Ancestral Warchief - Dual Wield Behavior

So I'm currently running an elemental Ancestral Warchief build and I'm using a high eDPS/APS 1H sword as my main weapon and I've been trying to figure out what's best in my off hand.

According to the wiki, the skill attacks with a main hand attack, meaning it will never actually swing with the offhand weapon. I was able to confirm this using a Rive claw, the enemies were never bled.

I figured this meant that the skill would behave like Ground Slam, or Ice Crash, in that they only use the main hand weapon, or even a skill like Reave or Earthquake when using an incompatible offhand. So my expectation was that I would get the 10% more attack speed (really stupid by the way that it's More PHYSICAL Attack Damage, ignoring elemental, but that's another issue altogether) and the APS would be based solely off my main hand, and not averaged between the two, however this is not the case.

I wanted to use a Singularity, Platinum Scepter at first for the hinder effect, and (ignoring the broken tooltip) I noticed that the totems' APS went way down, to the point where just using my high APS main hand was faster than dual wielding. I tried it with a weapon of very similar APS and it went up a decent amount as expected. But then I tried it with Brightbeak, and it skyrocketed.

Is this intended behavior? Should this really be averaging the attack speeds of my weapons, and therefore making the highest APS offhand the best-in-slot for a flat eDPS build? Or is this simply a bug with how Ancestral Warchief interacts with dual wielding?

If anyone else can confirm, or offer other options, please do. Also GGG, this is a bit upsetting as I planned on having a bit more flexibility in my options for off hands, and wanted to try some interesting combos, not just the weapon with the highest APS.

Thanks!

Are you sure it is changing your actual attack speed, or just the tooltip attack speed? (It sounds like you actually tested it, but it pays to be sure.)

Tbh, though, I think GGG just kind of forgot about dual wielding when they were coding the new Ancestral Warchief and Lacerate skills. (Lacerate also has a bug where you can use incompatible weapons in your off-hand, if your main-hand weapon is compatible)

I imagine once they've ironed out the crashes with their new preloading system and all of the buggy prophecies, they will have more time to fix this sort of bug.

In the mean-time, though, why not take advantage of it? Brightbeak is a pretty awesome off-hand, since it has elemental resistances. If it also skyrockets your dps, then that sounds pretty ideal. :)

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Are you sure it is changing your actual attack speed, or just the tooltip attack speed?

100% sure, I tested it with a Goredrill and a Brightbeak to get the biggest difference is APS and the difference was very clear.

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Tbh, though, I think GGG just kind of forgot about dual wielding when they were coding the new Ancestral Warchief and Lacerate skills.

Yeah after I saw the bug about Lacerate I figured that this is what was happening to AP, but it seems like something slightly different, since it's not attaking with the off hand, just averaging its APS.

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In the mean-time, though, why not take advantage of it? Brightbeak is a pretty awesome off-hand, since it has elemental resistances. If it also skyrockets your dps, then that sounds pretty ideal. :)

Yeah it's not the worst thing in the world, but it basically means that brightbeak is BiS for any dual wield AP build. It actually affects me even less though, since the base APS of my main hand is nearly 2.0, whereas some phys build might have a 1.7 APS axe, or 1.5 APS maul, both of which would benefit even more from Brightbeak. But other potentially good options like Doryani's Catalyst or Singularity will slow my APS down so much that it's not worth it.

Yeah, uh, have you considered just outright changing your mainhand weapon to something slow that hits like a truck? If you want to run a build with warchief as the primary attacking skill, seems like this is a bug that really wants to be exploited until it's patched :P Maybe a royal axe?

Indeed, I've seen some skills behave oddly with dual wielding. I think whirling blades was one of them when I tested something a while back, can't remember exactly what but it was something similar to what you saw on the totem, some strange interaction of attack speed bonuses in off hand and main hand where there should be none. Maybe I could test it again to check but it wasn't really a big deal back then and it isn't now. On the other hand, this totem bug should be fixed as soon as possible.

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Yeah, uh, have you considered just outright changing your mainhand weapon to something slow that hits like a truck?

This is definitely exploitable for phys builds, since you can go with the higher phys damage bases, and average out some of the APS loss. But for Elemental damage, it doesn't make much of a difference, because you get the highest APS base you can anyway, since they all get the same ele rolls. Although this could maybe make up for the low APS of something like Hyaon's Fury, but I'm still not sure it would scale as well as a high APS foil (linked mine below), I'll have to test it out.

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Boomdog83 wrote:

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Yeah, uh, have you considered just outright changing your mainhand weapon to something slow that hits like a truck?

This is definitely exploitable for phys builds, since you can go with the higher phys damage bases, and average out some of the APS loss. But for Elemental damage, it doesn't make much of a difference, because you get the highest APS base you can anyway, since they all get the same ele rolls. Although this could maybe make up for the low APS of something like Hyaon's Fury, but I'm still not sure it would scale as well as a high APS foil (linked mine below), I'll have to test it out.

That's fair I guess, but physical damage builds can generally be scaled higher than elemental for Attacks.

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That's fair I guess, but physical damage builds can generally be scaled higher than elemental for Attacks.

True. Ele gets the short end of the stick in a lot of cases (looking at you dual wield phys bonus) but it's generally cheaper. Might switch if I can afford it.