Been thinking on this one lately. Usually I'm a fan of using a very slow weapon usually on mc rapier or sabre. This is working on the theory that auto attacks between ca's and spells will hit harder. However! with over 50% DA, and with 8/8 poison and occasionally having graves peace up.. would overall dps be enhanced with a faster weapon? Has anyone done any experiments regarding this? I'm thinking I should maybe go for a more midrange weapon speed maybe 3-4?
in solo, group, or raid situation? If one of the latter, pls post group set up. Also, what is your unbuffed haste? once you have divined the variables you can start making very easy test runs, or ask one of the math wizards to do it for you. Best weapons in most situations are between 3-4 sec delay. Reason is you won't have to many missed swings to postpone the hits, but still have high end dammage weapons for high crits.
Lets say Im working in a solo situation as I do 90% of my play solo. working on sta tree 5/8/6 agi tree 4/4/8 snb. I dont always have graves peace up so wouldnt like to factror that in. (unbuffed haste is minimal)
As a general rule of thumb I've always tried to use a weapon that will allow me to cast 1 spell or use 2 CA in between auto attacks. This is going to vary depending on how much haste you have and if you are DW or S&B. At lower levels and when I don't have much haste or a lot of melee crit, I will opt for faster weapons 2-3 second delay and I typically used S&B so the weapons would swing at their normal speed. As I got more haste which increases how fast I swing the weapon I would increase the delay of my weapon of choice to a 3-4 second delay. When I switched to DW weapons (DW slows your weapons by 33%) in groups I would usually try to keep the 3 second ones or if my group had a member that gave me more haste I'd increase my weapons delays by a second or two. I could be wrong, but I've been playing of the opinion that if I don't have a lot of haste or melee crit, its better to swing a lot (as long as I'm not delaying auto attacks by much) and do a little bit of damage with each hit, rather than get a weapon with a super high delay and swing every 6 seconds hoping for a crit and big damage. If the longer delay weapon misses once you might be in trouble in a tight fight, if the quicker delay weapon misses its not that big of a deal as it will swing again in 2-3 seconds.
Well the reason I've thought I should drop to a faster speed is Im guessing more auto attacks = more chance to double attack and more chances for poison to proc. As Im dropping my early bard AA into Agi and Sta, I wont have the + crit benefit from dktm. So low haste, low crit....
Personally, I also prefer the very fast weapons. It just seems more sensible when you have a 50% DA chance on every hit that you should hit more often. None of the weapons I use are over a 2 second delay. Most I've used are 1.2 seconds. So I'm auto-attacking almost every second. I've never used the slower weapons so I can't compare DPS numbers, so you should try out both types of weapons and see what you prefer.
Dual wield with the fastest weapons I can find. Think I am using 1.6 or 1.7 weapons now. They are the world event piecers that look like blazin hot irons "Smithy's Blistering Points". Maxed Wisdom to DKTM. Maxed sta to 8 points in double attack. 5 points into agility to get rank 1 of bump.
You're better off going with a 3-4 second delay weapon, for several reasons. When you crit, the damage will be much higher assuming you can find a weapon with a decent damage spread. Your auto attack damage will improve because you won't have your attacks delayed as long even if you're spamming spells/CA's. You'll receive much greater benefit from haste, especially as it applies to procs. This is directly related to the reason stated above. A glance at the proc rate listed for poison concoction, and the tomb's line, would seem to indicate that a faster weapon will proc more often, but this is not the case. The percentage chance listed is modified by the delay of the weapon or casting time of the spell or combat art. This means that a 10% proc on a weapon will trigger the same number of times per minute, on average, regardless of the speed of the weapon. The % listed is calculated using a weapon delay of 3.0 seconds, and is "normalized" for your weapon delay. Also, it's a good idea to get used to a 3-4 second delay simply because our epic weapon has a 3.5 second delay. And you simply won't find a better Dirge weapon that this. Not this expansion, anyway
The consensus of expert opinion is that you get more output from slower weapons. The reasoning goes something like this: -Procs are normalized for weapon speed. So, if you've got a slow weapon, it procs on a higher percentage of swings to make the total procs per minute similar. No difference here. -Slower weapons hit harder per strike, so there shouldn't be a particular advantage to more double-attacks one way or the other. Fewer, bigger events. No advantage either way. -Faster weapons get more Chimes, since those occur with each strike. Slight advantage to faster weapon. BUT -Slower weapons get less net delay from interference with spells and CAs. In short, unless you time things to the autoattack, which I have trouble believing is possible and favors the slower weapon anyhow, each autoattack swing is delayed by some amount, on average, by having to wait for a spell of CA to finish. This is a constant delay chance and amount per event, and so with fewer events to interact with, there's less net interference with slower weapons because fewer swings=fewer interference events and less loss of autoattack dps. -Slower weapons tend to have a higher ratio of highest to lowest damage. Arcane mathematics of the crit system makes high-ratio weapons do better with crits. There are extensive discussions of these issues going back a year or more on these boards, but this is what I've gleaned from them. Whysp
1--Get to JW and play with the weapons at the training wall to see how things go. You'll want ACT or some such parser open of course. 2--/weapon is your friend use it, know it, love it. ProfitUI's persona window or other UI mod is also quite nice and it lists some of the ACTUAL numbers and not just the displayed ones.
Which ever weapon speed you are choosing, if you are dual wielding, making sure both your weapons have the same delay makes it easier to fit the autoattacks in between the firing ca's and spells.. I found that the 3.5 delay on our Epic is not so bad after all, so getting a 3.5 delay for offhand is very high on my Prio list atm (MArrows Song from SoH preferred). Sure with DA you can start to think about getting faster weapons, but if you rely on the proc's from various items, you will also have to remember that the faster your weapons the lesser your items proc. So its not ALL about the weapons, its also, about how your entire gear setup is.
