Guild Wars 2

Skill 1: DPS nerfed. It is near impossible to get off a full chain anywhere outside of PvE so DPS is considerably lower.
Skill 2: No changes to it but this is such a lackluster skill. 4 stacks of vulnerability and tickle damage.
Skill 3: No changes to it but this is also mediocre. Throw an axe to deal a cripple and tickle damage. Whoop de doo!

All of this on top of the HF and BP nerf mean axe damage is pitiful. I’m confused as to why the warrior community isn’t speaking up about this enough when you see Thieves cry about getting a second added to revealed or when you see Mesmers complain when they get a .25 Global Cool Down on their shatters.

The only thing the axe skill 1 nerf did was force PvP and WvW warriors into less diverse builds and did practically nothing to PvE. I fail to undertsand the point of the update. If you were going to destroy Skill 1 then why not give us buffs in the other skills to compensate. Now we just have 3 unrelated, boring, and sub-par skills.

Now to top it all off: The sword got a skill that does the same damage as eviscerate under the proper circumstances.

Turbo Whale.1738:

All of this on top of the HF and BP nerf mean axe damage is pitiful. I’m confused as to why the warrior community isn’t speaking up about this enough

Because most of the warrior community (and the game community in general) is patently clueless.

The recent changes ensured that there is basically never a reason to bring an axe to PvP. The weapon has no mobility, which already makes it a questionable choice for a warrior, but the final kick in the gonads came when they nerfed the auto attack damage, pushing it into the final hit of the third chain. Previously one of the good things the Axe had over other weapons was old plain auto-attack DPS and Eviscerate, if you set it up. It was the “brute force” option. With sword getting its own eviscerate and, overall, becoming a far better weapon than it already was (which was a good thing mind you, made the weapon viable), only thing Axe had going for it was AA DPS… And then they nerfed that… because of reasons.

As off right now there’s no reason to use an Axe in PvP…. Sword is the better option. GS is also a better option due to much better mobility. If you don’t need mobility, then Mace is the better option due to extra block and loads of CC. Axe fits in nowhere.

…And there’s little reason to not use a GS in PvE, so personally I put my warrior’s axes on the mantle piece to rust in piece.

ProxyDamage.9826:

…And there’s little reason to not use a GS in PvE, so personally I put my warrior’s axes on the mantle piece to rust in piece.

Agreed on the whole post, but i’d beg to differ on this.

While GS is still a extra viable weapon, if you’re looking for Min/Maxing the Axe has better DPS (ask Dg speedrunners who spend all the day to test and squeeze as much DPS as possbile out of their chars) than GS in Pve.

It seems like the devs suffer from axephobia. I’d love to know why axe doesn’t have the normal 3 hit chain.

I agree that axe has taken a huge hit in pvp. And as far as pve goes even then sometimes a mob will be dead before you can get off triple chop, or it turns it’s focus on you and you need to dodge away in the middle of your AA chain. Pretty aweful.

IMO they need to reverse some of that damage back across the board, and add something to eviscerate to make it a worthwhile ability. Perhapts a daze effect? .5 sec for 1 bar, 1 sec for 2 bars, 1.5 sec daze for 3 bars?

Huh… a ranged cripple in a melee weapon? sounds a bit helpful in my eyes to use to cripple people that try to gain distance.

I used an axe/axe+GS build previously, if you guys want, maybe I’ll try and write that build down.

And I don’t know about the chain skill – the raw damage is still better, and I can keep up with people thanks to the traits “warrior’s sprint” and “furious speed”, so that I can unleash the chain skill’s potential… or it could be that I am playing against bad players? who knows XD

You know what i do not even disagree, but too my knowledge most if not all auto attacks that chain use their third hit for the big DPS skill in the chain. While I do agree it’s a nerf it seems more like they just brought it inline with other skills.

AndrewSX.3794:

In my experience they’re very close, but because of HB and GS traits, GS still wins. Axe+Mace only wins vs things like HP sponge bosses because of vulnerability stacking (which half of which is single target). If you already have vulnerability stacking on someone else or through some other utility, GS wins.

GS takes the lead again once you consider mobility options, and how the extra dodge from WW allows you to basically trivialize a lot of attacks in the game while delivering high AoE damage.

ProxyDamage.9826:

Turbo Whale.1738:

All of this on top of the HF and BP nerf mean axe damage is pitiful. I’m confused as to why the warrior community isn’t speaking up about this enough

Because most of the warrior community (and the game community in general) is patently clueless.

With sword getting its own eviscerate and, overall, becoming a far better weapon than it already was (which was a good thing mind you, made the weapon viable), only thing Axe had going for it was AA DPS… And then they nerfed that… because of reasons.

I know it is out of topic, but how does taking away DPS, limiting our cripples and force it on our mobility skill makes it a better weapon? Faster bleed application wont change anything sinds we could already easely get up to 25 in a matter of seconds, your “eviscerate” variant can’t be used 50% of the time during the combat because it is slow and will barrely do more damage than the previous final thrust if the target has more than 50% of his health. And what about those who used this weapon with ranged weaponery? How do they gap away now? To get back to final thrust, it has also no place in any condition or hybrid builds unless you play Berserker. How does that make people more viable, I realy wan’t to know, because I always have played a Rampager sword&rifle hybrid, I even manadged to make it work perfectly in both PVE and PvP, and I can’t see how those changes are beneficial to me…

ProxyDamage.9826:

As off right now there’s no reason to use an Axe in PvP…. Sword is the better option. GS is also a better option due to much better mobility. If you don’t need mobility, then Mace is the better option due to extra block and loads of CC. Axe fits in nowhere.

…And there’s little reason to not use a GS in PvE, so personally I put my warrior’s axes on the mantle piece to rust in piece.

To get back to the topic, Axe was mainly used when you already controled your target and it couldn’t escape you anymore, Axe&Shield beeing a very popular build when combined with a greatsword for mobility.

And indeed there is almost no reason, unless you play for fun and not effectiveness, to actualy choose any weapon beside a Greatsword sinds we lost a good chunk of our DPS on both Axe/mh and Sword/mh. Hammer and Mace/mh are more defensive and control focused and ranged weaponery is inferior when it comes to raw DPS. So yeah, now instead of having an illusion of choice, they Shattered it and we end up with only a few viable choices…

Give me back my old eviserate arenanet! Its one of the reasons i rolled a warrior
Seriously nerfing every single kitten and no good utility for warrior plummering us to the bottomless pithole of uselessness…

lmaogg.7325:

Seriously nerfing every single kitten and no good utility for warrior plummering us to the bottomless pithole of uselessness…

Let’s not get crazy here… calm down.

TheGuy.3568:

You know what i do not even disagree, but too my knowledge most if not all auto attacks that chain use their third hit for the big DPS skill in the chain. While I do agree it’s a nerf it seems more like they just brought it inline with other skills.

Before, looking only at 1H weapons, Sword had mobility, Mace had CC/defense, Axe had high flat damage. Axe still does more damage than Mace and even Sword, but the flat damage is what helped alleviate the problem of its atrocious mobility. To me, Axe said, “You made the mistake of letting me close. Time for you to die.” Now, it says, “You made the mistake of letting me close. Please hold still.” That relatively flat damage across the entire auto-attack did a lot to offset its inability to guarantee high time on target; because when you were on target, you got guaranteed results. That’s not exactly the case anymore.

Due to dmg nerf, Anet could increase atk spd in Axe Chain.
Ex:

1: Chop (withour cast time)
2: Dual Strike (without cast time or 0,25s)
3: Dual Chop + Final Chop (0,5s)

obs¹: Axe #3 could evade, and Axe #4 could be replaced by another new skills.
obs²: Increase range of Axe f1 to 600 or 900.

Giving the fastest chain attack even more speed isn’t a very bright idea.

imho, the 5 button total on weapons is not enough for designing good weapons.

In any event, when i use axe its usually as a surprise, I have another weapon out, then if someone gets low I swap and eviscerate.

At this point sword mobility or hammer/mace cc is hard to pass up. Eviserate damage on axe is probably about right, but I would like to see its range back a lil longer.

Hu, your title is wrong. You say “Axe is garbage” – and fail to specify that this is no generalised statement but only your opinion regarding PvP. Not everyone plays that! Wether Axt is good in WvW nobody discusses. And you also forgot to mention that you only speak of Axt mainhand. At least I havn’t seen anything regarding second hand axt skills and damage here.

It would improve the quality of this forum if you and others take the time for proper titles.

I like MH axe a lot! When you use greatsword, choosing traits gets messy, and forceful greatsword seems to be in the wrong tree which screws my traits up. Axe MH doesn’t have that problem, and 30/10/0/0/30 or 30/0/0/10/30 both have every trait an axe user would ever need, aaannnd you get to have 2 Sigils.
Oh and in wvw it’s not difficult to hit 6-7k with the final hit of the axe chain. teehee

I use Hammer + Axe/Shield combo and I enjoy Axe. If you can line up a solid eviscerate when the target is half health or less then it’s usually over.