Uh... it does, and with Power attacks it quadruples.

Can you explain this better? I have never been able to get this to work. Is it a console thing?? I'm on PC and if I have hotkeys:

1 - Sword ( R )
2 - Axe (L)
3 - Healing spell

Hit 3, and Axe goes away now I have Healing (L) and Sword ( R
Now, Hit 2, the Healing is still (L) but the Sword goes away and now it's Axe ( R ). The spell is never replaced.

What am I doing wrong?

It all depends on what character you are playing. Each have their own unique play styles.
The blender is a wonderful anology, but instead of Deadric, I use scimitars

Agreed! The animation is at it's most awesome when you are dual wielding Daedric Daggers or a Daedric sword/dagger combo!

I was more making a note to the OP but I did know what you meant.

In my experience at least, Duel wielding is freaking cheap ._.
there's nothing that epic when you kill dragons within like 3 Power attacks with Duel wielding

I use Two-handed Swords and Frost destruction, and switching between the two is no hassle which some people apparently believe

I would like to know this as well if possible. Either Rosveen is wrong or we can learn something useful. Unfortunately, I suspect that Rosveen is just mistaken.

I recently made a dual-wielding paladin. Two swords (occasionally two maces), heavy armor, restoration... that was pretty much it.

But I needed to be sold on dual-wielding, too. I had tried it before briefly and didn't like it. Too clunky, no defense, and it seemed boring to just power attack, power attack, power attack. Didn't seem like there was any finesse to it.

Then another poster informed me that, yes, there is some tactics involved in dual wielding. You have your double power attacks, of course, but you also have a right power attack and a left power attack, which operate differently. The right-handed PA shoots you forward vey quickly: good for closing distance vs an enemy mage, for example.

The left PA doesn't rush you forward so fast or so far, and it's easier to direct. But the most interesting thing about the left PA is that it staggers your enemy briefly. 'Think of this as your block', that poster wrote. And he was right: A left-handed PA, timed correctly, will interrupt enemy attacks and leave you open to execute a double PA or a quick double-slash if you want to save stamina.

'Footwork' is important, too. By 'feinting' (moving) toward the enemy, you can often lure them into power attacking against you. Dance backward, out of their reach, and be ready to move in and attack once their missed PA has sent them off balance a little. You can do a double-PA or a double slash, again.

Finally, power attacking is something that you don't need to do all the time. Since a double PA or a double slash will root you to the ground, often times a single quick slash will be preferable, since you can dance out of the way more easily. Your Dual Flurry perks will help even with these single-handed slashes as long as you are technically 'wielding' both weapons.

Around lvl 5 with my paladin, I started to feel pretty badass. I was walking toward Valtheim Towers from Whiterun and one of those wandering groups of bandits spawned along the road. By dodging and weaving through the battle, using my various PAs and slashes, I was able to take out 2 regular bandits and 2 bandit chiefs. The 5th guy ran away without taking a hit.

My only complaint about that paladin character is that, by around lvl 18 or so, it got boring. With Heavy Armor, Restoration, and some basic One-handed perks along with Dual Flurry, I was pretty much unstoppable. I do plan on focusing on dual wielding again, but probably with a Light Armor-wearing assassin type.


Oh, and about the hotkeys - I have not found any way to make that more manageable. KhorneDeth's experience matches my own. The most frustrating thing about my paladin was the fact that, whenever I switched to a Restoration spell in the middle of battle, I had to enter the favorites menu to re-equip a sword in my off-hand.

There's one little trick you can do, though, but it's very situational. In the beginning of the game, I carried around two Imperial Swords - not enchanted, not smithed at all, just the regular swords you can find. They 'stacked' on top of one another in my inventory. In the favorites menu, I assigned them the hotkey '3', so it looked like the following:

3. Imperial Sword (2)

When I tapped '3', both swords came out. So if I was casting a healing spell, I'd tap '4' (for the spell), then '3' again for the swords.

Unfortunately, improving those swords made them not 'stack' anymore - even if they were both 'fine' or whatever.

The only other thing you can do is just never cast spells, I guess. Switching between bow & dual weapons is easier, actually. Say you have a bow equipped to hotkey '2'. You don't even need to hotkey your weapons. They can be a sword and an axe, or whatever you want. Make sure you have your melee weapons equipped, tap '2' for your bow, then tap '2' again to unequip it, and you'll be returned to whatever you were wielding before the bow.

Not an ideal system, for sure.

I use dual wielding when I'm trying to level one-handed skill as quickly as possible. Only 2 things matter for gaining experience in one-haned skill, number of hits and the base damage of the weapon. So for best result, I dual wield only for the dual flurry speed gain, and only use regular attacks with ebony sword or daedric sword in my main hand. You get the benefit of dual flurry whenever you have a weapon in each hand. You don't have to make two-handed attacks. I also use elemental fury. The speed gain is amazing. It's quite fun killing a strong enemy with 50 or 100 regular hits at double speed.

Well, they are all fun. I change around my fighting style all the time. But whenever I am having more difficulties in a fight than I would like, I take out my shield and sword.

Duel wieldings ok. but not that good. Some fun finishers.
You end using one weapon more than the other, though.
It ends up right, right, right, right, whys my other weapon not moving, oh yeah, I've got to do it. Cue awkward attempt to hit with both at the same time that hits nothing.
Not having block is fine. I never use it anyway, unless I am fending off powerful mages.

Honestly, you're better off going magic and weapon or weapon and shield.
Try it, for fun or curiosity, but it it's not that great.

I've been testing it out with daggers. It's more difficult in the sense that your strikes aren't as fast, but you can deal some good damage. Probably my favorite thing about it is the power attack - very powerful, very deadly, very cool.

What system are you playing on?

Hotkeys and dual wield are a pain in the ass on the PC to be sure, but on the X-Box 360, it seems as though your hotkeys default to the left hand.

So you can hotkey a spell, and your left hand item, and swap between the 2 without going into favorites or inventory.

I do agree though, that the hotkey system is not ideal.

As far as blocking goes, I just have to ask, on X-Box 360 and PS3, what key would blocking be bound to? I think that's a huge reason why there is no blocking with dual wield.

Correction, just make sure the left hand weapon is unenchanted. That's the hand that the shout checks. You can have an enchanted weapon in the right hand and still use the shout.

Darn, indeed I was mistaken. I haven't dual-wielded for months and I somehow got confused.

Anyway, I fired up Skyrim and checked - actually, you CAN get the hotkeys to work if both weapons are exactly the same - which is the opposite of what I wrote :/ Starting unarmed, if you tap the button twice, you'll equip both items. You can then change to spell, then tap the first hotkey again to equip your weapon.
Funny, because I remember that "same weapon setup" was broken when I first started playing - equipping a spell made weapons un-hotkey themselves.

I can't believe this hotkey system made it through QA. Oh well. There's always mods for hotkeying equipsets...

Huh I didnt know that.

Because it looks cool. The end.

Because of the slowness of a two handed weapon if you miss with one swing or it gets deflected then your DPS for the battle duration is severly lowered. Also just overall the slowness in general of any two handed weapon alone will lower your DPS making them on par with each other. I dont know how it actually breaks down though. You can't sneak attack and do 30x damage with a two handed weapon though. Two handed weapon style of play is literally the only one I dont do. I have like 12 characters that do every thing except that. I really don't like dual wielding either though. It's easily my second least favorite style of play. For a standard warrior I like weapon and shield the best.

I'm not sure about PC but switching between spells and dual wield on Xbox and directing which one you want which in is very easy. You just press the trigger button that you want the item or spell to show up in.

versatility

I haven't found a good non-modded solution to mapping hotkeys for dual-wielding either. This is quite inconvenient, especially since I'm currently playing a dual-wield character with a realistic lighting mod -- so I often have to quickly switch from LH torch (or shield, or spell, or whatever) to LH weapon, and without gumming up my RH weapon. What I do is a bit unelegant, but it's (minimally) functional:

(i) I favorite my LH weapon so it's in the favorites menu; but I don't assign a hotkey to it. Everything else that I use regularly is assigned 1-8.

(ii) whenever I anticipate that I may want to dual-wield, I go in to the favorites menu, highlight my LH weapon (but I don't equip it), and then I exit the favorites menu. Since I only have nine items in my favorites menu this works out well -- I essentially just do this whenever I load a new save. Then I go about using torches, shields, whatever (all of which are hotkeyed in my case) in my LH until I want to dual-wield

(iii) to quickly switch from something (torch, shield, spell, whatever) to my desired LH-weapon for the purposes of dual-wielding, I just quickly hit q, then right mouse, then q (I'm on pc btw). This takes about a second while in-combat. As is probably obvious, doing this opens up the favorites; but since my desired LH weapon is highlighted already from step (ii), I don't have to do any tedious scrolling to select it. By quickly tapping the right mouse it is selected as my LH weapon, and then tapping the q key immediately after exits the favorites menu. It takes very little time to do.

This seems to work in most situations. But like I said, it's a kludgey solution (and probably not feasible for many people -- especially those who like to play around in their favorites menu a lot). Just thought I'd throw it out there since it seems to work somewhat ok-ish for me. If anyone has a better solution to the hotkey problem for dual-wielding, I'd love to hear it.

Dual Wielding IS the most effective form of combat in skyrim. Sure you can't block, but the damage you dish out far outwieghs any damage you would take in return.

I recomend people watch this guy's youtube series. pms00 and type in dual-wielding to watch his dual-wielding video. This guy has everything in skyrim down to a mathematical science.

Very good advice. I just watched this and it IS very informative, indeed.

Here is the direct link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEdi2WzkLc&feature=plcp

Thanks man. I didn't have the link on hand. There's another guy MrRhexx (something like that). I don't like all his videos but he does have a set of vids relating to the best armor setups for a warrior, assassin, mage etc (without using enchanting). Maybe not useful to most, but I personally like to see the best the game has to offer before i start using enchanments. Plus I'm looking to start a dunmer assassin character and I was using the video as kind of a heplful suggestion as to how I should start.

I tried several builds and with my thief character I used primarily dual wielding daggers and bow.

I quite like dual wielding, but you need to be quick on your feet (aka light armor). Generally I would dodge around until they do a power attack, then I'd attack getting multiple hits in before falling back again. With a 2H you can kill them faster, but you are drained of stamina faster which means you can't sprint or dodge as easy... not to mention if you miss a swing it leaves you really vulnerable.

Only drawback with dualwielding is how the game screws it up if you equip something in your offhand, like a spell.... when you try to swap back to your offhand, it will put whatever weapon you have hotkeyed in favourites in your main hand, and it keeps swapping out your mainhand rather than offhand... so you have to manually open favourites and click the weapons to put a weapon in offhand again.

I quite liked the dual wielding, but the constant "go into menu to fix the offhand" everytime I used a spell was really frustrating. Can't belive they haven't done a fix for this.

Here, watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEdi2WzkLc&list=PLE77CF44FCA23F6FE&index=3&feature=plpp_video

Since none of my characters really have a magic-weapon mix, switching isnt an issue.

If im not wrong dual wielding has this "increase attack speed by 50%" or whatever which 2-handed weapons don't have. And with DW you can have twice the enchantment power.
2H weapons allowing for block does introduce some tactic in combat instead of just mindlessly slashing with your DW, but i doubt blocking really blocks that much damage. I think blocking got kinda nerfed in skyrim as compared to oblivion.