Dual wield question

Right now I'm playing an Adventurer that dual wields pistols. Lately, I've been paying pretty close attention to the two yellow bars in the upper-left of the screen that show the delay between attacks. In watching these I've noticed something that's raised a question in my mind.

Specifically, I've noticed that only one will fill at a time. For example, weapon 1 will fill its yellow bar and then fire. Then, its bar stops filling and holds still while weapon 2 fills and fires. Then weapon 2 holds while weapon 1 turns around. The end result seems to be that my weapons are taking turns firing instead of firing at the same time.

Therefore, if I'm correct, I'm actually firing the exact same number of shots per second as if I was wielding only one pistol. The only difference is that I'm firing A-B-A-B instead of A-A-A-A.

Is this correct? Am I right that weapons just alternate instead of attacking together and giving me twice the amount of damage like in EQ?

Thanks in advance for the help! :)

The way it's been explained to me is that the weapons do take turns firing. However, they recharge at the same time. So if you had one weapon going Fire, Recharge, Fire, Recharge, Fire, Recharge, then with two weapons you'd have Fire, Fire, Recharge, Fire, Fire, Recharge.

So, if the two weapons are roughly equal QL, then you're getting a benefit from dual-weilding. If your off hand weapon is low QL, though, then you're probably lowering your damage by dual-weilding.

You may want to verify this over on the Adv forum, though.

Multi-Wielding only increases your RoF by abot 25%-33%, depending on your luck and speed allocation of your pistols. Combined that with the fact that it is impossible to dual-wield the decent pistols at anything near the same QL and it means that the actual damage increase yielded by dual-wielding in most instances is around -10%-15%. (Yes, you CAN gimp your damage dual-wielding.)

-Jayde

Ok, thank you all VERY much for your detailed answers! Looks like I'll be getting some points back from emptying out dual ranged :)