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From Diablo Wiki
Combat
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The design goal of Diablo III is to make combat more immersive and challenging. Characters cannot heal so easily and cannot flee combat at any time (via town portals), thus the monsters are more difficult and dangerous, even without the potential for cheesy/buggy one-hit kills. The developers hope this will create a more tense, exciting atmosphere and make combat feel more real and intense.
==% Weapon Damage on Skills==
Nearly all skills in Diablo 3 are based on a weapon damage value. This measurement can be confusing because weapon damage can be misinterpreted to be the damage listed on your individual weapon tooltip itself, rather than your actual final damage after modifiers (such as +attack).
[[Image:Bash.png|thumb|300px|Typical Skill using % Weapon Damage]]
When Skills refer to doing "X% weapon damage", it is referring to your final adjusted damage after passives and all stats/items, not the damage listed on the weapon itself.
This final adjusted damage includes the total +Attack modifier (from the Attack Attribute) and any other item stats that affect your damage. It is simply your final damage as if you are attacking with a base attack. This does in fact mean that slower weapons will do more damage than faster weapons for that swing or cast, but it will take longer to perform the cast or swing. While this may appear to favor slow weapons, it is offset by both the ability to attack faster therefore more often, as well as faster resource generation via generator skills. Skills with cooldowns may favor slower weapons depending on your play-style, as you cannot perform that skill more than once, however the faster resource generation of faster weapons is used to offset this advantage by giving you extra resources hence doing more damage.
==Dual wielding and Weapon Damage when using Skills==
[[Image:Broadaxe.png|thumb|300px|The base raw Damage on a Weapon is NOT the % Weapon Damage that Skills refer to.]]
When performing a skill that is based on % weapon damage and you are dual wielding, your character will alternate between both weapons that are equipped. For example, if you swing with your right hand weapon, than the next attack you perform will be with your Left-hand weapon, and that will be used in the %weapon damage calculation. This may give the illusion that dual-wielding is inferior to 2-handed weapons because you are in essence using a 1-hand weapon to perform the skill (which has lower damage than a 2 hand weapon), however dual-wielding offers a passive 15% attack speed bonus which increases your resource generation as you are attacking more often, as well as the added stats granted by equipping a second weapon.