Blunderbluss should give the spear another range management option to get the bruiser low before going in with spear.
Spears normally get me as a bruiser when I dive their backline in OPR and they’re positioned defensively to protect their healer etc. They’re pretty easy to manage when they initiate combat head on to me as bruiser. If I turn my back to one they can punish as well in short bursts.
This is an answer. Best paired with SnS or Rapier imo.
Thwarting strikes axe user is still tough but doable.
Enduring strikes wasn’t nerfed this patch, patch notes were wrong. Still 20% instead of 12% damage resist for GA (while grit, basically 24/7 @300str)
Next patch will be better if that change goes through.
Try to trade damage when they use WH, GA has too much life steal.
Light spear vs light GAWH, is doable.
Light spear vs medium/heavy GAWH is hard because their damage absorb
Medium spear vs light/medium/heavy GAWH is doable
If you roll with 200 Con as a Spear user your base damage will never be above 1250. Good luck killing a Bruiser GA/IG or GA/WH with their damage absorb. In order for a Spear main to do comparable base damage to a 300 str or 300 mage we have to roll with about 50-100 con.
Currently with food buffs, 100 str, 309 dex and 100 con my base dmg with a Spear is 1422. A GA/WH can run 300 str 200 con and be at 1450-1500 base damage. I hope you can land your stuns and dodge long enough to survive.
Besides an obvious skill or gear gap, the GA should lose to every other melee weapon in a 1v1. It shouldn’t even be close. If this is not the case, why do other melee weapons exist?
People also forget that Rapier was meant to be an attack weapon, meaning that anyone playing it should’ve been able to have equal chances against a player using GA.
They do, but it’s because of the GA’s emphasis on aoe damage and cc that you see it so commonly used. This makes it good for wars and group pvp in general. All other melee weapons besides the hammer lack AOE and oh look at that, GA/WH is the most common combination of weapons in new world. Weird.
GA players still beat other melee builds routinely. It shouldn’t even be close. The damage per swing is too high for the GA. It can burst +8k damage in a few seconds to light armor players. In terms of single target damage, the great axe should be doing like 1/2 the damage per second every other melee weapon does because, like you said, it has AoE damage and the other weapons do not. It doesn’t make sense for the only AoE weapons to hit as hard or harder than the single target melee weapons. This not a controversial point of view. This is just normal balancing in any video game. Single target damage is high and AoE damage is low.
Single target damage IS higher than GA and WH. If you put a med or heavy wh and a light sns spear on fort dummies, the sns/spear would be doing loads more dmg. It only seems like GA WH does more because of heavy armor, masteries for dmg resistance, 300 str grit, and cc.
In terms of leaderboards for war/opr, you would see more WH/GA up top than other melee’s because if the air dmg and the way that dmg is weighted for points. AOE DPS will should be doing more total damage than single target dps.
I will say that GA/WH + heavy is synergistic to the point where it’s clear that someone (head dev) had a bias.