Nell
25.04.2005, 20:32
Offizielles Statement von Blizzard aus dem US-Kriegerforum, fands ganz interessant.
With regard to dual wielding, I'd like to clarify how it works and its intent. First, we do obviously realize that DW has a significantly higher miss rate, and that the offhand weapon does not deal its full damage. This is done to keep DW in direct DPS balance with using 2h weapons, and to ensure that both 2h and DW are well balanced in total effect against 1h+shield.
For a little background on the DW balance process, I need to first give a little background on how 2h weapon use is balanced against 1h+shield.
In order to make both 2h and 1h+s viable strategies for general purpose gameplay, we want approximately the same overall effectiveness in terms of total sustained killing ability over time between 2h weapon and 1h+s. This means that if you were to kill 100 creatures (for example) of your level, it should take close to the same total time including downtime when using 2h or 1h+s, perhaps favoring 2h choices somewhat (although it should be noted that there are intangibles that make measuring downtime a reasonable estimate rather than a perfect science).
While you will kill more quickly using 2h, you are expected to end the fight with a lower remaining health compared to the same fight using 1h+s. In the 1h+s case you will be killing more slowly, but have more health at the end of the fight, and therefore less downtime over the long haul (and yes, it is balanced to account for the fact that killing more quickly implies taking less hits from the enemy).
After it was all calculated to exhaustion (factoring in other objectives such as the desired damage reduction contribution of your shield relative to the rest of your armor), we determined that to achieve our goals of relative balance between 2h vs 1h+s, 2h weapons needed to produce approximately 20% more DPS then 1h+s. What this meant was that in order for DW to be an interesting (but not overpowered) choice, DW needed to also produce a total increase of 20% DPS over 1h+s (just like 2h does).
As you might realize at this point, if you got the full DPS from your second weapon while dual wielding (by having the offhand weapon attack at full speed, with full hit chance, and full damage), your DPS would go up by 100% rather than by 20% (assuming an equally good weapon in the offhand). Unfortunately, 100% amounts to a *lot* more then 20%, and would make DW the best choice by such a wide margin that it would have been pointless to have 2h or 1h+s in the game at all.
Given that, we needed to find a way to modify some combination of damage, hit chance, attack speed, or other basic combat factors in order to achieve 20% rather than 100%. Since we didn't want to reduce any one of these by too much, we opted to reduce the hit rate for both the main and offhand (since at least swinging a lot more helps correct streaky behavior caused by the increased miss rate).
In addition, since increasing the even-level miss chance to 24% or so for both weapons while using DW still wasn't enough to get us down to 20% increased DPS (and for "feel" reasons I'm sure you can understand, we didn't want to push the miss rate higher than that), we opted to reduce the damage of the offhand weapon, figuring that doing less damage from your offhand seems like it makes sense to players and would feel acceptable.
The combination of the increased miss rate for DW and lowering the offhand damage got us down to the 20% overall DPS increase from DW that we needed to ensure that DW was well balanced against 2h weapons.
So, while it can be always be said that some other combination of trade-offs for DW would have proven to "feel" better, we do have a DW system that is balanced and arguably feels more like you're actually using two weapons than DW systems in other RPGs that are also intended to be balanced.
As such, in response to the myriad of posts that offer the shocking revelation that DW has a higher miss chance than 2h or 1h+s, I’d like to say that it really isn't necessary to inform us of this. We know this, that's how we made it, thanks again for the reminder. ;] Also, it seems these revelations often imply that since DW has a higher miss chance, that the DPS isn’t as good as 2h, which (as explained above) simply isn’t factual.
With regard to dual wielding, I'd like to clarify how it works and its intent. First, we do obviously realize that DW has a significantly higher miss rate, and that the offhand weapon does not deal its full damage. This is done to keep DW in direct DPS balance with using 2h weapons, and to ensure that both 2h and DW are well balanced in total effect against 1h+shield.
For a little background on the DW balance process, I need to first give a little background on how 2h weapon use is balanced against 1h+shield.
In order to make both 2h and 1h+s viable strategies for general purpose gameplay, we want approximately the same overall effectiveness in terms of total sustained killing ability over time between 2h weapon and 1h+s. This means that if you were to kill 100 creatures (for example) of your level, it should take close to the same total time including downtime when using 2h or 1h+s, perhaps favoring 2h choices somewhat (although it should be noted that there are intangibles that make measuring downtime a reasonable estimate rather than a perfect science).
While you will kill more quickly using 2h, you are expected to end the fight with a lower remaining health compared to the same fight using 1h+s. In the 1h+s case you will be killing more slowly, but have more health at the end of the fight, and therefore less downtime over the long haul (and yes, it is balanced to account for the fact that killing more quickly implies taking less hits from the enemy).
After it was all calculated to exhaustion (factoring in other objectives such as the desired damage reduction contribution of your shield relative to the rest of your armor), we determined that to achieve our goals of relative balance between 2h vs 1h+s, 2h weapons needed to produce approximately 20% more DPS then 1h+s. What this meant was that in order for DW to be an interesting (but not overpowered) choice, DW needed to also produce a total increase of 20% DPS over 1h+s (just like 2h does).
As you might realize at this point, if you got the full DPS from your second weapon while dual wielding (by having the offhand weapon attack at full speed, with full hit chance, and full damage), your DPS would go up by 100% rather than by 20% (assuming an equally good weapon in the offhand). Unfortunately, 100% amounts to a *lot* more then 20%, and would make DW the best choice by such a wide margin that it would have been pointless to have 2h or 1h+s in the game at all.
Given that, we needed to find a way to modify some combination of damage, hit chance, attack speed, or other basic combat factors in order to achieve 20% rather than 100%. Since we didn't want to reduce any one of these by too much, we opted to reduce the hit rate for both the main and offhand (since at least swinging a lot more helps correct streaky behavior caused by the increased miss rate).
In addition, since increasing the even-level miss chance to 24% or so for both weapons while using DW still wasn't enough to get us down to 20% increased DPS (and for "feel" reasons I'm sure you can understand, we didn't want to push the miss rate higher than that), we opted to reduce the damage of the offhand weapon, figuring that doing less damage from your offhand seems like it makes sense to players and would feel acceptable.
The combination of the increased miss rate for DW and lowering the offhand damage got us down to the 20% overall DPS increase from DW that we needed to ensure that DW was well balanced against 2h weapons.
So, while it can be always be said that some other combination of trade-offs for DW would have proven to "feel" better, we do have a DW system that is balanced and arguably feels more like you're actually using two weapons than DW systems in other RPGs that are also intended to be balanced.
As such, in response to the myriad of posts that offer the shocking revelation that DW has a higher miss chance than 2h or 1h+s, I’d like to say that it really isn't necessary to inform us of this. We know this, that's how we made it, thanks again for the reminder. ;] Also, it seems these revelations often imply that since DW has a higher miss chance, that the DPS isn’t as good as 2h, which (as explained above) simply isn’t factual.