A New Hope for Combat Dual Wielding

[Corayo]

My personal opinion is that no spec should have 1.4 speed weapons, and Combat shouldn't use a dagger at all. Assassination and Subtlety should dual wield 1.8 speed daggers, and Combat should dual wield 2.6 swords/axes/maces.

Blade flurry should be changed from a cleave to making our sinister strike attack with both weapons, enforcing the 2.6 offhand, much like raging blow for warrior's and Threat of Thassarian for Frost DKs.

[Deleted]

Well, no, because then it'd be a weapon with the speed of a dagger and the damage range of a sword. The DPS would increase dramatically for nondagger weapons and make them better in all situations.

Oh right. Except that the problem is the exact opposite - daggers would be too weak. Because with current Ambidexterity, offhand weapon damage already gets increased by 75% so it's (almost) on par with 2.60 weapons.

Anyway, we all know what I've meant and the exact wording and implementation is just a detail. What I was trying to say is that I'd much more prefer using the actual swords/axes/... in offhand instead of some awkward transmogrification visual-only solution. And all it would require is a slight change of Ambidexterity specialization, not some massive tweaking of the whole Combat tree. Either by forbidding daggers for combat all together (I would not mind) or by keeping increased offhand damage for daggers only and increasing attack speed for non-daggers instead. We already have some abilities with damage conditioned by weapon type (Ambush, Sinister Strike with Fangs, ...) so it's not really anything special.

The math behind adjusting speed and damage is so simple that it's possible to make both choices (daggers and non-daggers) provide pretty much the same damage output. And those small differences that would occur because of rounding would be irrelevant compared to differences caused by itemization and racials - assuming that we'll never get a dagger and a non-dagger of the same iLvl and with exactly the same stats.


EDIT: Thinking about that, this would give combat twice as many chances of getting an offhand weapon compared to the other two trees. But then, Combat has lower chance of getting a mainhand that is shared with Shamans. On the other hand, looking at 3 T11 mainhand swords that are exclusive for Combat, this is probably not a big deal.