To Dual Wield, or Carry a Big Stick (part I)

It's an argument that plagues pretty much all casters.

"Which is better? Staff or the MH/OH?"

And the answer is almost always vastly different, depending on who you ask.


Some will say the staff, because it has better stats.

Some will say the MH/OH, because it has better stats.

Make sense yet? I thought not.

THINKING CAPS ON EVERYONE!
Obviously, we need to dig deeper.

Ok, so the staff options is very self explanatory. Its a 2H weapon, it comes with stats. There ya go. Take, for example, this little puppy here.

[Gladiator's Mage Stick]

Plenty of purty stats. Nice stamina, a goodly amount of spell damage, and so on.

Now let's compare it to an equal level MH/OH combo:

[Gladiator's Mage Pointy]
with
[Gladiator's Book Thingy]

Oooh, purty darn purty too. So let's compare the raw stats, shall we?

The staff will have 3 more stamina and intellect than the MH/OH combination. This is what I refer to as "raw stats". The staff has more of them. The staff also has 21 Spell Hit, and 33 spell crit, which the MH/OH are missing entirely. I call these stats "caster stats"
The MH/OH combination has 10 more resilience than the staff, and has 16 more spell damage than the staff.

From this, we establish our base-line principle. Staffs have higher "raw stats", where as the MH/OH combinations have more "caster stats", by which I almost always mean more spell damage.

Continuing here, the weapon loot you get from PvP differ a lot from the stats you gain from PvE equivalents. The relationship between their stats are, quite simply, different.

The relation in PvP weapons are always the same like this. The staff always has slightly more Stamina and Intellect, has more spell hit/crit, and less resilience and spell damage.
Oddly enough, I would recommend getting the staff as a PvE weapon, considering the spell hit/crit stats are very nice for PvE, but very close to useless in PvP. The MH/OH combo really is not lacking in stamina/intellect (falling no more than 3 points short at its hugest gap), so you will not be missing out on any "PvP" stats by getting it. Extra resilience, and extra spell damage.
If you're going with PvP weapons, hit up the staff for PvE, and the MH/OH for actual PvP.




This is terribly short, because my interent hates me.

Part II tomorrow!