I have been using the Whirlwind Blades for ages, and also was very familiar with the one-handed axe/throwing axe combo as well, so I think it is fair that I critique the new weapon class.
I will first get the most obvious point out of the way, the dual axe is a copy/paste of the old one-handed axe/throwing axe dual wielding. This came with the side effect of an intolerable light attack animation where the play never uses the left-hand weapon. I hope that new light attack animations are already in the works, because this is really bad design. However, it is also mostly cosmetic, so it doesn’t play much of a role during actual gameplay.
To make light attacks even worse though, and in a way that actually matters, light attacks are all just very slow swings with no added status effects. This makes them pretty pointless since heavy attacks are faster strikes (except the opener), start with shieldbash, then stack cripple at an alarmingly high speed.
The descriptions need to be updated. Both the Whirlwind Blades and Havoc and Malice still only say they are bleeding weapons, when they are actually cripple weapons.
The only time they cause bleed is from a sprint attack, which, since it is completely impractical to stack that way, added to the 8-second bleed nerf, this single bleed stack is utterly useless. Against any enemy weak enough where one stack of bleed would cause enough damage to be relevant, the enemy is not strong enough for it to ever matter.
If light attacks added bleed as a finisher, this would make both the sprint bleed and light attacks actually relevant.
Another issue is the delay between when the weapons are drawn to when the first attack can be performed. In the video below, I am rapidly clicking the attack as soon as I draw them to start the first attack as soon as possible. You can clearly see a window after the draw stops and before the attack begins where I am just standing there doing nothing.
To be fair, I’ve seen a similar standing-around-doing-nothing-delay on several other weapon classes I’ve tested as well, and I equally think it should be cut down from them too, but I think the window is a little more obvious on these dual axes specifically (possibly because the opening attack is so slow).
One final criticism is the special attack having the backflip replaced with the kick. The kick is useless.
The special attack from the dual wielding one-handed axe/throwing axe combo was throwing the throwing axe, which obviously didn’t make sense for dual axes. So, in my opinion, they should have just kept the backflip from when they were daggers.
If a backflip seemed out of place for a different weapon class, then they should have gotten something new for their special attack.
Maybe there is a new special attack in the works and the kick is just a placeholder, but I would still have preferred the backflip as a placeholder.
As a conclusion, I want to say that the dual axe is not a bad weapon class. I still like my Whirlwind Blades and have not found a compelling reason to switch to something else yet. There are just several glaring issues with them that should not be ignored.
That would be fun.