Weapon of choice (cont)

As I talked about weapons for assasination let's move on to a broader category for combat rogues. Unlike assasination combat rogues can use anything from swords to crude fist weapons and maces. Which one should be best then? This is determined by the diffrent effects of each weapons mastery that you spec into. There are three diffrent weapon mastery talents: maces, swords/axes, daggers/fist weapons. Comparing their individual attributes we find that these with daggers or fist weapons get a flat 5% increased crit chance with all abilities and attacks. Axes and swords get a 5% chance per hit to instantly strike again at no cost or reduction to swing speed. Maces receive a 15% increase to abilities only in their armor penetration. 5% to critical strike chance is the weakest one of these stats and you won't often see combat rogues bearing fist weapons and daggers. Let's compare the swords and axes to the mace talent. Since the 5% chance for another attack can also occur from your high-damaging abilities this is a fair increase to your overall damage. The mace skill on the other hand is a full 15% armor pen increase to everything. As I talked about in a previous post armor pen is your number one stat to look for as combat. The mace talent clearly being better why don't we see more rogues with maces? The answer is simple, they don't exist. Your attacks as combat are all based off the damage range of your main hand weapon so the slower the better. I once had someone tell me a combat off-hand could very well be a stick with a heart on it, so long as it swung really fast and was coated in poison. Your off-hand weapon is entirely neglected in damage range it just needs to be fast. The typical speeds you'll find for weapons such as these would be around 2.6 and 1.5, not ideal but doable. The only problem is that 1.5 speed swords and axes abound in this game where a fast mace...extremly hard to come by. In fact after reviewing all of the loot tables for every single raid and dungeon lvl 80 or higher I found that there were over 21 fast offhands for combat rogues and only 2 of them were maces. A 1.7 and a 1.6 both coming from the lowest level dungeon available. This seems to have put swords and axes on top as the best to go with except that we forget something very key to combat. All of your attacks come from your mainhand so if one were to use a mace in their main hand they could just as easily pick up a nice 1.4 speed dagger for their off-hand. Thus giving them faster offhand attacks and therefore more poisons and 15% more armor pen than the competition. So the best weapons for combat slow mace main dagger off or slow sword/axe main and fast sword/axe off.