Dual Wield vs One Hand and Shield

Hello all!

I just have some thoughts about the dual wield nerf to share:
- Dual Wield is much more investment than weapon and Shield, as a second good Weapon will probably cost much more currency than a good shield
- Shield gives you much more benefits: be it defences, resists or life/ES, other stats. This is for melee characters: Spellcasters can probably benefit from more crit or other stuff on the weapon.
- Shield gives you a higher Block value

So, in deleting the 20% more damage modifier, there is only 10% more attack speed left, right?
I think this 10% more attack speed is probably only in rare cases enough reward to choose dual wield over a shield in melee.

What do you guys think about that?

Or is Dual Wield the right way if you want to stack poisons very fast?

In what situations would you prefer dual wield after the nerf?

Greetings

"

Alando wrote:

In what situations would you prefer dual wield after the nerf?

2x Nebuloch
Savior
Potentially Ahn's Might (but it's likely too weak now)

Most* other melee builds i could think of would be better served with a Great Old One's Ward in place of their 2nd weapon.

*edited all to most, cause I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two other uniques/rare mods

For some reason the added flat damage on nebuloch is listed as a local mod in PoB. I do not know if it applies globally.

My 2 cents regarding OP: You can get some nasty mods on things like foils with crit multi, pen etc, which heavily scale your damage. Shields dont really have any great offensive mods for melee.

i think this nerf is dangerous in combination with the armour buffs of the enemys

1H + shield seems good option even for softcore now.
You can save some defensive passives and invest more in offense if you take shield.

On the other hand there are still come cool combos for DW

Foil + Paradoxica / Savior
Dual Nebuloch
Rigwald's combo etc

They said they will buff Dual Strike, and I think it's about to make DW gain its original power with limited builds. Dual Strike is already the single target strike skill with highest numeric dps in this game (70%*170%*2= 238% at gem level 20), especially it kinda have +1 link when clearing (with jewel).

Remember most DW builds have some form of crit and crit multi.

They have also reduced every crit multi node on the tree giving the DW playstyle even more of a knock.

I would not mind if they actually made DW into a attack speed monster by taking away 20% more damage.

But as far as I can tell DW is just getting hit hard to force people down the 2h play style.

Pathetic GGG

real question was, did ANY non-caster ever even consider shield as an option before the change? It did 20% less damage per hit, 10% slower. it was worse in absolutely every way.

Now, at least it is a consideration.

"

Rafein wrote:

real question was, did ANY non-caster ever even consider shield as an option before the change? It did 20% less damage per hit, 10% slower. it was worse in absolutely every way.

Now, at least it is a consideration.

Uhh...only for niche builds i guess...

"

Longanxy wrote:

They said they will buff Dual Strike, and I think it's about to make DW gain its original power with limited builds. Dual Strike is already the single target strike skill with highest numeric dps in this game (70%*170%*2= 238% at gem level 20), especially it kinda have +1 link when clearing (with jewel).

Dual Strike was pretty strong before. Its problem was that it did not add any flat damage, and usually DWing was with 2 foils and insane amounts of atk speed giving you incredible scaling with flat damage. As a result thereof, DS was pretty niche.

"

insilopeh wrote:

"

Rafein wrote:

real question was, did ANY non-caster ever even consider shield as an option before the change? It did 20% less damage per hit, 10% slower. it was worse in absolutely every way.

Now, at least it is a consideration.

Uhh...only for niche builds i guess...

Gladiator builds were popular before DW nerf
It will open more options for melee builds.
On the other hand casters / summoners seem untouched (with some exception).