Axes are king right now. Bleeds are not affected by resistance so they are actually better against high resistance opponents than maces. They tick every 2 seconds so it means their ticks are higher than other dots so they pair well with a whitle your opponent down into burst combo range then can tick hard(er) during your burst combo piling on lots of damage simultaneously. They are also affected by NB Incap and minor berserk.
Bleeds 1v1, but if you’re spin to win then maces. Penetration is the best avenue to damage, especially with the shield changes. For CP I’ve swapped my stamwarden to 5x bone pirate, 5x spriggans front, 2x master dw back back bar. 2x blood spawn. Medium gives sweet damage and powered dw back bar daggers give good crit and heal buffs. You lose out on bleeds from back bar axes, but stacking pen makes that inefficient anyways and lets you maintain huge front bar burst with solid sustain. Master’s bleeds give you acceptable single target burst so you can wear down tanky targets a bit more.
Still not decided on front bar traits - likely nirn/sharpened for the most upfront pressure in dawnbreaker dumps.
If you feel like you’re lacking tankiness I would just swap bone pirate for impregnable and run the stam gold food. I do have the luxury of playing with someone else that regularly runs troll king so I don’t have to compromise on that either.
I ran some solo parses during the murkmire pts. 10 with each of the 4 weapons against a 3m dummy. Don't have access to the results right now, but I remember the average was something like 44k maces > 43k dagger > 42.4k axes > 42.1k swords.
I also wouldn't recommend using axes in the current templar meta. The bleeds can be cleansed and the overall dps will be the lowest by a large margin.
Edited by MaxJrFTW on November 24, 2018 8:24AM
"I don't know you, and I don't care to know you."
―Ulrich Leland, 3E 433
It's worth noting that swords improve your healing, the others do not.
No they don't.
.(Mace if target is above 20k resists iirc)
A one handed mace gives 10% pen, which is 10% of what is left after debuffs like major and minor fracture. Swords increase damage done by 2.5%, which is actually less then that in cp environments, so for maces to give a comparable damage increase, the player would have to have at least 16,500 armor, after debuffs. Because 1% armor equals 660 and 660*2.5 is 1650, which is the amount of armor you need to pen to get 2.5% damage increase, and 1650 is 10% of 16,500. Of course if you have any other damage done increase percentages, the amount you actually get from the swords is diminished, so the actual amount of armor to come ahead with maces over swords will vary.
Edited by Lightspeedflashb14_ESO on November 24, 2018 7:30AM