Daggers.. #1 in dps... #1 in crit... #1 in passive tree... am I missing something?

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missuse wrote:

LimitedRooster if you are going to post nodes post them correctly (6% phys 30% crit not 10/30)

He's not wrong. Take a look at the three nodes leading up to Adder's Touch. The first one is 10phys/30crit just like he said. Yeah there's only one, but the other two leading up to Adder's Touch are just as strong (20crit/10multi).

Since I saw the new passive tree before the expansion was released, I knew that I will be playing a CI physical wander. Now I'm doing maps, oneshotting almost everything. Have some crit nods, 6 power charges and some crit gear on Rampage league. The DPS tooltip is of course not 250,000 because of LMP and Chain, but who cares when I can one shot almost every pack ?
My phy wander is doing wonders now.
The Mana gain from kills change in the Assasin's Mark curse helped a lot to sustain. I stopped to use mana pots.

Nerf hammer incoming ?
Wands have a very low base damage and it is still a big problem to craft or buy a good phy wand since they can roll spell modifiers which are ueless for me. Also the highest APS on wands is 1.50 and even with AS on the weapon its not that great. Compared to daggers it nothing.

"

Since I saw the new passive tree before the expansion was released, I knew that I will be playing a CI physical wander. Now I'm doing maps, oneshotting almost everything. Have some crit nods, 6 power charges and some crit gear on Rampage league. The DPS tooltip is of course not 250,000 because of LMP and Chain, but who cares when I can one shot almost every pack ?
My phy wander is doing wonders now.
The Mana gain from kills change in the Assasin's Mark curse helped a lot to sustain. I stopped to use mana pots.

Nerf hammer incoming ?
Wands have a very low base damage and it is still a big problem to craft or buy a good phy wand since they can roll spell modifiers which are ueless for me. Also the highest APS on wands is 1.50 and even with AS on the weapon its not that great. Compared to daggers it nothing.

Wands are considered equally as op as daggers due to the high base crit chance they have.


In my point of view, and I have mentioned this numerous times before the patch, the mechanic how crits are spread on aoe needs to get limited/change/nerfed. An easy solution would be to give lmp, gmp, chain (etc.) an aditional crit multiplier penalty to the plain damage penalty. This would not fix the crit vs not crit thing but at least balance out the ranged+aoe vs the melee single target heavy balance issues. While melees oftenly need to run to every enemy and then are only able to hit a small area at best, ranged stand still in the middle of the room and crit hit everything in sight at the same time.

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Aelloon wrote:

"

missuse wrote:

I have a clan mate that has a mirrored 2h axe. He is using it in a RT build. He sits at 69k cyclone. I have a mirrored dagger and my reave is 140 k with auras. We both have very high survivability. Guess what, when we map he clears most shit before I get my reave charges up.

Ive bought my former diamond rings from a guy who had one of the best crit/staff builds. He had over 120k cyclone which is almost double than Tommy (my before mentioned clan mate has).

What numbers should I run? I posted two builds, a fully optimized dagger life build with block and the first crit stave build I could come up with 180% life. Check them out. Do number crunching, I am sure the stave will be at least at 820/560 = 1,46 more dps compared to daggers with those builds. DPS is not the issue, its the fact that in the Atziri patch everyone copied dagger ST low life builds since they could run high dps and a lot of auras and obliterate uber.

Except you completely disregarded the fact that the dagger build has close to 50% higher IAS from the tree AND has a good >100% crit multi over the staff. You're telling me to check out numbers you posted that I already told you were wrong. The numbers do NOT support your argument. I am telling *YOU* to look at them because the daggers are dealing MORE damage. No, the staff is NOT dealing 46% more damage than the dagger - that's just the baseline per hit. It's quite the opposite in fact - if you take crit multi and IAS into account then (without gear critmulti or IAS) then daggers are dealing a good 70% more damage than staves.

Then on top your story compares two skills which have nothing to do with this. You say you have double his DPS but he clears things faster because he hits them? Have you tried using a different skill also?

OK, I was not lazy and I wanted to check for my self how it scales

I optimized the staff tree a bit

link to staff build

and compared the numbers I got after gear equipped to my dagger build

assumptions were as follows:

staff user will have
Gale Song Maelström Staff
leg kaom (since has 6L on wep)
550 other life on gear
2*30% diamond rings + 50% (leg mali) + 35% (amulet) crit chance on gear
70 (amulet) + 50% (lega mali) + 38% (wep) crit multi on gear
7-15 * 2 ring added phys and 12-25 added phys amy

dagger user will have
loath bane
100 life chest and 550 life on other gear = 650
2*30% diamond rings + 50% (leg mali) + 35% (amulet) crit chance on gear
70 (amulet) + 50% (leg mali) + 38% (wep) crit multi on gear
7-15 * 2 ring added phys and 12-25 added phys amy

I assumed they both would use crit dmg + faster att + melee phys as supports

I calculated as follows

8462 life for staff user vs 5027 life for dagger user (has 40/30 acrobatics)
Id say acrobatics evens the diff in life for hits that do not kill either but for hits that one shoot the dagger user but not the staff user the 8,5k life is better.

37% block vs 58-68 % block (depending on shield) - another important layer of defense, the dagger user is a clear winner.

45704 dps vs 42021 dps

So yeah I was mistaken the dps scales rly good with loath bane cof attack speed

for this dagger


I obtain

38394 dps

in any case
45704/42021 = 1,087
45704/38394 = 1,19

in both cases very far from the base difference in staff/dagger dps

for loath bane is = 1,35
for entropy razor is 1,58

I admit my mistake, daggers do scale better than crit 2h, so either crit 2h should be buffed or dagger base dmg/crit and tree should be toned down. I am more for introducing interesting 2h keystones - dual-wield 2h keystone for instance and adding new 2h only support gems to balance things out.

EDIT: the DPS calc I used does prob not yield the same numbers as the game engine but the ratios should be very similar.

EDIT2: why compare staff and dagger? since I wanted to see how the best melee crit 2h wep scales to the best melee 1h crit wep. I see no point compering axe or mace since they will prob take RT keystone and therefore should have less dps than any crit build since they do not have to invest in crit chance/multi/acc and can just pump up defense with the extra points.

EDIT3: there are higher lvl staves that can achieve more DPS but loosing 6% block, like lathi and Judgement Staff which have higher aps at the cost of block, but again this diff is to small to really make a substantial change in my calculations.

EDIT4: about CI dagger - even tho CI can put in one more "more" support gem - melee dmg on full life I feel they have to sacrifice gear slots (drem frag, chayula) or a lot of points (US) to be able to be successful as melee, Imo that pretty much evens out the dps difference between CI dagger and life dagger, Hence I used my life dagger build as reference and not a CI dagger build. Also no one is stopping 2h user to make a CI crit staff build, although coz of node distance that would probably be bad.

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Aelloon wrote:

Then on top your story compares two skills which have nothing to do with this. You say you have double his DPS but he clears things faster because he hits them? Have you tried using a different skill also?

While you make this as nonsense it really is not.

reave is one of the most used AoE melee skills for dagger users in PvE. Alternative is double strike + splash, LS (so so melee) and molten strike (so so melee)
Cyclone is one of the most used AoE melee skills for 2h users in PvE

the dps numbers can not be compared 1 : 1 since cyclone is a very different skill than reave. It has a 0,4 base dmg multiplier while reave doe not have a base dmg multiplier. The tool-tip DPS for cyclone is quite mysterious, but anyone that has a high lvl/well geared cycloner can say that 100k tool-tip dps just melts everything.
What I wanted to say is that a 2h 70k dps cycloner (RT in his case) melts everything faster than I do with my dagger and reave. Its all.

I will post my cyclone dps when I get a chance to borrow the gems so the comparison is more clear.

Any chance GGG might respond to this?

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Tygerwoody wrote:

I've been playing this game 3 years... and I've always wondered. Why daggers are by far the best in the game for nearly *everything*. I was thinking about it, and it really is massive how far ahead daggers are ahead from everything else.

#1 in dps. Beating out all 1h weapons AND 2 hand weapons. With access to a shield.
#1 in crit chance and crit multiplier
#1 in passive tree. Theres no weapon on the passive tree that has more of a catering than daggers and its not even close. And to top it off, lets add poison to one of your nodes, just because.
Shadow tree(daggers) now has access to all three mana leech, life leech, and ghost reaver.
No Vaal Pact right beside you? No Problem. Since you crit nearly every hit, we'll give you some Acuity gloves that give you a full leech instead of 40%.
Shadow tree right beside CI, capable of 15k+ Energy shield VERY easily
Access to the best death avoidance skill in Whirling blades(yes, this goes on the list. whirling blades is 10x better than leap slam for death avoidance)
Very cheap to build in comparison to all other weapon types.



The question isn't if daggers are overpowered. Its why. When 1.2 was releasing, there were many rumors that daggers were being nerfed because they were easily out damaging 2 handers. Now the patch has released, and those dagger builds that were once doing 250,000dps are now doing 350,000 dps.

I realize we are talking about a mirrored dagger that is capable of doing that. But if you put it in comparison to a 2 hand mirrored sword or axe. What are they doing, 180k dps? And with no access to a shield.

In the past, 2 hand weapons were good because they allowed you to use a 1000 life Kaom's(pre legacy days). Then they nerfed kaom's to be unattainable... then they nerfed Kaom's again with the 1.2 "life" patch. Why do I need a 6L weapon if I am likely going to have a 6L chest? The only reason I would give up a 6L chest is to have a Legacy pre 1.2 1000 Kaom's. Thats it. And let me say. I do think 1.2 is in the right direction as far as life goes. The improvements to flasks are great. But theres no disputing that there's zero reason to play a 2 hander these days. Or anything besides a dagger build if you're melee.


So there's my rant. I've been playing this game for 3 years. I've seen a lot. I've donated over $300. The catering towards daggers just makes me shake my head. I'm hoping someone from GGG will respond to clear this up. What reason does anyone have at all to play a 2 hand build? Or an 1h axe... or sword... or mace....

L O L!!


On topic, wands and bows are just as good as daggers, if not better, claws are great for tankier build, and infinetely better than daggers if you do not have atziri's acuity. 1 handed swords, axes and maces make infinetely better Resolute Technic builds. Yeah 2 haders are still crap though. They need a built in melee splash to start being competitive.

Buff 2h weapon range on the base items. It only makes sense for 2h to out range other melee weapon types.Nerf dagger base DMG and see how things play out.

+2 range buff to every 2h melee weapon.
% base Nerf to dagger class weapons that effects existing ones as well. To avoid legacy daggers.

I'd start there, I think its enough. Adding 2h physical DMG/HP combo nodes would be the next logical response.

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missuse wrote:

Nice dagger, where can I mirror it?

"

MullaXul wrote:

Buff 2h weapon range on the base items. It only makes sense for 2h to out range other melee weapon types.Nerf dagger base DMG and see how things play out.

+2 range buff to every 2h melee weapon.
% base Nerf to dagger class weapons that effects existing ones as well. To avoid legacy daggers.

I'd start there, I think its enough. Adding 2h physical DMG/HP combo nodes would be the next logical response.

@range topic

Fun fact; 1h sword has same range as 2h sword (range 6), staff has range 6 and one-hand-thrust 7 range (the highest range, same as 2h axe)

a way to solve this would be to replace daggers increased critical multiplier with something else and then add those multipliers to foils and to a lesser extend to staff.

that way we get:
daggers: highest crit chance but moderate crit multiplier
staff: good crit chance and crit multiplier
foils: lower crit chance than daggers/staff but better crit multiplier.