Crit Effects: 2 Handed vs Dual Wielding

[Youngtimer]

Thanks for clearing that up. Seems i am still a bit into my beloved World of Warcraft Arms-Warrior

[Sooru]

In comparison to a mage, the Barbarian has no real penalty for overkill: Imagine a mage wasting 100 mana for a spell to killing a mob with only one hitpoint left.

All classes have the same "overkill" issues, since all classes have to balance between generator/free ability usage and resource spending abilities, and all of those can overkill to some degree (some more than others).

I don't really like the overkill argument anyway, since if you're worrying about overkill you're usually winning anyway (and thus it only affects farm-mode areas, not ones you are having difficulties staying alive in). Sure you can make up a special scenario where overkill can be determinant to your survivability, but that would be a weird one (aka, one where you are swarmed by weak monsters from all directions in a very special way that makes you unable to properly AOE them all down, for example if they're all ranged). But in general overkill is probably one of the much smaller concerns.

It's not about resources lasting or survivability, those concerns are trivial to solve. You'll simply get enough of both and start working on the issues that are left, where it is harder to maximize the efficiency.

The true issue with overkill (we don't know how large the effect is, but it s till exists) is time. Imagine a skeleton has 1000 hp. Your weapons deal either 400 damage per hit every second, or 800 damage every 2 seconds. Dual Wielding, it takes 3 hits = 1½ seconds to kill a monster. With the slower, harder hitting one, this is increased to 2 seconds per monster.

I know this is an exaggerated example, almost all skills are aoe too, so it won't be as much of a deterrent in reality. Still it's one of those little matters people who are interested in figuring out the 1-2% differences will need to take into account.

[galzohar]

Except not monsters have the same HP. Sure, on average you'll waste less damage if each attack does less damage, but you'd need those extreme examples for it to really make the difference to justify a lower DPS weapon, and those extreme cases will only happen on monsters with specific (and low) amount of HP. In general, it's unlikely that we'll be worried much about damage we deal to monsters with low amount of HP, at least not when comapred to how much we care about the damage we deal to monsters with a high amount of HP (and for those, overkill effects are minimal).

Sure, if Blizzard really want, they could make overkill a real thing to consider, but they'd have to work really hard for that (mostly giving many monsters in inferno relatively high damage and low HP), and I doubt they'll really make this a primary concern that will be enough to justify using weaker but faster weapons.

Instead, so far it seems like faster weapons are being balanced by static +damage/hit mods (such as +damage rings in beta), which is a solution I really dislike, as it makes items with no +damage quite weak (seen anyone who would use a ring without +damage, without it being caused by lack of knowledge of how the game works?). I really think they should remove/minimize the existence of such items (so that we have more choice in what to use, rather than HAVE to use damage rings for example), and instead just buff the faster weapons.

[HardRock]

I think this won't be such a big problem at higher levels. For pure damage, the flat damage bonus on rings and amulets will always be the best, after we'll have a certain amount of primary stats. However, primary stats also give you damage mitigation. For example, at level 5 +4-8 damage competes with +10 Strength on your magic rings. Extra Strength may be worse if you only want damage, but that bonus of 10 Strength will also effectively give you 4% HP through extra Armor. At level 60 +66-132 damage competes with +200 Strength and that amount of Strength will give you 6.5% HP. 4% HP is nothing at level 5, since the game is really easy at that point, but I bet that 6.5% HP at level 60 will be much more valuable.

[galzohar]

Depends, if you lose 20% damage to get it then the 6.5% is really nothing. Of course it's hard to tell how much damage rings will be relative to your overall damage at higher levels, but at least in the beta their bonus is pretty extreme.

[HardRock]

I agree, unless you're trying to discern how the different affixes work, you should always use a wounding ring in the beta. Another important factor will be their availability later in the game. It's easy to get a perfect keen ring of wounding in the beta, but I'm hoping that in Hell and Inferno vendors won't carry items with the highest affix level.

[galzohar]

Still, if one affix is way better than others, you'll find yourself compromising on others just to get it.

Think weapons in D2 - Life leach, IAS, strength, etc could have been nice to have on your weapon, but if the weapon had 200% ED instead of 300%, that was a real deal breaker. I'm afraid damage rings will have a similar (though maybe slightly less extreme) fate. That's why I like that damage bonus on weapons in D3 is more in the 10-30% area, because then it can compete with similar values of attack speed (while 200% weapon cannot be competed with since giving you triple attack speed is just silly for gameplay) and possibly other stats. Then again, stats like STR probably can't compete, unless they allow weapons to have a lot more STR (or other similar stats) than any other item.