I recently realized something about melee+ranged combination:
- You still retain the speed bonus that comes with dual-wielding. This means that although you only attack once, that attack will be faster than if you were One-Handed. Essentially you are actually giving up the ACC bonus you get when going 1-handed in return for doing the same result (1 single attack) but with a speed bonus.
- If you have 1 weapon that is more powerful than your 2nd weapon in your dual-wielding setup, it is better to change out the weaker weapon for melee/ranged combo. If you attack with sword/sword or gun/gun, and 1 of them is much stronger than the other you do less damage than you would from simply attacking with only the strong weapon: the game averages the resulting damage of strong-weapon+weak-weapon which brings down the DPS in comparison to using strong-weapon in 1-handed style, or using the strong-weapon in melee/ranged.
- There is no recovery phase when switching between ranged and melee. This means that you can shoot at the enemy and also hit THEM first when they reach engagement-distance; since the enemy was moving towards you the enemy incurs the Movement Recovery penalty when they engage you to attack, whereas you, who was stationary, will hit the enemy with your melee weapon first. It's not that much of a benefit but it's something.
Lastly I found a cool way for the rogue to squeeze something more out of ranged/melee combo:
- Shoot the enemy from range and then use Escape to teleport next to the enemy and hit them with your Melee weapon without having to manually switch weapons, which means that you attack immediately instead of switching and having to incur switch-recovery penalty.
If you really want style on some niggas as a rogue doing this you can:
1. Shoot
2. Escape-teleport
3. Melee them using a full-attack ability (like one of the 'strikes')
4. Escape-teleport again to another enemy or behind the same enemy and hit them again ***
Ranged/melee is still dual-wielding which means that the full attack, which only inititates the recovery of ONE weapon, allows you to recover faster than you would if you had done the ability with one-weapon or two-handed weapon.
And yes, this also means that dual-wielding in general, because of its speed-bonus, is the mechanically superior weapon style, both because of higher DPS, because of having enchantments from two different weapons in play and also because of the way full-attack abilities work (factoring only the recovery penalty of 1 of the weapons instead of both).
I imagine this is specifically why Obsidian turned most abilities into Primary-attacks instead, changing many of the ones that were Full in PoE1 into Primary ones in Deadfire.
EDIT: Another thing to note is that shields that have Bashing count as a weapon for the off-hand which means they also enable "dual-wield speed" when equipped. AFAIK there are only 2 shields with bash, though I believe neither of them explicitly say "bash" and instead obsidian gave both unique descriptions for their ability. I know one of them is Monk-specific.
- You still retain the speed bonus that comes with dual-wielding. This means that although you only attack once, that attack will be faster than if you were One-Handed. Essentially you are actually giving up the ACC bonus you get when going 1-handed in return for doing the same result (1 single attack) but with a speed bonus.
- If you have 1 weapon that is more powerful than your 2nd weapon in your dual-wielding setup, it is better to change out the weaker weapon for melee/ranged combo. If you attack with sword/sword or gun/gun, and 1 of them is much stronger than the other you do less damage than you would from simply attacking with only the strong weapon: the game averages the resulting damage of strong-weapon+weak-weapon which brings down the DPS in comparison to using strong-weapon in 1-handed style, or using the strong-weapon in melee/ranged.
- There is no recovery phase when switching between ranged and melee. This means that you can shoot at the enemy and also hit THEM first when they reach engagement-distance; since the enemy was moving towards you the enemy incurs the Movement Recovery penalty when they engage you to attack, whereas you, who was stationary, will hit the enemy with your melee weapon first. It's not that much of a benefit but it's something.
Lastly I found a cool way for the rogue to squeeze something more out of ranged/melee combo:
- Shoot the enemy from range and then use Escape to teleport next to the enemy and hit them with your Melee weapon without having to manually switch weapons, which means that you attack immediately instead of switching and having to incur switch-recovery penalty.
If you really want style on some niggas as a rogue doing this you can:
1. Shoot
2. Escape-teleport
3. Melee them using a full-attack ability (like one of the 'strikes')
4. Escape-teleport again to another enemy or behind the same enemy and hit them again ***
Ranged/melee is still dual-wielding which means that the full attack, which only inititates the recovery of ONE weapon, allows you to recover faster than you would if you had done the ability with one-weapon or two-handed weapon.
And yes, this also means that dual-wielding in general, because of its speed-bonus, is the mechanically superior weapon style, both because of higher DPS, because of having enchantments from two different weapons in play and also because of the way full-attack abilities work (factoring only the recovery penalty of 1 of the weapons instead of both).
I imagine this is specifically why Obsidian turned most abilities into Primary-attacks instead, changing many of the ones that were Full in PoE1 into Primary ones in Deadfire.
EDIT: Another thing to note is that shields that have Bashing count as a weapon for the off-hand which means they also enable "dual-wield speed" when equipped. AFAIK there are only 2 shields with bash, though I believe neither of them explicitly say "bash" and instead obsidian gave both unique descriptions for their ability. I know one of them is Monk-specific.
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