Diablo 3: 2-Handed Weapons Are Getting Major Buffs in 2.1.0

Blizzard has been making great strides in responding to player feedback over various aspects of Diablo III and its recent expansion pack, Reaper of Souls. The studio has been diligent in implementing various changes to the game based on feedback provided by players, such as its upcoming change to the Monk and Demon Hunter classes that sees the Dexterity stat provide armor instead of dodge chance. 

Today, Blizzard has confirmed that major changes are coming to 2-handed weapons, which have been filled with problems for a long time. 2-handed weapons have always lagged behind their 1-handed counterparts, and Blizzard has decided that it’s about time to bring the two weapon classes to parity. 

Instead of nerfing 1-handers like some might expect, Blizzard is instead giving a buff to 2-handers by offering new 2-hander passives and buffs to existing 2-hander passives for the Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor and Wizard classes. 

Here are the details, via Battle.net:

We’ve been discussing 2-Hander buffs for a while now. Right now on live, 2-Handers are almost always less powerful than dual-wielding 1-Handers for a few different reasons, and we wanted to rebalance them for Patch 2.1. We had two options to address the issue:

1) Make new 2-Hander passives and buff existing 2-Hander passives for Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, and Wizard.

2) Buff all 2-Handed weapons baseline and adjust Heavenly Strength accordingly.

After trying both options out internally, we decided to go with option 2. This solution has two desirable benefits: 1) it’s immediately noticeable to all players when they pick up a 2-Hander and see the DPS number both significantly higher than a 1-Hander and higher than pre-Patch 2.1 2-Handers and 2) changing 1 passive is less of a jarring overall change for players than changing/adding 4 passives.

In the upcoming PTR patch, you should see the DPS of 2-Handed Melee Weapons increased by 23-26% across the board. The goal is to get the raw DPS of a 2H build to be close enough to the raw DPS of a Dual-Wield build that the weapon choice is mostly determined by the legendary powers on the item and by the build you are using. Some of the tradeoffs of 2-Handers vs. Dual-Wielding are that 2-Handers are intended to make more efficient use of resources and hit harder for skills with cooldowns while Dual-Wielding is intended to generate more procs, Life on Hit, and give more of certain stats. Currently, the raw DPS gap is large enough that Dual-Wielding feels like it is always the right answer.

To summarize the changes:

– The DPS of 2-Handed Melee Weapons has been increased by 23-26% across the board.

– This applies to the following weapon types: 

• 2-Handed Maces
• 2-Handed Mighty Weapons
• 2-Handed Axes
• 2-Handed Flails
• 2-Handed Staffs
• 2-Handed Swords
• Daibos
• Polearms

– In direct response, Heavenly Strength will now reduce damage done by 20%. With both changes, Crusaders using a 2-Hander should see a very small DPS increase.

– This change is retroactive to existing live items.

– This change only affects level 70 two-handed melee weapons.

– This change affects two-handed melee weapons of all rarities.

We are still considering additional changes if needed but this should be a solid step towards making 2-Handers viable again for all classes.

These changes are expected to go live in the game’s 2.1.0 update, which remains on the horizon but is currently in testing on the Public Test Realm (PTR) server, open to any players who want to have an early taste of the changes to come.