Haven’t seen a recent discussion on this point so curious how other fighters are approaching this.

With Axe mastery bleed effect and the speed between axe and sword being the same now it’s clear axe is the route to take for maximizing damage (particularly effective against bosses). Coppersan also had fighters as the only S tier 2nd job class with ice/lightning and I think he’s on to something.

I use to always play 2h swords because they just look way better but I’ve been thinking of changing to 2h axe when classic starts, and using a weapon skin because 2h axes just look way too small and underwhelming to me despite having the same range as a doombringer.

On top of this fighters are the only ones who can make use of axe weapons in the game, so it might be not only stronger but also cheaper to play and scroll 2H axes as well.

The exact bleed formula I couldn’t figure out how it worked (does it do 100% damage over 3 seconds of the initial attack that triggered the bleed, or of the fighters base attack? Can it scale with crits and final attacks? Etc). My rough estimate right now is axe fighters do 10-15% more damage when bossing compared to sword fighters which is pretty substantial. If anyone has first hand experience testing and verifying this please share!

Fighter Axe vs Sword?