The State of Balance: Two-Handers vs Off-Hands

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Game Balancing is a subtle art, small oversights often lead to some skill, character or item being absurdly overpowered and chosen by most players in spite of the rest of the content the devs worked so hard to produce. In this series we will look at Balance in Diablo 3 and see how fair things are right now.

Hello everyone, this is Dannie “Immersion” Ray. A few days ago, we took a quick look on how to best dual wield; Not every class has the chance to do it though, Wizards and Witch Doctors sport powerful off hands in the form of Sources and Mojos respectively . Build diversity dictates that using Two-Handers or One-Hander + Off-Hand should be personal preference and/or a choice based on what fits your build better. Both options should be balanced in power, if one of the options is significantly better than the other then we can’t have build diversity.

We will now take a look at how they stack up with each other, but I know what you are thinking right now.

@DannieRay23 “2H weapons need improvement!” There, I wrote it for you. 😛 Now you can go play the game.

— Waterfiend (@Waterfiend1909) June 2, 2014

So yeah, you probably already know that Two-Handers are a bit behind; the question now is, how much behind and how should we buff them?

Analyzing each type of weapon would take forever so we are going to look at a few different attack speeds and asume the weapon types are balanced within themselves.

We will mainly be looking at Damage per Second and Damage per Hit, Damage per Hit is often overlooked but it can be very important as it is a big factor when we are calculating Damage per Resource Point; resources are limited and usually fuel our strongest abilities so it makes sense that we keep track of our Damage per Resource Point, hard-hitting long-cooldown abilites can also be heavily dependant on Damage per Hit.

Two-Hander:

The fastest weapons are Swords at 1.15 ApS and the slowest ones are Maces at 1 ApS.

Two Handed Swords:

Without 10% extra damage or any attack speed a top end sword would look  like this:

• 2072-2733 Damage.
• 1.15 Attacks per Second.

That’s 2762.8 DPS and 2402 DPH,

Two Handed Maces:

without 10% extra damage or any attack speed a top end mace would look like this:

• 2448-2896 Damage.
• 1 Attack per Second.

That’s 2672 DPS and  2672 DPH.

Extra Attributes:

2 Hander weapons usually come equipped with 3 more attributes, and since we are talking about top end weapons they would look like this.

• 10% Damage
• 1125 Base Stat.
• Socket

1-Hander + Off Hand:

The fastest weapons are Daggers at 1.5 ApS and the slowest ones are Maces at 1.2 ApS.

Daggers:

Without 10% extra damage or any attack speed a top end Dagger would look something like this:

1156-1625 Damage, 1.5 Attacks per Second

A Mojo or Source would add an additional 370-450 Damage.

That’s 2700 DPS and 1800 DPH

One Handed Maces:

Without 10% extra damage or any attack speed a top end mace would look like this:

• 1515-2075 Damage.
• 1.2 Attacks per Second.

A Mojo or Source would add an aditional  370-450 Damage.

That’s 2646 DPS and 2205 DPH

We can already see that our DPS is more than comparable to the Two-Hander.

Extra Attributes:

One-Hander weapons usually come equipped with 3 more attributes, and since we are talking about top end weapons they would look like this.

• 10% Damage
• 750 Base Stat.
• Socket

You’d have to add the Off-hand with 4 primary properties though.

• 750 Base Stat
• 10% Critical Hit Chance
• +15% Skill Damage.
• 8% CDR/RCR/Damage Against Elites or APOC/Mana Regen or Vitality.

Results:

At a glance you will realize that DPS is comparable, while Two-Handers boast around 20% higher DPH.

But when we Factor in the 10% Critical Hit Chance, 15% Skill Damage, and 375 Extra Base Stat; we realize that we actually get a higher effective DPH when using One-Handers. Besides higher DPH, using an Off-Hand also grants extra utility, damage or survability depending on what you choose for that last properties.

Two-Hand Weapons feel super obsolete for classes with access to Off-Hands.

The Solution:

Before Reaper the solution would’ve been simple, buff Two-Handers somehow so they are comparable. The problem now is that we need to keep an eye on Crusaders thanks to that annoying Heavenly Strength passive.

There’s also a design concern here; One-Hand + Off-Hand requires 2 different items, but a Two-Hander is just one item so going for a Two-Hander means that you need 1 less item.

The best solution might already be in the game in the form of Quivers, adding a special type of Off-Hand (D2 Style Runes, Charms?) that any class could use along with a Two-Hander. This Off-Hand shouldn’t give extra damage but rather supply the missing stats like Critical Chance, Reductions, etc. Now that I’ve talked about  D2 Runes maybe that’s what Two-Handers need, a Special Slot to augment them.

Next week we will see if that is actually a good idea when we pit Two-Handers against Dual Wielding in a battle to the death.

Hope to see you again then.