Why 2 hand (non crit) builds are weak

Why are 2Hand builds so weak? Because 2Hand builds usually have a lot of strength, sometimes 400 or even 500.
This means that 2Hand builds already have around 80-100% increased physical damage just from strength alone.
Their melee skills also add another 60-100% increased physical damage on level 20.
Just from the skill and strength alone, a 2Hand character already gains around 150-200% increased physical damage. Adding another 10% from a weak 2hand node, or those weak melee physical damage nodes that grant only around 10-15% increased physical damage just doesnt do enough if you already have so much of it.

Reaching 300% increased physical damage as a 2Hand character is so common in fact, that you dont actually have to do anything to get it, just moving out of the marauder area already gets you there.
Then if you finally get to a wheel that specifically increases the damage of the weapon type you are using, you are looking at a wheel that grants 12%+12%+12%+24% increased physical damage to a specific type.
That is another 60% for 4 points. While it looks great on paper, in reality it is quite weak.

Taking your base 100% damage and adding 300% to it, increases it to 400% damage (with 300% increased physical, you deal 4 times your regular damage, thus 400% total damage). Adding another 60% to those 400%, we go up to 460% total damage, which is just a 15% increase over 400%. 15% more damage for 4 skillpoints.
Then you finally get to another wheel that grants another 60% for 4 skillpoints, which raises your total damage to 520%. That amounts to 13% more damage for 4 skillpoints.
Skilling any more damage increase nodes becomes pointless.

2Hand is missing that additional multiplicative multiplier that crit builds have, thus they dont scale very well. They only have attackspeed and increased physical damage (and some amount of more physical from support gems). After you reach quite a lot of both of those stats, adding more on top of it does close to nothing for your character.
For crit builds, adding more to any of the stats helps greatly, because they all work multiplicatively.

I think the easiest way to buff 2Hand damage would be to add a completely new multiplicative multiplier that only applies to 2Hand damage (for now anyways, GGG is free to use it for anything else later on). Lets call it augmented 2H damage.

Lets take the skillnode Fell the Weak for example. Currently it reads:
"24% increased physical damage with axes, 20% increased accuracy rating with axes, 4% increased maximum life".
With the new augmented damage it could read something along the lines of:
"24% increased physical damage with axes, 6% augmented physical damage with 2H axes, 20% increased accuracy rating with axes, 4% increased maximum life".

This way, it wont increase the damage of 1 handed axes at all, while helping 2 handed axes.
If we add small percentages of augmented physical 2Hand damage to all these nodes (even the smaller skillnodes), we could increase the total damage of 2hand damage from anywhere between 50-200% depending on how much GGG wants to buff 2hand damage. At the same time we are not handing this damage out freely, because you still actually have to invest into damage nodes to get that damage.
Crit 2 hand builds dont exist except for staffs, so GGG just needs to be careful about whether they want to add some augmented damage to staffs aswell.

Voila, 2hand is finally balancable rather easily, without GGG having to worry about increasing the damage of 1 hand crit builds even further.
Detaching 2Hand damage from 1hand damage enables GGG to directly control how much damage both variations deal.

Not just about damage... You must not play HC.

The right way to fix 2h damage without doing passive tree shenanigans is to make off-weapon flat damage mods count twice instead of once (since you're using both hands...).

I did the math and making flat mods off-weapon count twice compensates for their slower attack speed to bring their dps effectiveness to about ~170% of 1hers, the same-ish ratio of base dps between 1h and 2h weapons.

It would enable 2h aura builds and allow 2h to make good use of BoR, Abyssus, etc

All these sensationalists and "whoa is me!" posts every time something is considered good. Kids just can't help trying to nerf the person next to them who seems to be better.

At various points of PoE, 2-handers were hands down the best way to go for overall dps and survival builds, especially in hardcore. Things like this go in cycles. While daggers are powerful, enjoy that or keep on doing 2-hander builds if that is what you like. Seriously, how does what someone else does really affect you other than causing envy because you refuse to do it also?

Let's see: Totems were fotm, 2-handers were fotm, fp builds were fotm, the summoner with certain spectres were fotm, searing/blast, and some others I missed and now daggers. Each time we had to bear kids crying in every single thread, posting dozens of times the same things, using hyperbole and lies and exaggeration to try to win their argument. Dagger crit and crit multi isn't even CLOSE to what some builds in the past could get the crit multi to. Not even CLOSE.

But dont' worry. The exact same people who have posted and cried in other threads dozens of times already will come to this thread crying also. "Oh hey. Is that guy over there having fun doing a fotm build that I refuse to do? NERF!!!"

NERF mindlessly broken crit daggers NOW

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Haderach99 wrote:

All these sensationalists and "whoa is me!" posts every time something is considered good. Kids just can't help trying to nerf the person next to them who seems to be better.

At various points of PoE, 2-handers were hands down the best way to go for overall dps and survival builds, especially in hardcore. Things like this go in cycles. While daggers are powerful, enjoy that or keep on doing 2-hander builds if that is what you like. Seriously, how does what someone else does really affect you other than causing envy because you refuse to do it also?

Wait what? Where do i mention anything about daggers or any build for that matter being OP?
Where do i mention that another weapon type needs a nerf?
I neither use a dagger critbuild, nor a 2Handed weapon build.
This is my current character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkoCM0AOSWo
A freezing pulse witch.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish with your anti-whine post when there is no whine anywhere to be seen? You look like a sensationalist to me, completely out of your mind.

I have played countless builds in this game and theorycrafted hours at a time, so i know my theorycrafting.
When i play with friends and one of them plays a 2hand build, has more than reasonable gear, but deals a tenth of the damage of one of my other friends who has garbage gear i look into it for my friend since he is not as good at theorycrafting as i am.
After hours of theorycrafting, the conclusion i come to is that there is actually no way that he can deal as much damage as neither me, nor my other friend (who is playing a fotm tornado shot/puncture build) because there literally is no way to increase the damage to these proportions.

Even with perfect gear (perfect flat physical on all pieces), a perfect 2 hand weapon (800+ dps) and even a CI build to utilize more physical on full life, he will only deal about 30% of the damage that we are dealing. On top of that, who has perfect gear anyways? (especially a perfect weapon like that)? Even the CI build on a melee char is farfetched for 99.999% of the players.

Fact is also that both me and the tornado shot user have better defensive stats due to the offhand slot (i have a shield, the bow user has a quiver with life/res/leech).
Fact is, that the bow user is only using a 200dps bow. The maximum for these is around 550ish dps.
With perfect gear, he will probably deal 10-20 times the damage i deal with my freezing pulse, and i will deal 10 times the damage my 2 hand mace friend does.
Not complaining about freezing pulse at all though because it is perfectly capable of clearing the highest level maps in a reasonable time. Also not complaining about tornado shot being brokenly powerful. Just pointing out that 2hand builds deal no damage whatsoever compared to everything else in this game.

Looking at all my builds so far i realized that 2 hand is actually garbage, just talking numbers wise.
Their damage is garbage, their scaling non existant and there is absolutely no compensation for the loss of the offhand slot, meaning that their defensive capabilities are also garbage.
I looked into why that is the case, and the conclusion is in the OP. They dont have enough multiplicative dmg increases available to them.
The only exception to this are 2Hand staffs, which are capable of going the crit route (they can even utilize power charges to further augment their crit), which is the reason i excluded them in the OP.

I have a 2 hand flicker striker duelist on level 87 which i played with 2 hand axes in the last league.
He had very good gear, but he only dealt around 30k aoe dps.
I respecced him to dual wield crit swords in forsaken masters just for theorycrafting purposes.
He now deals 320k dps. The swords he is using, well, they are garbage compared to the 2hand weapon he was using before.

2 hand sucks, period. The difference between 2 hand and anything else is incredibly huge.

Thanks for the spending the time to do this thread Ghoun. I have been wondering who 2 handed builds still appear to be bad for a long time now.

Considering the lack of defenses I can't believe GGG hasn't made 2 handers the most powerful weapons in the game. Just seems like common sense to me....

I disagree on the solution entirely.

I think there are issues with 2hers, and I think it stems from two things.

They appear to have been balanced in a vacuum. Look at white 2hers, and white daggers/1hers. The white item definitely seems like its, while not 100% always better, valid. But this is before all the mods rolled onto the rares, and with those mods 2hers just fall further and further behind.

Crit is the other issue, and 2hers along with the lower right hand side of the tree really lack this option.

I think the actual base items need some significant changes to make them a better damage based option, including staves not being the ONLY crit option, possibly having something like maces low crit but high damage, axes getting crit hid dmg boost, sort of similar to a suggestion in victor doom's thread.

The other issue is that there are lacking defensive options compared with shield/dw, so the 2hers need some sort of defensive boost. This I feel is best done through the passive tree itself, which allows it to be rescaled easily for any major patch changes (like the life change for example), but still can make 2hers distinct from the 1her block bonus's.

Also needs to be more 2h crit options, seriously crit is super valuable and the only crit option being a staff is part of what holds back 2hers



Edit:
Also for reference, anyone who says 2hers can never be viable is just plain wrong. Back in CB 2hers dominated, and I mean DOMINATED the ladder as they were supremely viable

a) no block. block is the broken king of defense. with spell block being the ugly but crazy queen
b) low base damage (top 1h is 530pdps, top 2h is ~830pdps - it isnt even double)
c) low base speed - removing flat ele scaling from the picture
d) bad 'perks' - stun.. one build relies on stun. what else there is?
e) bad nodes
f) bad crit
g) good skills work with everything, 2h-only skills are the worst in the game (sweep - do not mention hegemony BiS built-for-sweep staff please)


all this for an option of second 5link (or 6link for the lucky ones) in a game when we pretty much all use one skill for everything