[Bruman]

A guildie had an RFS, and I tried it out over my AC/SoS. I did not think it parsed well. Tstaff procs are great dps.

Another guildie with a tstaff typically out-parses most fights, especially once you consider how parsing doesn't record other procs properly.

I don't have any logs to show, this is just from watching it and averaging things out over various raids. There's a couple of things to be wary of when parsing though.

1. You only get proc damage from YOUR weapon. This is to due to when other people proc, you see a message about it, but no damage numbers. When your weapon procs, it will tell you how much damage it did. This is the same way spell damage works, so noone ever knows what damage the other casters are doing, unless they're parsing too.

2. DPS is VERY inconsistent. If fights lasted longer, that would help, but generally they're over very fast. Rankings and dps-per-person fluctuates between fights wildly. The only way to get a good idea is to average over a night's raid, but even that has issues because...

3. Stats fluctuate. For it to be a good comparison, everyone needs to have the same DPS-related buffs - haste, str, and dex (for proc-rate). Even then, gear between everyone is different.

4. People come and go. This is EQ. AFKs are common. Sometimes the parser will get tripped up on when a fight started, which will destroy DPS. Looking between monks, we often are out pulling (and then the parse really reads bad on our dps, because it starts the fight with the throwing weapon, including the non-dps time to run it to camp). Monks getting aggro have to FD it off. You get the idea.

5. Even then, things aren't consistent here. Short fights especially skew numbers. If you're using a 2hb, a few misses will tank your dps. So 1hb will look better. DPS seems to be especially more-so all over the map here than it was on live.

The only real way to get a good feel for what weapon is better is to have access to them all yourself, find a consistent place to kill a mob by yourself, then do several fights with each weapon in a controlled environment.

And even THEN, you still have issues of how dps changes with haste. With very fast weapons (monk epic, for example) and haste items and spells, you reach the minimum delay of 9 easily. At that point, weapons with higher delay can reach better ratios with haste.

But wait! Now throw in damage bonus calculations! The faster the weapon, the more damage bonuses you get. So it's more than just the ratio too. There's probably some point where a certain amount of haste will flop which items are better.

For best results, get a shaman (and maybe an enchie) to find some dark blues, give you raid buffs, then kill 5-10 mobs with each weapon and average it out. I don't know if anyone's tried that, or they're just posting parses saying "Well, over the night, I did better with my tstaff than so-and-so with their RFS", not taking into account the fifty billion other things that screw with parses that I went into way too much detail about.

What do I recommend? Get what you can afford, and don't sweat it too much. Most shit will be dying so damn fast that it won't matter. And with all the other variables that come into play, you wouldn't notice it on a fight-per-fight basis anyways. General recommend upgrade path is JM/KD -> AC/SoS -> TStaff.