Hopefully this won't be viewed as too narrow of topic but I could find no thread for which it readily fit.

The question I have is to do with Blizzard being seemingly content to have virtually all item stats grow with the expansion while leaving the DPS value on caster main hands completely stagnant. The magical value of daggers and maces seem to hover around 41DPS.

Is it possibly the case that this particular stat only affects elemental/restoration Shaman (and to a lesser degree Druids and Paladins) who do not have the option to wand and thus it has been overlooked or simply viewed as not that important? With the new content, wand DPS values have increased by ~50% and yet I'm seeing weapon upgrades for myself that are +/- 0.2 DPS.

Obviously I'm not expecting to wield a weapon with damage on par with that of an enhancement Shaman and I realize that staffs should not have values on par with two handed axes and maces but even then, staves has seen a marginal DPS increase.

Should I just be content with the marginal scaling of my flametongue buff?

If you noticed, one of the major changes between pre expansion and post expansion weapons is the amount of damage/healing on them. My understanding is that part of that to fit within the item budget is to keep the actual DPS of the weapon low to fit more +dmg/healing.

I have a paladin and if I were to spec holy, I wouldn't even look at weapon DPS, just the amount of damage/healing.

Correct.

Weapon damage range/DPS is a very important and expensive part of a weapon's internal iLevel. Reduce those numbers, and you allocate a great deal of points to other more powerful stats.

I believe that damage is subtracted from the weapon and added to the stats of the weapon -- the sacrificial dps system, I think.
While I understand what Uziel is suggesting, I'd like to see the math that proves that sacrificial dps is a good thing for paladin dps. There are some weapon, I believe that don't use sacrificial dps but have dmg&healing such as the GM 2h mace and the quest reward about Sedai. These weapons have far fewer stats than sacrificial dps weapons, I think.

Edit: [Sedai's Blade], [Revered Mother's Crysknife], etc

I do recall hearing that it was planned to have more damage/healing on weapons to narrow the gap that existed between melee weapons and caster weapons and the respective power gained from said items. However, staves have at least seen a DPS increase on the order of ~10DPS while the increase on one handed weapons has been effectively zero yet the given damage/healing values on the two items still remain in line with one another.

Generally, holy paladins will find most of their damage coming from seals/judgements and holy shock, all of which have high damage coefficients regardless of speed/cast time. Holy paladins also tend to use shields, and when are doing DPS/going on the offensive, they basically become a turtle mage. Barely any DPS is coming from their actual white damage. Most are swinging their weapon and its hitting for 100 damage, and rarely critting. I understand that you could likely go with a higher dps weapon with less spell damage but more spell damage/healing will benefit everything the paladin does besides white damage, while more DPS is only going to effect white damage.

This changes with retribution spec however, and I would never take a two hander with spell damage because it does indeed take too much away from a weapon in the context of retribution, ie DPS/white DPS being more of your damage than spells with damage coefficients.

I'm sure they are great for PVE damage, but my paladin is my PVP character and I'd rather see high stamina and some melee crit rating, ala the Grand Marshal's Claymore.

Do you have any specific examples though? From what I've seen thus far (not including the GM weapon), they seem to be too fast. Seal of Command is not normalized so a 3.8 or 4.0 speed weapon is ideal for a retribution paladin in my opinion.

I'm not sure I follow you with regards to, "...but it seems caster weapons have a higher budget on damage for that." and "I think 1H have a bigger damage budget." Could you perhaps clarify a little your line of thinking.

I hadn't realized how much of the item budget was allocated to a weapon's DPS, I assumed the low DPS on caster weapons was mainly to discourage melee from wanting them (e.g. that 2.9 speed +heal dagger that was on test for a while during the AQ or BWL testing days). I wish they'd apply this sacrificial dps concept on hunter 1H itemization. Getting really tired of seeing so many easy to get 1H weapons in TBC with Razuvius to KelThuzzad level DPS, but sub-hakkar level AP/Crit/Hit.

^^ That's exactly why I will be crafting Thunder and Deep Thunder. The 3.8 speed and non-normalized Seal of Command make it superior to any faster weapon with +dmg/healing.

Let's compare two weapons of the same itemlevel:
[Sedai's Blade] and [Ensorcelled Marshfang Blade]
Let's assume that paladin can use daggers (they can't).
The caster dagger has -7.5 dps, + 23 dmg, +10 spell crit.
According to wowwiki:
1h seal of righteousness gets .092*dmg = dps, so 23*.092=2dps added from righteousness.
holy shock gets 43% of spell damage over 15 seconds, so .43*23=9.89 over 15 seconds, so 0.66 dps
judgement of righteousness gets 73% every 10 seconds, so .73*23=16.79 over 10 seconds, so 1.68 dps
That adds up to a total of 4.34 dps from the 23 damage additional that the caster dagger has assuming you judge every 10 seconds and holy shock every 15 seconds. Both JoR and holy shock use spell crit, so they are further improved by the caster dagger's spell crit. Spell crit is harder to calculate since it requires that I know total spell damage of the pally. When you consider damage reduction from armor and the spell crit, I agree, the caster weapons seems to be better.

Hyzenthlei's item points are the standard by which we calculate stats/ilevel: here's a link to a post:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...11873712&sid=1

And the relevant passage:

A lot of warriors and rogues would be interested in offhands with 41 dps and 200 attack power--if 3 spell damage is equal to 5 AP (ZG shoulder enchants, 18 to 30).

While this is true, they would never want this on a mainhand. All caster weapons are effectively main hand as we cannot dual-wield (except shaman), and they don't do any sort of off-hand item scaling. One of my alts is a Hemo rogue, and I'd love your proposed offhand dagger, but I know Blizzard wouldn't make it.

Make it a 3.5 speed off-hand axe, or 1.6 speed main hand dagger then :D. Or just throw on +rangedAP to drive the point home.

edit: to clarify, I don't have anything against melee wanting such itemization too - I just wish it existed so I didn't more or less have to use 2H weapons (which also have similar issues, but not as bad - I don't really need 93 dps on my polearm, i'd much rather have had 1% crit on it and -40 dps).

Thank you for posting that. I suppose this means it's not as simple as "1dps sacrificed gives 3 spelldamage" or something like that.