I still remember a time where if you wanted to play crit, daggers were the go-to weapon, mostly due to the innate crit chance. Harbinger bows were the best base by far because of the crit implicit. There was an argument to be made for axes, mostly in RT builds.
Now? Foils have more range and a crit mult implicit, in a world where it's extremely easy to cap accuracy with little to no investment due to the amount of accuracy on sword nodes & the Precision aura (where axes mostly still need to go RT in some cases). And sword nodes are extremely good in general, so no questions asked.
In short, if you use an attack skill that can be used with swords, it's likely better to use it by dual wielding foils.
(Also if you can sustain the mana, otherwise it's likely a gemini claw. Hello flicker strike.)
The prime culprit, this league, would obviously be Cyclone, but even then this has been happening for a while. The consistency of Foils prices being light years above every other base shows no hint of dropping - and why should it? They're clearly the best base in the game right now.
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So, the real question is : how is it possible to change that without breaking the game?
There is no easy answer for that, imho. There are hints of what could be with support gems like close combat or shockwave, but I don't think they're build defining / useful enough to make someone switch from a foil to anything else.
One thing that could be a possible way to shake things up would be to use ailments to reinforce weapon identity. For example, give axes the exclusivity of melee bleed nodes (which would also allow axe bleed builds to not take a sword notable just for that, IJS) as well as actual implicits that focus on bleeding; something like can inflict an extra stack of bleeding (so 2 without CD, 9 with it) could be an option? idk. That, or generic bleed damage, or bleeds with this weapon deal damage 10% faster, that kind of stuff).
Daggers are thematically / skilltreetically (I just decided that's a word okay) aligned with poison. So push that even more, maybe ; poisons deal damage faster, poisons inflicted by critical strike with this weapon take 10% of your crit multiplier into account, that kind of stuff. Give us a reason to play dagger with direct poison damage, otherwise claws are generally going to be much better solely because of how good the sustain they give is.
For both daggers and axes, having implicit chance to poison is probably not the best idea, at least for high tier bases ; having it exist in normal/cruel tier bases could also be a way to make ailment-based leveling more realistic
Maces are where I'm at a complete loss. Stun is, to put it bluntly (heh) not the most appealing of mechanics in the current state of the game. Something that could work is make Stun carry either a damage reduction debuff or a damage amplification debuff based on stun duration that is applied for a while after the monster is stunned. The latter is kind of uninspired, I'll agree, as that's basically a physical shock, but meh.
In terms of weapon implicits, you could then have weapons that instead of reducing stun threshold, increase stun duration, or have things like "attacks with this weapon have 5% chance to deal double damage to stunned enemies", that kind of stuff (probably a bit long text for an implicit)
Staves… Yeah. I honestly don't know. Making them a block-centric weapon could be a thing, like, having effects like next attack after blocking deals more damage, but I honestly don't know what staves should be as non-casters weapons. Or maybe I should say "warstaves".
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Which brings me to my (last) point -
I really think we could use more base diversity
At this point, choosing a weapon base is easy, outside of some specific cases (like bleed builds where you'd probably prefer a Reaver or a Royal over a Siege axe, for their innate flat damage), you just take the one that has more dps. If it has a great implicit (jewelled foil), even better. But that implicit does nothing for the identity of the weapon, it's just "does it deal more damage? Yes => take it, no => don't take it."
One choice that is somewhat interesting is with one handed axes
Royal axe : 92.4 pdps, consistent damage, slow
Reaver's Axe : 91.2 pdps, inconsistent damage (but higher highs), slow
Siege Axe : 81.0 base pdps, consistent damage, fast
While for direct damage builds you generally want a siege axe (because of the importance of the flat damage rolls everywhere on your gear), for bleed builds as you only have a limited number of crimson dance stacks, you will rather want to hit hard, yknow? And then reaver's for gamblers (especially if you couple it with a Ryslatha's) while Royal is for the consistent dudes
But the fact that there's a choice to make is a good thing imho. On the other hand of the spectrum, with swords, it's like "Jewelled foil? Yeah, jewelled foil."
