Is there any reason for using a Great Axe rather than a Great Sword?

[LunaCee]

I don't understand any of this jibber-jabber about Carnifexes and adrenaline and sentient weapons.

Well quite simply the Carnifex is the absolute strongest two handed option available at low levels. A lot of builds will use it until they can pick up their free minimum level 10 weapon choice from the Mists of Ravenloft DLC.

https://ddowiki.com/page/Item:Carnifex

Sadly the epic version of the Carnifex is a let down with a minimum level requirement of 25 and no real special properties. You can get better value out of the Epic Xuum as a weapon basically anyone can lay hands on with a little bit of farming out in the Sands of Menechtarun explorable and materials from the epic enabled quests. And as the Epic Xuum has a minimum level of 20 it can be given a sentient jewel and slowly upgraded by feeding it junk named items to unlock slots to put filigree upgrades into which can result in even more power.

As for Adrenaline, it is part of the Fury of the Wild epic destiny. It is an active attack of that tree and increases both your damage by 75% and your critical threat range by 16 when activated. It also only has an 8 second cooldown before it can be reused.

 

[WDS]

https://ddowiki.com/page/Item:Carnifex

"Location: Free Delera, End chest"

(click)

"Requires access to adventure pack: Delera's Tomb"

Well then, not something I'll ever need to concern myself with.

 

[unbongwah]

But for real, I don't understand any of this jibber-jabber about Carnifexes and adrenaline and sentient weapons. The only things I understood were "at low lvl you want crit chance, at higher lvl you want more crit multiplier" and "maximize the product of the total range and multiplier"

Carnifex has a 17-20/x3 critical threat range; basically meaning that on 20% of your attacks, you'll do triple damage. For a level 4 2H weapon, that's pretty great, especially since many class-based crit threat bonuses don't become available until level 12. So at low levels, about the only times you wouldn't want to use Carnifex is you're fighting something with Fortification (thus negating Carnifex's best feature) and/or damage reduction that resists slashing weapons (e.g., skeletons).

As the wiki page shows, almost every class gets some sort of critical threat bonus. So figuring out what's the best weapon for your build depends on which bonuses you plan to use, since you want to increase both the frequency and magnitude of your critical hits as much as possible. E.g., a 2H barbarian with Frenzied Berserker's Focused Wrath (+2 crit multiplier) will want to use a weapon with a wide crit range such as falchions: 18-20/x2 base -> 15-20/x4 with Focused Wrath + Improved Critical feat, meaning a 30% chance to do *Quake announcer voice* quad damage. OTOH a 2H barbarian who takes Ravager's Critical Rage (+2 crit range) will want a weapon with an already-high crit multiplier like Riftmaker.

Okay now we get a little more advanced. Adrenaline is an Epic Strike in the Fury of the Wild Epic Destiny: "Your next melee attack deals +25/50/75% damage, and increases your threat (range) by 4/8/16." Because of that big boost to threat range, you are almost guaranteed to crit with an Adrenalized attack (presuming you hit, of course), regardless of what your weapon's base threat range is. So the bigger your crit multiplier, the more damage you'll get from using Adrenaline. Hence my comment, "Adrenaline favors weapons with higher crit multipliers."

Even better, if you pair Adrenaline with a special attack, the +75% damage bonus will stack with whatever damage bonuses that special attack adds. One example is a paladin using Exalted Smite: "An improved Smite that adds [+1/+1/+2] to your weapon's critical damage multiplier and [+0/+1/+2] to your weapon's critical threat range. "

Frankly, this is just scratching the surface of DDO's DPS math, but you gotta start somewhere.

 

[WDS]

Well then, not something I'll ever need to concern myself with.

Never mind this. I just learned that the Delara's Tomb pack was made f2p a while back.

 

[kmoustakas]

Got it.

But for real, I don't understand any of this jibber-jabber about Carnifexes and adrenaline and sentient weapons. The only things I understood were "at low lvl you want crit chance, at higher lvl you want more crit multiplier" and "maximize the product of the total range and multiplier"

I'll try to explain it better because I can't find that old post.

If your critical one shots the enemy, you want higher critical range. Thus, in low levels (or non-reaper?) where mobs have disporpotionally lower hit points than the damage you do, higher range is better. As soon as hit points start to go up and you don't kill in enemy with a single critical, you want higher multiplier. With reaper mode, champions and bosses, you don't one shot enemies with x2 weapons. Soon, you don't one shot enemies with x3 weapons so you want class enhancements etc to turn that x3 into a x4 or more.

The reason carniflex, sos, epic sos, epic xuum etc are so good is that they have a x3 multiplier AND a wider range of critical threat.

Example: at levels 1-3 you want a keen falchion of whatever. Every critical (15-20 with keen) will one shot everything. Once you start getting to level 4 you want carniflex because your falchion won't one-shot as much whereas carniflex will one shot EVERYTHING. The only reason we don't use carniflex 4-19 is that SOS is a better carniflex (and riftmaker is pretty good too).