Borovian pickaxe can only chain its horde combos indefinitely, while the heavy attack combo will always end on a diagonal with horde-oriented damage profile (aside from resetting through the special attack, which I think is a bit too clunky and cumbersome to feel smooth). Recently, the obscurus force sword had its attack chain changed for a very similar reason - that it couldn’t keep chaining horde combos indefinitely (aside from block-cancelling L1 that is), and I feel the weapon became much more friendly thanks to it without having to pump the numbers up in any way.
I’d like to propose a similar kind of change to borovian pickaxe, where it’s third light attack (overhead) would be followed with the second heavy attack (overhead) instead of the first one (diagonal) like it is right now. It would make the weapon feel a lot better.
I do realize that many other melee weapons in the game could be candidates for such changes (latrine shovel mk 3, achlys mk 8 combat axe, catachan mk 1 devil’s claw sword) but I think most of those weapons have other compounding issues that necessitate a more thorough revision, while in case of borovian pickaxe it feels solid enough in most other areas.
One concern I thought of is that such a change would make branx pickaxe lose a bit of its identity, but given the fact that borovian would still require the pull to start off a single target combo combined with branx’ superior damage profiles and better variety of single target combos, I don’t expect that to be an issue.