have a favorite weapon you once wielded that just won’t leave your bank no matter what? Let us know in the comments!