Since I started to play slayer, I gettin’ just incredible amounts of damage, especially from storms/maulers/warriors. I’m not so bad at melee, because tryin’ to play it as much as possible, so I couldn’t understand why I’m taking so much damage from slow enemys. Now I got why. After much time spent as shade, I hadn’t such issue because she can close heavy attack with daggers via block, there is a window between sweep start, when you can. Many weapons can aswell, even when animation already begin. D. axes can’t. You have to hold just a little bit, misclick, lag issue or just wrong move, and thats it, you won’t stop this attack. Don’t know how others, but for me it’s the real pain.
Hm. Didnt look into this issue or was something i was realising. At the start i got much dmg as Slayer as well, but after some time you get used to be just a fast whirlwind of death. You are the one to kill elites faster then everyone else 
And not just one. Every elite.
You have to play faster then the other members of your party and also take 25% health perk and 20% health on necklace. Dont go without it. You wont need the 5 % crit for example.
I started playing slayer two days ago. With the dual axes i also did really bad. Constantly got hit. Can’t really say why. I use other weapons with him now. Works good so far.
I also noticed that some weapons have strange behaviours, like the window to cancel youre attack is much smaller or other stuff.
In this thread Strange behaviour on some weapons i already call attention to some of them. if you want you can add youre weapon there.
Its more like the “feature” that u cant cancel animation of normal attack on all “shield breaking” and “armour piercing” weapons cause its kind of “charged”. same for halberd and glaive at least.
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on what Difficulty you play Slaver? Legend?
in Legend More, a BlackRat Kill a Hero in like 2 Hits!
and Slayer Play is a bit more different to other Melee Class…
you need a more “Risky” Play! And use the Ulty a Lot…
The Play is super fast, is hart to Control and to learn the Play Sequenz, how to jump in, how to attack… is not a normal Melee play…
Slayer is actually rather “easy” and fun to play if you can get used to not having ranged weapons, he just needs very specific setups to work, some of them are not that obvious. Things that are pretty much a necessity in talents are increased dodge distance, oblivious to pain and the defensive buff stack on trophy hunter. The movement-speed on 25 seems to be the slayer meta and it IS really good an useful, but depending on your weapons, you might want to go for uninterruptable attacks.
When it comes to weapons, dual axes are absolutely beastly and probably the best armour piercing melee weapons available to any hero at the moment, but you need to play them differently than other melee weapons. One thing you absolutely want is +2 stamina on your dual axes and +2 stamina on your necklace, because the dual axes’ bread and butter are its push attacks. They are fast, they hit hard, you can do them from a block, you get a small forward leap while doing them, they come in at a very precise angle at head level and can be chained into almost any other attack rather easily. You can close distance to armoured elites with them, you can use them as your last attack before dodging away, you can spam them on single enemies when you can go all out to quickly dispatch them. Your dual axes are used for single target dps on CW, SV and specials, depending on the situation with light attacks, heavy attacks, but use your push attacks plentiful.
Second weapon should be your CC weapon. 2H and 1h hammer work very well, the pickaxe can do the trick and even 2h axe does, though it is rather moot to bring it along since your dual axes outperform it in any aspect other than range (which isnt important due to your mobility) and CC, and CC is not one of 2h axe’s strengths compared to the other weapons. I’d say go with a good 2h hammer, and if you have the choice, go with attack speed and crit chance, since you want to run ressourceful combatant on it. Swift slaying seems like a no brainer, but your active skill’s cooldown is rather long, and with high attack speed and crit chance, you can pretty much get you active skill’s cooldown down with a few swings into a horde, alowing you to chain them together, giving you beastly horde control with the jump stagger, attack speed, cleave and stagger from your hammer as well as very good battle field mobility with your constant movement speed buff and ability to leap. Oblivious to pain essentially gives you 50% DR and the defensive buff on trophy hunter stack ensures you can eat the occasional hit without having to worry too much about your true hit points, since you will be generating temp hit points a plenty while massacering hordes.
Replace the defense stack with faster cooldown on max stacks and you lose the need for resourceful combatant. Still plenty of tankiness with the 50% DR.
I’m not sure why you’d say that the 2h axe only has range and CC, for one it’s range isn’t higher, for another the 2h axes strength is it’s massive anti horde damage. Lackluster CC is made up for by the slayers mobility, inherent CC with leap and damage reduction, which pairs well with it’s high kill potential. There really isn’t any dwarven weapon that deals with hordes faster.
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That’s also an option, yes, but I personally like to go for a little more safety on a 100 hit point character. Like I said, this is the way I and alot of people do it, you can go perfectly well with the cooldown stack and swift slaying for a more offensive build. I still prefer the 2h hammer over the axe (with range I meant attack angle with sweaps), but yes, 2h axe is a perfectly viable choice on Slayer if you want to trade CC for horde clearing power. It all depends on your team composition and playstyle. You can never go wrong with the hammer, though.
2h axe compliments a team who works on their positioning best. Instead of slapping enemies around into your own flanks with the warpick or 2h hammer, you actually kill them off. Armor mixed into the horde goes down faster as well.
And if you get singled off or can’t hold the horde, you can always chain dodge with your dual axes to try and create some space.
It’s not as bad as you think it might be. Your Dual axes can one shot storm vermins and your push attack comes out so quickly that it’s easy to switch to your block. However, more than that, most hits that you take with dual axes out come down to not dodging.
Hardly need to block anything.
I put my guard up to block the things that may not have died when i have chopped up a large group.
The thing is, slayer absolutely wrecks faces with dual axes charged attacks. Use it as much as you can to destroy foes so that they can’t hit u!
For me, the key is oblivious to pain and stack increased attack speed and swift slaying. He is very safe and strong.