2 hands vs dual wielding

[MrFrengLitch]

Hi,

So what do you think guys? Which is the best? Two hands or dual wielding? I'm playing on circle mage and I've been destroying stuff with my two hander, but I've read somewhere that dual wielding is actually better?

Is it true? What do you think guys?

[Sharpe]

...depends?...you got more options..from damage types to better attack speeds
think of it like this..(1spear anda sword) = slash and piercing dmg and if they;re elemental weapons..it gets much much stronger.

[Lord_WC]

Since damage reduction is percentile based it's more beneficial to dual wield - generally faster but smaller attacks are preferrable over bigger but slower attacks. You also are able to have better damage source composition since you have two weapon slots for that. And obviously if you have on hit effects like plaguebearer (which is incredibly good and you should have it), it means you trigger it more reliably.

However due to the existance of restoration shields I would go sword and board 24/7. Those shields are awesome and the dps loss isn't too high. The only actually painful tradeoff is not having siege damage on your autoattacks.

[MrFrengLitch]

Interesting. Are strenght scaling swords better than dex scaling swords?

[g0jira]

Originally posted by MrFrenglish:

Interesting. Are strenght scaling swords better than dex scaling swords?

depends, if we compare 1h to 1h, from what i see is that STR 1h weapons have better dps (dmg done with similar speed) than DEX, but im unlucky maybe, for now i was able to find STR 1h weapons with 12 dps while highest DEX 1h weapon was 8.70...

[shaki92]

Dual wielding is better for auto-attacking, but two-handers give you more dmg on weapon-based abilities like whirlwind.

Unless you buy massively overpowered one-handed archmage hammers from dwarf trader you can rescue in Aeonir's Blade, this ♥♥♥♥ has more dmg than any other weapon I found in the game.

[VeraelHasta]

There is something weird going on with weapons dps. SOmetimes they show in loot as 12dps, but then in inventory it turns to 8dps. So either something is bugged or they scale them in some weird way.

[MrFrengLitch]

Hmmm Haven't seen that bug. Weird.

[Zlorfik [CH/BY]]

Originally posted by MrFrenglish:

Interesting. Are strenght scaling swords better than dex scaling swords?

The main difference is that de scaling weapons tend to have a higher crit rate at a lower DPS. I have seen a dagger with 7-8 DMG at 0.59 speed with 23% crit. Also, some very fast weapons - most notably daggers - give some additional block chance.