Bring back blood DPS.
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And Unholy tanking!
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UH DW tanking.
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So I was able to confirm our abilities are impacted by weapon damage. This is easily verifiable by picking up some level 58 weapons in Dalaran, and some level 11 weapons in Orgrimmar(or Stormwind for our fellows on Alliance) if you’d like to test for yourself and have a small amount of gold and some bag space.
Pick up the weapons and go to some dummies for our current level. Strip naked and equip the level 58 weapon(s) and save that as one gear set, check your tooltips and test a couple of abilities (i suggest frostscythe and howling blast as frost as you don’t have to worry about armor calculations). Swap to the level 11 weapons and save that as your second gear set for easy swapping for additional testing. You’ll find at 120 with no gear equipped except for these white quality weapons that the damage is increased with the higher dps weapons (the level 58 ones) and should exactly match the tool tip for damage on either set (no versatility to muck things up, and mastery is pre-calculated into the tooltip for you, just be sure to hit the damage training dummy and not the pvp damage training dummy as it has modifiers for pvp testing purposes).
Article detailing this can be found from Rockford’s shared link here:
Strange things: Glacial advance, even though it is a spell, requires a 1 handed weapon where howling blast does not. Unholy’s equivalent to glacial advance, epidemic, does not require a 2 handed weapon (so even though you can’t dual wield as unholy you can still use the ability with a 1 handed weapon equipped).
Unholy also requires a 2 handed weapon for scourge strike, but not clawing shadows.
Glacial advance was intentionally gimped, likely to force users to use dual wield in case a janky 2 handed build became available with just howling blast and glacial advance (which has a cooldown for no apparent reason =/) so runes couldn’t be efficiently recovered. It’s pretty intriguing.
I hope this is helpful and can facilitate more educated discussion on what we’re all pretty passionate about.
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What is the damage difference though?
I also read that article, but the abilities listed on Wowhead, which usually goes through how to calculate the damage of abilities listed in the tool tip, show its just attack power. 60%+60% ap for obliterate.
Lets just take your character as an example. 8457 str and 9% versa. That comes out to 11,061 damage for obliterate. If it doesnt match up, then the ability calculations on wowhead under their tooltips which are kept up to date, are wrong (or there is a lot of information being withheld by blizzard which wouldnt shock me). I was within 200 damage for another player on here without even taking into account their versa. I said 10.2k their tooltip said 10.4k. So if the weapon does apply into damage, its soooooo small at around ilvl 435 that its not even really worth being included.
I really do hate conflicting information on the same website.
I suppose i could try to set up testing for this, but it will require alot of legwork (finding current level weapons with enough ilvl difference that dont have str on them to skew numbers, or variance in secondary stats that impact ability damage, then having a full gear set that doesnt have procs that increase any damage, in the ilvl range that is relevant).
Bottom line, before i do any of the leg work to show how relevant weapon damage is to our ability damage is to recognize that it does impact our damage. In fact it impacts the damage of all our abilities, where before it only impacted strikes. This makes weapon upgrades important for other than auto attacks and additional stats.
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Allow me to assist. Well, we’d have to figure out how many attack power points are given per strength point at max level to ease the question of scaling, and then apply versatility and figure out how the weapon damage is calculated, or see how what is left over when the math is done.
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It’s 1-1. It was more before but now it’s 1-1.
Well, weapon dps. If it is right they used things that didn’t have a range of possibilities so the damage stays the same unless str is modified.
So it’s (attack power + (weapon dps + weapon dps) * 6) * ap coefficient * damage multiplier for DW scenarios I would assume. Either that or it’s just calculated for each weapon, they didn’t go through DW calculations even though they used a frost dk so I don’t know why they didn’t show that as well.
So if it is weapon dps, and if both weapons equal out to what 2h would be in terms of dps which it looks like it actually equals out to more, then it still wouldn’t be some huge increase in damage if you applied a 2h. Just using you and Trumpknight, because you each have a 430 weapon, the 2h is 376 dps and the 1h is 211 dps (*2) which would be 422. So if everything else is the same then DW should beat it unless the equation isn’t finished for DW.
I just need to download the game at this point since it seems like outside game information isn’t quite complete.
Their portion covering dw calculation should be in the formula for frostscythe in that post.
A decent out of game calculation for how they (blizzard) approach it would be lookong at deathstrike since they specifically put in an additional attack power portion for the offhand but main hand is the same as 2 hand.
I feel, and this is just estimated guessing, thst the bigger discrepancy comes into play with access to a second weapon enchant and anything that speicially procs on auto attacks (that isnt regulated through the rppm system).
In the case of the above with similar stats between dw and 2h youd think dw would be superior except in cases where sources get more mitigation for frequent smaller attacks then fewer larger attacks or thorns style mechanics.
Oddly enough, ferals are listed currently as preffering a 2 handed weqpon vs 2 daggers and i am not sure why.
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It looks like that page isnt right either but it might have been right at the time in the alpha. Even using a 400ilvl weapon which has 214.6dps that comes out to 11.8k damage when they were seeing 10.4k damage on obliterate (in the tooltip before versatility). Thats 1.4k damage that is being lost somewhere or that equation isnt right.
The only time I have ever been accurate is Attack Power * ap coefficient + weapon damage or just straight up attack power * ap coefficient. At the time they had 8558 attack power. 8558*1.2 = 10,270 (ignoring versatility and I dont know what it was at that time) or if you use a 430 weapon its 10,270 + 283 weapon dps which is 10,553 damage for obliterate before versatility.
That 11.8k number is also before versatility so that equation just cant be right.
So im leaning more towards “(attack power * ap coefficient + weapon damage) * damage modifiers” Or just “(attack power * ap coefficient) * damage modifiers”.
If I had an updated tooltip I could figure it out since there is enough information on character armories to go off of in that case.
It also depends on if 2h would use the main hand ap coefficient which would be 60% unlike the 120% from DW, which it could just be changed to 120% ap.
I’ll only agree with a Frost DK two handed when they make frostmourne a transmog, until then neh, i’d rather got with dual swords
blizzards do mistakes like that all the time, i don’t think it is rly a thing to players push over, like, Anduin is a priest, with sword and heavy armor, don’t mean priests will use plate and 2H swords too
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While the appearance of Legion’s Feral Artifact was DW daggers (like Guardian’s Oven Mitts), they have never actually been able to dual wield through the lifetime of this game.
While there was some interesting choices in stats and weapon types early in WoW’s lifetime, 2H Agility weapons are the weapon of choice for Feral/Guardian being they are limited to Polearms (currently, but not an option in early wow), Staves, 1H & 2H Maces, a singular Fist and Dagger combined with an Off Hand item which is (currently) a non weapon +int stat stick.
With those options at 120, a +Agi staff or Polearm is going to greatly outweigh any such dagger/fist and off-hand combinations. This has been the case for some time.
In edit:
While acknowledging that druids are very different from past expansions, it’s been some time since I’d last played vanilla/BC. Its worth noting that Druids from early expansions had used a mish-mash of what was available with some off-hand items, and the possibility of using +STR items for the AP gain with some inconsistencies with itemisation and secondary effects (weapons with both +AGI & +STR (Manual Crowd Pummeler)).
In quoting Icy Vein’s explanation of stats for Classic:
Feral Druids get 1 AP and 0.05% crit chance from each point of Agility. Until you approach your crit soft cap, Agility is going to be better than Strength due to the value that the crit chance provides. After you are at your crit soft cap, Strength becomes more valuable due to the crit not being as valuable. Agility and Strength are very close however, so do be afraid to take more of either.
AP is the base stat off which all of your damage is calculated. For Feral Druids, this is especially true since your auto attack damage is not based off your weapon DPS. In fact, weapon DPS has zero value to Feral Druids. Your auto attacks are normalised on a 1-second swing timer, and the damage is calculated based on your AP. All of your abilities have their damage calculated either as a multiplier of a single auto attack’s damage or are based on your AP as well. You generally will not want to pick up straight AP pieces, however, because while it is a great stat that scales exceptionally well for Feral, Agility and Strength will offer more of it point for point.
Again, this is not for BFA (Classic), as Feral/Guardian will generally just stick with the +AGI polearm, which from memory, wasn’t the case until WotLK as it was unavailable. While there’s less of a romance in the flexibility, things are now consistent and relatively balanced (in comparison to past expansions).
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The only reason I brought it up was that another poster said that there was DK npcs dw. And was using that as a reason why frost dks should dw. So using that as part of the reason why frost dk’s should dw.
Reforging to reach the soft cap on hit and expertise. Yeah that was a thing. It was always higher for dual wield. And then youd go beat on the max level training dummy and the raid boss dummy. I was glad to see it go. I liked reforging though. Customization is always good.
Here is why a 2 hander is better. In real life grab a baseball bat and swing it with 2 hands. Feel the power? Now pick up 2 smaller ball bats or 2 sticks and swing them. Nice hey? Now try to hit a baseball with the 2 smaller stick bats. Keeping 1 in each hand of course. Useless. Dont belive it? Have a buddy attack you with the Louisville slugger and you try to fend him off with your 2 sticks. This illustrates why the 2 handed frost dk is straight up gangsta.
“When you absolutely positively got ta kill each and evry last muthfooker in the room accept no substitutes.”
Jackie Brown.
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I want to point out that on the hottest 2 hand/dw DK forums Kelliste is there contributing around 52-66% of the total posts per forum. Just wanted to point that out to everyone. This person is only here to argue, demean, and antagonize. Do not waste your time arguing with this person or justifying your personal opinions and preferances.
Side note: lets push this baby to 1,000 posts. We are going to get 2 hand frost back.
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Right now I just want to get my Pandaren DK. I’ve been holding my breath for months since they were announced.
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Thats not hard at all. If you miss with that slugger then the wind up to swing again is a lot longer than those 2 “sticks”. And that is the best case scenario.
Now go get a weapon from Michael Cthulhu which weights around 50 pounds, and go up against someone wielding some hatches. Who do you think is going to come out on top? The swing timer that might as well be a year, or someone that can actually use the weapons?
Granted this is a fantasy game with a class filled with unholy might and speed, but to me that just tells me that real world examples dont actually translate to fantasy world outcomes. Anything can happen in a fantasy world.
If anyone is going to use real world examples then those include the use of hands and feet, and different ways of wielding the weapon. Using IRL combat scenarios is pointless because of the variables. What won’t change in the physical reality, though, is that a 2H object does exponentially more damage per swing than two weapons that occupy both hands. The definitive ratio of damage difference between the two wielding types in reality (given the same object, but with varying size), based on gravity and density, is even higher than depicted in games. So, we should stay away from physical examples. Far too many variables.
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