% weapon damage skills discourage dual wielding

[Strill]

I'm not talking about on-crit damage, but stuff like flat amount of life and resource gain. Or have you accounted for those in your comparison somewhere and I just missed it?

No, that's something I missed.

Ah, I see what you mean, and I agree.

It's worth noting that attacks with cooldowns will also deal less dps with dual wielding than with a 2h.

[Moonfrost]

Extra sockets will still favor dual-wielding though.

I can't imagine why they'd let two 1H weapons have more sockets one 2H weapon. Ultimately, the playstyle should be the deciding factor for most people, not the amount of stats available to either fighting style.

[vileguy]

If you can find an official quote about this, that would be great. So far from the beta testers' reports (mainly from Kastigar's) it looks like most abilities use your main hand weapon only for damage calculations, at least for the barb.

I'll look for the blue post when I can, but I know I saw this. Any attack while dual wielding, at least with monk and barb, will alternate. The dps of both weapons will matter for 50% of your attacks, so if there's a disparity you could hit for more every even swing than every odd swing for example.

found it:

09/22/2011 09:05 PMPosted by Vanguard
This is correct. The way the systems are currently set up, whether a player dual wields or uses a two-handed weapon mostly comes down to item quality and personal preference. The number crunchers among you will surely find the most effective choice for a given situation, but the difference is still pretty slim when the item quality/attributes are comparable.

Speaking of Dual Wielding, do skill percentages combine the damage from both weapons, or just use the one in main-hand?

If I understand the question correctly, the damage of a skill modified by weapon damage is based on whatever weapon you happen to be swinging with when using the skill.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/top...4602?page=1#17

[HardRock]

I can't imagine why they'd let two 1H weapons have more sockets one 2H weapon. Ultimately, the playstyle should be the deciding factor for most people, not the amount of stats available to either fighting style.

I agree. The problem is that so far we don't know if the Blacksmith can add more sockets into two-handed weapons, compared to one-handers. Since there are 2H specific enchantments, I guess socket numbers could be balanced similarly as well.

I'll look for the blue post when I can, but I know I saw this. Any attack while dual wielding, at least with monk and barb, will alternate. The dps of both weapons will matter for 50% of your attacks, so if there's a disparity you could hit for more every even swing than every odd swing for example.

That would certainly make sense.

[Spens]

That doesn't mean higher or even the same amount of damage, mind you. Fury is also generated from damage taken in addition to damage dealt, which works to the 2h barbarian's advantage even if you take the dual-wielding attack speed bonus into account. To expand upon your math with that in mind (assuming an extra 6 rage per second from damage influx):

Using Weapon 1, you generate 18 fury a second (12 + 6). It takes 1.11 sec to generate 20 fury, which does 90 damage. 90 damage every 1.11 seconds equals 81 DPS (93 DPS with 15% AS).

Using Weapon 2, you generate 12 fury a second (6 + 6). It takes 1.67 sec to generate 20 fury, which does 180 damage. 180 damage every 1.67 seconds equals 108 DPS.

Naturally, this is all just an example as we don't know the actual fury generation rates, but the gist of my post is that the higher the barbarian's passive fury generation (damage influx, passives, skills/runes), the more the dual-wielding barbarian will fall behind in terms of sheer DPS. Having more reliable access to utility skills might make up for it, though.

Valid points. The comparison is not straight forward, as there are many skills, runes and other factors that may favor one style over another.