The question is pretty straight-forward: a monk can hold a single weapon (with or without a shield), two weapons or one of a certain subset of the two-handed weapons. Is it ever possible for a monk with a two-handed weapon to do as much damage as an optimized dual-wielding monk?
Diablo – Is it possible for a two-handed weapon to do as much damage as a dual-wielding monk
diablo-3diablo-3-monk
Related Solutions
Dual-wielding does not mean you attack twice as often. There is a slight attack-speed benefit, but this is apparently being offset for you by the lower damage from the offhand weapon.
According to this thread on the forums, the formula for number of attacks per second is
((Main Hand APS*1.15) + (Off-hand APS*1.15))*1/2
Which means that if you had two identical weapons, dual-wielding would give you a 15% attack speed bonus.
The main reason to dual-wield is that you get the bonus attributes from both items. This doesn't mean much early on when attributes aren't very strong, but is a big incentive later on. However, compared to a two-handed weapon that does more DPS, there isn't a clear winner. It will mostly come down to whether you've found better one-handed weapons or two-handed, and what your preference is for faster attack versus stronger attack.
On PC, there is an explicit note about handedness right there on the item card, in the top right.
Anyway, here's the list. Of all weapons that don't explicitly state that they are two-handed, the following weapons are:
- Polearms
- Staves
- Daibos
There are also two-handed Axes, Maces, Swords, Flails and Mighty Weapons, but those also exist as one-handed, and 2H versions always state themslves as, for example, "Two-Handed Flail".
Also Bows and Crossbows are two-handed. But Demon Hunters have an unique ability to equip Quivers to their off-hand, making Bows and Crossbows effectively one-handed for them, and other classes rarely have any reason to equip ranged weapon anyway.
Also, items are listed by handedness here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/
Best Answer
Overall DPS is a hard thing to qualify without a lot of number crunching however the logic behind the two different systems you mentioned are this:
Using a 2 hander (2h) results in more damage on abilities than dual wielding (dw) - monk abilities do damage based on "weapon damage" not "weapon dps"
Therefore a 2h with 100 dps vs dw with 100 (+15%) dps - the abilities the 2h uses will do much more
The flip side to this however is that dw generates spirit much faster so you can use more powers, more often.
I can only assume Blizzard balanced this out so over time (say, a minute?) they are somewhat equal.
An example of my build: I use Fire Ally, Seven Sided Strike (+Ult AoE Rune), Serenity (+Heal Rune), Lashing Tail Kick (+360 Degree Rune), Evasion Mantra.
The ally is doing 40% of my weapon damage and 7SS is doing 777% (plus the explosions) the damage on these two would be much lower with dw although I would have more spirit to spend, but considering the build I use; I have two substantially long lasting spells, one with a huge cool down and two with low costs. 2h is a no brainer for me.
However if you wanted to use wave of light for example with it's huge cost of 75 spirit dw would be the way.