So does the fastest weapon go in my main hand or off hand? I’ve read different things some saying fast is in offhand and slowest in main hand and vice versa, i don’t know which is right.
MH slow weapon (for instant strikes)
OH fast (for poisons)
Thank you, thats what i was thinking.
Is it okay to use a Mace or Sword/dagger combo?
Why wouldn’t it be?
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Wasn’t sure if they synced well together. So, basically keep the slowest weapon in MH, and the quickest in OH?
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Levelling? Use the slowest speed / highest dps weapons you can get.
Dungeons/Raiding at 60? Matched weapons to your specialization talents
PVP? Daggers usually unless going Hemo then a slow mainhand and a fast off hand.
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Please, for the love of god, don’t listen to people telling you to go fast offhand.
For combat:
Your off-hand speed is largely irrelevant. A slower and hard hitting off-hand is actually, arguably, better in all areas. This can be a pita in pvp for poison application, but combat was gimmicky-at-best in pvp back in vanilla.
For assassination:
Your off-hand speed is largely irrelevant. A slower off hand is actually, arguably, better in all cases. Even pvp. This is due to daggers just not getting that slow to begin with, so more white hits from both hands = more innate poison application.
Why:
There were three things which influenced the development of the “fast off-hand” rogue preference.
For combat, there was Combat Potency. A talent which regenned energy on off-hand hit. i can’t remember if the original implementation was 5 per hit, or a chance to proc for 20, as both iterations have existed throughout the game. This was a talent implemented in BC.
For assassination (and actually combat as well), there was the removal of debuff slots. Vanilla wow originally had a 8 debuff per mob limit, and later on a 16 debuff per mob limit. That meant that, in a raid of 40 people, less than half of the raid could put a SINGLE debuff onto the boss… At the best of times. The current tank took up 3 of those debuff slots with Sunder Armor, T-clap, and Demo-shout. The rest were ‘reserved’ for utility usage. For example: Shadow priests needed two (mind-flay was a debuff based attack) not because they were top-tier dps, but because they were fire-and-forget group healing that never ran oom, which was SUPER useful. Suffice it to say that rogue Deadly Poison wasn’t high on the priority list, and poisons didn’t actually do much damage in classic. Not to mention a not insubstantial amount of mobs were flat-out immune. This changed in BC, when they removed the debuff limit.
Three, Shiv. Shiv was an ability rogues acquired in BC which awarded 1 combo point, immediately applied off-hand poison, and had an energy cost which scaled with the speed of your weapon.
Those three factors created the “fast offhand” requirement for rogues.
So, where did that leave rogues?
Well, it left them using instant poison. Which was a pretty negligible damage source even before you got into the issues with small amounts of hit on gear, and massive off-hand hit / parry / glancing / the % hit chance on rogue gear not effecting poisons (poisons were ‘magical’ hits). Really the only thing you should care about for your off-hand is going to be stats. That being agi, raw dps, bonuses (+% to crit or hit), and procs. Speed is about the least important factor.
This is even more true for combat swords. The 5% double swing massively out damages any minuscule benefit from poisons, so it’s much better to shove a beefy slow weapon into your OH and go to town. Traditional combat swords ran stuff like double Skullforged Reaver, or Chromo Temp + Maladath.
Two other important explanations.
First: weapon speed is hugely important for your MH weapon, even more so than the actual DPS.
This is because, back in vanilla, % damage increase abilities (Backstab, SS, Hemo) scaled with the speed of your mainhand. Basically they’d amp up the % scaling behind the scenes for uniquely slow weapons, and reduce the % scaling for uniquely fast ones. This was why some blue & green weapons (daggers with 2.0 swing speed and such) were actually better than epic items. And also why Hemo became absolutely nightmarish with that Spare Part mace from Naxx.
Second: In classic, you want your essential poison on your main hand. This is directly contrary to live, where you run your essential poison (crippling for pvp, for example) on your off-hand. Due to old-school rogues not having shiv, getting poisons onto your target is 100% RNG. Due to the prevalence of avoidance & punishing nature of hit chance, you score more hits with your mainhand (even if it’s big and slow) due to ability usage. As such you want your most important poison on the mainhand; this is mainly a pvp thing, to make sure you get your slow up.
Lastly, for pvp reasons, you often times want to double-up on your poison. Dual poison types didn’t become too much of a thing, again, until BC (when rogues would have off-hands with extra poisons, which they’d switch to in order to shiv the poison on). While you certainly can run something like mind numbing + crippling, doing so leaves you with a very real chance of not getting an important debuff (usually crippling) onto the target, and therefor having them get away.
Or even worse, get a dispel and then hop away while you pray for a 20% application rate to happen on a single yellow / white hit.
EDIT:
If you are raiding as combat, any kind of combat, do not mix weapon types. The weapon specialization talents are very strong and extremely important, and you don’t have enough talent points to mix them. Generally speaking you’re either going to be daggers or swords for raiding, although there are a few different builds daggers can go. This is made easier by the fact that there are barely any agi fists / maces which come from raids, so swords / daggers / bust is all you’re left with shortly after starting raids.
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But wasn’t 1.12 after weapon speed normalization? So the only difference in speeds as it pertains to special attacks is dagger vs sword/mace?
Slow OH for Sword Spec Combat is incorrect. You can proc a sword spec swing with your OH sword which will be an attack with your MH (which is why, along with how your Sinister Strike damage is calculated, you want a slow MH). Faster OH = more Sword Spec procs. This is why a fast OH started in Vanilla.
Hallinton is correct about a few points on changes that occurred in TBC (Deadly Poison being viable in raiding finally due to debuff limit being lifted, etc.), but is incorrect on OH preferences for a Sword spec Combat Rogue and the reasons why you want a fast OH. The extra attack is with your MH, so a faster OH will increase your procs and your damage.
He mentions a common combo was CTS + Maladath. This is correct because CTS is 2.6 speed and Maladath is 2.2 speed. Maladath was BIS for that tier because there are no other swords at that level that are faster.
Tier 1 raiding combo was Vis’kag + Brutality Blade. Again, Brutality Blade is the fastest 1H sword at that level - unless you want to pony up and buy the crafted Blackguard which is super expensive - (until Warblade of the Hakkari (1.7 speed) is introduced in ZG) so it goes in your OH.
Dual wield Skullforge Reavers were never a serious thing. Most likely, if you saw someone with that setup, it was for appearances as the SR has a unique item glow and sheaths across your back (iirc). Either that, or the Rogue was misinformed. They would have been much better served (and DPS) by having Mirah’s Song or Dal’rend’s Tribal Guardian in their OH.
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In regards to weapon normalization and the speed of weapons, normalization does not make weapon speed irrelevant. Slower weapons have higher min/max weapon damage values. This weapon damage value is factored in when determining your actual damage range both for white hits and your Sinister Strikes (or w/e instant attack you are using).
For white damage, the actual damage formula is as follows:
(Attack Power / 14) * Weapon Speed + Weapon Damage = Damage
For Sinister Strike, it is the same except you add the Sinister Strike bonus damage to the end of the formula. The Combat talent Aggression and Assassination talent Lethality add further multipliers to this formula when calculating your actual damage.
Before weapon normalization, a slower speed meant a higher multiplier instead of the normalized 2.3 constant in the formula. The nerf, aka weapon normalization, made it so that the multiplier was always 2.3 but your weapon damage is still factored in, hence you still want the highest damage range in your MH to maximize MH white hits and Sinister Strike damage.
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Fast weapon offhand, slow weapon main hand. Reason is your poisons will apply more often on your offhand. Now i don’t know what faction you are, but on horde when we raid we don’t put poison on our main hand so we can benefit from shaman totem damage buff (this is the other reason for fast weapon on offhand).
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This is incorrect. Instant poison was not changed to PPM until 3.1.
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You are correct. Thanks for the heads up.