I have a quite a few thoughts on this topic, most of which have been covered in one form or another upthread. Your weapon (or lack thereof) is part of a really complex system, affected by the following variables:
- weapon speed
- weapon base damage
- weapon bonus damage due to stat multipliers
- weapon proc damage
- any other advantages your get from your weapon (poison or elemental damage, attack bonuses, resistances, skill or stat boosts, etc.)
- your ability with the weapon
- what gear you have, and how it is affected by your stats
- what gear you have to unequip in order to use your weapon (for example, you can't use an offhand item with two-handed weapons)
- whether or not you intend to use skills
- which skills you use in the fight
- whether you intend to switch weapons mid-fight
- your opponent(s), and their attack types and speeds
- which skills (spells) become reduced in effectiveness because of the equipment you're using
- the skills and abilities of your group mates if you're grouped
- how dense the mobs are in your zone, and how likely they are to add themselves to your fight
Yikes! That's a lot of variables. As I mentioned in another thread, bare H2H damage is pretty pathetic: in the 1-5 point range depending on your STR stat and H2H ability. If you're going to go H2H, you definitely need some supplemental gear in order to do damage.
If it's damage that you want to do. If you want it purely for the interrupts, then you don't need to worry about this.
As Teaweasel described above, when figuring out the effectiveness of any damage-dealing equipment, you really need to calculate the damage over time. You can't simply look at your damage stat and believe that bigger numbers are better, otherwise the winterking weapons would still be worth something to people other than collectors, and all warriors would wield two-handed hammers. But in addition to the calculation of weapon damage and speed, you also need to look at
how often you are going to actually hit your target. Caliban mentioned this weeks or months ago. So although Morphmarfa's theoretical calculation puts H2H ahead by the equivalent of slightly less than one hit in a one-minute fight, you are, in fact, likely to land a lot more hits with H2H because you have more changes to successfully land a hit.
But here are two key factors for druids: interrupts (on the right mobs) and high level main hand books.
I'm still training H2H on my main druid. At level 135, his H2H is only around 570 so he is a poor example. But I've recently discovered when duo training my rogue and support druid (both around level 114) on ghosts, the interrupts help a great deal in reducing the amount of healing that the rogue needs. I suspect that this will be the same when soloing a druid. Right now my druid buffs the rogue with high wards of soldiers and giants and embrace that heals about 115 per tick, and then the rogue wades into the fray. The interrupts with knuckle blades (speed is 1750) or the shoreline dagger (speed is 1520) are so common that sometimes the mob will spend almost the entire fight trying to cast its spells. It might land one or two hits and one or two skills, but these are easily taken care of by the embrace. Which can easily be re-cast in combat. Suffice to say that if no additional mobs attack, it's not uncommon for my rogue to end the fight with a full health bar. I haven't had as much luck interrupting flaming orb from loredancers, or the dragon cultists' blast spell, or meteoric bosses. Of course, the rogue has the advantage of high strength and quite a few pieces of pierce and/or slash damage gear which are amplified by high strength so the comparison isn't exactly equal. But it's worth noting.
What about the high level main hand books? These are dropped by Aggragoth. They are equipped as main hand weapons but treated as H2H. The lowest level one I've seen is the Dark Grimoire of Health and requires you to be level 110 to equip. 5 crushing damage, 100 focus and 100 health, 1750 attack speed. I don't know any druids on Lugh who use their diamond icon once they get one of these. No matter how much focus you have, the extra 100 focus from the grimoire is pretty much guaranteed to boost your spells more than the 200 nature magic from the diamond icon. What you have here is all the advantages of H2H, and you get a different (better) bonus to your spell casting than the diamond icon.
Morphmarfa, I agree with you that haste gloves (or potions/elixirs) should not even be considered when doing these calculations. I've lost count of the times someone has claimed that their [slow weapon] is just as fast as [fast weapon] when wearing haste gloves. Well, if you have haste gloves, why wouldn't you wear them to wield [fast weapon]?
