8 minutes ago, Daeglan said:
Using a tool wrong doesn't make you smart. It just means you are using a tool wrong.
Using the wrong tool for the job doesn't make you smart. Indeed it does the opposite.
And attacking with dual wieldling is always the wrong tool. It's never better than the other tools.
15 minutes ago, emsquared said:Using the wrong tool for the job doesn't make you smart. Indeed it does the opposite.
And attacking with dual wieldling is always the wrong tool. It's never better than the other tools.
No it is not. It is a great tool for dealing with minions.
Can you two just stop? This isn't helping the OP, and he already asked you to take it elsewhere.
38 minutes ago, P-47 Thunderbolt said:Can you two just stop? This isn't helping the OP, and he already asked you to take it elsewhere.
Thank you @P-47 Thunderbolt
I have a (Lightsaber) Duelist spec in mind, which would include a version of Gun Blazing from the Gunslinger, but for Lightsaber and/or Melee. Still on the brain-storming stage.
8 hours ago, Jegergryte said:I have a (Lightsaber) Duelist spec in mind, which would include a version of Gun Blazing from the Gunslinger, but for Lightsaber and/or Melee. Still on the brain-storming stage.
Dm me when your finished please!
So, I signed upon this forum (something I'd been considering doing for a bit) to actually talk about the strengths (and weaknesses) of using two lightsabers.
First, I'd like to start by saying that dual wielding is flatly worse offensively than Linked 1. Period. That said, actually using a double-bladed lightsaber, the only way to arrange Linked on a lightsaber outside Ataru Striker (who shouldn't generally bother with either dual wielding or double bladed sabers...Saber Swarm eclipses both), requires Agility 3 (and Ataru requires even more Agility than that). That's not a huge hurdle in some ways, but it's a real one. A character with Agility 2 or less cannot do it, or at least cannot do it without suffering the same difficulty issue as dual wielding. Given the ability of lightsaber use to be based on any stat, wanting to play a low Agility one is not gonna be super uncommon IME, and raising your attack stat and dual-wielding is always gonna be better than raising Agility so you can get a double-bladed saber, if you need to choose between the two.
Dual Wielding can also be a fair bit better defensively, using a defensive saber in one hand and an offensive one in the other. That's probably not worth the offensive loss on its own, but if your Agility is already too low for the double-bladed saber, it provides a real benefit over those using the double-bladed option.
Now, that aside, is it worth actually using two lightsabers offensively over a single saber while the defensive one just sits in your off hand? The short answer is yes...at least at high skill levels. Adding a purple die to your foes will drop your likelihood of hitting by about 8% or so (so, from 70% to 62%, for example)...with an according drop in damage. For dual wielding to be worth it, it must increase damage by more than that...and it does. Indeed, it increases it by a lot more than that a lot of the time. At Lightsaber 3 (and thus three yellow dice), you score a Triumph, which can be used to trigger the off hand attack, nearly 1/4 of the time, meaning that in the example above it triggers 15% of the time or thereabouts, and all by itself almost doubles the damage loss from lower accuracy, not even including those second attacks triggered by Advantages. The exact details vary by specific stats and specific difficulty, but for many characters in most situations it's gonna be quite good.
My actual F&D character (who just, at about 650 xp, acquired a second lightsaber), does about half again as much average damage when dual wielding as he would with a single saber offensively (and that's with his off-hand saber using a Lorrdian Gemstone for defense, a bonus he gets either way). Sure, his accuracy is a tad lower, but his damage averages so much higher when he hits it's not even funny. That's with a 5 in his attack stat and 4 in Lightsaber, mind you, and ways to increase the number of advantages he rolls, but it's a real character and based on me running a bunch of sample combats with him for my own amusement, to see if the tactic was good for him. I assure you it is.
Now, this comes at the price of crits (though no more so than Linked does), and specifically often the bonus on the crit roll for having scored multiple crits on a single attack. IME, the huge boost in raw damage is more than worth it over an occasional +20 to a crit roll (as the popularity of Linked attests), but if you're going with a build focusing on Vicious and trying for singularly high crits, this tactic becomes comparatively worse (as does Linked). Inversely, however, any big accuracy enhancer, most notably Draw Closer (which my above mentioned character does not have, for the record), makes it quite a bit better as it decreases the downside of hitting less often by quite a bit (this works out nicely theme-wise, too, given that Niman is the style associated with dual wielding in the lore, and the one most thematically likely to skimp on physical stats like Agility as well). Obviously, anything that gives bonus Advantages (Superior, Paired, Curved Hilt, anything that adds boost dice, etc.) , is also very good for a dual wielder.
So, for an Inquisitor, giving him a double-bladed saber was probably the right decision, since he probably has Agility 3. For a PC? It really depends on the PC what the correct choice is. In many ways, dual-wielding is a poor man's Linked, which will always be inferior to actually having Linked, but on the other hand, even a poor man's version of Linked is very good and if the poor man's version is all you can get...