When a character on TMWServ equips two one-handed weapons their damage boni stack to one strong attack. This is not really the behavior I would expect from dual-wielding two weapons.

How it should be

In practice I would like to have this damage distribution:

• 1hand weapon + shield: 100% damage + better defence
• 2hand weapon: 150% damage
• dual wielding: 2 x 75% damage where each attack uses the damage bonus of a different weapon

These values are against enemies of average defence. One strong attack should be more efficient against high-def enemies while two weak attacks should be better against low-def enemies because the attack of the 2hand weapon passes the defence only once while dual wielding weapons pass it twice. For that reason the combinated attack power of dual-wielded weapons should be higher on paper.

Two handed weapons can be made stronger by simply giving these weapons better stats. So I assume that it will be no problem to balance the item stats in a way that 2handed fighters do 150% more damage than one-handed fighters against enemies with average defence.

But making one-handed weapons slightly weaker when they are dual wielded is less trivial.

Solution

To solve this issue I would suggest to add an additional dual wielding skill which has to be leveled to be efficient at dual wielding.

attack mechanics

When a character with two one-handed weapons attacks two separate attacks are calculated - one with each weapon. The first weapon is calculated normally, but the effective skill level for the offhand weapon is either the corresponding weapon skill level or the dual wielding skill level - whichever is lower. This negatively affects the offhand weapons accuracy, damage, equipment prerequisites and special attacks (when the offhand skill level isn't high enough for a special attack the character performs the attack without the 2nd weapon).

exp distribution

When a character with two swords damages an enemy (see Skill system 2) the dual wielding skill becomes one of the used skills to defeat it and thus receives a share of the experience which also lowers the share of all other skills. This means a character with two swords (who uses no other skills in combat) receives 50% exp for sword and 50% exp for dual wielding. When the character uses two weapons of different categories (like sword and axe) it receives 33% exp for each skill. This might sound like a harsh exp penalty but because the character level is calculated from all skill levels and skill level progress is logarithmic a dual-wielding character will have roughly the same character level as a one-weapon character - just its weapon skills will be lower.

conclusion

This means that a regular dual-wielding fighter will have two attacks with both slightly less damage and accuracy than one attack of a regular one-hand+shield fighter of the same level. A casual dual-wielding fighter will do an attack with the right hand weapon which is almost as good as that of the regular 1hand fighter + a low-accuracy and low-damage offhand attack.