You concerns are already addressed by the Two-Weapon Combat skill, which when trained up makes dual-wielding a viable combat method if the weapons are light, especially for rangers. Making it better or adding more talents would probably tip the balance towards it being overpowered.

Overall I think dual-wielding should be suboptimal. It's not a very sensible way to fight, and it does give a major benefit in double attacks per round (and both prior to enemy attacks).

The twin daggers are still good. Any buff for two-weapon fighting would make them even more powerful, that is true. But dual wielding anything else seems not so attractive. I don't see why it should be suboptimal, it is a fantasy game after all. Striking twice is good, getting retaliated twice is not so good. Even as a ranger I'm more likely to pick up a shield or a 2-hander than dual wield. With the recent buff to 2-handers I think dual wield needs some love too.

I agree with the OP and as a side note, considering the talent names - I suspect you played SW:KotOR game as there are similar solutions there ;)

The only problem with the talent names is that they're not really talents. "Tough" is a property of a person, as is "Boon to the family". "Flurry" doesn't describe the PC.

Something like "Well-timed" and "Precisely-timed" might work. After all, the trick to attacking with two weapons is timing your attacks so that you can attack with both in less than the time it would take to attack with one, and then the other, independently.

For the sake of clarity, let's see what exactly the energy costs are at this moment.

Let's assume a Two-weapon combat skill of 100. A reasonable assumption, because the skill is easy to raise through training. Let's also assume that the lowest weapon skill the player has in the two weapons he is wielding is moderately high, say 8 to 9. This means he can attack with one weapon for some 800 energy points (and attack twice for 1600 EP). When dual wielding, a double attack will cost him 1200 energy points.

Now let's also assume that the dual weapons are both equally good, which is reasonably possible as there exist good candidates like bloody daggers and phase daggers. So his damage per second rating is then increased by a factor of 4/3, that is, +33% if he chooses to dual wield. The higher your weapon skill, the worse dual wielding becomes compared to fighting one handed (because the off-hand attack always costs a fixed 400 EP). At zero skill dual wielding increases your d/s by 43% and at grand mastery it increases your d/s by only 20%.

Actually, now that I think about it, letting the energy cost of your off-hand attack depend on weapon skill instead of a fixed 400 EP seems best to me.

Between using a second weapon and increasing your damage output by ~33%, or using a shield and increasing your DV by easily 100% (not to talk about PV), the optimal choice seems pretty obvious... so yes, I agree with the OP.

I play Two Weapon fighting characters mainly for the coolness factor - both my Archer and Paladin winners finished the game using dual swords whenever viable. never really noticed it being that much worse than using a shield, mainly cause they were killing stuff before it could attack, so it kinda worked as defense?