Apparently, Dual Wielding is actually pretty good when you do it right.

I was not happy about Blizzard's changes to the Frost tree, supporting dual-wielding over 2Handed. I did not like how they gutted Frost Strike and the Vengeful Heart sigil, making them both worthless for two handed frost users and basically destroying my favourite spec.

However, I like to think I'm adaptable, and prepared for the change. I picked up some decent 1 handed weapons, a lot of Armor Penetration gear, and figured I could either go 2 handed Blood or dual wield.

At first, I tried dual-wielding. I was not impressed. I had heard great things about the Glyph of Disease spec, the first spec that was capable of actually using the glyph without a significant DPS loss. I found it unwieldy, clunky, and prone to mishap. You had a one to two second window to refresh your diseases, and even just standing on a target dummy I found myself missing it by a fraction of a second. I can't imagine running that spec on a movement heavy fight, such as Mimiron or Vezax.

Next I tried the Unholy version of DW. It's a strange spec, and one I expect to be nerfed eventually. Typically, Unholy uses Scourge Strike as its main 'nuke' strike. This spec, however, utilizes Obliterate, which is supposed to be Frost's nuke strike. It supposedly works well, but for some reason I wasn't able to produce results with it. The most appealing thing about the Unholy spec is the bonus run speed (optional), and the permanent ghoul pet. The latter is both a plus and a negative, however, since there are fights he's prone to die on, forcing you to lose a significant amount of damage.

Failing those two, I went to two-handed Blood for a few days, and loved it. The gear ratings worked out very well, too. I had perfect hit rating, slightly above cap on expertise, and 4500 attack power unbuffed, not to mention a shit load of Armor Penetration. Best of all, I was able to solo instances I couldn't before. Heroic Shadow Labs, Heroic Magister's Terrace, and Zul'Gurub are the notable ones I solo'd while Blood spec.

However, people kept saying that dual-wield was doing extremely well. Begrudgingly, I tried it again. This time, I decided to pick up a spec that more closely resembled the rotation I used while two-handed Frost, simply to make the transition easier. Before I made the change though, I ran some Test Dummy runs with my Blood spec, so I could have something to compare my results with.

As two handed Blood, over a course of 10 minutes, I could sustain an average of 3700 DPS, with spikes upwards of 3850.

My first attempt at dual-wield, a five minute dummy test, produced a result of 2800 average DPS, with no notable spikes.

Pretty lackluster, and was about to give up again when I noticed something strange - not a single Rime proc happened in five minutes. That's pretty odd, since Rime has a 15% proc off of Obliterate, and I Obliterate four times every 20 seconds. That led me to my stupid, stupid, stupid error.

I was still using Death Strike as my F/U strike. Thinking back to when I tried the other Dual-Wield specs, and I'm near positive I was doing the exact same thing.

So... after a quick swap of my hotkeys, I tried again.

Over a ten minute parse, recount showed my Dual-Wield spec at 3800 average DPS with spikes upwards of 4100. This is with weapons of lower iLevel than my two-handed axe, no longer expertise capped, and 700 lower attack power than my Blood spec.

Ummm... I'm thinking I'll be dual-wielding in the future. Now I just need to farm some quality weapons.