So as many of you may or may not know, I’ve written a Hardcore guide, and I’ve played a lot of Hardcore generally. I’ve taken a lot of suggestions and talked with many of my friends, many of whom also exclusively play Hardcore, and one of the most frustrating things we’ve talked about the game between us is about 2-handed weapons. See, I love 2-handed weapons, they’re so utterly satisfying to use with both their animations as well as the sick thud you hear when they slam down. This includes ranged 2-handed weapons as well! I have both an Obsidian Juggernaut Cadence build and Vortex of Souls build that I’ve been working on for quite some time - trying to get just right - and at some point in the future I hope to write up a thread about one (or both) of them. However, that isn’t looking like it’s going to happen soon since the builds, comparatively to virtually every other good build right now, are complete trash. Commandos, Spellbreakers, and even DaShiv’s silly fire pet build completely outclass every 2-handed build - melee or ranged - I’ve ever made, or anyone’s made in the last bunch of patches to such a degree there is virtually no reason for me to play them if I intend to farm either single player content or Crucible. They can’t compete in any aspect whatsoever to these other builds.
What compounds this issue for me is how 2-handed weapons play out in Hardcore Ultimate: they’re a liability. I can’t ever suggest a 2-handed weapon build to anyone just getting into the game, which breaks my heart because it’s so fun. Specifically, you need very high gear requirements to even make them work. And once you’re there, after expending all that effort to get BiS gear (like I did for both of those builds I mentioned earlier) you feel like crap when you look over at the poor man’s Coldbreaker as he kills Cronley in two seconds. Real rewarding that you spend all that time just to make your build slightly less bad. So this is a plea from not just me, but my little corner of the Hardcore community where we want to be able to play without the spectre of death looming over our shoulders at all times on Ultimate (had to throw that GD quote in there, a cookie goes to the first person to remember where it’s from).
Now that I’ve told you my personal experience and opinion, I’m going to pull out some general facts then stats to point out what specifically the problem is. Every weapon type and combination, I assume, is supposed to have it’s own merits and demerits. The problem with 2-handed is that, supposedly just like dual-wielding, it’s supposed to have high damage, but that just isn’t the case. Dual-wielding allows for not only much faster attacks and much easier time reaching attack speed (AS) cap, but also has the chance for both weapons to attack at once, which deals more damage than 2-handers half the time, so why bother with them! What makes this issue even worse is the fact that many of these 2-handed weapons (if not most of them) have really bad stat lines, despite their cool effects. This means that if I wanted to get even close to a dual-wielding build’s damage I need to entirely give up defense. But since I’m a Hardcore player, I can’t do that, so I have to be happy with clear speeds that make Sword-and-Board builds laugh at me.
See, I like the arrangement of +skills on all of the 2-handers, but the actual stats on them are garbage. A lot of them have little to no attack speed stats on them, like Obsidian Juggernaut (despite the fact that it has +'s to Fighting Form ??). The final nail in the coffin is the reduced gains from attack speed that 2-handed weapons have, making it virtually impossible to reach cap attack speed unless you do Ceno’s theory build. Another stat problem many have is that they have literally no identity, like Leviathan. Like, +s to cold damage but no conversion, what? Oh, and don’t even get me started with the awful task of trying to get higher conversion on 2-handers. The most I’ve ever seen it is 50% outside of weapons that don’t need it or Abomination proc for my Obsidian Juggernaut build (by the way, that proc is on enemy death, which means it’s utterly worthless on most bosses, gimping it even more). This is terrible compared to Dual-Wielding because both weapons can have a component that converts the damage as opposed to one in 2-handed weapons, not to mention the extra mileage that flat damage gets those builds.
I honestly don’t think I can keep going on about this - I’m going to go mad, much like whomever designed half of these weapons. They’re either gimped into the ground or nonsensically designed (holla’ at you Leviathan!). Of the ones that aren’t absurd, I absolutely love their design! I just wish I could make use of them, but I feel as though my time and effort are wasted when I could’ve made one of the many, many great and accessible builds that exist today. Overall, I really love how everything feels as though it’s getting balanced over time, but 2-handers just feel like they’ve been left in the dust. There was recently that patch that made Augments better, but it isn’t remotely enough. Between a gimped attack speed, small selection, bizarre stat lines on otherwise cool weapons, inability to use two components, and the lack of versatility that dual-wielding offers, 2-handers are so pathetic it almost makes me want to cry.
As a last note, just because something can clear Ultimate doesn’t mean anything - even in Hardcore - it’s just the effort required to do so, and it’s seriously inordinate how lopsided that is away from 2-handed builds. Wanted to get this out of the way before people come in here saying ‘oh my 2h build is just fine,’ when that really doesn’t mean anything when the standard of builds is, well, Commando or Coldbreaker at the moment. Even ten steps under them is still way above 2-handers right now.
As a last last note, I really hope this thread is going to make me look silly when the expansion comes out and you guys will have already been working on answering all my worries. But judging from the fact that the testers still make ‘lul 2h builds’ jokes without reserve, I can’t help but assume nothing has changed.
