There are a lot of small tidbits in Warhammer that often aren't obvious. In this article our fearless glorious master and leader will show us the way, the light and most things in between. If you happen to be a class worthy of his attention that is... That being tanks, mêlée DPS and DoKs.
[This article has been editted to remove some very out of date information.]
- Auto-attacks and attack skills:
Unlike many other games, attack skills do not modify your auto-attacks, instead they run in parallel. The damage for an attack skill is based on the base damage, your strength, your foes toughness, our foes armour and your weapon Damage-Per-Second. The weapon DPS in an attack skill is converted to damage by using the Global Cooldown of 1.5 seconds rather than the weapons swing time.
- Dual Wielding - auto-attacks
Off hand attacks work as procs from the main hand, ie. every auto-attack swing you make with your main hand has a chance to activate the offhand. Damage from the off-hand uses its own swing-time to calculate damage from DPS despite proccing in the time of your main hand (which would seem to favour slow off-hands), although there is a counter term in the formula that deducts damage for using a swing time higher than your main-hand and adds damage for a lower off-hand swing time (which favours fast off-hands). The formula is complicated, however it can be shown that, assuming the formula that players have deducted is correct, you want to maximise the ration off (off-hand time)/(main-hand time) if your damage is mostly due to strength, and minimise the same ration if your auto-attack damage is mostly down to weapon DPS. The decider is thus: if 10% of your off-hand DPS is greater than 50% of (your strength- foes toughness) you want the latter; otherwise, the former. Unless you are planning on mostly killing tanks, most mêlée DPS classes will want the slow off-hand, given that you can't change weapon in combat.
- Dual Wielding - attack skills
When you use an attack skill with dual wield, a percentage of your off-hand DPS is also added to the attack, making dual wielding damage comparable to great-weapon damage in relation to attack skills.
- Shields and Charms (ie Chalices, Books) - attack skills
This one is odd. Switching from a greatweapon to a weapon and shield, or from dual wield to weapon and charm will lower your auto-attack damage, since you either face the lower DPS of a 1h weapon, or you are losing the off-hand weapon proc. This is obvious and expected. What isn't obvious or expected is that this does not change have a significant impact on attack skills. This is because shields and charms have an unpublished DPS associated with the item's rarity and level. This factors in to attack skill damage in a similar manner to attack skills while dual wielding (see above). This also means that great-weapons are almost entirely pointless vs the shield option unless you have a skill you really want to use that requires a great weapon to activate (block is far better than a little more auto-attack damage, stats are probably similar).
Hope some of that theory was enlightening. Oh, and if anyone uses the word "theorycrafting", I might have to stab them in the eye... It's not a word, OK? (speaking as a real-life theoretician here)
