What Gaming Should Be

As an avid lifelong gamer, I try to describe what has worked well and poorly in games I've played, and in any given gaming scenario, to define how it could best be handled as a result.

Author: reillan

I hate dps charts.  Its all bs.  Theorycraft is horrible for games. 

I like two handed swords.  I like dual wielding less than I do two-handers.  Yet crap game mechanics would force me to two swords instead of 1 big one.  Boo.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by part 3 anyway.  There is a valid reason to use 2H weapons, so if you want to wield one, by all means, wield one. 

I personally just want the most DPS I can get right up front, and that comes from dual-wielding.  But DPS over an extended time is a valid strategy, too, and a 2H wielder can do that better than the best DW.

BTW, if you happen to have the numbers for ICPR for Fervour handy, I'd appreciate having it.  I forgot to copy that down, and it'll be useful for my discussion of power management.

This is a great article! What about crits? Wouldn't a 2H weapon have a large edge because when it crits the damage is much higher than is possible with 1H weapons?

I hadn't commented on that because I think it probably shouldn't matter.  I also don't have specific values for how much damage increase you can expect to see from either a Crit or a Dev Crit.

Let's say you have a 10% chance to crit, and a crit increases damage 2 times.  A 2H weapon would hit 23.226 times per minute, so it would crit 2.3226 times per minute and increase damage 2x during those times - effectively increasing the damage done by an additional 2.3226 hits.  If those hits do, on average, 601.14 damage (they do in my example table above), that means they do 15358 damage per minute (as opposed to 13962).  

The DW mode hits 35.122 times in a minute, dealing an average of 483.34 damage per hit, and critting on 3.5122 hits during that time.  The damage from crits increases from 16976 to 18673.

Either way, a 2x crit increases damage on 10% of hits, meaning you multiply the damage output by 1.1 (90% of hits do 100% damage, 10% of hits do 200% damage = .9 + .2 = 1.1)

There are two possible ways that 2H could get damage made up as opposed to DW:

1) If crits are not just a multiplier, but rather a multiplier + bonus that is awesome enough to make up for the damage loss.

2) If 2H mode gets damage bonus from might that is considerably greater than the sum of individual damage bonuses from might that the DW weapons get.

I read both of your articles, and one thing that struck me in both of them is that you measure DPS on a skill-to-skill basis, rather than letting the cooldown timers play their part (as they would in an actual combat scenario). I too thought a fast off-hander would be the way to go for dual-wield, but through simulations I discovered that in fact it weren't - my dual axes 2.50 global speed do considerably more persistent DPS than my axe/dagger 2.10 global speed setup. I won't try and convince you about this, but rather let you run some simulations on your own, and see what you come up with - that is, over the course of a longer period of time; I've found that a 20 second snap shot can be misleading. It would be interesting to compare your results with mine.

Keep up the good work Reillan...

Thanks.  Yes, it's a bit difficult to do that, and so that's part of my larger-picture project.  I may end up having to come back and revise this at some point.  The great difficulty is that thanks to averaging of speeds, there's practically an infinite number of possibilities of speeds, and making any of them fit into cooldown timers is ... tricky at best.  :D

I am looking at whether my 3rd age Mace (39.6DPS) with a Flawless Dagger beats a 2nd age 2H sword that dropped for me.  Clearly following your logic a 2nd age 1H axe or mace + dagger would work better but what are your thoughts for my 3rd age (until a 2nd or 1st age one hander drops). Both wpns have fervour legacies though the 2H is better. I have tried to replicate your calcs but with my setup, not sure I've got it right though because i come up with a much bigger advantage (~150% increase) for the 3rd age dual setup than the 2nd age 2H setup. This can't be right?

Could you check my maths?

For feral strikes:

2H: =(1.21*(148((av raw damage)+23(bonus for 2H 3.1))*2+42) /3.1(speed) = 147

Dual =1.21*(90+17bonus for 2.3speed))*2+42+(1.21*(70(av raw dam for dagger) +13(bonus for 1.7speed))) /2(av speed of mace and dagger)= 201

Thanks,

Noelion

Snowbourne Server

I think I see the problem.  You're adding +13 damage as a bonus for the OH weapon, but in Feral Strikes, you don't actually get bonus damage for your OH weapon.  I also don't really know where the 1.21 and +42 numbers are coming from (although 1.21 could be your fervour modifier - we don't need to worry about that).  It should be simply:

((90+17)*2 + 70)/2 = 142

((148+23)*2)/3.1 = 110.32

142/110.32 = 28.72% increase