I tested dw at lvl 20 and was impossible for me to change back do 2h, it so much faster and generate more rage than 2h…if I wanted a boring game I would choose 2h, but I prefer something fun to play
I was thinking you might want the opposite: 2x fast weapons. Probably swords or axes. Because of instant attack normalization, I think you’d benefit more from the normalization formula using a fast weapon (but not a dagger!) than a slow weapon.
Missing is terrible for a warrior. Not only did you just not do damage but you missed out on the rage of that missed hit, so it’s more missed damage than the miss itself. The crit on improved overpower is the only thing that makes it decent because otherwise you’re still having to spend rage to deal the damage that should have generated rage, but got dodged.
Attacking 2-3x as often is not an excuse for missing. You will do less damage and generate less rage while dual wielding if you don’t cap on +hit gear.
Dual wield arms, supported by +hit gear, is still…not great. Fury tops DPS because it has talents that maximizes white damage - Flurry, off hand spec, and deathwish.
Arms gives you MS, Sweeping Strikes, and extra crit. All of that needs huge top end DPS from slow two handers to do well. Your MS’s, Sweeping Strikes, and Whirlwinds will all hit for less, and especially your off hand attacks eating Sweeping Strikes charges is terrible. Your damage per rage is crippled using one handed weapons on those abilities AND you don’t get Flurry or off hand spec to get better damage from your white swings. The extra dodges for overpowers in no way makes up for this, and you may actually be gimping deep wounds damage because you’re likely to be reapplying it before it can tick in many cases. If you have 100% crit chance (recklessness) you will do zero deep wounds damage for that duration because it’s constantly reapplied and never allowed to tick - dual wield with a proper +hit build will do this a lot.
If you want to dual wield arms…sure? You do you and play how you want. But the OP isn’t asking about doing it for flavor or fun, he’s asking if it’s been explored and if it’s worth it. The answer those questions are yes, then no.
I agree now. Didn’t know that back in 2006. Was a little harder to find information like that during the early days. Most my info came from my guild chats
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Did we try variations that include talents like dual wield specialization though? Isn’t it possible to hit MS as well as dual wield spec?
Also I’m curious if anyone did it prioritizing highest dps fastest weapons they can get to minmax around the normalization formula?
My immediate suspicion is that it’s still gonna be strictly inferior but it could be a fun exercise in number crunching to figure out just how high we can minmax dual wield arms for pve dps.
Best I could do is this:
https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/warrior/023250213025104001-050501045
You will do vastly less single target damage than a strict fury build, but you will probably do good damage in dungeons like UBRS with lots of adds to SS/WW on. You would want the slowest weapons you can find so you don’t gimp deep wounds as much, and you want an axe in the main hand and a sword in the off hand.
Still it all just feels…meh. Mortal Strikes aren’t that great, Sweeping Strikes isn’t that great, WW’s are meh. Just without a solid two hander all of those abilities are simply just less damage per rage otherwise. Off hand spec helps the white damage a bit but without Flurry I don’t know. The extra 5% crit on the main hand the 4% double swing on the off-hand make up a little for that but not enough. Flurry is extremely powerful when you get enough crit to give it near 100% up time.
Trading Deathwish for Sweeping Strikes again is fine for dungeons with things to cleave but on bosses it’s a straight DPS loss most of the time.
If you really wanted to try it for flavor and could build for it (needs tons of +hit gear and 2.9 speed main and off hand axe/sword) then it’s workable in dungeons but falls off quickly in raids or PvP.
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Makes sense! But I think it might be doing one thing slightly sub-optimally. My suspicion is that with an arms dual wield build you want to just go ahead and sacrifice the high mortal strike damage and take a fast mainhand weapon. The reason for this being that mortal strike uses this formula to calculate damage:
normalized_damage = base_weapon_damage + (X * Attack Power / 14)
where X is 2.4 for one handed weapons.
So what I’m saying is, you prioritize your white damage more highly than your instant speed attack damage since those instant speed mortal strikes are normalized anyways.
That way with the lack of flurry, you’re still attacking quite often since both of your weapons are fast. This also gives more improved overpower procs in theory.
That said I agree with you it probably still ends up totally meh, but I am super curious and wish I could emulate some endgame setups to see if I can tinker such a build into relevance.
This makes no sense. A faster weapon does not mean more white damage than a slower weapon.
And a normalized MS is only part of the Arms build - Sweeping Strikes and Whirlwinds are still going to be a lot weaker and less damage per rage with a one hander. I highly doubt going for weapon speed for “more overpowers” is going to make up for the damage loss on those abilities.
No, it doesn’t mean more white damage than a slower weapon I agree, that was mis-stated on my part. But with a normalized attack like mortal strike, and whirlwind, a slower weapon is more penalized than a faster weapon is by the normalization formula so why not check the other extreme of de-emphasizing the importance of MS in the whole build?
Mortalstrike is already going to be sub-optimal using a one hander, and it is a long cooldown ability and tends to not be a large portion of a pve arms build’s dps anyways.
I guess I’m proposing a build where mortal strike is de-emphasized as a damage dealing move and proccing as many overpowers as possible is heavily emphasized, trying to keep whirlwind and MS on cooldown 100% of the time with multiple overpower procs in between.
Again this is just a curiosity and I wish I had an emulator or private server that I could test the build on without committing in game resources to it haha.
I’ve mutilated entire groups, even being outnumbered. However, at this stage, no one strongly geared for Fury is PvPing; they won’t be armored or specced for it. It becomes particularly good once the first set of PvP gear is completed.
What about maces for like a bunch of stuns, or swords for even more attacks
As I understand it, if you want DW you really need to go Fury. If you want high crits, you go 2H Arms.
Fury has abilities that generate rage based on crits, etc so more hits means more damage. Arms is more based on weapon damage abilities and 2H has a higher max damage than 1H/DW.
If you want to DW then yeah, you need to go Rogue or Fury. There’s nothing wrong with either, and you can be pretty certain TBC will drop eventually which gives Fury the ability to dual-wield 2H which makes the whole point moot.