Dual wield stronger than 2h early game

[GUTS-CHAN]

Warfare DW 1h + combine ooze barrel poison attack deals a hell of a lot of damage throughout act I. never tried it after that though. How does it scale compared to 2h warfare mid-end?

[Division by Zero]

Stop using the ooze barrel for anything other than selling. At best it's damage of the wrong type that gets absorbed by magic armor while you are hitting vitality with your physical. At worst, it's actually decreasing your damage output because so many things heal off poison later it's rediculous.

[glythe]

Early game dump all points into warfare.

Use 1H+shield so you dont die.

Act 2 I started with 2x 1H until I found a really nice 2H around level 11 or so.

That's about the breakpoint where I think 2H is way better.

Bear in mind I killed Slane (amazing 1h drop) in act 1 and used his lvl 9 sword for a chill/freeze combo with 2 water/chill weapons.

I dropped this combo for a ridiculous 2H sword with 50% cleave damage. Imagine every attack hits a 180 arc in front of you. The % for cleave is how much of the total damage it does (and it had 10% chance for acid damage.... wow).

Replaced it with Lothar's hammer..... built in knockdown on hit. Wow.

[Sunshine]

I think youre probably right with the 'early game' qualifier. That dual + guaranteed crit is nice and reliable. Then suddenly 9k+ crits with 2H attacks late game just dominates

[GUTS-CHAN]

Originally posted by Division by Zero:

Stop using the ooze barrel for anything other than selling. At best it's damage of the wrong type that gets absorbed by magic armor while you are hitting vitality with your physical. At worst, it's actually decreasing your damage output because so many things heal off poison later it's rediculous.

poison attacks take bits and pieces of the magic armor from the enemy, which my casters will capitalize on. it might seem minute at best but any bit helps so why not?

So just switch weapons if you're facing undead/poison resistant enemies. it's not rocket science.
Fighting in the castle in fort joy where most of the enemies are human, once you have their magic down by casters the extra damage is helpful.

[wendigo211]

Yeah, 2H just outstrips everything eventually. By the time you hit level 12 or so it's impossible to find two one handed weapons that deal as much damage as a two-hander.

It's even worse for dagger users, my dagger user's backstabs do as much damage as my two-hander's regular attacks. The have similar multipliers from attributes and skills it's just the base damage from two daggers is around 60 points of damage when a two hander does 100. When you throw in that the Two-hander skill increases both damage and crit multiplier, while the dagger user has to increase both dual wield and scoundrel to get the same effect, it's not even a close contest.

[raubrey]

I read some of the 2H hype and decided to go that route and I haven't liked it either. I either had duel or shields (mostly) the first playthrough. Glad to see i'm not the only one ....I increased the difficulty but thought I messed up my build. I guess I'll go back to what worked for me first time and switch to 2H later.

[GUTS-CHAN]

Originally posted by raubrey:

I read some of the 2H hype and decided to go that route and I haven't liked it either. I either had duel or shields (mostly) the first playthrough. Glad to see i'm not the only one ....I increased the difficulty but thought I messed up my build. I guess I'll go back to what worked for me first time and switch to 2H later.

my general build for my heavy armor meele was
act 1 dw
act 2 2h
act 3-4 shield and sword

shield/sword OP when you max phys armor as much as possible and then shackles+reactive armor.

[Division by Zero]

Originally posted by GUTS-CHAN:

Originally posted by Division by Zero:

Stop using the ooze barrel for anything other than selling. At best it's damage of the wrong type that gets absorbed by magic armor while you are hitting vitality with your physical. At worst, it's actually decreasing your damage output because so many things heal off poison later it's rediculous.

poison attacks take bits and pieces of the magic armor from the enemy, which my casters will capitalize on. it might seem minute at best but any bit helps so why not?

So just switch weapons if you're facing undead/poison resistant enemies. it's not rocket science.
Fighting in the castle in fort joy where most of the enemies are human, once you have their magic down by casters the extra damage is helpful.

Using mixed damage is in itself inefficient. Much faster to single damage type burn enemies down as a group. Note this doesn't mean no casters, it just means you'd use physical damage casters like Necros or Summoners instead of Pyros/Aeros etc. Swapping weapons, well that cost AP in a fight and even outside of a fight you have to have extra weapons, which are probably not as good as your main ones. So, in reality you were better off not poisoning them in the first place.

You can do it all you want and win the game just fine with it. That doesn't make it an optimal choice though.

[raubrey]

Originally posted by Division by Zero:

Originally posted by GUTS-CHAN:

poison attacks take bits and pieces of the magic armor from the enemy, which my casters will capitalize on. it might seem minute at best but any bit helps so why not?

So just switch weapons if you're facing undead/poison resistant enemies. it's not rocket science.
Fighting in the castle in fort joy where most of the enemies are human, once you have their magic down by casters the extra damage is helpful.

Using mixed damage is in itself inefficient. Much faster to single damage type burn enemies down as a group. Note this doesn't mean no casters, it just means you'd use physical damage casters like Necros or Summoners instead of Pyros/Aeros etc. Swapping weapons, well that cost AP in a fight and even outside of a fight you have to have extra weapons, which are probably not as good as your main ones. So, in reality you were better off not poisoning them in the first place.

You can do it all you want and win the game just fine with it. That doesn't make it an optimal choice though.

What your saying makes sense but what I did the first time is strip the armor type that was either lowest or resistant to what status I wanted to achieve -- I used a lot of cholororm, flay skin etc. At least until I found the power of shield throw or physical damage in general.

I played an Explorer run which is quite a jump from Classic -- a good thing as easy should be easy -- it's just taking me a bit longer to acclimate to classic D;OS 2 than on 1 in which I had no problem w/ classic difficulty.

Anyway, just thinking my tactics from the first go round might need an adjustment ...early game there aren't many options at least until you steal all the books :D

[raubrey]

I seem to be fine back with shields now and one archer. I see why this is such a huge jump in difficulty from Explorer as the vitality etc. is 50% more. I felt like I had deathy by papercut syndrome going on.

Personally, I"d rather see about 25% more health/damage between levels and maybe some really punishing damage on the higher levels -- I think the tactical decisions would be more fun. But I digress... still I see me going to higher DPS such as 2H as soon as I can -- Driftwood maybe.