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It was an amazing idea to me and couldent wait to break out the swords agein. But there isnt really any choice in the matter due to blizz makeing the damage swords, maces etc, so much lower than daggers anyway, that it actually hinders your performance.

Wouldent mind knowing why blizz made it this way and if theres any chance of it being fixed.

Did this dissapoint anyone else?

You don't think that the lower damage bonus is to offset the increased damage range of slow weapons?

Im not talking about the "bonus" at all! maybe you misread my post. I ment the end result yellow numbers they produce, you can take a dagger with a same level sword and use ambush with both. The dagger will always be on top by quite a lot.

edit: So in which case, whats the point of even having a sword as an "option"?

So that one can be combat and still ambush perhaps?

It is always a dps loss to use ambush as combat, even as your opener.

22/03/2012 17:42Posted by Tytharius

So in which case, whats the point of even having a sword as an "option"?

Levelling. If you're not using heirlooms, you are free to use this awesome new sword you just got from a dungeon instead of a green quest dagger you received 20 levels ago.

Swords are there as an option for diversity. Hemo swords works well; It provides increased main hand poison procs at the cost of some ambush damage. The rest of it, bisides being unable to backstab, is all the same.

Locks , boomkins and holy priests in pvp , sword spamming ambush..some things just don't go well with others.

Sure you can use it.And it will give some result.But it will be far from optimal.

With ambush there are ways to better the end damage disregarding the multipliers.

For example swords like Sword of Decay with very low swing speed (aka high overall damage) will one shot nearly all plate wearers in the 30-35 bracket.

Weren't all rogue abilities bar Gouge normalised? I.E: Doesn't weapon speed have no direct connection to damage?

They are, but those abilities still use weapon damage as a base. A weapon with slow swing timer will have a higher damage range, producing higher ability damage. Normalisation addresses this issue to a certain extent, but the 3.4 speed value is simply too high to be completely mitigated in this way.

What I mean is, weapon speed has no real impact beyond energy regeneration/poison procs, no? Damage range is what it's all about.

Weapons of similar ilvl will have a similar dps value, which is a function of average swing damage and weapon speed. As an example, the sword mentioned earlier has an average damage of 79, speed of 3.40 and a dps value of 23.2. Another sword with the same dps value but a speed of 2.6 would have an average damage of 60.4.

The normalisation formula is as follows: norm_damage = base_damage + (A * AP_value / 14). Base damage is the actual weapon damage, A is a normalising constant, 2.4 for 1h swords (and without normalisation, it would simply be the weapon speed).

So, normalised weapon damage with the 3.4 sword, assuming 100 AP for convenience, is 96.14; normalised weapon damage with the 2.6 sword is 77.55; without normalisation, the slow sword would hit for 103.29, the faster one would hit for 78.98.