The weapon balance patch was amazing and elevated eg. Bardin’s and Saltzpyre’s 1h Axe to being an actually good weapon.
There’s one 1h axe that you missed, though: Warrior Priest’s Tome is functionally a 1h Axe and is bad exactly for the same reasons: Middling attack rate, no cleave, and the heavies don’t seem to boost damage that much. Would be nice if Tome got uplifted the same way other axes were, it’s one of WP’s coolest weapons and IMO deserves to be actually good, rather than bottom of the pack as it is now.
If you know of another weapon that can cleave through potentially 110 enemies in one hit I’d like to hear it. I took this screenshot just before getting my last Warrior priest challenge (Old-fashioned learning), hitting 60 enemies with one charged tome and hammer attack. There’s some tables just after the hideout fight on The Pit where enemies can’t quite reach you and end up overlaying one another.
There were definitely a minimum of 60 enemies in that ball, but end of mission screen listed me as having 110 ranged kills and I didn’t use a single bomb, or barrel explosion.*
EDIT: I completed this at least 3 years back, not sure if the amount you needed to hit has been reduced, but back when I completed it, it was 60 enemies, it’s still listed as 60 in the Okri’s challenges in the keep.
*Admittedly there might have been some enemies that got killed by the burn damage from my ULT use during the mission.
As for damage, that’ll come down to your talent picks.
It has quick light attacks and you can charge it separately, so used in conjunction with talents like Rising Judgement you’ve got a strong downward striking attack, with unlimited cleave, minimum 25 AOE burn damage and a respectable amount of stagger (increased further with Prayer of Might).
Yes I do. It’s not enough to save the weapon. It’s cool as hell, and works wonderfully up to ~Legend or so, I guess, but it doesn’t cut it on Cata as the sole reason to run the weapon. It’s too infrequent, too easily interrupted while charging, and frankly just doesn’t do damage. It’s more fireworks than work.
If the rest of the weapon was up to par, having access to C2 would be fantastic. As is, the rest of the weapon is a pre-buff Axe, and those were uniformly awful before they got buffed in the last patch. Tome is no exception, except it didn’t get fixed.
Sure, Fire Sword. Which does it nonstop and actually deals damage while doing so. Really juicy C2 hits are cool, I get it, but they are rare, and ultimately C2 just doesn’t do damage, most of the time. It’d be great on a weapon whose standard lights and heavies were good, Tome’s aren’t.
Its whole problem is exactly the lack of cleave, as was the issue with one-handed Axes before the last patch. They were trash because they had a middling attack rate and no cleave, and Tome is in the exact same spot. The explosion isn’t cleave, and just isn’t applicable consistently or frequently enough. Even patterns like Push, Push Attack, Charge 2 just get interrupted even with the push and sweep making space for the spell. And the overall damage just isn’t there.
Genuinely the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the weapon this way. It does exist purely on a double melee class though, so it doesn’t have to do everything, it just has to have enough utility to justify using it as your secondary, which to my experience it absolutely does.
Unfortunately making hyperbolic claims like this really really undermines your credibility. It wasn’t meta, but at absolute worst you could describe it as a bit niche, but still a great fit for shotgun builds and the like. It was absolutely nowhere near awful, and yes, I am using Cata as a reference point for this evaluation.
@OP,* I’d recommend watching some true solo videos or use guides on YouTube on best way to use SS&T, including attack combination patterns such as you would use on weapons like The Holy Great Hammer (L,L,H for armour/single targets and H,H, L for hordes ). Not being facetious here, I genuinely have never seen anyone complain about SS&T’s cleave.
*Still not 100% convinced it isn’t as OP contradicts themselves bemoaning the apparent lack of cleave on SS&T and then saying fire sword also has infinite cleave. I have to wonder what difficulty OP plays on, Fire sword is nice but doesn’t deal high levels of damage on single hits comparative to SS&T.
Per run, or per week, none because unless you’re specifically holding a point to allow enemies to overlap to hit 50 or more with one hit you’re simply not going to hit that many as no melee weapon has the range.
Assuming that your question is aimed at the proving the point of the OP then that’s a False equivalence as you’d be conflating capability with frequency. In the OP’s own words:
“…no cleave, and the heavies don’t seem to boost damage that much” - Neither of these are true.
It can cleave through 60+ enemies, it doesn’t need to consistently hit 60+ enemies at least once in every single run for it to be viable. A well placed smite can easily hit and stagger 20+ enemies with one hit on a Cata run. It You don’t have to favour it either, I prefer running F&S with the Great hammer as those were the two weapons I stuck with when the DLC first came out (following chocoB’s build) so I have much more experience with those two weapons, but I still use SS&T occasionally and it is good, it doesn’t need any more buffs.
The Axe was and still is one of the best weapons for beginners. For the first 200 hours or so of V2 I used it almost exclusively because it’s so easy to use - no combos, all anti-armor attacks, so you don’t have to think about which one to use. Just click and it works.
I have over a thousand hours in the game, WP is probably my third most played career, and I love Tome. I know how to use it, thanks. This is the point:
None of Tome’s lights has any cleave whatsoever. 2.24 is the number that says “no cleave”, which is what pre-buff Axes used to have.
Yes, tome has the explosion on C2. It’s not enough to save the weapon. It’s infrequent, easily interrupted by enemies even if you go into it from push attack to get space. And even though C2 hits are juicy, they’re too infrequent to carry the weapon.
Light spam and heavy spam (no charge, so notated Lnumber and Hnumber) are just one handed axe tier, ie. really bad.
Bad doesn’t mean “totally unusable”, you can just about make any weapon in the game work even on Cata - but 1h Axes got buffed for a reason. Tome is a 1h Axe. It was skipped over in the patch. Tome was probably the least bad 1h Axe exactly because of the C2 explosion and the push attack being a real sweep.
But that just isn’t enough. Not even to compete against Dual Hammers as the generalist/antihorde weapon, nevermind the Flail, and it also just loses to Dual Hammers and especially Reckoner as a single target weapon.
You’d be wrong, and calling 1h Axes awful before the buffs isn’t hyperbole. They were easily the worst weapon category in the game, perhaps outdone in suckiness by Bardin’s/Kruber’s Great Hammer if used as a main weapon.
No, the frequency absolutely matters. If you could just spam Charged 2 on Tome, it’d be a good weapon most likely. You can’t. None of the lights and heavies have cleave, which was the point.
It’s like if I said Bardin/Kruber Great Hammer is bad (which it is) because it does no damage (120% true, if we’re talking horde dps - the horde clear is abominably bad) and people said it’s false because the single target lights are good (which they genuinely are, which is why Great Hammer’s recommended as second slot for Slayer/GK), which is just weird reasoning.
Charged 2 is a good attack, everyone ever agrees. The problem is that the entire rest of the weapon isn’t, and Charged 2 isn’t enough to save it.
I’m not trying to be a pedant about weapons’ peak capabilities here. I’m just talking about the general quality. And Tome’s lacking in it, severely, even if the rare peaks are genuinely really juicy.
I’d far rather recommend something like picking WP and spamming Flail heavies or BW with Lingering and spamming Fire Sword heavies. No brain activity, but you can actually hit multiple enemies and do work.
You don’t need to play Twitch for pre-buff Axes to be bad. They genuinely were subpar. Not unworkable for a skilled player bad, but easily the worst weapon category in the game (or second worst, since Bardin/Kruber Great Hammer exists)
Vermintide exists and existed in a good place where even those weren’t completely unworkable even on Cata, but they really, really were behind, and by a lot.
I think people are using “bad” differently here. I used 1h Axe extensively before the patch, and I still use Greathammer quite often. I would describe both as specialized and sometimes comparatively inefficient, but not bad overall.
Greathammer’s heavies trade kill speed for exceptional crowd control. They stagger extremely well and keep moving through dense, armor-mixed groups, while its lights provide strong single-target and armored damage. Its real problem is comparative efficiency: with enough power and stagger investment, other weapons can reach many of the same useful stagger breakpoints while also killing more quickly. That can make Greathammer suboptimal beside certain Kruber and Bardin options, but suboptimal is not the same as nonfunctional. I would not confuse Crowd Control with Crowd Clearing. They’re 2 different things. Again, the problem is that builds can be designed easily so that Crowd Clearing weapons do enough stagger that main-purpose crowd control weapons are often just crutches to help people survive better, and Greathammer is requires careful timing so you don’t get poked between heavy attacks, so it’s not even that great at that, and you sacrifice the dodge count/distance of other 1h weapons that can stagger like Mace/Hammer. I guess if one were to buff it, just give all it’s attacks a 20% damage boost or something.
Likewise, the 1h Axe had a legitimate use. Its principal weakness was cleave, but it already had strong anti-armor damage, good defensive statistics and +10% critical chance on its lights. On Slayer it gets around 35% crit chance on lights; even before the buff, it was devastating. Ironbreaker and Ranger Veteran could pair it with Drakefire weapons or the Grudge-Raker to cover its poor crowd clear. You mentioned using melee careers to pick a weapon to offset their weaknesses, but the point is, there’s nothing stopping you from doing that with ranged weapons too.
I agree that Axe having low cleave in a horde game made it a lot less useful, but I think the total package in the recent patch went too far. So far, it’s received additional cleave, better movement while attacking, greater dodge range and stronger armored and super-armored heavies. That substantially reduced its defining weakness while leaving its crit, mobility and single-target strengths intact. I would not say it categorically outclasses Dual Axes or Axe & Falchion, but I think 1H axe generally is now just better than Falchion, and I daresay it’s close to making Greataxe seem pretty obsolete. 1h Axe is now OP for sure, it just needed a small cleave boost for handling trash, even then, it was one of my most used weapons on Bounty Hunter, RV, and Ironbreaker for the way it pairs nicely with CC ranged.
The same design logic applies to Hammer & Tome. I agree that its ordinary lights have essentially no cleave. That is intentional, and it is not the entirety of the weapon’s crowd-control kit. The push attack creates space, while charged H2 provides the large-area stagger and density payoff. Those tools cost stamina, positioning and timing, as they should. Warrior Priest also has a second melee slot, so Hammer & Tome does not need clear through crows with light attack spam.
With pre-charging and careful positioning, Heavy 2 is not merely a rare highlight involving fifty conveniently stacked enemies. It can be used repeatedly throughout ordinary dense engagements. Light attack 1 into Heavy 2 is the weapon’s intended routing to get that juicy powerful explosion attack. Evaluating it primarily through light spam or uncharged-heavy spam ignores the part of the moveset carrying its specialization.
So I do not think resembling the old 1h Axe automatically means Hammer & Tome deserves the same changes. Tome already possesses the multi-target attacks, which 1h Axe lacked.
The Flail and Shield I’d argue is OP, it’s pretty blatantly abusable. I think making it’s light attacks have a little more cleave, and then making the heavy windup slower would be a good way to balance both Flail and Shield, and the regular Flail. Also, might consider tweaking the dodge distance/count of each.
On WP, the only weapon I tend to get similar damage output compared to Skull-Splitter and Tome is the Reckoner, but not quite. The Skull-Splitter and Tome tends to be an easy (albeit a bit boring) way to get max damage. With timing, positioning, and practice, that thing clears out hordes. You have 1k hours, I have 4k hours and I still learn new things. I’ve confidently blundered into these forums about buffs/nerfs only to completely change my mind after investing more time. It’s true that with more time investment, you can learn to make anything work, but I can confidently say that the Skull-Splitter and Tome is the #1 weapon on WP for racking up damage numbers, and the only reason I wouldn’t say nerf it, is because it’s not a capable weapon on it’s own. By design, it’s light attacks suck.
Axe: Good Single-Target / Anti-Armor, bad at cleave.
Greathammer: Good crowd control, decent single-target, bad at crowd clearing.
Skull-splitter and Tome: Powerful AoE attack, terrible at most everything else.
I wouldn’t even say it’s bad at everything else either. The second special attack is great for speed and killing specials. And the basic attack is good against single armored enemies. And push attack is a nice emergency move that keeps enemies at a distance.
Then you are the ONLY person I’ve encountered (not saying there can’t be others) who has over a thousand hours in the game who thinks the Tome is lacking. Although a over a thousand hours on “probably” your third most played character doesn’t really equate to much. Not an accusation (as I’m thinking of someone specifically on my friend list who has 9000+ hours but runs zealot with Nat bond and refuses to try Barkskin), but thousands of hours doesn’t actually mean someone knows how to use a weapon, or that they’re any good at the game.
“No, the frequency absolutely matters. If you could just spam Charged 2 on Tome, it’d be a good weapon most likely. You can’t. None of the lights and heavies have cleave, which was the point.”
If you equate viability or capability for hitting a minimum of 60 enemies with one smite at least once per run then as I said before that is a False equivalence. The ability to just spam the second charged attack makes it very difficulty for me to take you seriously. The light attacks are fast, there’s nothing stopping you from using a push attack, then straight into heavy 2, or light attacking into heavy 2.
Again with the "None of the lights and heavies have cleave" … If there is no cleave on the heavies then why does the Okri challenge “Old-Fashioned Learning” exist?
“They were easily the worst weapon category in the game, perhaps outdone in suckiness by Bardin’s/Kruber’s Great Hammer if used as a main weapon.”
I’m sorry, but this is where you completely lose me in terms of the seriousness of your complaint. Has it occurred to you that perhaps horde clear and stagger are more the point for spamming heavies if you’re using Great hammer?
I’m obviously talking pre-recent buff,
tell me why would you pick a weapon that:
cripples your mobility,
effectively removes any ult gen gain from combat,
has awkward thp gen,
and in exchange offers mediocre defensive capabilities and middling single-target damage?
No, axe had MIDDLING single-target damage.
It wasn’t low, it wasn’t high, it was average.
I can’t run and record actual tests with the old axe without some mod to revert the changes, especially the movement speed one valuable for practicality, but I think the next best thing would be to look at the DPS spreadsheet. This has its flaws since it omits stuff like stagger or practicality, but that’s the case for every number, so it’s good enough for basic comparison I think.
Single-target dps, EP, at 40% HS rate, 15% Crit, vs Armoured:
Axe: ~25.5
Dual Hammers: ~23.6
Hammer: ~27
Great hammer: ~36
Daggers: ~52
Elf sword: ~30
Falchion: ~29.8
Rapier: ~30 (at 100% HS rate: ~44 vs axe’s ~32)
Axe did have decent single-target stagger that helped it some more in practice, although bad movement speed made it much harder to fight multiple elites, especially if some trash was involved.
I could present these numbers with any other config of HS rate or lvl 15, yet the conclusion would be the same.
Also, for whatever that’s worth, from weapon balance patch:
So, again, Axe was awful, no, the problem wasn’t solely that it lacked cleave vs hordes, there were significantly more problems with it. To go over my mentioned points:
Crippling mobility:
‘But Axe had 6 dodges + 20% dodge range!!! Elven version even had 100 dodges!!!’ - it also had one of the largest movement speed slowdowns for attacks in the entire game. On EVERY SINGLE attack. Every single attack you did, you instantly slowed down to a crawl - there wasn’t a slowdown into a lunge, nor a progressive go from high to low speed.
The moment the attack started, movement speed went down dramatically and stayed there as long as you were swinging and even in between swings, if my memory doesn’t fail me.
Basically no ult gen from combat:
It had alright attack speed and no cleave. I don’t think I need to elaborate.
Awkward thp gen:
This is because:
Execute, so relied primarily on elite kills and partially on hordes, using, if we are talking shotguns, etc., builds which for the most part had no/few melee buffs.
Considering that shotgun+axe=good idea existed for a long time, before thp changes, horde thp gen was even worse, terrible vs skaven.
Second Wind, so relied primarily on push spam into hordes. Only after the thp changes.
Carve, so you got 1 hp per swing.
Sting, for better thp gen with a high headshot rate - aided by +10% crit chance, but held back a bit by average attack speed. Also, considering the headshot rate of even average cataclysm players, this is always questionable imo.
Or you used stagger/cleave thp with shotgun bashes, obv only applicable if combined with shotguns, and also ‘awkward’ since it meant you relied for thp gen without the ability to block easily.
And obviously, if before the thp changes, lesser selection of thp talents.
Average defensive capabilities:
Basic 6 stam; basic push; basic block angle; basic block cost on both angles; basic movement speed when blocking and pushing.
A good defensive quality it has is that it allows you to block quickly during light attacks. Also, cheaper push, but axe got cheaper push when many other weapons received it too.
So I’d say it has average defensive capabilities, although no cleave and bad movement speed are not insignificant problems for defence, never mind the offence.
Basically, old Axe with shotguns/hagbane/drakefire/etc. was ‘how do I make axe seem good?’ not ‘how do I complement my main dps weapon (ranged) the best?’ because:
Why not pick rapier with both better movement speed and dodges, cheaper block on inner angle, amazing headshot damage vs trash for fast blessed combat as well as good dps vs armour provided a good headshots, with superior thp gen with both carve and sting?
Why not pick sword and dagger with better attack speed, overall damage output across the board, better mobility, including a move tech, and better thp+ult gen?
Why not pick 1h hammer with comparable damage vs armour, but more stamina, much better thp and ult gen, very strong single-target stagger and overall superior safety in party due to its very high stagger cleave?
Why, on a ranged-centric build, focus your melee entirely on single-target damage, when that weapon had so many drawbacks and when dps isn’t even extremely high?
At least with elf, focusing on single-target damage with melee means you pick daggers for one of the best single-target dps weapons in the entire game (on top of great mobility and actually slightly higher cleave than the old axe), while axe’s dps is not even close to the numbers daggers do.
Ultimately, if you orient the vast majority of your game impact on a ranged weapon, why not:
Pick something with simple, easy and fast thp gen, like a shield or hammer or dual hammers or snd or even maybe falchion?
Pick something with strong push and cheap block, like a shield, that allows to create space; or something with high mobility both for dodges and combat speed to allow for easy kiting?
So again, old axe was awful.
No, old axe didn’t complement these ranged weapons well,
IT was complemented BY these ranged weapons well.
It only offered good single-target damage, instead of good mobility/push/block or thp/ult gen among other things - in some variation, all offered by many other melee picks which also had at least decent(if not superior) single-target damage.
On its own, it was a completely not versatile weapon, with big drawbacks and little advantage. You could get good numbers with it just like with everything else, yet it was just inferior to so much other stuff.
You’ve repeated that several times. I don’t think it was. It was probably the most underrated weapon. The old Axe wasn’t meta, universally efficient, or free of weaknesses. I considered it mediocre, but exceptionally good in its particular role: complementing a ranged weapon or second melee weapon that already handled density.
If my Grudge-Raker, Drakefire weapon, Duckfoot or other crowd-control option already handled hordes, I did not necessarily need another melee weapon devoted to producing more cleave. I needed something that could quickly kill and control elites without sacrificing the mobility of a one-handed weapon. That’s always been the axe’s role.
I was genuinely shocked by the DPS numbers. I went to reproduce the numbers you posted using the public Melee Combo DPS spreadsheet and your stated settings: 40% headshots, 15% listed crit, Enhanced Power and armour. I don’t have the spreadsheet, but I used the source code for some calculations. On the surface, the numbers are good, but that’s not the full story.
Falchion H1-L2-L3 does produce approximately 29.8 armour DPS. But Axe L1+QQ produces approximately 28. The Axe’s ordinary L1-L2-L3 chain is approximately 25, so it appears you may be comparing the Axe’s basic light chain against the Falchion’s optimized single-target combination.
That is already a much smaller difference: roughly 28.1 versus 29.8 before accounting for Swift Slaying or the usual attack-speed property. It certainly does not demonstrate that Axe’s single-target performance was merely average, much less that the complete weapon was “awful.”
All three old Axe lights had an attack-specific +10% critical chance. With the conventional setup, that means:
Slayer’s crit talent raises that to 35%. Swift Slaying gives 20% attack speed for five seconds and refreshes on every critical hit. Using the actual pre-patch attack timings, 25% crit gives roughly 94–96% sustained Swift Slaying uptime while spamming Axe lights. At 35%, it is approximately 99%. That effectively gives you about 30 DPS with axe.
Falchion also benefits from Swift Slaying, but it begins at 15% rather than 25% under the same property setup and therefore has appreciably lower uptime. A comparison that uses neither the common +5% attack-speed property nor Swift Slaying disproportionately undervalues the Axe’s hidden crit bonus.
The spreadsheet also admittedly omits stagger and practical attack uptime. Those omissions are especially important here. Axe lights had substantial first-target impact, and against armour a critical light changed the impact modifier from 0.5 to 1.0. With Enhanced Power, which I frequently used, the additional 7.5% power increased both damage and impact, though it arguably benefits more from Smiter or Assassin.
In practice, my Axe lights could repeatedly stagger Stormvermin and Maulers. That allowed me to continue attacking, produce more critical hits and keep Swift Slaying running. I could and did fight entire Stormvermin patrols in melee with the pre-patch Axe. Its heavies also gave it a decent answer to super armour and Chaos Warriors.
That interaction is why the weapon can give you more effective damage output. Once a Stormvermin can be kept staggered by light attacks, the Axe gains substantially more safe attack uptime than a damage-only spreadsheet represents.
The official patch notes do not establish your broader conclusion either. Fatshark described its armoured damage as “slightly lacking” compared with other weapons and consequently buffed the heavies against armour and super armour. “Slightly lacking” is not “awful,” and it says nothing to invalidate the old lights’ damage, crit rate or stagger. The same patch also improved cleave, attack movement and dodge range simultaneously. My position is that the total package went too far, not that every individual change was unjustified. Patch 6.11 notes
I agree that the old attack-movement slowdown was a weakness. “Crippling mobility” still overstates the entire package. It had six effective dodges, 120% dodge distance and speed, six stamina, and unusually quick access to blocking during its light attacks. Compare that with Greataxe: Greataxe was my preferred Bardin option when I wanted maximum armoured damage, but it was slower and had only two effective dodges with no distance bonus. The 1H Axe sacrificed some output for much better evasive mobility.
The Elven Axe is also a poor stand-in for the Bardin/Saltzpyre Axe. Its moveset differs, and Kerillian’s careers already bring their own speed and mobility. Sword and Dagger belongs to a different character and role. Rapier is a legitimate Saltzpyre alternative, but it is much more dependent on headshots over staggering elites, and is irrelevant to Ranger Veteran and Ironbreaker. These comparisons show that alternatives existed; they do not show that the Axe lacked a role.
Hammer is a much better comparison and alternative, but with the axe, light attacks and Swift Slaying uptime, you’re going to have a much easier time handling multiple elites while also dealing significant damage. You can knock around elites with the hammer’s light attacks, but it’s heavy attacks aren’t going to handle several Stormvermin nearly as well.
This is also overstated. Ordinary combat cooldown generation is on hit, not exclusively on kill or cleave. The cooldown function grants it for melee light and heavy hits, while non-melee attacks receive it on their first target. Low cleave therefore reduces multi-target melee cooldown generation, but it does not “effectively remove” combat generation, and the ranged weapons in these ranged-centric builds generate cooldown themselves. Cooldown-on-hit source
THP was the old Axe’s most legitimate weakness, particularly before the THP rework. Even then, I found it one of the weapons that worked reliably with Execute because it killed elites quickly. After Execute was strengthened, that weakness became substantially less serious.
Yeah, it changes how the loadout is being evaluated.
A crowd-clearing ranged weapon has a hole in its coverage: armoured elites and durable isolated targets. The Axe filled that hole. Simultaneously, the ranged weapon covered the Axe’s weakness against density. The weapons complemented one another, but the reason I selected Axe was specifically because it supplied what the primary damage source lacked.
Choosing 1H Hammer instead would provide additional crowd control and THP generation. Choosing Axe concentrated the melee slot on armoured damage, first-target stagger and elite removal. That is normal loadout specialization, not “trying to make Axe seem good.”
I don’t think anybody here is asking for the Axe to be restored wholesale to its pre-patch state. My actual position is:
The old Axe was mediocre as a generalist but very effective in a specialized anti-armour role.
A modest cleave improvement was defensible.
The combined cleave, movement, dodge and heavy-damage buffs made the present Axe overtuned. Right now, I think it overshadows Falchion.
None of this proves Hammer & Tome needs to receive that same complete package.
More importantly, this thread is supposed to be about Hammer & Tome. Tome already has tools the old Axe did not: its push attack, charged H2 explosion, special mobility attack, and Warrior Priest’s second melee slot. Evaluating it primarily through light spam and uncharged-heavy spam ignores the attack carrying its crowd-control specialization.
I am happy to continue the old Axe disagreement in a dedicated thread, preferably with the exact spreadsheet configuration and a reproducible pre-patch test. But “old Axe was awful” cannot serve as the premise that automatically settles Hammer & Tome’s balance.
If you want, I was planning on including pre-patch versions of weapons in my Tweaker: Weapons mod. I think I’ll get to work on that now as it could genuinely be useful. Note that it’s much easier to tweak this mod with Tweaker: GUI’s interface than the VMF. It provides the native-style settings interface combined with VMF options for all my mods.
I used the L1-L2-L3-BC chain because that is the optimised combo vs normal armour.
The reason why I haven’t used L1+QQ is that if you aren’t LITERALLY perfect on QQ, and I do mean LITERALLY PERFECT, the dps increase will be very small, and there is a pretty good chance that you’ll straight up be lowering the damage output.
This sort of QQ efficiency, even for just one engagement, never mind the whole game, doesn’t exist outside of the spreadsheet, no matter if it’s a player’s first time using it, or a guy with 9000 hours on axe alone.
The damage drop-off from having anything that isn’t literally perfect QQ efficiency for this specific combo is such that taking it into consideration as an actual combo is not a thing at all without a macro.
On the other hand, I did take into account QQ for Greathammer, using L1+L2+QQ, since that combo is much better than just light spam, and QQ’ing it is pretty easy AND the DPS drop from not being perfect is significantly less harmful to damage output. I still didn’t use the number for a literally perfect QQ rate, but an undervaluation of a far from absolutely perfect QQ rate.
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Just to make it clear, the spreadsheet accounts for base crit chance increases of a weapon. But I suppose your point is more related to SS uptime, which is fair enough.
To that point, I’d just note that SnD will usually have very high SS uptime regardless of scenario for a number of reasons, while Rapier can use special to proc SS (at little cost if Blessed Combat). But admittedly, a lot of other melee weapons, like hammer, will suffer vs axe.
As I said, spreadsheet omits practicality and axe did have decent single-target stagger.
How effective stagger is, remains more dependant on enemy type, since vs SV you’d stagger with basically every attack almost always, while vs CW/Bestigor it was more crit reliant, yet reasonably reliable.
Nonetheless, this stagger and crit chance is also why I called the damage ‘average’ and ‘middling’ even though for pure numbers it was lower than the rest of the weapons (except one) I’ve listed, or why later I called 1h Hammer’s single-target damage ‘comparable’ instead of better.
Especially in comparison to 1h Hammer, Axe has better SS uptime and staggers with its damaging attacks, while with 1h Hammer vs armour, it won’t have 100% SS uptime, and some swings will usually be spent on attacks with high single-target stagger for safety (if fighting multiple armoured enemies alone), both lowering the effective DPS.
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I didn’t call axe’s damage awful, I called the single-target damage:
‘Awful’ refers to the weapon as a whole.
Sure, and if you used Graxe with a shotgun RV, etc., I’d be scratching my head. Old axe isn’t literally the worst pick for such a build. It’s just not very good.
If you classify eating breadcrumbs collected from the cutting board as ‘eating’, then I suppose that a weapon which, in almost every scenario, hits one enemy at a time ‘generates’ ult from combat.
Of course axe generates ult from combat, it doesn’t bend the mechanics of the game.
Yet, you are hitting 1 enemy per swing. With ok attack speed per swing. One enemy per swing.
Do I have to explain what ‘effectively remove’ is supposed to mean here? Do I have to investigate hpw many swings/seconds it’d usually take to get 10s of cooldown on RV using old axe?
If you are fine running Execute on a build with no/few melee buffs and can reliably generate thp vs elites and hordes when playing with other people (not bots), sure, execute thp axe is quite fine.
I’m the first in line to advocate for people using execute on more builds, but I find that a lot of people are really aversive to it, even on strong melee builds.
Yet, I’d call it ‘awkward’ because, as a ranged build, you are probably not the first in line for meleeing armoured elites, and not the most statistically predisposed to be an armoured elite killer in comparison to basically any other character on the team.
Picking Execute also means you effectively no longer generate temp with shotgun bashes.
So I’d say it’s ‘awkward’ - that doesn’t necessarily mean bad.
You omit this part:
Ranged-centric builds want significantly more other things than damage from their melee weapon.
Using a damage-oriented melee weapon at the cost of utility on a ranged build is banking on things going well rather than preparing for things to go bad.
Unless this melee damage is overwhelmingly high, this is a bad idea.
I’m way more sympathetic to using daggers on WS with hagbane, simply because the damage output is very high and actually quite a lot ahead of other picks, while also providing great mobility and attack speed.
Yet, going for simply the highest damage weapon is NOT maximising the potential of your ranged weapon, which is what I meant by saying that old axe didn’t complement these ranged weapons, EVEN THOUGH, axe itself was complemented BY these ranged weapons.
If you are orienting your playstyle around a ranged weapon, you want fast and easy thp gen to get back to shooting as soon as possible.
You want ability to find space to shoot - either by creating it yourself (like shield push+bash/high stagger cleave) or by getting to it with good mobility (in particular movetech).
If you are spending time getting thp, you aren’t shooting. If you shoot but stay at low hp, you are at a much greater risk of dying.
If you have enemies right in your face, you aren’t shooting.
Axe won’t help generate thp rapidly on a ranged build, nor will it create space, and it’s not in any particular way good at finding it. It simply deals alright damage to armour.
If you pick hammer, you’ll have rapid thp gen, easy ability to create space, and alright mobility to move to a better spot. And you’ll deal less armour damage, yet it’s still not something super low like with dual swords, and it isn’t far behind axe like it would be behind dual daggers.
Simply put, crowd-clearing ranged weapons, especially on ranged-oriented careers, want much more than just to have armour damage covered. You want fast thp, space, high mobility, etc., extra ult is nice. Good armour damage is secondary to them.
And, sure, if the choice was between axe and a high utility weapon with anti-armour dps akin to base dual swords, then I’d be more supportive of old axe.
But even 1h Hammer has decent armour damage and, unlike old axe, offers so much more utility that is useful to any ranged-oriented build.
Other picks are not extremely slower at killing armour, yet provide more utility, and old axe had movement speed akin to most immobile 2h weapons across every attack, so I wouldn’t really classify it with mobility of most 1h weapons.
I agree, I’m in the process of writing a response to the original topic, since there are things I agree and disagree with in regards to the assessment of hammer and tome.
Comments on old axe are related entirely to old axe and my opinion that it was awful. Whether it should have a thread or not, I don’t care.
Mostly, because I also don’t know what else I could say other than what I’ve already stated:
Ranged-centric builds want good utility with their melee, and old axe did not offer that, it only offered decent anti-armour damage, which isn’t so much higher than that of high-utility-alternatives to make old axe a good/great pick.
