So, I decided to try a rift on Master on my Monk last night. He has pretty good damage as he's around 500k without the +fire damage factored in. However, his toughness was kind of low at around 3 million. Now, I was fine in most situations, but I was rather unlucky early on in my rift. The game gave me one of my least favorite enemies to fight as a champion pack: the mallet lord. Honestly, mallet lords aren't that hard and they really only have one move, but it
hurts if it hits you. Fighting a single, named mallet lord is easy because you only have to watch out for a single enemy, but when you have to fight five at once?
The funny part is... right after I killed the first mallet lord champion pack, I ran into another one! :'( Luckily, I got a gargoyle-type rift guardian who was an utter joke compared to anything else that I've ever run into.
So, I was working a bit afterward to try and tailor some newer yellow gear to raise my toughness a bit while trying to sacrifice as little damage as I could. Right now, I think I'm choosing between two different gloves and a potentially different off-hand weapon. I got that pig sticker dagger (or whatever it's called), and the only bad thing about it is that it suffers from the +%damage bug as it has +poison on it. So, it is a tiny bit weaker than my Exarian. Although, it does have the bonus of giving me more damage against beasts and humans; however, I would say that there aren't
that many beasts and humans enemies in the game. I think they're mostly in Act I.
Base attack speed is determined by the swing speed of the weapon you have equipped, that's the 'floor'. Dual wielding grants a passive +15% attack speed and attack speed for each weapon is calculated independently, not as a composite.
Well, the one thing that makes Diablo III weird to me in regard to weapon-oriented stats is that we don't actually use our weapons for attacking. We're all like Huntards in WoW with our stat sticks. So, that makes me wonder... if I'm using Crippling Wave with a 1.3/s and a 1.4/s weapon... what happens? Does it alternate the attacks between the different speeds? What about other attacks like Lashing Tail Kick? ...or if I were to use something like Meteor on my Wizard, what happens there?
If you want a "simulation" just look for a D3 DPS calculator online. It effectively accomplishes the same thing, you just have to keep in mind that your 'paper' DPS only goes so far and in actuality some play styles and some skills with benefit more from some stats than others. For instance, wizards and witch doctors will often want to avoid being invested too heavily in IAS because it can cause resource generation to bottleneck.
The simulations that I'm used to from my WoW days (EnhSim) would actually report how long you spent OOM over the course of the simulation. The only thing is that WoW simulations were given a little flak in the beginning for being "too perfect". EnhSim ended up having a latency feature added (among other things) to help introduce aspects seen when actually gaming. I mention that because ARPGs are even more awkward when it comes to this because instead of just target-based casting, you have to target "an area", so other factors such as projectile speed may matter a lot more than just damage. I know I've had to do things such as predecting where those stupid wasps in Act II would fly to before I cast my spell at them (via holding Shift).
I really want an Andy's helm with +fire for my DH. I can reroll the APS for crit and get an additional DPS boost!
I looked up Andariel's Visage on Blizzard's database, and it looks like it also makes you take more fire damage. That could be an interesting combination with that necklace that makes you immune to fire.
Anyway, I like him now. One thing though, he dual-wields and every high str shield I loot says its a DPS upgrade. Is there an inherent DW bonus or is it really better to equip the highest DPS weapon and whatever gives me the most stats in the off-hand?
After I found a set glove at 70, I had that same problem with my monk. Of course, my shield was also pretty good (dex, vit, +9 crit), which didn't help! I eventually found a good legendary sword that was finally able to replace the shield while providing significantly more damage.
However, I would love to know what sort of calculations Diablo III does with multiple weapons like that. What causes it to factor the damage to a lower value? Is it some weird average between weapon damage ranges? I did notice that as the weapons got far closer in parity, the lesser the -damage was. I think the lowest that I saw prior to the legendary sword was a near-perfect yellow fist weapon that had +damage, +%damage, dex, etc.
From what I have read, the only downside to the shield is that you won't swing as much and you won't gain as much resource.