It took me a while to wrap my head around weapon choices in LOTRO. Unlike other MMOs, the "DPS" value is not very important and instead there are more important factors to consider.

Note: this information is compiled from various early observational posts by other players and my own observations. Since there's no absolute damage parser for LOTRO (a good thing, IMO), we may never really know for sure what the real mechanics are. I've done a lot of weapon damage theorycrafting and reverse-engineering in my time, though, so I'm fairly confident the following details are close to the mark.

Basic terms and formulas

• Speed: The weapon tooltip's listed weapon speed value. Lower values mean a faster weapon. Note that the real underlying Speed is rounded to 1 decimal place.
• Speed determines the rate at which your autoattacks fire, which in turn determines how often you can trigger your non-instant weapon skills. Therefore, faster weapons enables you to spam more skills more quickly for front-loaded threat generation, which can be especially important to guardians or whomever is the defacto tank for the fellowship.
• Speed also affects the +damage modifier of your skill-based attacks. A slower weapon will increase the +damage modifer, and a faster weapon will decrease the +damage modifier.
• For dual-wielders, your effective Speed is actually the average of the Speed value of both your weapons (add both Speed values and then divide by 2).
• Max Damage: The weapon tooltip's highest value in the listed Damage range.
• Avg Damage: The weapon tooltip's lowest and highest values, added together then divided by 2. For example, a 6-10 weapon's avg damage would be (6 + 10) / 2 = 8.
• DPS: A simple and misleading value on the weapon's tooltip. It is the the result of a weapon's average damage divided by its speed. Note that the real, underlying DPS is rounded to 1 decimal place.

Off-hand weapons do have damage reduction but it's not very important

For you dual-wielders, the weapon in your off-hand slot does have its base auto-attack damage reduced by some amount. The exact percentage is not yet known, but the most common guess based on observation is that a weapon does 60% of its listed DPS when it's in your offhand.

This fact is essentially something you don't need to care about however. What's really important is that all of your weapon-based skills that mention bonus damage based on your "off-hand" weapon are not affected by this damage reduction. In other words, if you have a skill that uses the "max damage" of the off-hand, and your off-hand weapon's listed Max Damage value is 10, then the bonus damage from that skill is based on 10, not on 6. Some of the following sections will elaborate on the important stats for off-hand weapons.

What we do know for certain is that the off-hand does not swing more slowly than its listed Speed, as is done in some other MMOs like WoW.

Speed is an important factor for guardians

A guardian's role in the fellowship is to generate threat above all else. Most of your skills have a damage component and a threat generation component. While it's true that higher damage in itself means you're generating more threat, that threat generation component of your various skills is the same regardless of whether the weapon you're using does a lot of damage or not.

For this reason, guardians who are tanking for a group should generally use the fastest weapon possible in your main hand regardless of its Avg Damage or DPS values. This enables you to fire off your opening skill chain faster, for more front-loaded threat generation. In other words, don't focus so much on how much damage your skills are doing; what's important is firing off as many skills as possible to max out the cumulative threat generation component of your skills.

When soloing as a guardian, however, the following guidelines become more important because you're not worried about keeping the aggro off of any teammates.

Speed affects your power burn rate

Because a faster weapon enables you to fire off your non-instant weapon-based skills more rapidly, be aware that it also means a faster weapon will drain your power faster than a slower weapon.

Another way of looking at this isn't so apparent until you absorb some of the details in the following sections: slower weapons generally yield more damage per point of power you expend. That is, faster weapons are less power-efficient overall. There are some exceptions to this general rule depending on your class and the types of weapon-based skills that you use the most, but 90% of the time this is a true rule of thumb.

The DPS stat is generally the most important for backline caster classes

If most of your skills are DD nukes or other "caster" type skills such as the Minstrel's heals/buffs, and you have very few weapon-based skills, then you should generally equip whatever weapon has the highest DPS. This is because most of your weapon attacks (if you're even in weapon range) will be auto-attacks in between your queued-up nukes/heals/etc.

The Avg Damage stat is generally the most important for DPS classes (not Guardians or Burglars)

If you mostly use weapon-based skills that apply "main hand", "off-hand" and "ranged weapon" damage, you might often be better off with a given weapon that is lower DPS than another one.

What you really care about instead is the weapon's Avg Damage stat (remember, you have to calculate this for yourself--it's not directly shown in a tooltip).

You always want the weapon with the highest Avg Damage stat in your main hand slot and your ranged weapon slot, because this will yield the highest overall damage from your weapon-based skills.

The Max Damage stat is generally the most important for Burglars

If the weapon skills you use most talk about "max damage" in the tooltip for the skill, then you generally want a weapon with the highest max damage stat in your main hand, regardless of it's Speed or DPS values.

Fast weapons are generally best in the off-hand slot for all dual-wielding classes

For all dual-wielding DPS classes, most of your bonus damage from weapon-based skills comes from the main-hand weapon. (For example, a given skill might give you 2x main-hand and 1x off-hand damage, or 3x main-hand and no off-hand at all, etc.) Unfortunately, all of the high Avg Damage and high Max Damage weapons that you want in your main-hand slot are typically very slow.

It's a common practice, therefore, to equip a very fast weapon in your off-hand slot (regardless of its Avg Damage or Max Damage) to lower your overall effective Speed (which makes your autoattack cycle and therefore your skill chains faster).

Fervour cost for Champions depends on whether you are dual-wielding

Many Champion skills have a "Fervour" cost, and this cost varies depending on whether you're dual-wielding or not.

• If you are dual-wielding, the Fervour cost of skills like Savage Strikes, Brutal Strikes, Exchange of Blows, etc. are lower, with a flat cost like "3 Fervour"
• If you are wielding 1H only, 1H + Shield, or 2H, then the Fervour cost of these skills is higher, with a cost that says "Requires at least 4 Fervour, but Removes 3 from Fervour"

When to use 2H weapons

Because of the preceding guidelines, the classes that can use 2H weapons will typically do more damage overall with a 2H weapon, because they have a higher Avg Damage value and therefore your weapon-based skill bonuses are usually higher. This is especially true for the skills that do multiple main-hand "swings".

For this reason, soloing will generally go faster and better if you use 2H weapons. However, guardians should stick with 1H weaps and a shield whenever they are in a fellowship for two important reasons:

• Your shield attacks are a huge component of your threat generation.
• Your 1H weapons are typically faster and therefore contribute to faster threat generation for reasons described previously

Skill cooldowns are not the same thing as Speed
(Thanks to A99Barnsey and Brat for this addition)

Speed works as I've described above. There are also individual skill cooldowns on many skills, as well as a global skill cooldown. These skill cooldowns are totally independent of the effects of Speed on how quickly you can chain attacks. In some cases, a skill's cooldown will be much longer than your effective Speed. Other cooldowns, including the global cooldown, might be much faster than your effective Speed.

So cooldowns will also affect how quickly you can front-load an opening attack chain, but here's the important distinction: your effective Speed comes into play after the cooldown (or in addition to the cooldown). Let's assume you have a skill A that has a 2-second cooldown. Theoretically, you could trigger skill B exactly 2 seconds after skill A. But let's also assume that your weapon Speed is 2.6. This means that no matter what, you will not be able to trigger skill B until 2.6 seconds after skill A.

The flip side of this example is to look at the exact same skills but now you have an effective Speed of 1.7. After triggering skill A, you will not be able to trigger skill B until 2 seconds later, even though your effective Speed is less than the cooldown for skill A.

The interplay of auto-attacks and queued-up skills is not yet fully understood

This section is currently just a jumble of observations from various players that attempt to give us a clue about when and how the normal auto-attack cycle ("white damage") is overwritten by skills. None of this is "for sure"--we're still attempting to understand the full pattern here.

• Weapon-based Attack skills seem to not overwrite your auto-attack "ticks", but instead to merely delay them. For example, if a 2-swing skill is in the middle of executing, the auto-attack "tick" that would have occurred at that moment is delayed until after both swings take place. So you'd see swing damage > swing damage > autoattack damage.
• All other skills (buffs, cries, heals, etc.) seem to overwrite your auto-attack ticks so that they don't happen at all. Instead, you won't see any auto-attack damage until the next normal "tick".

A final note on the fast versus slow debate
(Thanks to A99barnsey and Brat for reminding me about this)

In every MMO we see a debate about faster weapons versus slower weapons. LOTRO weapon speed seems to work more or less on the same principles as AC and AC2, which means that:

• In a theoretically long fight, auto-attack damage from a fast weapon versus a slow weapon that both have the same exact DPS will be equal.
• In short fights, however, the faster weapon always does more reliable and consistent damage and is therefore better for things like PvP where whiffing one of your big 2H hits can make you lose the damage "race" in a relatively short fight. Yes, a lucky streak with the slower weapon will do more damage but in general for short fights the faster weapon has better odds for doing the most damage within that short time period. I'm not going to rehash the math for this; it's been proven time and again even though this fact seems counterintuitive at first.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make an educated guess, therefore, that armor mitigation in LOTRO probably entails a flat absorption amount rather than a scaling percentage of absorbtion. I could be wrong though! If I'm right, it means that against high-armor targets your auto-attack damage will generally be better with a hard-hitting 2H weapon than a faster but equal DPS weapon.

Another aspect of the fast versus slow debate that is unique to LOTRO is the lack of understanding we currently have about power regeneration from cumulative group buffs. For the DPS classes, the bonus damage from many of your weapon-based skills is based more on all the "extra swings" those skills confer and less on the +damage component. For these skills only, a faster weapon can generate more of that "extra swing" damage over time in a really long fight. The problem is that using a faster weapon to gain this higher damage output from your "extra swings" will burn out all your power long before the fight is over.

Because of the power burn-out issues, it's not easy to calculate which weapon Speed might be better for attack chains comprising mostly those "extra swing" style skills. Intuitively, though, if your fellowship is somehow generating a ton of extra power regen during battle, you should be able to do more damage over the course of a long fight with a faster weapon. Really, though, this is a judgement call and the anecdotal evidence so far points to the slower 2H weapons being superior damage over time in most regards.