What are good skills to use while Dual-Wielding?

I was looking at trying a Wings of Entropy build in the next league, and was wondering which skill I should try and build around. Or should I not worry about it and just stick with my original thought of running a Cyclone (or maybe Lacerate) Slayer with a 2h weapon?

Cleave is the obvious one when you use both weapons for damage. But most DW builds use a single weapon for damage, plus a stat stick, and a skill that allows for this "fake DW" mechanic. Cleave aoe is getting a buff relative to other skills but is still very limited.

I'm might do a dual wield lacerate build depending on its buff. I was thinking a Scaeva and a off hand mortem morsu for the poison.

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Stinkycabbage wrote:

I'm might do a dual wield lacerate build depending on its buff. I was thinking a Scaeva and a off hand mortem morsu for the poison.

Last time I tried that, it didn't work. Mortem morsu needs to be the one hitting to inflict poison.

Deaths Hand is a popular choice for stat stick.

Moonbenders + phys2light gem lets u run physical reflect maps.

Cleave and Dual Strike are the only skills I know that actively take advantage of dual wielding and give extra damage (2 x damage for DS, 2 x 0.6 x damage for Cleave).

Other skills either use the main hand or alternate weapons, which effectively halves your damage with WoE vs DS (not so much vs Cleave). You might as well be using 1H + shield, apart from the block, damage and attack speed DW bonus.

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Mal_function wrote:

Other skills either use the main hand or alternate weapons, which effectively halves your damage with WoE vs DS (not so much vs Cleave).

Dual Strike has multiplier of 104% per weapon = 208% total multiplier per Attack.

Heavy Strike has multiplier of 193.7%.

208/193.7 = 1.0738 damage multi

"Halves your damage" -> 2.0000 damage multi

Hardly halving your damage.

(Blade Flurry would actually outperform Dual Strike if it could be used with Axes.)

Lacerate is a fine choice for dual wield due to innate AoE.

Hmmm, you're right about heavy strike, should have taken the multiplier into account. I did notice the tooltip of dual strike wasn't much of an improvement over cleave, so I always used cleave.

There's not much between cleave and lacerate in terms of damage. It's all about the mechanics of the skill - overlapping cone of lacerate, or 180 degrees of cleave. I never liked lacerate myself but that's a personal thing...