2h axe vs its counterparts - usable, but lacking

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Gameplay Feedback
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Bardin’s great axe is one of the coolest looking weapons in the game, with nice illusions and great feel.
It’s well known for its anti-armor capabilities and it also is not that bad against monsters, right?
Well, yes. But other weapons in Bardin’s arsenal are simply better - at least for IB. Namely - 2h hammer and 1h axe.
Why am I not using shield and axe? I enjoy “offensive tank builds” since dead enemy is better than alive enemy, so the faster I kill them, the better, killing potential helps more in difficult situations, especially when you’re the last man standing and ulti works the same no matter the weapon.

Lets start with the hammer. I’m using +chaos + armor power on charm. The hammer itself is vanilla. And at 600 hero power I’m dealing 24 dmg to CW with light swing. It means CW is dead in 5 light hits - no headshots needed, and scoring HS on CW can be tricky due to his arm and pauldron placement during attack animations.
Oh and 2h hammer delivers the same 24 dmg with push attack.
Worth to note: 2h hammer actually can benefit greatly from health on stagger simply by beating horde left and right with charged attack.

Now 2h axe, same situation - light attack is 17, 17, then 5,25. Good joke. Push attack? 5,25 too.
So you have to block-cancel every 3rd attack, which is time consuming and when you’re trying to wipe chaos patrol using speed potion, this is even worse.
Charged attack? 23 damage and is noticeably slower. Yes, it staggers CW. So the fastest way to kill CW with axe I think is 3 charged, 3 light attacks. Charged attacks take more time and leave you unable to block for longer. Hammer has no such issues. And 2h axe leaves you with temp HP on kill, because temp HP on stagger is not giving you back enough HP - yes, you can stagger even CW, but staggering CW and clanrat gives back to same amount of THP.

So, hammer may be slower to strike the light attack, but you can simply spam it not worrying about block-cancelling, long block downtimes etc. Spam left click, concentrate on the fight.
Vs bosses?
Finally axe is better. 21,45 vs19,5 and axe light is faster. Too bad 3rd light attack deals 10,5 dmg, so back to the drawing board I guess?
The only real advantage of great axe - charged attack. This deals solid 4 dmg more than light attack ( :smiley: ), but vs boss when he’s aggroed on you, you don’t really have time for more than 1 swing, dodge, swing, dodge. So yeah, better vs bosses I guess.
But IB overall dmg output vs bosses is rather bad and well, drakefire pistols are noticeably better at delivering dmg to all monster-armored enemies anyway - since they are the main source of dmg, the difference between hammer and axe dimnishes in this department - when you’re not aggroed, spam pistols. Simple. When aggroed, you’re not going to deliver a lot of dmg anyway.

But the worst offender is 1h Axe. It delivers exactly the same damage with normal and charged attack vs monsters (bug?), has v. high attack speed, way better dodge range and dodge count (and dodge > block). The only real downside? Range. But it’s way easier to adapt to lower range than to lower damage output and lower dodge range and dodge count.
Horde clear is similiar to 2h axe. And the additional crit chance with crit stagger really makes a difference. How to win? Spam light attack and enjoy the carnage.

Maybe the numbers from the mod displaying damage are wrong, but I doubt that. I have used all 3 weapons and well, I still use 2h axe, cause it looks cool. But I know full well, that my IB is way more useful with 1h axe.

To make the 2h axe great again it needs its push attack power back, more 3rd light damage, so I won’t have to block-cancel it and a slight increase in charged attack damage. Voila. It should be the heavy anti-armor hitter, right now 2h hammer and 1h axe are simply better from gameplay perspective.

Also the dodge distance penalty of 2h weapons should be lowered, because low dodge count is already bad enough in the much more dodge-centered post-patch battlefield.

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I like that the 2h axe was made more useable. But the nerf on the 3rd light(sweep) and push-attack was absolutely unnecessary.
I agree that it’s getting to the point that it seems better to just always avoid the 3rd light and do something else. I hate there’s almost no armorpiercing on the attack now.

In comparison to the 2h hammer though. The hammer’s push attack feels like a total limp d**k. It’s slow to fire, meaning you’re vulnerable. And the attack it’s self goes from top right to bottom left so it won’t hit anything on the sides. At least the axe’s push-attack arc is a full 90 degrees in front of you.

I think it’s kinda on even terms with the 1h axe, and maybe a bit better just because of stagger potential. One thing I don’t like about the smaller axe is that attack chain seems slow and your movement speed goes way down while attacking. It feels super weird for a one-handed weapon.

But the change I’d want most is faster blocks because I feel like a huge idiot whenever I’m trying fend off a skaven horde. The clanrats are too dense and too fast for the greataxe.

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Well, yesterday played a bit more and the lack of stagger was no issue - when you can block instantly and easily dodge (more dodge count and dodge distance), CW is not that much of a threat and the axe kills them very quickly.
While attacking with axe may slow you down, you can run and block all day long. With 2h axe blocking severly limits your movement speed. So overall mobility is better with 1h.
Back then when CW actually landed their overheads unless you dodged in the last moment, I used parry on great axe ehich gave me reasonabld defensive capabilities. Now it’s better to dodge and much easier and with 1h axe dodging is effortless.
Hammer’s push attack is slower, that’s true, but it hits hard and I like that. But the best thing about hammer is temp HP. You stagger horde, you get HP. Simple. Tons of HP actually. With either axe you get HP on kill, which is, unfortunately, a lot less effective. :frowning:

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The third attack strikes me as particularly odd because that defeats the whole purpose of attack chains in general. If the third attack is worthless and necessitates cancelling the chain, it might as well not exist in the first place. Or, better yet, it should do as much or more damage than the first and second attack.

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You guys seem to be forgetting that 2h axe has heavy attacks too. In fact they deal more damage than 2h hammer light attacks and have better cleave. So with the Light 3 “nerf” you can’t just spam light attacks like you can with hammer if you want to maximize armour damage, but you don’t need to because you have heavy attacks too. Changing push and light attacks opens up the possibility of anti-infantry combos. I like the new greataxe because it’s much more versatile.

Anti armour combos:
Light 1, Light 2, block cancel
Heavy 1, Heavy 2
Heavy 1, Light 2, Heavy 2

Anti horde combos:
Heavy 1, Heavy 2, Light 3
Push attack, Heavy 2, Light 3

You can also mix and match to do a half and half combo like Heavy 1, Light 2, Light 3 with both armour and horde damage. If you contrast that to 2h hammer it only has two viable combos

Light attack spam (with optional push attacks mixed in)
Heavy attack spam

I think greataxe is in a good place and we should leave it alone for now.

2h hammer and 1h axe could use some tweaking though. 2h hammer is pretty good in general except for the push attack which is far too slow and doesn’t reliably stagger. Every time you push attack it’s a gamble because it opens up your block for a long time and if you don’t stagger the target you will get hit back. 1h axe just feels OP in general, the monster damage being that high may be a bug so I’ll reserve judgment until after the next patch. There are a number of damage multiplier bugs that popped up during the beta or existed before that still haven’t been fixed.

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