It doesn't seem that auto-attack does anything with the offhand weapon and I'm having a hard time seeing the value in it compared to say using a shield or wand in the offhand.
Barugon, I would love to have a conversation with you on the Duel Wield question. Duel Wield is fantastic, and the text doesn’t explain much. Syee Kco in game and Syeekco on Discord. This is an actual offer, I’m not trolling. 616 or Ridge Runners discord channels.
Is there any way you could list some of the benefits? I was considering adding bladed combat to my main and dual wielding daggers. I was thinking this would be good due to the higher base critical chance of daggers and also the added Vital Points skill. [edit] We could talk on Discord but I think there might be others that would like to get the information too.
PROS: 1. Inexpensive skill 2. Can be high damage when the passive and main skill are xp invested. 3. Extra card in your dynamic deck. (Extremely needed for Swords build, because of lack of spam able attacks) 4. The Largest Benefit of all for Off Hand Attack is it resets your Global Cooldown to 0 seconds. (All other abilities cause a global cooldown and Off Hand eliminated it.) CONS: 1. Sota does not calculate the base stats of the weapon correctly or at all. Example Critical Chance start diminishing returns at 1%. (Worst decision ever!) (Daggers have a base of 20% Crit. If you Duel Wield you should be starting with 40% Crit Chance, but in SOTA you won't see a difference between Dual Wielding Daggers, or main hand Dagger and Off Hand Sword. Except bigger damage that is. 2. One handed weapons are lower damage per hit then 2 handed. 3. Two weapons you have to craft of instead of 1. Hope this helps.
In my testing damage over all is close between 2 Handed and Duel Wield builds in swords and poles. Two handed is bigger damage but much less focus efficient. I drain my Focus much faster with 2 Handers. But I would also say that Duel Wield is cooler looking and more fun.
To add to what @Syee Kco said...My Spec is blades & earth, and a while back I did some testing of two-handed sword (2H) versus dual wield long-swords. I tried to craft 2 long-swords that were roughly equal in stats to a 2 H sword (all swords were meteoric iron with elven hilts; the longswords each had ~ +17.5% rend damage masterwork and each had an imbued rend gem; the 2-H sword had +35 rend damage masterwork and 2 rend gems). I then tested dual wiled versus 2-H with the same gear and same buffs. The 2H sword did more rend damage on initial attack and on the damage over time, and also gave a higher healing (regen) debuff on the enemy ( i think this is mainly because the base damage of the 2H is higher than the longsword; and only one longsword is actually inflicting the rend). Based on my tests i concluded that for my build (which depends heavily on rend) and when fighting creatures where maximum rend DOT and healing (regen) debuff is important (e.g. big bosses like frost giant, breach bosses, legendary saber tooth, etc) that a 2H sword appears to inflict more damage and appears to be more effective at reducing enemy HP regen. I tried to make the comparisons as close as possible; however, I never actually compared 2H sword versus dual wield on the frost giant. But my small scale tests were enough data for me. With a 2 H sword, I burn thru a lot more focus than with dual wield, but with foods, blessings, harp of invigoration, and rhapsody of recovery...I only occasionally have to use a focus potion (this is while stacking rends, then spamming thrust and double slash). I had way more trouble managing focus with a 2H when I was lower level and frequently ran out of focus, so I used dual wield back then. Since my HP pool was lower back then, I often used a shield against archers otherwise I would die against archer mobs. As I got higher level and my focus pool increased, I was able to use 2H without running out of focus (also my HP pool increased and defensive skills increased, making a shield unnecessary, and allowing me to use a 2H sword in all circumstances). So, for my specific circumstance (blades build with heavy dependence on rend and high enough adventure level to have an abundant focus pool), the 2H seems to do more damage, inflicts a greater HP regen debuff on the enemy, and allows me to kill bosses faster (although I must utilize buffs/foods that give high focus regen to avoid running out of focus).
Correct, the Rend damage and Healing debuff is based on the Base Weapon Damage stat on the weapon in your main hand. Plus any Masterwork, and Gem bonuses you add onto the weapon. I dont agree with Swords being relient on Rend, when I moved away from stacking rend, I doubled my DPS. When hitting The Breach bosses hitting close to 1.5k to 2k DPS at times. When I focused on Rend it was closer to 1.2k DPS. Remember Rend damage is limited to max weapon damage stat. Strength, Crit Damage is only limited by your XP pool.
Thanks for all the info. I'm not quite understanding what you're saying. Does having Offhand Attach trained eliminate global cooldown or are you somehow able to activate Offhand Attack while global cooldown is active and it also removes any current global cooldown? I'll have to do more testing on QA but from what I've seen so far, the extra base critical chance of daggers doesn't seem to add up to much more real critical chance than ranged.
When you activate a skill it’s creates a 1sec cooldown on all your skills. But when you use Offhand Attack it doesn’t. That means after using offhand attack you can activate another skill without the wait of a global cooldown.
