I’m no expert, but I’m just having a hard time figuring out what weapons are the best to use.
And that’s because I don’t really understand how weapon damage, weapon speed and strength work together. And how attack power is calculated, and how reliable it is.
Maybe I have a weapon that has a small bonus to Strength, and when I change it for another one that has a significantly higher damage… Attack Power doesn’t change in an understandable way. It may go much lower.
This would imply Strength is more important than basic weapon damage. But sometimes, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I can’t find a consistency there.
Thank you all for your time.
One skill use a type of weapon, so if your skill is using 2h slashing weapon but you upgrading weapon dmg on something els. Yea it wont do you much good
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So, what you’re saying is that sometimes it doesn’t change because Attack Power is displayed based on the Ability/Skill I last used. So, if I change a weapon that doesn’t involve that Ability, it won’t change the score at the moment.
Yeah, that makes sense and I didn’t think of it. But that doesn’t answer the rest of my post. How reliable is Attack Power, really? Because, again, I don’t see a consistency. Sometimes a small Strength bonus seems more important for Attack Power than a large weapon damage/speed increase. And sometimes it seems otherwise.
Your attack power is calculated based on your currently wielded weapon - so if you’re a whirlwind barb you’re going to be using a 2handed slashing weapon, usually a sword. This means that your other 3 weapons do not matter DPS or attacks per second wise. They are entirely stat sticks.
Your attack power also doesn’t take into account things like ‘damage to vulnerable’ or ‘critical strike damage’ so for example, using the whirlwind barb again, if I unequip my 1h axe that has the following stats:
- damage to slowed
- critical strike damage
- damage to vulnerable
- damage to close enemies
- a socket with more critical strike damage
my attack power does not go down. This means that yes, attack power is unreliable. If you played Diablo 3 you’ll remember this being the case there too. You could equip a massive attack speed high end damage roll weapon and get crazy ‘sheet DPS’ into the millions, but in reality the weapon was terrible when compared to your slower, ‘worse’ weapon because of its affixes that could often do crazy things like give you a flat 800% damage increase to your main attack.
In my opinion your best bet would be to just follow a guide for your build over on MaxRoll, and if you want to make your own build - you can reverse engineer their thinking to see which stats would be best for your own build.