Quote:
Poison will proc more often on One-Hand weapons then they will if you have two Dual Wield weapons. So, when you decide on weapons, the choice concerning poison is more poison procs, or more melee damage from Dual Wield.
There is another aspect to this.
If you use a poison with a large DoT (Damage over Time) element then proccing too frequently is wasting the poison since it simply over-writes the existing DoT. The poison lasts 12 hours or a fixed number of procs (100 iirc). Having a slow poison proc all the time will run you out of poison for little extra damage.
The recommendation is
Purple poisons for highest damage total but they are mostly DoT damage. Perhaps it is worth switching to
Yellow poisons when going to 1-handed. They are mostly DD with small DoT.
For example I'm using
Catacomb Sludge which does a feeble 8 initial DD then 44 per tick for a total of 184 damage. I dual-wield so this is fine.
Perhaps for 1-handed I should use
Caress of the Spectre which does 62 initial damage and 13 per tick for a total of 114 damage.
Let's have a look
Now I don't know how much less the proc rate is for dual wield but in a two minute fight (20 ticks) I know I get several procs dual-wielding. Each lasts 24 seconds (4 ticks).
Maximum damage from Purple is 184 x 5 = 920 damage without overlap.
If I, dual-wielding, proc 4 times without overlap I will do 736. (4 x 8 initial plus 4 x 4 x 44).
If I go 1-handed and proc 8 times I can still only do 944 because of the overwriting. (8 x 8 initial plus 20 x 44)
If I switch to yellow I do 8 x 62 initial plus 20 ticks of 13 for 756 damage
Red interestingly would do 8 x 45 plus 20 x 20 = 760.
Player made Hateful Indulgence does around 988 in the same 1H fight if you can a) find it and b) use it.
Now if the proc rates are widely different from my 2x assumption then these figures don't help. However my gut feeling is that they are between 1.5 and 2. The higher the proc rate the more it is worth having a heavy DD.
Personally I'll take the slightly lower damage and add it to the extra melee damage from dual-wielding. I also make my poisons last twice as long
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*all info drawn from the
thread on SoE boards and personal experience