Guide: Git Gud @ IB RQ

Still good to point out that off-balance is broken.

I run a crit IB with 2h axe, so consider SS to be superior. I still wouldn’t take a 20% debuff even if it stacked correctly. 50% would be great for abusing the anti-boss ranged meta though.

But yeah, if you’re not running crit and are running block cost reduction, then you’d run off-balance because it’s not like there are any good alternatives.

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Good point. I’ll add that to the post.

My build is almost identical, but I run with Swift Slaying and bring crit chance on my charm and my weapon. Procs often enough to be worth it, and allows you to easily chop through a horde or chaos warrior… Other than that, Off Balance is honestly not worth it anymore. Its only 20%, and only for 3 seconds. I’d recommend giving Opportunist a go, or Parry. Both are extremely good and very underrated traits.

Being a hairy Scottish man of average height, I was immediately drawn to Bardin (/all dwarfs in any game I have ever played) and have approximately 200hrs of gametime with 90% of it on IB. I adored the 2H hammer in VT1 and has been my weapon of choice through vet, champ and Legend. Initially, I ran with the pistols in vet and found that I consistently on top of the leaderboards in terms of number of green circles obtained (not that I care about green circle acquisition, actually dislike the system in general as it does not promote teamplay). After switching to champ, I made the switch to the gruderaker and found it to be a great weapon for higher difficulties.

My issue with the pistols is that they may be highly effective at removing ambient mobs and dealing with hordes, they fail to delete specials instantly at close to medium range. This may not be important in the majority of situations, but when your brawling in the middle of a horde and a leech teleports in, you’ll struggle to find a more effective deletion tool than the gruderaker. It has been a while since I have used the pistols so I am a bit hazy on which specials are staggered, but sometimes the additional couple of seconds it takes to put a few shots into a special can be the difference in a cluckertruck fight. It is also highly preferential to kill the special rather than stagger and have to deal with later, when you might not have a shot.

You also mention in your guide that LMB should only be used on hordes when they are lined up. In this situation, gruderaker is king/queen/democratically elected government official. One shot will clear the entire line and do significant damage to any special unlucky to be caught in the blast. This is also apparant when a hyper density blob comes knocking. I find myself frequently switching to the shotty to pop off one shot while holding a horde in a choke point, just to reduce the potential for stacking.

Either way, I am planning on trying out your build for a few days to see how it feels as i’ve been meaning to go back to the pistols at some point. Good to see a discussion about IB hit the forums again. I feel the class is often overlooked as it is generally considered one of the more forgiving classes, and therefore easy to play. I still think that high level IB play is not something that is easy to achieve, especially due to his inability to deal with bosses.

Finally, something I never see mentioned is the use of your 1 free hit every X seconds as an offensive trait. Too often it is assumed to be a safety blanket for those who cant look behind them or avoid direct damage, as opposed to a hit trade enabler. Maybe I will soak this CW overhead if it means I can get 2 extra hits on it before it has a chance to recover.

Someday I will figure out how to record some gameplay and put some pictures to my haphazardly worded ramblings.

You can only do that if you give up Power vs, meaning you’re missing some important breakpoints.

That’s not something I can agree with. That’s sacrificing vital breakpoints to have an abysmal 20% crit rate on a slow weapon that we only pull out for CW, bosses, and occasional other elites/specials. Using Axe for horde isn’t nearly as effective as Pistol pbaoe blasts.

People keep alluding to this, but it’s a crazy sentiment for a number of reasons:

  • It’s not just 20%, it’s 20% Power for the entire team. That said, even 20% alone is a substantial power boost. Without a single Power vs Armour, I still deal 145% damage to CW.
  • It reapplies, meaning that vs Spawn, the boss is pretty much perma debuffed anytime you’re kiting it
  • 3s is way more than enough to dummy a CW and it does make a big difference
  • Off Balance = Bardin’s Ult basically reads “tank everything in play and the party gains a 20% power boost for the duration.” This is especially true with heavier targets in the mix.

@InFro I love Grudge and use it on RV and I’d love to use it on IB but the issue is that the ammo sustainability just isn’t there and that it has a slow reload w/o both Fast Hands and Loaded for Battle. It’s also not as good vs hordes as Pistol blast w breakpoints. It’s also useless against CW/bosses w/o Disengage or, at minimum, a STR pot which you’ll never have because you’ll always be grim bearer. Great vs Maulers but only average vs SV w/o major breakpoint investment and the worst weapon in the game vs Packrats. Also has less effective range than Pistols.

Fair points. Same reasons I want to try the little pooters again. You rarely run out of ammo if you save shots for specials and the occasional hyper density clear. Combine general ammo conservation with scrounger perk, you can punch your way to full ammo relatively easily (couple of punches into a horde should get you there). The hardest part is going from pistols to grudge and resisting the urge to unload into every rat bastard you see.

When it comes to CW, 2H hammer has you covered and I tend to stick to special and horde CC when a boss shows up (unless its roger, where locking him in place indefinitely is easily done if you manage to hold aggro).

Packrats are the bane of my existence and the main reason I am contemplating the switch. The blanket “monsters now super resistant to shotguns because we broke the game by allowing huntsman to one shot bosses with blunderbuss” has been a real pain. Like the idea of trying a completely new build though and trying out my red 2H axe, which just looks delightful.

Yeh it’s just @ max crit rate of 20%, which you have to sacrifice critical breakpoints to achieve, Scrounger’s feast or famine. Even on characters with way higher crit rates, Scrounger isn’t generally enough to reliably sustain ammo without RNG.

If you haven’t tried the 2H axe yet I’d strongly recommend it. It’s great paired with either Grudge or Pistols. Feels a lil wonky at first compared to hammer but much better single target damage and surprisingly good for bosses.

I realized I could push the Power vs min:max harder and @Fatshark_Hedge was kind enough to update the OP with my latest edits. Here are the changes:

  • Ranged weapon is now Power vs Chaos + Power vs Infantry, Charm is now Power vs Chaos + Power vs Armour (this removed 1x Power vs Infantry and Power vs Skaven). This achieves all of the same critical horde-wrecking breakpoints as before with Barrage, with the stacks from the initial blasts pushing the envelope for both Skaven and Chaos hordes now. This ensures all important breakpoints are achieved while better enhancing melee output vs CW, Maulers, and the three non-Roger (ie. more threatening) bosses.

  • 2H Axe is now Power vs Chaos + Attack Speed + Off Balance. Removed the turtly properties, as they weren’t required and didn’t make a huge difference as in any situation where they’d actually help you’d be wrect regardless w/o your ult. This new build hits the charged-light-charged-light Mauler breakpoint (can kill em with less if you hose them with Pistol fire as you close distance). Hits critical SV breakpoints w/o Barrage needed. Max possible melee output vs CW. Attack speed helps sneak shots in before you need to block more easily (and it’s the only other valuable property since we’re not doing a crit build). Off Balance still present to ensure our ult still has the added effect of giving the entire party a 20% Power boost for up to 20s vs big threats like Chaos Patrols while you keep them contained.

  • Necklace is now Health +20% + Damage Reduction vs Chaos (or Stamina +2 if you can’t stomach Damage Reduction) + Natural Bond. This is the only time I’ve really found value in Damage Reduction but I do think it’s pretty strong on this more aggro IB approach. He already has so much health and so much mitigation that we get a lot of value out of this here, while on most characters it wouldn’t even be enough to allow you to take an extra hit. Chaos tend to be not only the biggest threat but the cheasiest threat, given their penchant for hyper-stacking, running attack BS, and more dangerous bosses.

  • On Trinket, encourage either CDR or movement. Both are solid. I’ve been taking movement more lately for the added aggro-ness.

No change to talents.

I agree with dropping the defensive talents, they aren’t very good on IB.

You can hit the good drakefire breakpoints by running 10% infantry/chaos on the drakefires, 10% infantry/skaven on the charm. Then you kill slaves in one blast, clanrats in 2, with all good regular shot breakpoints, without any barrage stacks whatsoever. By not taking barrage you only lose out on killing fanatics in 2 blasts at full barrage stacks.

Off Balance is still a bad trait due to being overridden by other classes, having a restrictive trigger, having anti-synergy with 2h axe (stagger), being underpowered, and having a terrible duration. It, on average, saves a single swing per chaos warrior and is largely ineffective against the majority of bosses (100% if you have a weapon with the dodge range to in-place tank chaos spawn). Off-balance is alright during the taunt, but only affects a significant number of targets if you hold still and block (which means you’re also not killing, 20%x3 < 100%). Your build would be more effective running swift slaying with crit, even if you otherwise went with the same build. Which I suppose would end up looking something like this: http://verminbuilds.com/#9a69c7109994-6cb4298de26d

If anyone wants another IB 2h axe and drakepistol variant, I run this: http://verminbuilds.com/#55709c5dd0b9-7965ee66f60e

There’s no actual advantage to not taking Barrage. Thermal isn’t nearly as good. I ran it for a very long time. Heat Sink is pretty terrible on him, as are any other crit dependent traits, cuz, again, garbo crit rate. Have tested them all.

You should re-think how hard you’re trying to downplay that. Cuz you’re saying… you “only” deal minimum 33% less effective DPS to the more dangerous of the two factions’ hordes… while not actually killing a single thing faster or better than with the build listed. That’s terrible. Like… really… really bad. Also, which do you think saves more heat? Thermal Equalizer? Or having to take 50% fewer shots to have the same impact against the more dangerous half of the game? You’re arguing that that is worth giving up two entire talent slots for zero gain. Your statement is untrue. You also miss out on considerable extra ranged power vs SV, bosses, and all the other things we actually use Pistols for, and you have to vent considerably more due to needing more blasts to kill things.

Long story short: Barrage + Pistols = a 2.5x Power vs Everything buff that’s almost always up on IB in combat… no other trait comes close. It has a significant impact on the entire class’ optimization and ignoring its impact is foolish.

  • 5s is not, by any stretch, a terrible duration.

  • The classes that override Off Balance: a) are not always going to be there; b) Only debuff a single target; and c) Can’t sustain a 20% team bonus vs an entire patrol for up to 20s.

  • The classes that override Off Balance also override each others’ debuffs. That doesn’t devalue those classes whatsoever, just as it doesn’t devalue Off Balance.

  • 2H Axe isn’t underpowered at all if you build it properly. That’s also a pretty bold statement that should have been more appropriately backed up. I don’t really know what else to say other than that it’s not only his most potent weapon for single-target damage but that it has superb potency overall compared to other class’ weapons vs heavy targets. Also, your even suggesting it’s underpowered further undermines your own argument because, if you do believe it’s underpowered, why would you think hitting slightly faster <1% of the time with it is at all comparable to everybody dealing 20% more damage each?!

  • There is no anti-synergy. Everything you actually care about applying Off Balance to will routinely force players to dodge/block. The only difference here is instead of dodging you block it then either you or your team obliterates the threat. Having the option to apply it when we don’t have to does not suggest a lack of synergy.

  • Just because we can use taunt w/o turtling in some situations doesn’t change the fact that Off Balance has significant impact in the more important/critical situations that would otherwise result in a team wipe where we do have to turtle. Ie. the ones where we’re forced to grab everything and hold it and it simply isn’t safe to be swinging, even during ult. Ie. any mass-heavy situation or any bad situation where we die if we unblock. So we’re comparing “give up guaranteed attack speed for a slight chance to hit a lil faster than we would if we had the attack speed, sometimes (hardly ever)” to “save entire runs and improve team DPS.” Note that Swift Slaying does absolutely nothing in those same situations we’re talking about here.

  • 20% on three people is huge considering that, in the situations where that’s happening, we’d be forced to contain massive threats anyways. So no, it’s not 120% power x 3 vs the 100% power you’re sacrificing when blocking, it’s 120% power x 3 vs the 0% attack power you’re already doing in that exact same situation. It basically means that when we are forced to ult/hold a massive threat, or turn the tides, the damage you’re not doing while protecting the entire team is largely transferred to them, combined with the fact they get to go balls out on the crap you’re holding without having to shuck n jive.

  • Swift Slaying on a character with a crit rate that’s well below average and using one of the slowest weapons in the game is terrible. Period. Its wholly inconsistent/unreliable to the point it’s a completely wasted trait we have no control over. This is exacerbated by the fact that we aren’t heavily reliant on melee in the first place, with the majority of our kills coming from Pistols. Just because it can proc doesn’t mean it’s worth anything when it does, vs Off Balance which, unless the mob instantly dies (which can happen), equals “for 5 seconds your entire team gets a 20% power boost vs this heavy mofo”. They aren’t remotely close in terms of potency.

  • It isn’t hard or in any way unnatural to apply Off Balance to a CW or, really, anything, in any situation. There are a lot of attacks you block anyways unless you’re at the exact right point of the timing. It’s not like Off Balance = you sit in front of every mob and try to get it to swing at you.

Swift Slaying is only worth taking on full-crit builds or a few hybrid builds on classes that already have above average crit potential. This is especially true if: a) you’re sacrificing permanent attack speed to buff your crit rate to try to make it work; and b) your crits don’t even push breakpoints. Low crit + slow weapon + low mobility = it’s full-on worst in slot. It doesn’t have “synergy” with the fact IB isn’t a crit class. Any trait would be better. It’s not min:max whatsoever. Arguing for Swift Slaying on the slowest, least crit-y career, especially when we use ranged so extensively, would be like me arguing for Off Balance on Slayer.

Edit: I have run Swift Slaying on IB fairly extensively, with multiple weapons, and with maxed IB (read: still low af) crit rate. there were multiple entire runs where it didn’t proc a single time. It’s bloody pointless at best and worst than pointless when you have to sacrifice so much for it.

Edit 2: Note how I more-or-less just went from the build you’re arguing for to the new one, in terms of Power vs? That’s because I extensively analyzed and tested both and realized the new one is better by far. This isn’t conjecture or theorycrafting. The approach in the OP does considerably more both on paper and in practice, where it matters most.

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Yeah, so this is why I usually refrain from posting at all.

What? There are advantages to other traits, you just prefer barrage. Honestly that’s fine, it’s a decent enough trait. Thermal equalizer is good too.

Nah, I don’t need to rethink anything.

I don’t consider the fanatic 2 blast breakpoint a big deal. Most chaos horde are thinned out before melee anyway, since the regular shots 1 hit kill fanatics and pierce. If a full horde reaches melee it’s easy enough to clean up with the 2h axe, +1 blast, or more single shots. The extra power from barrage doesn’t affect the regular shot breakpoints for fanatics/clans/slaves/marauders either.

On bosses I use the 2h axe, not the drakes, excluding perhaps the chaos spawn and incidental potshots when outside of melee.

I vent less because thermal equalizer reduces the net heat usage by another ~28%.

I’ll admit I was wrong here, thinking it was 3 seconds (tooltip). It’s 5 seconds because it’s using the entirely wrong buff. I still don’t think 5 seconds is worth it. If it was like shrapnel at 10s, then maybe.

And when they are there, it’s a 100% a useless trait outside of patrols. Fantastic.

I never said this. I think 2h axe is Bardin’s best weapon due to its boss damage and stagger.

Charged attacks and specifically charged attack crits stagger everything, including chaos warriors. You can’t block if the enemy isn’t attacking, therefore anti-synergy.

In fact, staggering chaos warriors consistently probably provides more value than the 20% damage debuff.

Hyperbole. It’s a niche use at best. There are games where I only use the ult as a damage cancel (intentionally jumping into a storm for example). With my group I’ll mostly use it on patrols to turn shielded SV around. Most patrols also get bombed before they are in melee.

Wow, when you don’t like things you really don’t like things. It’s either the best or completely terrible, right.

The mob dying instantly or on the next hit is the typically use case for off-balance. You need to proc the effect on a chaos warrior at full health for it to, best case, take off more than a single swing.

I would say the opposite. Most attacks you can avoid blocking entirely by dodging. If you aren’t blocking then you can be charging up the next swing.

And the off-balance debuff literally doesn’t matter on anything below a chaos warrior or mauler.

You really don’t like things when you don’t like things. That’s not even true; at 5% crit SS would still be better than Heroic Intervention. At 15% crit it’s still good. But you don’t think it’s worth it, that’s clear.

Doesn’t look like you have to sacrifice anything at all to me. I linked a crit version of what I think your build is. Crits also do increased damage, which is one reason to take them independent of SS.

But it’s fine. I don’t really care this much and just wanted to put forth an alternative build that doesn’t use either barrage or off-balance. I’ll leave you to it, clearly a discussion isn’t the goal of this thread.

You’re at 7 edits. Come on now, finish your posts before submitting them.

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I already explained all of this in extreme detail.

That’s blatant false equivalency. Advantage compared to nothing =/= advantage compared to the best thing. Everything practical achieved with other traits is similarly achieved via Barrage, only better. Eg. Thermal Equalizer slightly reduces overheat generation vs Barrage making it so you need to take 2/3rd as many shots in the first place, which means 33% less overall heat generation, significantly better than Thermal. Same deal with Heat Sink, which is unreliable at best on this class. Hunter requires a crit, so it’s unreliable, and the buff only counts agaist the enemy type hit, vs Barrage which we have up all the time in combat and is a 25% buff against the field.

That explains things.

… buuuuuuuut using two completely unnecessary Power vs slots, achieving nothing the guide doesn’t already, to hit the Skaven breakpoint is? There is no logic in your thinking, man.

Again, illogical. Also highly subjective. You could further apply that to your argument as to why it’s supposedly important to utterly waste 2x Power vs slots for Skaven when we already bloody well achieve the same thing with a better build.

Yeah. How bout vs Maulers? Spoiler alert: It does. Significantly. You’d have noticed that if you didn’t have 2x Power vs slots totally wasted.

Yeah? You chase a boss around with your axe out the whole time you’re fighting a boss? Instead of shooting it when you’re not in melee range then switching to axe when in melee range and having an additional Power +25% on all of your swings from your naturally and efficiently obtained Barrage stacks? Solid. :joy:

Doesn’t matter when you have to take 50% more shots… generating 50% more overheat per kill against the stuff that matters most. This isn’t hard math. :+1:

They apply their debuff to a single target. Are you suggesting we only ever fight one elite at a time? XD

Sorry, I mis-attributed that sentiment to the wrong sentence.

You gonna charged attack a CW that’s nearing the end of his attack and skating at you? Gonna interrupt/stagger his insta-punch/kick/elbow? Similarly, we don’t crit often on IB, even with max crit. It isn’t a thing that reliably happens.

Emphasis mine to point out hypocrisy as follows:

  • Swift Slaying =/= consistent, particularly not in melee on the class with one of the lowest crit rates in the game, when using one of the slowest weapons in the game, on one of the slowest moving characters in the game
  • You’re sacrificing permanent, consistent attack speed for a slightly better, totally conditional attack speed buff that will be active <1% of the time overall.

Further, it’s a 20% power boost for the entire party. Not just you.

None of that is hyperbole… If you’re turtling a patrol, a 20% power boost for your entire party on every single mob in the patrol is much more significant than the non-impact SS has in that same situation. Even non-patrol, if you’re able to only melee and not block the trash on you that means it’s horde only, which means we should be doing blasts, not chops, which means Swift Slaying is still totally worthless by comparison.

Terrible is a relative term. In this case, it’s being compared to every other trait for this class in which case, yes, it’s terrible in that it’s the worst of all traits available. I explained this. For some classes, Swift Slaying is BiS… That just isn’t the case here.

The difference being it will actually push breakpoints for the entire party, meaning that killing blow sometimes only happens because of the added power.

With practice it’s a difference of milliseconds. Also significantly less risk involved.

SS does? We Pistol virtually everything and on the uncommon opportunity to chop SV they’re dead in a few hits. Any number of SV present to make SS chops worthwhile is a number against which you can’t sustain direct combat without heavily relying on blocks/dodges or popping ult.

Recognizing the true value of something in a build =/= not liking it. Your point here is pretty strawman-y but I’ll grant that yes, since Heroic Intervention is broken you’re technically correct. If Heroic Intervention actually did what it says it does, like the similar traits in VT1 do, it would still be better by far (it would actually contend for BiS).

Doesn’t matter if the crits don’t hit breakpoints on a non-crit focused character and if you have to sacrifice attack speed or power vs to do it. That also isn’t how min:max works. You don’t compromise your max to augment your min, especially when that min isn’t game-changing and doesn’t actually do anything meaningful for the team compared to the alternative.

It’s entirely open to discussion. That doesn’t mean terrible advice will go unchallenged. Discussion =/= you stating opinion as fact without people pointing out when it’s not. If someone had pointed out how much I was losing by not using Barrage, initially, I would have looked into it and ultimately apologized and adapted to the new information.

:joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy: So how am I supposed to take this seriously, then:

Aside from how laughable those two sentiments are one right after the other like that, I didn’t add substance to the post, merely clarification/elaboration or corrections to spelling/grammar/punctuation.

Bottom line, once again, is that this isn’t theory or conjecture. I’ve run both builds extensively. The OP build is superior in every way. That isn’t hard to pull off when the build you’re pushing has 2-3x completely or almost-completely wasted property slots, 1x non-BiS trait, and a conditional trait that virtually never procs in any meaningful way.

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Not to belabour a point but here’s some crit demos to better demonstrate why we don’t take Swift Slaying on IB, especially with 2H Axe:

IB 2H Axe Crit Demo (AKA Why it’s an Awful Idea to Choose Swift Slaying for this Career)

Note: Vid uses charged attacks because that should be the start of any combo and the most vital Swift Slaying proc swing. It’s also the pattern that people who are more heavily dependent on melee will be using most often. Lastly, it’s the attack you have to use on anything you need to keep staggered.

That is not cherry picked; that is the first ~min of filming. I even cut off ~10 extra (all non-crit) hits at the start, because the Nvidia Share bar was still visible at the top right. IB is at the far “non-crit” side of the character spectrum. You can see that Swift Slaying would be totally inconsistent and objectively unreliable. As previously stated, I have on multiple occasions gone entire runs without proc’ing it on IB.

Shade DD Crit Demo (AKA What a Crit Focused Character on Whom Swift Slaying is Optimal Looks Like)

Shade is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum as IB in terms of crit ability.

Long story short: Even if we were to assume that every Swift Slaying proc on IB generated value and wasn’t wasted (obviously not the case), IB crits are so few and far between in terms of both crits/min and crits/swing that it’s demonstrably/objectively/mathematically significantly worse and less impactful than running Attack Speed where we can + a better trait, instead of running crit trying to get an impotent trait to work slightly less impotently. Swift Slaying’s impact is utterly negligible on this career even in the absolute best case scenario. In practice, it’s even worse since: a) we aren’t swinging at a defenseless dummy non-stop; b) we can’t get full value out of procs when they do occur; c) the first attack upon entering melee does not get any speed bonus, guaranteed. The average attack speed bonus and impact in a run from Swift Slaying on IB is close to 0%, practically. Compare that to, for example, Shade, on whom the Trait will be active virtually all the time and you can see why suggesting IB run Swift Slaying is silliness.

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Coming back to play Iron Breaker after a long time:
“Damn is this easy mode.”

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Largely used this post as a guideline for speccing out my own IB Bardin, and it’s been good in Champion so far. I stuck with the 20% heat reduction over Barrage though, and I’ve been maining either a 2H hammer or Axe+Shield combo.

Tend to finish first or second on the stat sheets at the end - almost always with the most damage overall…

The Drake pistols remain my favourite way to manage a horde of trash enemies in the entire game. So satisfying.

I’ve been playing my last few maps as IB using Pickaxe and Crossbow. Even built unoptimized, with the equipment I had on hand, it has worked quite well, but it did lead me to rolling this: http://verminbuilds.com/#cd8e5f2d32d5-5a7945c5382e The percentages of Properties are actually not all full, as I don’t have eveything in red yet, but all Powers hit some breakpoints.

Pick works even without Attack Speed, but it certainly makes it feel that little bit more dextrous that I feel much safer with it. I did at first run the Crossbow with Scrounger, but unless you want to reserve some Property slots for Crit Chance, you’ll run into ammo troubles if you use it as much as I do, especially if there’s another character picking up some. And yes, the Power vs. Berserkers is there on purpose, as it hits breakpoints and I find that being an important use for the Crossbow. (And, well, it was the first Property of my considered options that came up with Infantry with high enough percentage to hit a breakpoint.)

When playing lately, I’ve used Impenetrable more for its added Damage Resistance than the infinite Block. Blocking has its places, mainly against multiple Elites, but the added DR allows me to gather Temp HP even while taking hits from a horde. Without it, basic jousting and dodging goes a long way.

Now for honesty’s sake, I haven’t had a chance to test the final result yet, but that’s up next. I’ll update how it feels later.

I find there’s nothing more fun than popping Impenetrable, putting up your block with Off Balance on, and just watching your team wipe everyone out.

To me, nothing beats 1h hammer on IB. I run it with stamina, push/block angle and off balance with either pistols or cannon. You got better mobility, better block stamina, faster attacks, no charge up on sweaps, almost no slowdown while blocking, attacking or charging attacks and simply one of the best push-attacks in the game.

i tried to give it a shot, but i found that it’s really weak in terms of smashing horde. the push attack doesn’t cleave very much, and the light attacks are at an angle which allows you to hit 2 targets roughly.

i’m very used to using the 2h hammer for wide clearing sweeps and light attacks for killing elites which i find can’t be matched by the 1h hammer. can you elaborate how you use it effectively?

I came to the same conclusion when trying out the 1h hammer. I just can’t get away from the 2H hammer. It rips through horde, while providing a large “safe zone” for your team mates, and pops melons like theres no tomorrow. I also tried out the pistols for the past few weeks and just couldn’t get the hang of them and decided to go back to the gruderaker last night. Its just such a good combination and feels so versatile.