AXE is a MESS and has not been improved.

[Padra.1678]

AXE is a MESS. Here are a few reasons why it is so terrible from a pvp perspective. I hate it

- Still doesn't scale with malice for power which WHY? Or for that matter even consume malice because it glitched.

-Still isent usable with specter due to initiative cost. Also they STILL do not generate shroud.

- A/D still teleports you to the target so you can die even faster. Use "cloak and dagger" you say but wait that still doesn't work because the axes have a travel time and due to pathing it can be significant and it will PULL YOU STRAIGHT OUT OF STEALTH so you can die. 

- STILL does not track targets well.

- Its slow, clunky and doesn't really do much damage and that's AFTER you have stacked axes (which have cast times) and then you use a whole other skill (that has a cast time.)  Also it will RIP your Initiative and DO NOTHING if you press a button an extra time looking at you AXE 3.

-Axe 3 still misses most stationary building class targets.

- The AXE duel skill is a copy paste, actually it would be better if it WAS a copy paste (looking at you A/D forced death teleport). Point being its super lazy of Anet to make a skill like this that has no flavor what so ever between its offhand weapons. like we cant shoot them with the pistol on A/P or throw a dagger at them on A/D seriously? Nothing? 

These are all things the community brought up on this very forum and after months of who the hell knows what Anet was doing these problems are STILL HERE. I am so disappointed in this weapon and I am so disappointed in Anet that nothing was even fixed after all that time. Ridiculous. 

Edited March 6 by Padra.1678

[Antycypator.9874]

I see your problems might come from mashing buttons and not carefully using your skills when it's safe.

Teleport is good — because Cloak and Dagger is a melee skill, so instead of running to the enemy, or maybe wasting your dodge for it, you can teleport with Axe #3 and use Cloak and Dagger.

[Padra.1678]

I dont button mash. Though occasionally I double cast and thats annoying and fine ill accept it. but with axe and the cast times being so long its way to easy to do especially if you are someone new to the game you will struggle losing initiative to stupidity.

I can see that you missed the point of my comment about "cloake and dagger" your teleport is attched to the Same skill that is a delayed stike, depending on terrain it can be VERY delayed. This means that you have to wait to cast "Cloak and dagger" after you use axe 3 or it will pull you out of stealth. IF this was a short predictable delay it would be fine. BUT it is not. You can to wait to watch all your axes in case one is doing a rainbow over a non-existent pebble 900 range away and that one will pull you out of stealth after you HAVE waited and cast "cloak and dagger." My problem is that is a kitten design take makes it way harder then it should be to use your regular weapon skills.

 

Edited March 6 by Padra.1678

[Doggie.3184]

The ear-destroying sound effect it has makes it unplayable regardless of it's performance, unless you enjoy playing with audio off. I don't.

It mine as well not exist to me by that alone and I'll just pretend we don't get a new weapon. I really feel like they just don't want anyone playing this class. Why is a stealthy 'assassin' the loudest thing in game? It's really infuriating and really wish it'd get fixed ASAP.

Edited March 6 by Doggie.3184

[roamzero.9486]

It's pretty oppressive that it seems that both you and the axes need to be in 900 range to hit the enemy now. Makes them a lot less usable in battles with a lot of movement and the axes cannot reach your target even though you yourself are in range.

[Lithril Ashwalker.6230]

57 minutes ago, roamzero.9486 said:

It's pretty oppressive that it seems that both you and the axes need to be in 900 range to hit the enemy now. Makes them a lot less usable in battles with a lot of movement and the axes cannot reach your target even though you yourself are in range.

not accounting for all the kittening projectile hate. this company knows nothing about the original idea of thief on release, they nitpick anything and nerf it which gave the class identity. ignorance is bliss until they stop getting money flow

Edited March 6 by Lithril Ashwalker.6230

[Lithril Ashwalker.6230]

4 hours ago, roamzero.9486 said:

It's pretty oppressive that it seems that both you and the axes need to be in 900 range to hit the enemy now. Makes them a lot less usable in battles with a lot of movement and the axes cannot reach your target even though you yourself are in range.

you go 900 to cast axes which end up being now 900 from their position forcing you to move up if they try to kite away essentially making an invisible radius of 900 around each axe. it was great before it had the range nerf and now its kitten. bring back the 1800 unit range, keep line of sight, itll be fine, no one can get hit within keeps/walls etc. right now just utter trash when you are a/p and no one in their right minds will a/d into a zerg. both sets are crap and require axes to use #3 on both sets which without axes its a half second evade and or a port...useless weaponset, useless balance team xD boon ball forever i guess. glad i suspended my account

Edited March 7 by Lithril Ashwalker.6230

[Nomad.4301]

Bit of a rant incoming but here it goes..

Axe as a whole definitely needs some (ok a lot..) of work to have a place in my kit. It's overall a very boring weapon to use, effectively only having one real attack (3) which is virtually worthless without first spending HALF your initiative on a setup (2), which btw does almost no damage of its own unless you're point-blank with your target (good luck in any kind of PvP scenario) which entirely defeats the point in it being a 100% RANGED weapon.

The extremely high initiative costs on the weapon means it's pretty much only usable in the hands of a M7 deadeye, and the weapon almost feels purpose build for this one niche role. Specter uses nearly its entire initiative bar on a single axe3 combo which ends up doing less damage then if you spent the same amount of initiative spamming Sc/D 3, whereas Daredevil doesn't get much out of the AoE cleave that it doesn't already get from staff, and I'm pretty sure spamming weakening charge still nets more DPS per initiative spent anyways, DD also doesn't even have shroud skills to fall back on when it runs out of initiative after 1 burst.. Which leaves deadeye (specifically M7, any other trait and you suffer the same aforementioned issues), single target rifle is still vastly superior in power damage over A/P, leaving cleave damage the only use for this weapon on the power front, which is at least superior to shortbow, possibly also staff with M7's initiative regen. A/D M7 condi deadeye seems to be the only build this actually works out on imo, purely because it is the only build that can actually maintain the absurd cost of the skills.. and even then I consistently bench higher on specter using Sc/p in single target fights while also having better CC utility and survivability, those 50% post-beta nerfs hit the build HARD.

Mind you that's just PvE, the weapon in WvW (I don't play SPvP) is borderline useless especially post range nerf, owing mostly to its status as a pure ranged weapon it's vulnerable to every-single-possible reflect/block/bubble/wall/rock/tree/literally nothing (seriously the axes sometimes just vanish in mid-flight within range..) but also suffers from even-higher initiative costs in WvW as well as very sluggish cast times making your 11 initiative combo attack very easy to dodge/block/reflect etc.. This also means it's very bad against zergs with A/P being reflected back at you 50% of the time and blocked outright another 40%, you might be lucky that 10% of the time your axes land.. but they don't deal enough damage to down most targets (or even bring most to 50% hp) even if ALL axes land, which is fine except you literally can't follow up with another attack because landing that just took ALL of your resources and by the time you can launch another axe volley they're back at 100%... As for A/D, well it's basically a suicide weapon.. it's a melee teleport that ports you into the middle of a zerg/enemy for no good reason given axe is a 100% pure RANGED WEAPON and gives you nothing but a .5 second evade as compensation, seriously, there's a reason why other range weapon have skills that exclusively port you away from your target. The only reason you might want to enter melee range is to use Cloak and Dagger, but given the cost of axe skills you probably won't have the resources to use that anyways..

When you take into consideration the recent nerf to the range it makes the weapon almost unusable, because your target not only has to be in range of you they also have to be in range of your axes on the ground, which means all someone has to do to completely shut down an axe thief is keep moving in one direction and the axes will nearly always be out of range, even if the thief themselves if right on-top of you, GG.

TL;DR: Overall, I find it to be quite a boring weapon, with minimal usefulness outside of 1 niche build in PvE. Maybe it could've been saved by also adding an off-hand axe alongside it. But alas, I gave all this feedback and more during/after the beta 3 months ago and so did dozens of others and yet nothing changed. I doubt this weapon can be salvaged because the basic concept of it is just bad, even if the weapon absolutely SHREDDED like it did on target dummies in the beta, it would still be boring and extremely clunky to use effectively, but as it stands right now i do more damage and have more fun with almost every other weapon in the thieves kit excluding P/P and shortbow.

Oh and also this weapon feels like it was balanced with 100% quickness uptime in mind which makes it feels pretty lame in open world/solo, it also has very little synergy with either of the off-hands you can use it with.

[Lithril Ashwalker.6230]

1 hour ago, Nomad.4301 said:

Bit of a rant incoming but here it goes..

Axe as a whole definitely needs some (ok a lot..) of work to have a place in my kit. It's overall a very boring weapon to use, effectively only having one real attack (3) which is virtually worthless without first spending HALF your initiative on a setup (2), which btw does almost no damage of its own unless you're point-blank with your target (good luck in any kind of PvP scenario) which entirely defeats the point in it being a 100% RANGED weapon.

The extremely high initiative costs on the weapon means it's pretty much only usable in the hands of a M7 deadeye, and the weapon almost feels purpose build for this one niche role. Specter uses nearly its entire initiative bar on a single axe3 combo which ends up doing less damage then if you spent the same amount of initiative spamming Sc/D 3, whereas Daredevil doesn't get much out of the AoE cleave that it doesn't already get from staff, and I'm pretty sure spamming weakening charge still nets more DPS per initiative spent anyways, DD also doesn't even have shroud skills to fall back on when it runs out of initiative after 1 burst.. Which leaves deadeye (specifically M7, any other trait and you suffer the same aforementioned issues), single target rifle is still vastly superior in power damage over A/P, leaving cleave damage the only use for this weapon on the power front, which is at least superior to shortbow, possibly also staff with M7's initiative regen. A/D M7 condi deadeye seems to be the only build this actually works out on imo, purely because it is the only build that can actually maintain the absurd cost of the skills.. and even then I consistently bench higher on specter using Sc/p in single target fights while also having better CC utility and survivability, those 50% post-beta nerfs hit the build HARD.

Mind you that's just PvE, the weapon in WvW (I don't play SPvP) is borderline useless especially post range nerf, owing mostly to its status as a pure ranged weapon it's vulnerable to every-single-possible reflect/block/bubble/wall/rock/tree/literally nothing (seriously the axes sometimes just vanish in mid-flight within range..) but also suffers from even-higher initiative costs in WvW as well as very sluggish cast times making your 11 initiative combo attack very easy to dodge/block/reflect etc.. This also means it's very bad against zergs with A/P being reflected back at you 50% of the time and blocked outright another 40%, you might be lucky that 10% of the time your axes land.. but they don't deal enough damage to down most targets (or even bring most to 50% hp) even if ALL axes land, which is fine except you literally can't follow up with another attack because landing that just took ALL of your resources and by the time you can launch another axe volley they're back at 100%... As for A/D, well it's basically a suicide weapon.. it's a melee teleport that ports you into the middle of a zerg/enemy for no good reason given axe is a 100% pure RANGED WEAPON and gives you nothing but a .5 second evade as compensation, seriously, there's a reason why other range weapon have skills that exclusively port you away from your target. The only reason you might want to enter melee range is to use Cloak and Dagger, but given the cost of axe skills you probably won't have the resources to use that anyways..

When you take into consideration the recent nerf to the range it makes the weapon almost unusable, because your target not only has to be in range of you they also have to be in range of your axes on the ground, which means all someone has to do to completely shut down an axe thief is keep moving in one direction and the axes will nearly always be out of range, even if the thief themselves if right on-top of you, GG.

TL;DR: Overall, I find it to be quite a boring weapon, with minimal usefulness outside of 1 niche build in PvE. Maybe it could've been saved by also adding an off-hand axe alongside it. But alas, I gave all this feedback and more during/after the beta 3 months ago and so did dozens of others and yet nothing changed. I doubt this weapon can be salvaged because the basic concept of it is just bad, even if the weapon absolutely SHREDDED like it did on target dummies in the beta, it would still be boring and extremely clunky to use effectively, but as it stands right now i do more damage and have more fun with almost every other weapon in the thieves kit excluding P/P and shortbow.

Oh and also this weapon feels like it was balanced with 100% quickness uptime in mind which makes it feels pretty lame in open world/solo, it also has very little synergy with either of the off-hands you can use it with.

this is literally what i just got done posting based on your post to support ticket and that i asked them to temporarily suspend my account. i came back because axe was awesome with the extra range but among other bugs/trait inconsistencies, bad design with Harrowing Storm being a TELEPORT and not a shadowstep....nah....its been over a week and nothing is even considered. I just downloaded ESO and its probably going to be my main for a long long time until some actual consideration is coming and right now 3/19/24 patch previews are not enough to satisfy.

ESO, a few EcK play ESO and im going to be forming EcK and the rogue crew there for pvp

Edited March 7 by Lithril Ashwalker.6230