"Use Barbarous Thorn Shield or Swiftstrike Buckler. These basically have the same effect people think duel-wielding would have (that being increasing damage output)."

This idea has been done done to death, any many who have suggested this idea had put more thought into it.

Let me give an example thread:

Dual wielding is an attack stance that knight can switch two by pressing a certain mapped key which would equip the next viable/pair-able weapon (will explain in the mechanics section), and can be undone by hitting next/previous weapon key. This mode will offer about a 50-60% attack increase as well as the ability to dual charge (which can create certain special attack when using a certain match up), and longer string of combos, but the down sides include a weaker/limited shielding ability, the loss of the ability to use shield bash and slightly increased charge times.

Mechanics: you cannot simply dual wield any weapon, in order to dual wield weapon need to be the same type(guns with guns, swords with swords, bombs with bombs) and weapons need to be part of the same class/family (example: brandishes with brandishes) with maybe some exceptions. To attack you use you your attack key like always and to shield use the same shielding key. However while pressing both key you can charge your attack at a slower rate.

Attack animation would be different depending on what your dual wielding (this will mainly affect swords, but there won't be a need to make that many new animations. Heavy swords, sealed, troika and other heavy lines*, Brandish, calibur, FoV,spur, would have the same animation, cutter would need a new animation, and flourish would also need it own new animation) about 4 in total.

Special charge attacks will occur with certain pairings, examples: combuster & glacius charge attack would create whirl-wind that can suck up and trap small enemies, same for hail driver & manga driver pairing.

Shielding: unlike shields weapon have defense against all damage type but about half the health of you average shield.

* note: when I say heavy weapon I'm excluding the hammer an explain why in a bit

end of thread

This was an idea I had for a dual wielding a while back but thinking about it now I know many reason why this wouldn't work, be useful (or too useful in certain situations), and way too complicated for the following reasons:

First: dual wielding would require more button mapping and we don't need any more button to press (3 battle sprite keys, 4 pick up short cuts, attack, defend, strafe,next/previous weapon,dash, shield bash, movement key(s) that's 14-18 keys for game play only on a rather simple game)

Second: This may make the game easier in certain aspects, such killing enemies faster, especially bosses, mainly vanaduke, seriously the current record for killing vanaduke is about 50 seconds with max damage on blitz, charge attacks deal about 4500 damage, is there really a need to deal 9000 damage on him does he really take that long to kill?, does it make you happy to beat the life out of an undead king who already lost his entire kingdom to the flames of Vog?

Third: This form of dual wielding (with the use of pre-existing weapons) adds nothing to the game that's worth while and it doesn't open many possibilities for expansion. It won't be like the dash and shield bash up date which offer NEW defensive abilities in spiral knights which can also open a new line of dash modifiers, and a new line of shields that excel at shield bashing.

Finally and most importantly it would plain out look weird on lots of weapons such as the hammer, and bombs in general. I can see dual wield on guns and maybe swords like the like the cutter because it's a short sword but as we get to the large and heavier swords it will look odd and of balance no matter how you make the animation.

In short, dual wielding only sounds cool (and maybe looks cool when standing still) but over all it not worth much of a fuss unless you follow nick's idea.

Nick suggested (in some thread I don't know how to locate) that the most probable way to have dual wield is to create a separate line of weapons that count as one weapon (one slot), they offer limit defense but you can easily switch to you next weapon giving you you're shield back rather quickly just by switching weapons. This also offers much more expansion than anything else because:
-First of all there brand new weapons which mean the game has has more craft-able gear
-Secondly this new gear can allow more bosses to created by make some of these weapon token based gear which
-Thirdly add more recipes to the market and create more materials which can
-Fourthly create new enemy type that offer something new in terms of drop giving more reason for player to explore the clock works.

Over all this form of dual wield is beneficial and much easier to implement than dual wielding pre-existing weapons.

Dual wielding bombs in general equals fourth of July

Dual wielding brandishing pretty equals zombie and construct extinction (and we're barely managed to get the tortodrone population back up just so we can hunt them again)

Dual wielding blitz equal vanaduke needing therapy and or lawsuits of unjustified excessive force

Overall dual wielding equals unnecessary, overkill, and maybe lag in some cases.

Unless you go with Nicks better suggestion and making them into separate weapon that have balance in mind.

Well you got that right, I feel that fixing current weapon takes priority then make new sophisticate ones, though i do hope they make some sort of weapon that behave differently than others