The Spirit Realm

I was able to pick up the T6 attunable 1H, which is a pretty sweet weapon. With the advent of some additional taunt AA's and Shield Specialist, I am considering using the 3DMG aug in that sucker instead of the Rune III aug I spent 20 hours camping last year. Keep in mind I am not a raider. Any thoughts on a better aug for group content? Lifetap? Survivability is the key, but some extra DPS can help on that front.

Freevudo
Tunare

As far as I'm concerned, 1H & Shield will always mean damage mitigation & aggro keeps, thus the need for the Rune aug we all wasted our time on camping. I understand that SS changes the equation somewhat, but 2H should still out-DPS any comparable 1H & Shield even with SS maxed. If I'm wrong on that, then by all means solo/DPS with a sword and board and put the DMG aug in there.

Uh with a rune 3 aug in BoFS and an 8 dmg aug in CSP with all dps aa's done BoFS is out dpsing CSP. Prob won't be true with raid uf weapons but group ones the 1her gonna beat the 2her.

Do we have proof of that with a parse? This is quite interesting.

Freevudo
Tunare

Agreed - that would be pretty ground breaking. It would make all our 2H DPS AAs useless.

You don't need to parse it's obvious without it. Go fight some undead with an equal tier 2her and 1her. My csp max slay is about 28k my bofs is maxing at 31kish. And when we start getting uf raid 2hers it will go back to normal because the 2hers in uf raids got insane boosts compared to sod raid 2hers.

Cannot speak for the Group game but from a High End Raider, I consistantly outparse all the Guilds other Paladins who continuealy use the Tower Poker for trash whereas I use Tower 1 Hander and Shield and have all the Offencive AA's.
Shield Spec is definatley a boost added to the extra survivability sword and board gives, I will stick in this format for sometime to come (ie Beast 2 hander coming my way)

It would seem to me that the AA's for 2H weapons might take the 2H over the 1H, even on undead. One example of such an AA is "Speed of the Knight", the effects of which might not be apparent in a "naked-eye" analysis of a log file. As mentioned before, I would need to see a parse before banking my 2H.

Freevudo
Tunare

I expect anyone here would always welcome a well-controlled parse on the subject. The conventional wisdom, which is sometimes wrong when put under a microscope, is that against undead our dps is dominated by slays; the rest of our dps becomes far less significant. And slay damage is maximized by maximizing weapon ratio, since things like the damage bonus again fall into the noise. So to maximize your dps against undead, you maximize your weapon ratio. And with Shield Specialist, the best 1h weapons can perform at a better ratio than the best 2h weapons.

That is just my point. How much does 2H AA ultimately affect these variables, including the number of attack attempts per unit time (thus the effective "ratio" of the weapon)? As you know, the “Speed of the Knight” yields an effect of an additional melee attack with 2H weapons.

I do not have the weapons yet that the poster above points to with his/her naked eye observations and so I cannot do the parsing myself. :-(

Freevudo
Tunare

I did quite a bit of parsing of shield specialist during beta and though shield specalist definatly adds a nice chunk of DPS 2hander wins out over 1hander all the time if they are from the same expansion. VS undead is a bit trickier since its so random on short parses that you may well out dps the 2hander with the 1hander, but on long parses the 2handers always win out. shield specalist added about 400dps to my parsing when i was on beta, and was near the end of beta so I doubt any of that was changed. My parses were w/o buffs except haste, so I am not sure that buffs wouldn't effect it, but I think buffs would increase both by the same %.

I did parses using crystallos raid weapons as well as several beta raid weapons, cryst weapons are about what the 1 grp weapons are at now so should be a good comparison for the groupers here.

These parses were with maxed offensive aa prior to expansion release i think, they were definitely done with the same aa if not, the only difference was I purchased shield specialist. As far as I can remember the only buffs I had were the 100% haste buff from the npc. These were 10-12 hour parses and the test dummies unfortunately are undead flaged so have to divide the dps in about half to figure what the dps would have been vs live mobs. These parses were also done from the back side of the mobs. the 1hander would have had a rune 3 proc aug on it, the 2hander a 7 damage aug.

Cryst 1hander pre SS : 1432dps
Cryst 1hander post SS : 1795dps
Cryst 2hander (slasher from fire 2) : 2001dps

I have parsed out the dps increase for damage augs and it is far smaller then you would like to know, I don't have the parses infront of me but i parsed out the difference once between 2hander w/0 and aug and 2hander with 7 damage aug and it came out to about 10 dps increase (cant remember if this was after i devided it for the fact dummies are undead or not, parse would have been done with only 100haste buff) I would suggest you use the rune proc on your 1hander over the 1hand damage aug, id have to parse them out to tell you for sure, but Im betting you wont see much of a dps upgrade from 3 damage aug.

Kboall, a SK on my server, was telling me the other day he'd done some parses showing that, with our newest AAs a proc aug will outdo a straight dmg aug on our one handers. Since I use an AC aug in my tanking weap and (+5) dmg in my grouping one, this has me curious. I'm going to try out the Donup's Striking Stone and run some informal parsing on my own, but have any of you already tested this out?

This might be a good aug for the OP if the dps is greater, too.

Also, and totally anecdotally, I've gotten teh feeling that I'm doing more dmg with my tower 1 hander than the Staff of Forbidden Rites. Haven't had a chance to parse the 2 hander much though to make it scientific.

Ya! Please! I am floundering for some good data. I can try to hook up a parse myself regarding the proc aug after I max out twinproc.

Freevudo
Tunare

The main reason 1h dps with SS maxed is greater than 2h dps for some people is because:

2h ratios were revamped, but only for Underfoot weapons, meaning that an UF era 1her (equivalent to an SoD raid era 1her) will outdps an SoD and earlier 2her, but should not outdps an equivalent tier UF 2her - Note that the ratios on knight 1hers from the beta vendors was not a massive increase over BoFS, but the raid knight 2hers are like an 80% increase.

Basically, this means that when using pre-UF weapons, we're essentially showing relatively poor 2her dps relative to how they were balanced in beta.

When the 170ish/34ish dmg/dly knight 2her is available from the new zone in 2 months, and raiders start seeing the 200-230 dmg 2hers from t7/8, the point will be moot.

Also, being able to use 1h/shield instead of 2h does increase how many mobs you can swarm pull, so get better dps in those situations due almost entirely to that.

Parsing a single mob like an arena dummy, you'll of course show the 2her doing more dps, but thats not really how people are soloing.

That's a great point Abaz just made, and something that will be virtually unparseable. Particularly with the new target window, the results of riposte damage are visible to the naked eye. Pull a stack of mobs and watch just how much damage you're doing to various mobs you aren't even targeting. Really makes you want to keep that window full at all times for maximum damage and xp. In Illsalin I can pull way more mobs than fit in the target window at once, and at times will actually kill mobs with riposted before they even show up in that window.