How is Offhand damage claculated?

After all these years I still did not completely understand how offhand damage works (well, how it is exactly calculated), when asking ingame I get several different answers.

Weapon damage of the weapon itself seems to be not that important when it comes to offhand damage, for example, the T2 axe as an offhand weapon doesn’t increase your damage as much as a Falchion of the Blue East does, a blue crafting weapon, 100 combat rating gems in the slots for a total of 364 combat rating on the weapon (T2 axe got 233 CR and 32 strenght). With the blue crafting weapon I got 1 DPS more than with the T2 axe as offhand weapon (even though the weapon DPS itself is 14 points lower when looking at the weapon stats).

The armor builder of AoC>TV sadly doesn’t calculate a weapon as offhand weapon if you put one in there, so what’s a reliable way to calculate the damage you get for a weapon in the offhand slot?

Right now my barb is using the T3 axe and T2 axe, in May I wanted to claim the weapon scroll on that char so I would get the T6 swords, however, if I look at the combat rating of the T6 offhand weapon (Blade of the Manic Haze) it has far lower CR than the T3 axe (but higher weapon DPS), would the T3 axe be a better choice as an offhand weapon than the T6 weapon?


The actual DPS of the T6 weapon itself is 9 points higher but the total CR on it is 84 lower (T3 = 364 CR, T6 = 280 CR).

Don’t forget to also take into account the rune blessing you get with the T6 necklace.

In any case, use the T6 weapon over the T3.

Hm… yes that’s true. With my planned gear I would have 2xAshur, 2xSilence Falls, 2xBlack Pharaoh and 3xManic Haze, the 3rd Manic Haze stack comes from the sword but the increase in offhand rating (for the 3rd stack) is pretty low to be honest.

It would still be interesting to know how Offhand damage is calculated exactly, especially because I heard several different answers already but I don’t know which one is true.

Pretty sure you can only have 8 blessings, You wont be able to dual wield Blade on the Manic Haze. Its Main Hand only. You will need to use the Sword of Ashur – which has Ashur and Silence falls. So depending on the which neck you use Necklace of the Manic Haze (Manic Haze, Silence Falls) or Binding of the Eslaving Opiate (Ashur, Silence Falls) that will determine which set of 2x buffs you get. The raidfinder rings with the legendary gems will either make the same blessings goto 4 or one to 3 etc. But the sum of the buffs is a maximum of 8.

I want to add that the secondary stats (hit, crit, crit damage) are more important on an offhand. Even without the blessings, I would not trade the higher secondary stats for some combat rating / weapon damage (as a barb you have enough tools to push that, anyway).
The base dps is not totally useless (as many people say), but you are right, it is not the most important stat.

I never quite figured out how it is calculated, too. There is something weird going on with weapons that have strenght and combat rating versus ones with only one of that. Every time I started testing I get confused because of inconsistent results. In the end it does not really matter past a certain gear status, but I am very curious and would like to know the exact calculation, too.

@tman1991
There is a cap for T6 blessings? Hm… I think I have already seen people run around with more than 8 blessings (one blessing more than x2).

I got all the parts (well, besides the T6 necklace and T6 weapons which I can’t get until may) in my inventory and wanted to build it like that:
Chaos Ring + Chaos Gem [Manic Haze + Black Pharaoh]
RF Ring + Chaos Gem [Ashur + Black Pharaoh]
T6 Necklace [Manic Haze + Silence Falls]
T6 weapon mainhand Sword of Ashur [Ashur + Silence Falls]
T6 weapon offhand Blade of Manic Haze [Manic Haze]
=> would make a total of 4 blessings, 3 of them at a stack of x2 and Manic Haze at a stack of x3, are you really sure the Manic Haze buff would stay at x2?

@Kantakwa
I thought so too, the overall stats on the T6 weapon are (obvioulsy) a lot better, especially critical damage. The offhand damage calculation is indeed really weird, happened far too often that I bought weapons that turned out to be far worse than the one I already had even though most stats were a lot better.

Ahh now I see how you are counting…

With that setup you would get.

Manic Haze x3, Black Pharaoh x2, Silence Falls x2. This is where I might be wrong, but I dont think you get Ashur at all in that setup. You need it twice in your rings or once in your neck and weapon/ring combo. But Ring/Weapon (without neck) does not count.

But I could be completely wrong, since before raid finder rings, the most you could get was 2x2.

Ring + Weapon works for me, my ToS on saga server gets the Emandua blessing if I equip a Ring with an Emandua Gem + my T6 staff.

well maybe they changed it. I know there was a post on the old forums about the max being 8… So it would be good to know if you can get 9 out of that setup.

This is the thread I was talking about.

http://forums-archive.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?194272-All-you-need-to-know-about-Slithering-Chaos-loot

Ok, I see. Since I can’t reach more than 8 blessings yet with any of my characters I really don’t know if it caps at 8 blessings. But I guess you are right since I haven’t read about any changes on the “blessings-system”.

However, if it does cap at 8, how will it effect my blessings? Will Manic Haze go down to x2 or will it stay at x3 and one of the other blessings is going to be removed completely? That would be really bad since one additional blessing is far more valuable than 1 additional stack of Manic Haze since the increase on the 3rd stack is very low.

you can get a total of 9 with rogues and hox.
2 from sword of ashur + 1 from blade of the manic haze + 4 from 2 chaos gems + 2 from necklace. the thing that enables it is that you get 3 blessings from the weapons. but you cannot get a blessings to more than x4. to get a total of 9 you need to spread it on 3 or 4 blessings.
by the way, black Pharaoh isn’t that great in my opinion.

So it really works? That’s awesome. And yes, I know that a T6 blessing is min. x2 and max. x4.
I just happen to have these gems (Ashur + Black Pharaoh and Manic Haze + Black Pharaoh) in my inventory, I thought additional 44 crit damage is a nice bonus, right now I just use Ashur + Manic Haze buffs and since low armor penetration values don’t have that much of an effect (I don’t have T6 gear with my Barb, only khitai epic + T4) the critical damage makes more of a change than some more stacks of the Ashur blessing.

Cappy good to know this… Thanks for the clarification, didnt know about the special case of rogues and hox.

If you are a barb, i would personally prefer to have more then 2 stacks of silence falls, if u really know the class and push it hard, you will have a rly hard time not getting aggro in some fights. Barb has so little hate management and the insane burst u get in hybrid specc + t5 rune, gah i miss my barb :sweat_smile:

Think couple of guildies of mine knows how offhand works, lez see if they bother to reply

Thanks for all the answers!

I didn’t really bother with getting Silence Falls to x4 since I don’t have awesome gear (BB + Tigers epic gear and chest T4 only), most tanks I am playing with are better geared and mostly got the hate increase blessings anyways, if I really wanna grab aggro I need to use faction crit damage, rare combat rating and rare crit potions, that way I can actually manage to grab aggro off a tank if I go full out :wink:
I also don’t have the T5 rune, I know how it works and would really like to have it but I am far from getting it with my Barb (or any other character besides my ToS who is missing Kyllikki), especially because I don’t have a guild at the moment and don’t have a raid alliance that is doing T5.

Well, just gotta wait until May to get my new shiny swords and necklace :slight_smile:

btw.: What do you mean by big weapon dmg differences? Do you mean the weapon damage stats shown on the weapon?
Are there weapons that got a bigger damage range and become useless? I always thought that it was kinda “standardized” or are there weapons where the difference is so huge that they become useless?

Ah okay, thanks for the clarification :smiley:

Offhand damage was since 1.05 (maybe they fiddled with it since) calculated from the animation length of white hits or combos, using this value as multiplier of your DPS shown on general tab, the result divided by 2.
Offhand damage comes at the end of animations and it can crit with 100% crit chance.

You can’t exactly trust the stats that are shown. Try opening the tab and switching weapons with the shortcut a couple times, it will show different PvP Combat Damage Increase values.

Also any Combat Rating other than non-specific, base CR, don’t work on barbs Dot.

Good day

Tagging this for later reading.

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