Runes of Magic US / AU

From what ive heard from people, dagger works best as mainhand. For offhand id say either would probably work. If you wanna dual-wield axes just go w/r.

Mathematically you should use the one with the higher DPS. However, that being said, I find myself using both and switching based on situation. Axes do more damage, and the DPS is generally higher, which probably means you should concentrate on axe; but, I find myself equipping the dagger in most situations because it is faster and I generally kill in one hit anyways. Switch to axe when it is not going to be one hit...is my general rule.

Speed of the weapon is calculated in the dps. Because its Damage Per Second.

Quoted from "Zwarf;586916"

Speed of the weapon is calculated in the dps. Because its Damage Per Second.

Right, what he said. However, I think you will find, in most cases for equivalent level weapons that the axe comes out ahead in DPS because of the higher damage. For example, the Tinc Feather, lvl 72 dagger, Dmg 2029, spd 1.8, DPS 1127 compared to the Spirit Hand Axe, lvl 72, Dmg 3245, spd 2.8, DPS 1158.

However, I must mention that even though your R/W can use the axe, if for some reason you switch to R/X, say scout for example, your axe becomes some kind of lead weight in your hand as you, for some reason, have forgotten how to use it.

Axe only if you plan to play w/r as well.
Dagger if u only play rogue. Axe DPS is higher but u have a very lower weapon skill and bleed does not activate in blind spot.

bleed shouldn't activate at all if you're not using a dagger... from what the skills said back then at least..

Quoted from "spazx;586996"

bleed shouldn't activate at all if you're not using a dagger... from what the skills said back then at least..

From what little knowledge I have of r/w, you would be leeching SS (never applying it) and using WA/decay/poisonous elites/blind spot for sheer damage output for maximum dps. Hence why he didnt mention SS or LB bleed-they shouldnt be a factor. LB does not need a dagger for grevious to he applied, only the ss bleed prereq.

For R/W, the major advantage of using 1-H axes over daggers is how DoT damage is calculated. Since all physical DoT damage is based on main hand weapon damage (NOT DPS), having higher physical damage means your DoTs will hit harder if your physical damage is higher. The biggest issue with R/W using 1-H axes is the Weapon Skill is significantly lower than daggers, meaning you will miss more often. It's not a huge amount of missing but it is probably about 3-5% on your white attacks. The only draw to using daggers is that small amount of missing. The only real draw to using 1-H axes is higher bleed effects. The choice is yours.

Edit: For those of you in the dark about how R/W would get a Bleed effect from a 1-H axe for Low Blow - After you get your 50 Elite skill, Shadow Stab DOESN'T require you to have a dagger equipped for the bleed effect. Slash also gives a Bleed effect that can stack with the Shadow Stab bleed and can trigger the bleed on Low Blow.

In my experience of playing r/w the optimal setup has been dagger/dagger. In the past I only ever used an axe for my mainhand because they were cheaper, but now that Dim Light's drop off first boss KBNh, that's not the case.

As it's been said before, the mainhand dagger gives you: More dps (so damage in total), hardly ever misses and you get your bleeds from blind stab and sneak attack *which you don't get bleeds from with an axe equipped, even with the 50 elite*. But as I said, I've found it better to have dagger's in both hands.

When I first started playing r/w I thought that I read somewhere that the ghost stat of crit on a 1h axe (which most have for a ghost stat) helped skill use. After testing, I found that it and my tooltip matched in saying that it doesn't. With daggers on the other hand, you can get ghost stats like having patk and dex on the same weapon. Those ghost stats will help your skill use (just not as directly as crit might have). Also, having a dagger in offhand means it's basically not going to miss as long as the weapon skill is lvl'ed, so you don't lose any of that beloved rage, which is needed for the already complicated rotation.

For Rogue/X. YOU NEED main hand dagger to do alot of damage. No shadowstab bleed no grievious wound no blind spot bleed if no dagger. I use mainhand dagger 2nd hand sword but i am r/s.
i amactually thinking about checking if 2 daggers do better then dagger +sword

Quoted from "spazx;586996"

bleed shouldn't activate at all if you're not using a dagger... from what the skills said back then at least..

One of the R/W elites turns the bleed back on for an Axe.

Hmm, Shadowstab Perfection is a warrior/rogue elite skill, not effective on Rogue/Warrior. That being said, you can still get bleed from slash or leach from others.

I believe if you read through the R/W elite skill descriptions you will not find any that specifically state that axes will now generate bleeds. IIRC, this all came about in that one patch that re-worked some rogue skills, and no, I am not going to go look it up. What they did was re-work the Shadowstab skill to remove the requirement for mainhand to be dagger to get bleed once you hit skill lvl 50. So, up until you got your lvl 50 SS you still needed a dagger mainhand, after that....not so much.

I remember waaay back when I played my r/w, I used macros that autoswapped weapons depending on if I needed bleed or not.

IIRC.. the basics were:

1. first macro to run set the names of your dagger & your axe, something like:

/run daggername="Dim Light"
/run axename="Original Sin"

2. then you would make macros that checked your main hand weapon w/ what you need... don't remember the code off-hand, so I'll just explain it:
# slot 16 is the main hand, slot 17 is the off-hand
# for shadowstab, we want our dagger for the bleed, so we make a new macro called "newstab"
/run local _,_,mh = GetInventoryItemDurable("player",16);if mh=axename then PickUpEquipmentItem(16);PickUpEquipmentItem(17);end
/wait .3
/cast Shadowstab

^-- basically, it's checking to see if the main hand weapon is your axe's name. If it is, then it swaps the main & off-hand weapons, waits .3 seconds and shadowstabs.

I'm sure from here, you can figure out the others.

Please refrain from making comments about things you do not know. That goes for all of the posters who have stated that the bleed doesn't work unless you have a dagger equipped in your main hand.
As we all can clearly see, it no longer states that the player must have a dagger equipped for the additional bleed effect.

As I stated before, the only essential difference is the bleed damage, missing about 3-5% of your white attacks, and attack speed to gather rage. You could probably get about the same final dps with 2x 1-H Axes (Just speculation as I'm never going to play this combo farther than it is currently).

There was a reply to Rossbot here that was no longer relevant since he edited his post.

I apologize and have changed my post accordingly, I didn't mean to even quote you.

Quoted from "Rossbot;587114"

I apologize and have changed my post accordingly, I didn't mean to even quote you.

Apology accepted. Mistakes happen, sorry to have overreacted.

And what you are saying needs to get out, many times I have seen people posting about needing daggers to get the bleed, bad information that keeps getting passed down.