Aug 26 Beta Poll (0.9.1) - Best Weapon Strategy

Which do you find to be the most successful weapon strategy? How well balanced are these strategies with each other?

Nice poll, I feel like One-Handed Weapon plus a Shield works the best. I play Hardcore so my opinion may be biased based off the need for melee classes to gain survivability over offense.

With that being said, I feel as though when we get more skills that utilize specifically different weapon types more then the current ones we have, we may see a more equal advantage/disadvantage for each of these choices.

Currently, the Two-Handers give up to much in order to deal out their damage, and Dual Weilders give up the ability to utilize heavy armor if they focus up the dex path, to purely dual weild swords. Let alone if a Dual Weilder currently wants to go Claw Weapons, even the new class that focus' on Int/Dex will have a real survivability problem based off of the fact that the strength tree is the only option to gain additional health.

All that being said, we have to give GGG time to roll out some new skills, rework the passive skill tree, as they have planned, before we can further speculate on any of the true viabilit of each of these choices :D

Wow, lost myself on that explination! ;) sorry.

I can't really tell if one or the other has advantage now. Without some reference for weapon stats it's hard to calculate theoretical damage output.

I don't think 1h/shield is very good in Default. You can get enough mitigation to tank most situations (with either 2h or DW), and an unlucky death from multiple crits here or there you can handle.

Dual wielding just doesn't have anything going for it I guess. Sweep is superior to cleave and double strike is superior to dual strike. I think flicker strike should do added damage if dual wielding and cleave a slightly larger radius if dual wielding.

I find 2-handers to be about the only option atm to stand at least somewhere close to the damage of spells and not to get yourself bored to death on higher difficulties, playing HC as well. Dualwielding unfortunately has little to no advantages.

"

Chainer wrote:

Dual wielding just doesn't have anything going for it I guess. Sweep is superior to cleave and double strike is superior to dual strike. I think flicker strike should do added damage if dual wielding and cleave a slightly larger radius if dual wielding.

I'm not totally convinced of this. I can't log onto PoE for a couple days so I can't do the math for you right now, but a few points:

Sweep vs. Cleave: 360 is obviously better than 180. However I don't think the difference is particularly large in most cases, because I reposition and move to avoid being surrounded anyways. Cleave also has more bonus damage than Sweep (again I don't have the numbers on hand, and I don't know the %gain per lvl on Sweep). And what is the +quality bonus on Sweep? Cleave has the godly +1% speed per quality point.

Double strike is likely better than Dualstrike. But again, the damage bonus on Dualstrike is much larger. You get the +25% attackspeed bonus from dual wielding. And dualstrike allows you to leverage 1.56 speed mainhands to give 1.08 speed offhands 1.56 attack speed.

Anyways I invite someone with game access to do the math. Otherwise I'll try to get to it on Monday.

"

Chainer wrote:

Sweep is superior to cleave

That is just false. 360 degree, medium damage, slow attack versus 180 degree, high damage, fast attack.
If getting mobs in front of you is too hard to 1 shot them all with cleave, you're doing it wrong :P My cleave does something like 22% more damage, while the same level of sweep is like -30something% damage. I just don't see the payoff since when you're surrounded by mobs, you need the highest damage output possible.
Edit: granted, I'm only in cruel, I know the next difficulty, cleave won't be 1 shotting :P

two-hander beats dual wielding simply because you need to find twice as many uber damage weapons when dual wielding.

Unless you have a few spare mirrors lying around, that makes a huge difference.

witch, use a shield and a weapon

use skills instead of autoattacks

be tanky and do the best dps? yes please

"

aimlessgun wrote:

Sweep vs. Cleave: 360 is obviously better than 180. However I don't think the difference is particularly large in most cases, because I reposition and move to avoid being surrounded anyways. Cleave also has more bonus damage than Sweep (again I don't have the numbers on hand, and I don't know the %gain per lvl on Sweep). And what is the +quality bonus on Sweep? Cleave has the godly +1% speed per quality point.

I say its better because the slight knockback keeps you from taking a lot of the damage you would otherwise. That's my view on it anyhow.

"

aimlessgun wrote:

Double strike is likely better than Dualstrike. But again, the damage bonus on Dualstrike is much larger. You get the +25% attackspeed bonus from dual wielding. And dualstrike allows you to leverage 1.56 speed mainhands to give 1.08 speed offhands 1.56 attack speed.

Here I was implying using a 1h/shield in combination with dual strike made it superior for single target over dual wielding because of the added defense from the shield without taking a massive hit to your damage output.