Preferred weapon?

I originally started out with a bow/pike character and it was fun. I wasnt having any issues killing enemies or dying. It was, however, annoying to deal with archers in groups.
Then I saw someone post a build using a javelin and shield and i figured i would try that out. It only required me to pickup iron targe and balanced iron jav feats. While it was nice to have a shield to block arrows, I found that it was not very useful in melee and it seemed like my attack speed was way down. I started dying A LOT. So I made another lotus potion and figured i would try sword shield. Same issues. So now im back to my original pike. But the swords looked sooo cool.
What have you found to be your best weapon?

Axe and shield as my primary weapons.
Spear as a secondary. I use it for a lot of animals and other creatures, especially ones with screwed up collision that makes them hard to hit with an axe.

With an axe I mow down groups of NPCs, it doesn’t matter what kind they are or if they have shields.
Axes are better for AoE than swords, they smash through shields and they have a leap attack you can use to get the first strike on your enemies without fail, even against spear wielders. You can then finish your combo or dodge away if necessary. They also cause bleed, though it’s very minor compared to daggers.
The only real drawback is that axes have 0% armor penetration. But at higher levels, you can add +15% armor pen to them.

Javelins are the absolute worst weapons you could use in melee (and ranged). They have no heavy attacks, which are where the majority of your damage comes from. Heavy attacks also inflict debuffs upon your enemies.

I have a post in the following thread where I list the debuffs caused by each weapon. Maybe that could help you decide what you want to use.

For me it depends on what I’m hunting. My favorite go-to while doing general things like gathering mats is the pike. It just takes up one slot so I can have utility axe, pick axe, and skinning knife slotted along with food and water on my quickslot bar. Because of the grindy nature of this game I’m actually in this configuration naked 90% of the time gathering various mats.

When I go thrall hunting I equip a 1-h weapon and shield. I’ll probably stick with the mace for a while mainly because it does concussive damage and If things are going badly with a potential thrall I can switch to the mace and maybe hope to still knock it unconscious. Then also I can defend myself if something has respawned in my path back to the wheel.

Haven’t had much pvp yet even though I’m on a pvp server.

My experience with bows is that they are mostly a waste unless you use a poison. So I would only really use it to “soften up” a hard target that I wanted to kill. So I’m saving those poisons for when I think I actually have a chance to kill an NPC boss and not just die and end up leaving my equipment in its lair, lol.

Unfortunately we can no longer apply poison to arrows. So you’ll have to use the snake arrows for this.

My favorite right now is the sledgehammer. The first 2 light attacks have a surprising amount of forward movement to them, a lot like the daggers. You can out-DPS immobile targets who don’t bother to dodge your strikes, and both finishers will knock-down human opponents, which lets you get 1-2 extra free hits against them. A lot of times, that’s enough to finish the fight.

Light > Light > Heavy > Light will do everything you need, in a wide arc and with plenty of forwards-movement.

:hammer:

Good point. I forgot to mention the knock-down from the axe heavy finisher.

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