Axe Passives are poor and unbalanced GGG please take a look

I am not sure if this comment has been made before, but i wonder if anyone has ever looked at the current state of Axe specific passives in comparison to mace and sword. If you look at the common areas and the clusters along the path, and try to allocate them in a way that gets the most bang for your buck so to speak, it is clear there is a loser, and by a landslide. And I especially dont understand why, because when it comes to weapon choices, sword and mace already have advantages. The sword gets an increased accuracy mod or crit mod, and the mace gets a stun duration or elemental damage mod, while all the axes I have seen get nothing. And to top it off, the 2 best clusters of Axe passives are blocked by a Dex node off the main path.

I have switched primary weapons a few times now and had to respec, and I went from for example,

Sword Passives (11) 138% physical dmg 20% Attack Speed
Mace Passives (11) 174% physical dmg 6% Attack Speed
to
Axe Passives (11) 116% physical dmg 4% Attack Speed

And this is just one example, I challenge anyone to try and get axe to stack up better than mace or sword from any high level build. I reay dont think it is possible.

I hope GGG could take a look at this and address the balance.

Weapon specific nodes are just bad, not only axes. In my opinion there should be less weapon nodes and only powerful ones should remain. I mean seriously, single nodes with like +4% mace speed are just wtf.

Anyway you said that that axes provide no bonus compared to swords or maces. Well that's not true, they have higher dps.

Axes have higher base dps, so IMO their passives should enhance this, not nerf it. Axe passives should focus more on physical damage and less on other things (like aspd).

I agree. I recently "upgraded" from a 301 dps pure physical sword to a 337 pure physical axe and refunded all weapon specific passive a and bought axe specific and actually ended up with less total dps.

IMHO axes should grant some +X to strengt (like maces +% stun and swords + to acc%).

Axes actually do have something going for them: about 10% more base damage.

Whether that's enough to address the discrepancy in passive bonuses is another matter, though.

And yet, swords are still better due to their high attack speed. That's not always a good thing, but if you look at it flat, like we are now, swords are still the best choice if you want to have the highest dmg out put. That's why I also find it wierd you can gain the most ias out of it. And highest physical boost... Logic? None to be found.

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Skivverus wrote:

Axes actually do have something going for them: about 10% more base damage.

Whether that's enough to address the discrepancy in passive bonuses is another matter, though.

It's not really 'another matter', it's the main point of the OP. Sure, axes have more base damage per hit, but that's completely useless if they can't really get more *actual* damage per hit because of the passive tree.

many axe nodes give accuracy(include 3 notable!), which is not worth due to the RT keystone and the fact axe have low base crit rate
using one hand axe atm and i just pick one-hand nodes instead

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Skivverus wrote:

Axes actually do have something going for them: about 10% more base damage.

Whether that's enough to address the discrepancy in passive bonuses is another matter, though.

for white base, yes. but if you consider the flat phy damage mod, sword still better than axe due to high base APS

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Eternal_Echo wrote:

many axe nodes give accuracy(include 3 notable!), which is not worth due to the RT keystone and the fact axe have low base crit rate
using one hand axe atm and i just pick one-hand nodes instead

"

Skivverus wrote:

Axes actually do have something going for them: about 10% more base damage.

Whether that's enough to address the discrepancy in passive bonuses is another matter, though.

for white base, yes. but if you consider the flat phy damage mod, sword still better than axe due to high base APS

To be fair, swords have innate accuracy aswell which is unhelpful for RT keystone.

Side note though, wouldn't it be cool if they had high crit chance? They are very heavy and sharp, likely to do a lot of damage when you hit, means that accuracy wouldn't feel wasted, and you could get some cool crit builds for axes