Fist
Fist weapons are Monk-specific items in Diablo 3. These weapons are used to enhance the Monk's melee punching attacks, and are reminiscent of the Assassin's claw weapons from Diablo 2. They can not be equipped by other characters.
Nothing is yet known of their range or relative damage, but it seems safe to assume that they are strictly melee weapons, with little or no variety in range.
Fist Weapons
Fist weapons and the potential for weapon-specific attacks were first spoken of by Jay Wilson in an October 2009 interview. [1]
- Diii.net: The Monk has a staff and the fist weapons. Will he have any weapon specific skills? Like dual wielding with just the fist weapons?
- Jay Wilson: We're talking about that. One of the things we’ve talked about with the Monk is that a lot of his skills don’t really use his weapons. So he’s doing melee skills with his weapons almost holstered. For instance, Debilitating, I think it’s called Crippling Wave now. We change them a lot and I get mixed up on the titles.
- Anyway, the Crippling Wave skill seems like it should be a staff skill. It’s kind of AoE, he does it and affects a lot of guys around him. So it’s a possibility that we’ll do skills and redefine them based on combat styles and have those styles have a weapon preference.
Weapon Specific Skills?
As mentioned by Jay Wilson in the quote above, it seems that some of the Monk's attack skills will only work with Fist weapons, while others will only work with Staves. Since there is no weapon switch hotkey in Diablo 3, it's not known how characters will handle this sort of weapon-based skill variety.
It might be impossible, or at least impractical, to play a hybrid Monk; players may need to specialize entirely in one weapon type or the other. This might be optimal, if similar weapon skills have synergies or other bonuses to encourage unified skill distribution.
Another possibility is some sort of weapon switching tied to skills. In this hypothetical concept, the Monk would have two weapon slots, and which one was used would be determined by the active skill. This would seem to allow weapon switching, while making it user-friendly enough for the D3 developers, who have pointed to the problem of D2 noobs wondering where their weapons went when they accidentally hit the weapon switch hotkey.
