2 Handed vs Dual Wield

I was just wondering what peoples thoughts were on 2H vs DW. Any situations where one over the other is preferred or do you always stick with the one?

 

I started out 2 handed for the easy weapon damage then went to dual weild and now I usually run as sword and board. I do have decks built for each and can swap. For instance, I will use dual to kill Torc Dawl but when I am fighting higher level mobs I use sword and board.

For me 2 handed was good as I progressed through the lower levels and built up my skill trees

Dual is great because the crafted bonus on your 2nd weapon counts for your attacks and the offhand attack is fast and cheap so that I my current DPS

Sword and board is for survivability and tanking. The shield is great against casters and archers.

If you use blades, check out this guide by @Sara Dreygon . It is what I use to help me figure out what skills to work on first and which to maximize for my blade work.

 

her guide is great

 

Definetly read Sara's guide if you are blades or Crydoacry's (sp?) guide if you are polearm. I havent seen a guide for bludgeon.

Use a two-hander until your strength, dex and skills are high enough that duel wield outdamages your two-hander.

I noticed duel wield outdamaging 2H when duel wield attack & power skills were around 100, primary melee skill at 120, individual melee skills at 100, melee specialization at 80, total strength around 150 and dex around 100. Backstab and armor weak points also at 100. Remember to always be slamming/tripping your target and moving behind them for maximum damage.

Poisons will help you reach the point where duel wield does more damage than 2H quicker, but always using them gets expensive.

Also duel wield takes mich less focus per skill use than a 2H.

Good weapons and armor with the right wnchants for your setup make a huge difference too.

I dont use a shield - the best defense is a good offense! Shields are only useful on certain high-end bosses IMO. Using them on regular mobs just leads to a slow death or a slow kill - either situation is undersirable.

Good luck and please feel free to message me in-game if you have further questions. I'm by no means an expert but can at least teach you the basics.

 

Yea DW really takes off with good gear. The reason why DW is so much better than 2h is the fact that your main hand benefits from the masterworks of your offhand in addition. Later on in your character development stats become less and less relevant to your damage and masterworks inversely more relevant. Like you mentioned @Innascual Inch when your skills get higher it becomes better. This is due to the fact that masterworks are % based increases and when the baked in damage of the abilities get high enough they over power the stats. At that point it is far better to wield a second weapon for the extra masterworks than it is to go for the strength multipliers for the 2h.

 

Anybody tried dual wield daggers + poison? I'd like to give it a shot some day.. just not in the Blade path at the moment.

 

I made a couple daggers to try out dual daggers + poison... but just haven't gotten around to trying it yet. I really need to test them out though.

 

Arkah used to run around like this using a Chaotic Clone to take the attention while he got lots of backstabs off. Double dagger with corpion poison doing quad slashes is rather deadly. Every hit of the dagger gets double poison damage. Works best with Corpion but Corpion can be expensive

 

I did it when I first started fighting Trolls with Corpion poison, it would really cut down my killing time by a ton. Using a Halberd would take me 2 corpion poisons, and Dual Daggers would sometimes let me use only 1. That was with 100 blade passive and 60s-70s skills, so I can't speak for higher levels, but early on, it really does a difference.

 

I never have, but I have parsed the normal weapon/glyph damage of daggers vs. longswords, and the difference is pretty big, so daggers are kind of high maintenance in that they're pretty bad if you're not using poison. That being said, sylvan daggers out damage longswords and have the poison bonus of daggers.

 

I've been using a Short Sword Main Hand and a Dagger in my off hand for the longest time.

With that setup, I can slaughter the hell out of poisonable mobs in a viciously fast manner. It "feels" about as fast as it looks like some FAR more powerful and better lain out skill tree characters that I see in some of the scenes that I grind in. They generally slaughter mobs faster than me, if I do not use the poison.

That dual wield setup allowed me to bat WELL above my level for quite some time. I've recently started using the poison less often though, as I've been getting my skills closer to 80 across the board in blades. Most are in the mid-70's right now, except a few of the passives are over 80.