Identity of One-Handed Weapon Types - What's working, what is not

Whenever i start a new char i look at possible weapon types again.
This post became longer than anticipated. It lists all the weapon types and a conclusion for each summarizing what's working and what's not.

I'll start off with some general problems that i have with one handed weapons that have one-sided incentivization.

General Problems:
1)Adds x-y Physical Damage is scaled by Increased Physical Damage %:
Low Basedamage on Weapons becomes insignificant. Attackspeed becomes the only relevant factor for choosing a weapontype.

2)Increased Critical Strike chance is scaled by higher Base Critical Strike Chance (exception Harbinger Bow):
Scaling crits with everything but scepters, wands, daggers, claws is never worth it unless you possess a weapon with high explicit increase and even then the scaling seems too low to me

3)Elemental Damage is only being scaled by attackspeed:
Only weapons with at least high base attackspeed are good for scaling elemental damage.

Daggers:

Weapons:
- high base crit
- low base damage
- average speed(basespeed from 1.2 to 1.6)

Identity (in order of importance):
- Crit chance
- Crit multiplier.
- Physical Damage
- Accuracy / Attackspeed / Life

Related to:
- Int-based (1 cluster dex)
- related to Life + ES
- Energy Shield
- Ghost Reaver
- Evasion
- Dodge
- Crit chance
- Crit multiplier
- Power charges
- ...

Support:
5 Clusters with 24 nodes total.
All of them clustered around the shadow area

Everything here seems to fit. You can either go Life or ES route. Crit can be further supported by more crit.
Ghost Reaver enables Leech for CI.

Claws:

Weapons:
- high base crit
- average base damage
- low speed (1.1 to 1.5)

Identity:
- Physical Damage
- Life Leech
- Attackspeed / Crit chance
- Accuracy
- Life / ES


Related to:
- Dex/Int-based (2 cluster dex / 3 cluster int)
- less related to ES than daggers, more leaning towards life.
- Energy Shield
- Ghost Reaver
- Evasion
- Dodge
- Block
- Crit chance
- ...

Support:
5 Clusters with 24 nodes total.
4 of them clustered around the shadow area, 1 between Ranger and Duelist

One of the flawed weapon types. The weapon type is split up in the tree, but the major flaw lies in the main focus: Life Leech. Your leech gets so high that you NEED vaal pact in order for claws to utilize the leech. In order to reach vaal pact from the 4 clusters in the intelligence area you need to travek 18 (EIGHTTEEN) skillpoints.

Swords:

Weapons:
- low base crit
either:
- low base damage / high speed
or:
- average base damage / average speed

Identity:
- Physical Damage
- Accuracy
- Attackspeed
- Life
- Crit Multiplier
- Block reduce
- Armor

Related to:
- Dex/Str based
- Life
- Dual Wield
- Evasion / Armor
- Crit Chance

Support:
9 clusters with more nodes than i was willing to count
2 around ranger
5 around duelist
2 around marauder

One of the hybrids. There are some contradictions around for using swords.
The weapon has low crit, yet there are nodes for crit and base types favoring crit.
The weapon has high accuracy which would work well with crit, yet you are close to resolute technique and will almost always grab it. Block reduce is a completely wasted stat unless you are permafarming barracks or doing pvp.
Good for elemental damage, yet no elemental damage nodes on the tree.

Maces:

Weapons:
-slow (1.05 - 1.4)
either:
- elemental damage + high crit chance
or:
- stun duration + low crit chance

Identity:
- Physical Damage
- Stun
- Armor
- Accuracy
- Attackspeed
- Life
- Crit Multiplier
- Elemental Damage


Related to:
- Str(/Int) based
- Life
- Resolute technique
- Stun
- Armor
- Crit Chance
- Elemental Damage

Support:
6 clusters with more nodes than i was willing to count
4 around marauder
2 around templar

One of the hybrids. There are some contradictions around for using maces.
The weapon has low attackspeed, yet it is related to elemental damage due to implicit mods and having crit
crit could work well with elemental damage but the base attack speed is too low to scale elemental damage effectively and you are close to resolute technique again. Crit multiplier is a very random stat.
Stun works better on 2-handed weapons, 1-handed maces should rather have reduced stun threshold imo.


Axes:

Weapons:
-slow - average (1.05 - 1.5)
- low crit chance
- high base damage

Identity:
- Physical Damage
- Accuracy
- Attackspeed
- Armor
- Energy Shield???


Related to:
- Str/Dex(/Int) based
- Life
- Accuracy
- Resolute technique
- Armor

Support:
7 clusters with more nodes than i was willing to count
5 around the duelist
2 around the templar

Complete contradiction. It has only 2 foci: Damage and Accuracy. Seeing that its next to resolute technique and the crit chance is low and there is only to decide between crit and always hit, you will hardly ever decide to take any of the accuracy nodes. Due to low - average atttackspeed, scaling elemental damage isn't really worthwhile.


Conclusion:
Only Dagger works well as a whole, Claws is spread out too far on the passive tree and their main keystone went off to the opposite end of the tree, Swords are in a workable state but highly contradicting, Maces and Axes aren't working for anything but resolute technique-based chars.

tl;dr: what could be changed to make maces,sceptres, Axes, Crit Swords, Claws more attractive to use?

Nice write up. On phone or I would say more. But just wanted to comment on the feedback.

similar thoughts. i'm now playing my last 'thematical' char (cyclone + axe) and will probably drop poe for some time/forever. and while i was planning a build i had very strange feeling about axes after playing wander. wands are OK (except for diluted affix pool - caster/wander). have separation for slow/crit/phys and fast/less crit/ele routes with mixes in between

axes however.. dull weapon with dull passives. the only reason for playing with them is that ive gambled 5L kaoms primacy that i want to use at least once..

root of the problem? elemental scaling with attack speed. if ele dmg was added as 'dps' and not 'per swing' slow weapons would have place. but it is like it is the obvious choice is always high attack speed. this makes weapon choices no-brainers (corsairs, imbued, siege axes etc..) as with good phys roll you can benefit ALSO from ele dmg AND crit potential.

this leads to absolutely absurd situation when players have 12aps and it is considered 'normal'. not only it looks/sounds idiotic but also makes complex gearing system shallow in reality.

excessive scaling via attack speed is the culprit. stun mechanic somehow tries to make slow hitters viable but after reaching certain dps stun is an ornament without value. multistrike gem might have made melee viable but it also did a lot of harm to melee mechanic and diversity.

example of ele scaling?

my wander uses absolutely teribad wand:

most would have vendored it straight away
city tooltip dps: 2200

with auras:

11000

with 7PC and 3Frenzy charges:
23000

all because of 2 auras. i tried it with 1.1 speed wand with similar dps and crit - 12k max

auras after buff's plus aura nodes == fast weapon for the win. id have preferred some more diversity in this area :/

btw agree totally with claw + vaal pact. you saturate life leech even with elemental claws..

Those are good points sidtherat.

In general, scaling favors elemental damage for weapons - scaling also favors faster attacks, because realistically speaking, bosses/rares will be the only enemies to survive powerful two-handed hits - a lot of enemies that you fight can be just as easily destroyed with an extremely fast added-damage weapon. So, you have a slower kill speed with a two-handed weapon, usually, because of overkill. Which is kind of why I've suggested "overkill" mechanics in the past (like, "overkill damage" heals you/restores mana on an enemy kill X% of the time).

There are also no supports or weapons or anything really that reward players that take the risk of using a slow weapon (slow weapons lock you in place so they are more risky in general) - everything favors faster attacking. The only downside to faster attacks is mana costs per second of skills, but that can be resolved with blood magic or the right arrangement of leech, clairty and flasks.

In general resolute technique's placement is poor. Things are a lot better than in the past, but there is still very little reason to focus on criticals unless you simply cannot access RT without gross expense. Non-accuracy bonuses to weapons tend to not be impactful enough to warrant their use - the best passives for weapons are claws and daggers, with only a few mace nodes being appealing (like +20% elemental damage with maces). It is a giant nuisance to get enough accuracy rating as a Marader/Templar to take advantage of criticals - there should honestly be an accuracy aura, or something, like a flat accuracy ring, to help boost flat accuracy for these classes that can't get much dex.

Good write up.

I'd like to add some of my gripes, some of which I've been mentioning for a while.

First, either all 1h weapons should be higher attack speed than 2h weapons or the slow 1hers need their damage increased. In almost all situations the highest DPS 1h weapons are also the fastest. It's so imbalanced you wouldn't be wrong just not IDing most bases you find as the deck is so stacked against them.

Second, I've never played a game where the rarest, highest lvl weapons weren't generally the best. There should be some niche uses for certain bases, that's how you know there's a good item pool but it seems the highest DPS option, in most cases even considering implicit stats/crit chance, are around 50-60 req lvl area. I just don't get why the hardest to find bases of a weapon doesn't have the highest raw DPS in all cases. This goes for 1h and 2h btw.

Theorical Max DPS for each weapon
Link was posted on reddit a while back.

Some of those weapons have lower base dps but higher base crit mult, spell damage, base crit, etc. - those calculations do not seem to even take base crit chance/mult into account, which is a huge deal for some builds.

The weapons should be designed such that high-end ones are generally more powerful, perhaps in terms of raw dps, but some should be designed so that they can still compare to map-only ones, for specific niche focuses like aps, crit, crit mult, etc.

"

anubite wrote:

There are also no supports or weapons or anything really that reward players that take the risk of using a slow weapon (slow weapons lock you in place so they are more risky in general) - everything favors faster attacking. The only downside to faster attacks is mana costs per second of skills, but that can be resolved with blood magic or the right arrangement of leech, clairty and flasks.

root cause! spot on!

separating movement/reaction time from attack time (like fast-rail in q3 when you could switch to another weapon(LG/MG) but you couldnt fire again) would help A LOT to remove this issue

when you attack quicker it is one story. attacking quicker AND moving faster is another.

as for the slow weapon balance - crit and better/new stun implementations might be a solution. crit already is a strong differentation (for wands at least - prophecy can reach 12%+ crit and this is HUGE) but stun.. after you reach 5 digit dps stun etc is worthless anyway as mobs are melting

open systems - like poe - sadly will always lead to the 'best' solutions. in this case it is attack speed. to reduce impact on gameplay (And this impact is quite huge after you realize you dont even pick up certain base types.. like in d3) it requires not-so-open tweaks like manual adjustments to affix ranges, crit values or more system-wide changes like making auras scale with inverted ASPD to make them equaly viable for all weapon types (bit harsh.. not even like this idea at all..)

RE: chart missing some stuff. from missing stuff only crit chance is important. crit multi is negligible (20? 30?% my crit build has 460..) ele dmg is also not exciting - it is on weapons that are spellcaster sticks, not melee weapons. crit chance - local and global IS important and this makes daggers/wands more diverse in this area

I know, but I'm saying, wands are for casters too. If a wand has higher +spell damage, it should not necessarily have the highest base dps too. Critical is "negligible" but it still is an important factor when choosing weapons. You can't compare two staves if one has 18% block and 1% higher base crit than the other, the other may have higher base dps, but being able to crit and block more can mean a lot for a given build.

The game is coded a certain way - you can't cancel your attacks to move because of the way packets are sent to the server. The server is designed to know where you are when you launch an attack, if you can cancel that command, there could be a lot of networking issues that result as an effect of that change.

I find it a bit weird that you basically look at scepters and regular maces as one item, when they're essentially two different types of items. It's not surprising that you find the differences contradictory, they're not the same class of item. You do the same thing with swords and rapiers, which are also different weapons.

Still, this guide is an interesting concept, and I appreciate the work!

I'm gonna speak about axes since it's the weapon type I'm using the most ( 1H axe + shield ) :
Only one cluster is close to resolute technique, the other ones are not close to it at all, I will never pay 8 points to reach resolute technique when my chance are >90% effective anyway ( and getting > 85% is quite easy, especially with axes since most of the nodes are next in/next to the dext area of the tree). Axes nodes are amongst the best ones in the tree when it's about weapons, lots of AS, raw dmg and accuracy.

Now removing the accuracy bonus on the cluster right next to RT would make sense, but the rest works well atm.



I agree on the point that claws - Vaal pact interaction is too strong for the number of nodes between the nodes and the keystone ( making bloodseeker a must-have ... which hits really less than good claws ).