I gotta say, the bleed build with a Knife is ridiculously strong in terms of feat synergy. People keep saying that an axe is as good, but from my testing I can’t agree.
The axes are better if you don’t go bleed build, due to the cleave ability mainly. I would take axes over knives in most cases. But with the bleed build, the knife just outperforms in every way imho. The knife’s ridiculous attack speed (it’s like almost 3 attacks per second?) and crit makes it that almost every 3rd or 4th attack is a crit, which procs the bleed, the dmg resist and the crit rate ofc, able to stack the crit 3 times in a single second, effectively making you able to have the feats up all the time and in case of need, proc them incredibly fast and just hack away crits for days. Compared to an axe that takes double the swigns and time to proc and makes it hard to keep the stacks up. It’s bonkers.
Would be a different story if the crit was based on every hit (cleave) and not determined when you press the button ( it actually makes a sound indicating that it’s a crit swing at the start of the swing). So it’s way harder for a non knife weapon to start the procs.