I have made a PvP weapon tier list for the current patch (Age of War Chapter 3). This is my personal feeling from what I have seen and observed.
You can post your own tier lists about what you think. Make sure you state if it’s PvE or PvP.
Link to the template:
How do I know which ones are single handed? How about the border for perfected and epic types? 
Interesting list. How things have changed in a year…
Well yes, the biggest changes were that daggers + spear fell really hard in ranking.
Katana got huge buffs due to the new movement rotation. Same with 2h Axes and Hammers.
Swords both 1h and 2h still suffer from slower animations and non existing hyper armor. The same for maces and axes. All these animations are easily dodgable with the dodge spam and if you are a dodge god there is no way you could ever die in PvP in this patch (except fighting 2+ bow users and given there is no desync/lagg).
Throwing axes have always been utility. And lances… well actually the same as spears and daggers, got hit hard.
Javelins I already mentioned since YEARS that they need a new moveset. And shields are just useless except in 1v1. But there are hardly any 1v1s in PvP.
I have seen that some PvPers put the bow into S+ tier.
You know I’m happy about it, don’t you @SirDaveWolf ?
I mean, it’s not that I don’t agree with 99% of your posts, but spears could go die in a hole for all I care. It’s the lowest skill weapon in the game and I loathe it as much as I do poke’n’roll combat.
Lock on target, unlock on target ar the right time, done. There’s nothing more to it.
I remember my first attempts at pvp.
I knew I was a good pve fighter and well, I have the obligation to be a good combat player in any game due to my history and oersonal traits, but I though to myself 'OK, Marcos, take a deep breath. Here comes the pain you’re looking for".
It didn’t come until much later when I found some really good fighters who actually helped me progress first and kicked my ass later.
They kicked my ass to the point of forcing me to change my pvp playstyle and, if you’d knew me and my hard-headed nature, you would know that’s a feat in and of itself. I couldn’t win. Period. With a katana.
With a spear, well… I have unusually fast reaction times. So things evened out a bit more, but they could read the battlefield 10x times better than me so yeah… I was still inferior. But there was a clear difference. Spears nulified skill, as did daggers.
They all used katanas. They used them before, they used katanas when they were nerfed… they are in heaven now. I just don’t join their clan because, for them, the rules are more like friendly suggestions. 
Not a single one uses his main account to play.
So, yes, pikes and daggers can go die in a hole for all I care.
Actually, target lock did. As you have written yourself:
But for some reason Funcom INSISTS on keeping this mechanic in the game.
Non target lock servers were on a different level. I still say were, because with the introduction of rotational attacks everything went to skilless.
But don’t get me wrong, spears needed some kind of nerf. But with the latest ones, spears dropped to D-Tier, aka useless trash tier IMO.
Which is always how funcom does nerf : too much so the weapon goes from meta to useless trash.
Yes, another proof how FUNdamentally inCOMpetent Funcom is at handling PvP balance.
They should not make games with PvP. This is also one of the reasons why I say:
Hands off the new Dune game if your main focus is PvP.
They need to. Weapons without AoE are pretty much useless without in on PVE.
No weapon should be useless trash. You got a point there. The only time I’ll use a pike is very early game, when I farm Valis for gear. He drops a crappy one, but it’s not that bad as a first weapon. After that, only if the next legendary that drops is also a pike/spear.
What? Just go to al-Merayah and grab the Katana. Then go to Sobek Cave and farm a full armorset. Then you can do all PVE content.
Weird, I never had issues with PvE on non target lock servers.
If they were correctly designed they wouldn’t be useless on PVE without aoe. But it’s a larger problem. Funcom designed the whole combat system one way before releasing the game. Since that time the devs never stopped to change it one way then an,other way, without seeming to know where they wanted to go, nor what they wanted to achieve.
The result is both PVE and PVP are completely messed up with every changes adding to the mess rather than correcting it.
That’s actually a very good idea. I’ll still farm Valis for the Silent Legion he drops, but I didn’t know you could easily get a MBB at an early level. I never tried it. al-Merayah is still kind of a novelty for me, so I keep forgetting about it.
Better servers, perhaps? You keep hitting and it doesn’t register because effectively there’s a delay, compensated by target lock. No idea about the workings of it. Without target lock, weapons that don’t have AoE completely under perform.
Fundamental problems in the game, even after 5 years. It’s just sad.
And yes, server hardware is usually like Intel Core i9 13900 or AMD Ryzen 9 7950x. But the server still laggs despite the good CPUs.
I would have dropped yogs touch done one and ancient Lemurian axe in that spot because that is easy to obtain and the amount of time to grind yog touch does equate to it being that much better than what you can craft if you got the right blacksmith.
It’s about Weapon TYPES. Not single weapons.
Oh. Yeah I saw your bomb archer technique and I am way too old and on console for that level of crazy weapon swapping. It was fun and awestriking to watch but in all reality, I would have walked from the game early on if I encountered it because it just wouldn’t be a fun game to play as a noob. There is a point where ‘git gud’ in competitive gaming is a detriment to the casual player and what I saw in your vid was just that. CE would have not been worth it and sat in my game library indefinitely while I moved on.
Yes, this bomb PvP thing is so stupid.
Devs probably play only with controller, so they will never realize that this is a thing. (Also it is really hard with controller, most people already struggle with shooting explo + gas arrows)
Bomb damage is basically bow damage, but in an AoE.
You should not be able to spam place bombs 15 meters away whilst ninja jumping with double jump.
And these kind of things develop when there is competition and people find the next best way to beat their opponent.
But believe me when I say there are some players who can do it even better than me.
If a weapon is ‘useless’ because of a 150ms delay on a single attack, it was never good to begin with. Let’s look at this for a moment. One attack (the first heavy) out several (light and heavy combos) was delayed. And no one seems to want to touch it?
Everyone knows how weapon combos work. Your first attack leads to the second and then the third, and so forth. You can alternate between light and heavy attacks to vary up the combo a bit. With the spear, the light attacks jab without moving, the heavy attacks jab with a step forward. With most weapons the light attack when used in a combo comes out slightly quicker. The 9 frame delay ensured that the heavy attack was slower than the light attack.
So why didn’t they vary their combo to light attack then continue their combo from there? Well the reason being is there was no intention on starting a combo to begin with. It was lunge to hit and then roll away, then repeat.
It was a one-trick weapon with no depth behind the application. Now I said no depth behind the application for a good reason. The players using it decided not to use the weapon as it was intended, instead using it in a way that made combat… well derpy.
All the videos on it show the lackluster application. You see a group of burly characters wearing various amounts of edgy costumes (especially after the illusion change), rolling around and occasionally attacking, the guy in front of the one taking the video looks miles away just to get a few steps on either side of them in frame, and you hear some of the worst music possible added just to make the experience even more annoying. It looks like a circus.
They turned their own PVP into this weird game of bidirectional tag. It made combat look more like a children’s game some kids would play with pool noodles in the backyard. And they have the audacity to call that ‘skilled’ PVP. Ironically when something changes that they don’t account for, they cry foul instead of moving on. Or they move on to what they think is better rather than know. That usually entails to going to the easiest to use weapon or combo.
Of course if someone breaks the mold and finds a usecase for something they didn’t see, well you’ll see posts calling for nerfs and such. Because its much easier to cry witchcraft than to actually run some numbers or do a tad bit of testing. Its funny, you can see a statement in this thread that says a few skilled people test things constantly. But these same people will run to the forums and cry foul when something surprises them. Shouldn’t be surprised if they did thorough and thoughtful testing, they should already be mastering it, not calling for nerfs.
And don’t let them try to fool you with claims of game balance. They want easy to use. They also never advocate for the most underperforming weapons to be buffed. Spear is fine, anything better is to be nerfed, anything worse to be ignored and if you disagree you are a noob even if you win fights, because to win fights without a spear means you are cheating or hacking. The sort of bluster that gives PVP a real bad image.
