Shield or 2-hander?Follow

I'm trying to decide between my fury class quest weapon (1 hander) and a shield, or a 2-hand bo staff. The stats are pretty similar...more health on the 1-hand/shield, more power on the bo staff. The major difference is that the bo does more damage (and looks cooler :), while the shield protects better. As a 22 fury, which should I use? Or should I keep both and use them at different times?

I agree that you should keep both one and two hand skills maxed but for druids, my preference is for two-handers. I came out of EQ where over time, my druid carried a variety of two handed staves and soloed effectively with all of them. In EQ, you did not swing your weapon while casting so it was important to use a big slow two hander which allowed you to cast between the swings.

This is less of an issue in EQ2 where you can cast while you swing... or swing while you cast... never the less, I play both a warden and a fury and although they both "own" 1H weapons and shields, they most often carry a two hander.

The one thing that might change my mind would be getting a fast imbued one hander and an imbued shield. A substantial increase in the number of procs I see in combat would be nice.

In my opinion the only classes that should use a 2 hander are tanking classes who can truly benefit from the extreme increasse in damage, for anyone else it's a waste of a good stat slot.

Pure caster (mage) classes should NEVER use a 2 hand item because, to be honest, they can't melee for squat and lack the AC to be taking direct hits. The loss of benefit from the additional stats (if they use it wisely) they can put in their secondary slot is considerable and the gain from a 2hander is non existant.

The same is generally true of hybrid caster classes (druids, shaman, clerics. You're typically going to do far more damage with your spells than you are with any melee and so should use the secondary slot for a shield with good stats if you can carry one or a non shield item for stat building if you can't use a shield.

For scout/rogue classes I have only 2 words, dual wield. The only thing they should have in secondary is a good weapon.

This was guideline was true in EQ1 and still remains true here. The only time you should give up your secondary slot for a 2hand weapon is if the weapon itself gives you incredible stats or some huge bonus proc/buff, and for me, I haven't seen that weapon in the game yet.

Cheyia Battlepriestess
40 Inquisitor

Well Eq tends to be a bit different from other MMO's in regards to tanking/aggro building. In FFXI and WoW my I played a tank in WoW and she played one in FFXI, in both those games it went almost without saying that tanks used 1h/shield combo because tanks in these games command a wider range of aggro building tools.

In EQ1 My fiance played a Barbarian Warrior and usualy dual wielded two high end dmg weapons. Taunt in EQ1 was simply not enough to hold hate,but dmg helped alot. She wore high end armor though, and always carried around high resist jewelery for certain fights. She rarely if ever had a problem with holding hate or not having enough Damage Mitigation.

Being fairly new to EQ2 I am not sure how they went with aggro management. I am playing a Shaman atm, and am only lvl 17 but I have opted to stay with a decent stat 1h and a decent stat off hand item. My main concerns is +Health +Power, the more of each of these I have the bigger the group I can take out. I don't worry so much about off hand mitigation since I usualy Ward myself pre-battle anyway. I did luck out my first day and got 45g worth of drops and have been able to keep myself in adept1 spells and the best gear I could find for my level.(Would get my last 2 level adept1's if they ever get the brokers to sell me offline stuff again lol)