Weapon mastery 16?

I've noticed that some people have kicked up their weapon mastery to 16. How do they do this? Do they sacrifice attribute points from magic and become purely fighters? My sword mastery is 12. Is it all runes? I thought you could only use 2 runes max. Help. Thanks

weapon to 12 + superior rune (+3 for 15 ) +1 from helm for 16.

Doesn't that sacrifice health though?

the superior rune does (75 health i believe)

You only get the benefit from the best rune of one attribute. If you have a Superior Axe Mastery and a Major Axe Mastery you would only get the +3 from the Superior. However, all negative effects from runes apply. You would get -75 hp from the Superior and -50 from the Major.

So that gets you from 12 to 15. Add a headgear for the extra +1 and you have 16. Some weapons and skills actually let you get the stat up to 18.

so higher weapon attribute is better than higher strength attribute???????????for warrior?

In general, yes, depends on the type of warrior and the skills however

...too...many...questionmarks...

Hover your cursor (thats your mouse pointer thingie that floats around your screen and magically clicks things) over your attributes. You should get a description of what that certain attribute does. Try it, it's astonishing, really.

I must say that I've always wondered about this issue - is 15% more dmg worth sacrificing 75 health?

Aalric

I liked what was said in this thread on the matter.

The benefits of having 16 over 12 boil down to:
*15% base damage increase (as already mentioned above)
*a decent increase in critical hit rate (which is absolutely vital if you're using axes, less so with other weapons)
*an increase in weapon attribute based skills (which is what most of a warrior's skill bar will be full of

The draw backs:
*less health, which in PvP doesn't really matter since warriors are usually attacked last, but could mean a great deal in PvE where endurance is often the highest priority.
*only 8 or so points in a secondary attribute, which usually won't mean much, since a warrior has such limited energy anyway that it's not going to take advantage of its secondary very well one way or the other.

Basically, if I'm in PvP I'll use the 16 weapon attribute, 10 strength, leftovers in secondary set-up, and in PvE I'll use the same set-up without the superior rune.

is lvl 16 the absolute cut off?
as in if im a axe warrior with 16 axe mastery using a 20% chance axe mastery +1 haft, will i ever strke with 17 master and if i can, will there even be a difference between hitting with 16 and 17?

No 16 is not the absolute cut off. It is the hard cut off though. You can get it up to 17 while using a +1 Mastery Hilt, but that only applies to when using skills.

There is no cutoff. You would strike at Axe Mastery=17 20% of the time, and yes, it will do more damage at 17 compared to 16.

Necros and Elementalists can actually reach level 20 (4% of the time)

Is it worth it to have it that high?

That's a good question. As far as I can tell, the extra 1 point a percentage of the time is a much worse upgrade than any of the +armor upgrades. So in my opinion, it's not worth it to shoot for a 17 in your weapon attribute.

as an extremely general rule of thumb, i'd say in PvP, definitely sacrifice the health for the extra damage. warriors are almost always the last target after the casters are down, so the -75 is largely insignificant.

in PvE, it may or may not be a different story. if your job as warrior is to just tank while your teammates do the nuking, then you may not want the health reduction.

still, PvE is so stupidly easy in this game, that you may just want the extra damage to finish mobs off quickly and just get it over with.

My kd/as warrior: 16 hammer mastery. 5 strength. 10 earth magic.