DW - weapon considerations?

When I made my first character I named himTerminax and role played an axe wilelding Marauder. I've moved on since then and love my L49 Duelist, but I've kept the sentimental attachment to axes. But in my developing experience I have become more aware of the subtleties of the game and I've noticed my beloved axes have no implicit properties! Which leads me to re-consider weapon choices.

What are the trade offs for a DW Duelist? I've noticed nearly all of the daggers require Int, which is in short supply in my build. Same with claws, so both of those appear strangely unavailable to me. That leaves what, swords, maces and axes? Are there balancing considerations I should be aware of in the implicit characteristics of these? What weapons work best within reach of our tree location?

My tree. As you can see, I have avoided any weapon-specific nodes so far:



Thanks

Swords, lot's of sword nodes near the duelist tree.

Swords provide implicit accuracy benefits. How does that compare to other weapons and what are the downsides of using swords? Is it just the opportunity cost of forgoing the implicit properties of maces? And why do axes have no implicit properties? Are these just arbitrary differences unrelated to the class or skill tree, or is there a general plan here?

Thanks

note that swords also include rapiers. rapiers provide global crit multiplier boni instead of accuracy. however, whats really strong about them is their attack speed, as you can easily get rapiers to smth between 1.8 to above 2.0 aps. now, this usually is balanced out with lower damage values, however, note that absolute boni to damage such as +x-y to damage offsets the disadvantage of that (there is no absolute attack speed bonus modifier in the game). together with the fact that you have quite powerful sword nodes near you, going swords seems like the most natural choice.

in the end, if you want to use cleave your options boil down to axes or swords anyways

edit: axes have no implicit properties, but instead come with the highest dps values of all weapon classes

They're pretty much all viable. Daggers and sceptres though can roll for spell casting mods though so usually aren't too good for duelists (plus daggers have insane int requirements). The others are all fine though. Skill usage has some effect on choice.

Axes don't have implicit properties like other weapons because they have the highest dps. If you're taking the resolute technique keystone then axes and maces are kind of a no brainer since you can't benefit from the implicit properties of swords.

Anyway you don't need to decide anytime soon. The game kind of dissuades you from investing any points into dps when you play melee already so just use what's best available.

Thanks guys, that's helpful.

I hadn't considered rapiers, I like the idea of a global crit multiplier modifier (although chance would have been so much sweeter) as I have deliberately avoided RT and gone the crit route. My two main attacks are Dual Strike and Cleave, so that works, too.

I have enjoyed axes and I like what I've rolled (two RG 3-links with chaos resist and global crit mod), but I won't need the DPS as much as the survivability I'm still working on.

I just made a post on how each weapon differs from each other since I've seen many posts asking about it. take a look and see if it helps at all.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/178325