Ok, when doing a search I did find some stuff about this but not really what I wanted.
I also found someone who apparently had made 3 threads with a similar question that ended up heaped, which I don't want with this.

My problem is that I can't see how fist spec would give more dps then sword spec (assuming similar weapons, not sure how the itemization looks in tbc).
I've read on several places that fists ends up doing slightly more dps then swords (talking specs, not weapons ofc), but cannot understand how.

It might very well be that I don't fully understand the mechanism behind the both specs, and I've done some searching around here trying to find out how the both talents work.

Does fist-spec require fists in both MH and OH?
Does it give 5% crit on all attacks (evis, both MH and OH or only the hand where the fist weapon is equipped etc).

Does swordspec proc MH attacks or does it yield an extra attack with the weapon that did the attack that made it proc?
How does MH/OH come into play here?
What's the hit/miss ratio for the extra attacks?


What I'm wondering is basically if these things are covered somewhere I didn't find, or if there's some gap in the general knowledge regarding these things.

I'd greatly appreciate some help, and I'm sorry if I've missed some obvious place.

Fist spec effects all attacks with a fist in your main hand. So specials and finishers get the 5% crit bonus also. If you have an offhand fist it gets the bonus too. Last batch of testing I saw on fist/dagger spec showed that it does *not* effect non-spec offhand weapons.

Hit/Miss ratio for sword spec procs is the same as any other white attack last I saw. If this was changed someone please post.

So 5% of the time, Fist will double the damage of any attack that can crit(is Envenom effected? Assume so). And 5% of the time Sword will give you a chance at a faster MH swing. If it procs on a normal MH white swing, it's basically an extra attack. If it procs on an OH/Special(can it still proc on specials?) it's much less impressive. So while Sword spec is flashier and has the chance of some impressive stuff(a crit MH sword spec > single fist crit), fist is over time the better DPS spec.

The 5% is just roughly BTW, ignoring all outside factors(overall crit%, miss rate, etc etc).

Over time, they're nearly identical in practice, although to some extent it depends on things like relative MH/OH speed and %hit.

Over a long dungeon crawl, they will do about the same damage (assuming the weapons are similar in power).

However, Fist spec as an advantage in PvP, since people now have resilience (anti-crit), it is advanteous to have more crit (to offset the crit loss), so in PvP Fist is better while in PvE they are about the same.