So I finally switched to combat swords for the first time ever and immediately saw my dps go up, even though I am using individually inferior weapons (Malchazee/Searing Sunblade both with Mongoose to Spiteblade/Latro's with Mongoose/Agil).

However I'm a bit stymied on the offhand in trying to choose between Latro's and the Searing Sunblade. Latro's has offhand procs and 14 sword skill rating in its favor, but the dagger does significantly more base dps and will proc poisons and Combat Potency about 7% more, plus it has Mongoose rather than +15 agil. (And I'm not going to put Mongoose on a blue sword.)

First, I tried taking the theorycrafting and modeling this. Gave up fairly quickly as the variables piled up.

Instead, I went to Blasted Lands and beat on a Servant for a while. My test consisted of:
- 3 sessions with each weapon (so 6 total) for approximately 5 minutes each
- Sinister Strike before ever letting energy reach 100, S&D with 5 combo points (since I get the energy back 100% of the time with Relentless Strikes the S&D was effectively free, which meant I didn't have to worry about timing or cycles to make the tests consistent), and also used Riposte whenever it came up, primarily just to limit damage taken. Otherwise I used no finishers or cooldowns like BF and AR.
- I would get the first S&D up and then reset sw_stats, leaving the "effective dps" as the displayed valued.

Note that I don't care what my absolute dps values are, only what the relative values are between the controlled tests. Thus raid buffs, poisons, cooldowns, and damage mitigation as a result of armor weren't relevant. (However, other mitigations are, and I will get back to that.)

On each run my effective dps initially spiked, then started settling down (as you would expect) as the data accumulated but none of the tests were long enough for it to really find the average, and final scores (or really ranges of scores) varied greatly. Of the six tests, dps after 5 minutes ranged from around 660 to 780, and the Latro's best score was slightly better than the dagger's worst score, both around 720.

So the clear conclusion (?) was that the dagger offhand results in more total dps.

However, none of the above factors in dodge/parry/glancing, and after running all those tests I was swayed by the argument that +skill is the best stat you can get, so I ran with the sword and my Deftness gloves (another +15 skill rating) for a total of +29 skill rating or +7 weapon skill. (With talents a total of 367 sword skill.)

So my question for the community is: is +7 sword skill really worth all that? As best I can understand it, +7 sword skill against high level bosses equates to +0.7% hit, +0.28% crit, -0.28% dodge, and -0.28% parry. Thus that should give me in total about 1.6% increased damage. So if I'm doing 1000 dps, about 16 dps is attributable to the sword skill. True? (If not, please enlighten me). That also does not take into consideration glancing blows, as I'm not sure what the conversion formula is.

Since the spread on my rough field tests was much greater than 16 dps, more like 50 to 60 dps, the implication would be that I should be offhanding the dagger (and maybe using my T4 gloves instead of the +15 skill gloves.)

Any feedback/advice/insults? Did I forget something important? Is my math wrong? Was my testing methodology flawed?

I'm not convinced that +skill is "best" but you are neglecting a bit of context there anyway - the goal was for +skill to shine against higher level mobs.

Beyond that, I'm not sure that your question wouldn't find a better home tacked on to the end of a broader thread.

The major factor is mongoose vs 15 agil.

You do realize, that OH sword procs trigger sword specialization attacks to the main-hand. There is no other alternative, except a sword in the OH.

Also, you seem to randomly get CP procs from OH sword specialization procs (even though it will hit with MH), giving you even more CP procs.

Why? Whether it's blue or purple or green doesn't change that it's arguably the best off-hand sword pre-Black Temple.

I'm going to go ahead and wager that the Season 2 Gladiator's Quickblade will be an upgrade to Latro's. We'll see in 2 weeks - get those points now!

I doubt that the season 2 offhand will be comparable. It's PvP gear, after all, and PvP swords have a tendancy to be 1.8 speed. I'm basing this on shaky evidence, there's only been two and a half real offhands from PvP


*comparable speed-wise. It'll probably blow Latro's DPS out the water

Season 1 Quickblade is an upgrade. Make sure 'use blue post on +skill' is unchecked on the DPS spreadsheet, and you will see a real difference. If the current season 1 OH is 1.5 speed, I don't see why season 2 would be 1.8 speed.

It's a minor upgrade for me (3~5 dps), that's with blue skill unchecked AND with the updated stats.

And there's no way I'm spending the points to buy Season 1 when it's a minor upgrade and there's 2 weeks to see what Season 2's will look like.

Order by value :

1: Gladiator's Quickblade (1.5)
2: Blazefury (1.6)
3: Blazeguard (1.6)
4: Latros Shifting longsword (1.4)
5: King's defender (1.6)

Don't look too close at dps, weapon speed is "very" important.
questionably, latro's might be better than blazeguard, even with the upgrade in 2.1