[Ransurian]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

At level 14 your duel wield (and double attack skills) aren't great. You will rarely swing with your off hand, and never double attack with it yet.

Generally speaking, it is advised to ignore procs until the mid 30s, simply because any DPS weapons far outstrip any procs you can find until this point (especially since the duration of fights tends to be quite short until you reach the last third of the levels).

HOWEVER, what many people do not realise (or refuse to believe) is that the off hand weapon can still proc, even when duel wield fails to produce a swing! As such, until duel wield gets it's arse into gear (when you have over 150 skill in DW/DA) it can be worth using the off hand for a proc. A popular choice is the polished granite tomahawk, it has a rune proc (absorbs ~40 points of damage, a small amount of AoE aggro) with a strength component (supplements the damage your primary hand does, allows you to carry more loot/offsets encumberance, improving tanking). an alternative is the polished obsidian shard, which has a direct damage/ac debuff which is pretty decent aggro when it goes off (but can't be relied upon). Both of these weapons have poor ratios, so need to be ditched as soon as dw/da become reliable.

In regard to your actual question, the advice to put your fast weapon in your primary hand only becomes relevant at mid to high levels (the higher level you are the better the advice becomes). This is because you don't accrue damage bonus until the late twenties, and even then the bonus is small. The offhand not being reliable for the many levels also plays into this (where is the point putting a decent weapon into a slot that barely fires).

You know when your damage bonus kicks in (it only affects your primary hand) because your minimum damage will be greater than 1 damage (and you'll see a lot of hits for 2xDMG+damage bonus). Note for 1 handed weapons damage bonus does not scale to delay, so the faster the weapon the more times the damage bonus can be applied (at high levels it is ~13 extra damage, so if you use a low delay weapon with plenty of haste you can expect a couple of 13+ damage swings every second (ignoring misses, etc). With a high delay weapon and no haste that might only be applied every 3 seconds, so your baseline damage gets tripled by trying to minimise your delay on the primary hand.

I suggest until you are around 40 (perhaps earlier, perhaps later, maybe someone will do the math) you will probably find it best to stick the best ratio weapon in your primary.

Okay, so following my 2 suggestions (1: off hand is rubbish until >150 double attack/duel wield and 2: damage bonus doesn't take effect at all until late 20s then slowly upgrades every couple of levels) you want to have the very best dps weapon you can find in your primary hand, and secondary hand will be largely irrelevant for another 10-15 levels.

You might be interested to note duel wield will still skill up even when you are wearing a shield. Bash will probably still outdps duel wield for a while!


Edit:sorry for wall of text reply. had a wordvom.

TLDR put best ratio weapon in primary. Offhand sucks until 30ish.

Thanks! Very informative post. As an extension, thanks to the other responses in this thread for clearing things up, as well.