Best one handed weapon

[Eternal]

Hello guys !
I played a lot in legendary as a thief with Stealth/bow and i want to challenge myself with a warrior this time, to start slowly i decided to go with a shield and i'm looking for a one handed weapon. But i don't know what is the best between sword, mace, axe...

Mace seem to have incredible perks with ignoring opponent armor but i'm listening to any advise !

[Lady Aeleanor]

The main difference among weapons is the speed at which they swing. So daggers and one-handed swords swing fastest, next would be axes, then maces. But unique weapons can vary this statistic a bit. Perks increase damage with all weapons, and maces, for example, can ignore a percentage of an opponent's armour by putting points into the perk tree for one-handed. Personally, I play a Warrior, with sword and shield. And the nice thing about building perk points with Block, is that you get Shield Bash, which essentially makes the shield an effective weapon.

[steventirey]

Don't worry about the special weapon perks. They all either suck, or are of limited use.

Critical hits in the game are almost worthless. They only do half the weapons base, unaltered damage. So if a sword deals 20 damage before you apply your perks and stuff to it, and before its tempered, its critical damage will be 10. Then you apply all your skill perks and tempering to the sword, its damage might go up to 100. But a critical hit from it will still only do 10 damage. Critical hits do add damage, but in the end its only a very small amount. If the wiki numbers are correct, at most it works out to about a 3% increase in damage per attack. Not worth it.

The bleed damage for axes also isn't all that great. At the top, its only like 18 damage total over the course of 6 seconds. Or you could just swing an extra time and deal more damage than that. It does ignore armor, but a number of things are also immune to it. Situational at best.

The maces ability to ignore some armor sounds nice. Until you realize most tough opponents don't actually have armor (even some of the ones that appear to be wearing armor). Most just have large amounts of hit points, so the armor penetration has nothing to penetrate. It will help against things like armored NPCs. But most of the tougher creatures and draugr have no actual armor. And the ones that do only have a small amount of it.

In short, just choose the weapon you like best. Your actual choice of weapon will basically not matter in the slightest.

[John]

Enemies barely have armor, so that extra damage increase doesn't do a whole lot.

As lady said, it depends on weapon type. By all means the faster the weapon the more dps it has combined with smithing, so that goes to the dagger, with the unofficial patch perks work correctly so their damage, especially with stealth is by far the highest.

If you're not going for stealth their range is rather pitiful, so for that reason you might wanna go for a sword, at least you don't have to stand within 2 inches to hit them.

For which sword is the strongest?, it again depends if you're using the complete trifecta of improvements. Smithing, alchemy and enchanting?, stalhrim is the best option when you throw chaos on it, they get 25% extra power with cold enchantments, since chaos is part cold, all the damage potential gets improved. If you're upgrading the destruction damage perks the enchantment alone will do absurd damage compared to anything else and even more on a stalhrim weapon.

[Robert Zerker]

I haven't tested much axes, so I don't know if the bleed (axe perk) actually stacks or if it's just limited to 1 bleed at once.
(I don't even know if you can bleed one target, then swap to another one and apply bleed to that secondary target, while the first one is still doing its damage over time.)
I remember there's a unique shield that can bleed on bash, and that specific bleed does stack with itself (but it's weak).
Now, a daedric axe will do more bleed than an iron one, but I don't know if tempering actually boost the bleed or not (I guess it does not, but not sure)

Now, swords will do critical damage very often and they're fast. They're very good with low-medium enchants that drain 'small' ammounts of health/magic/stamina, since they hit more often than the other weapons (excepted daggers, which are faster).

Maces will ignore a % of armor, so that makes them the best against heavily protected enemies. But maces are slow. If you do not enchant it at all, you can use the shout that increases attack speed, which will boost your dps a lot and might be just as strong as a legit enchantements.

TLDR : in my experience, the higher level you get, the 'better' maces get. Just because more and more enemies start spawning with heavy armor or just higher armor values.

[Senor Cinco]

This page will tell you every thing you need to know. So, you can make a good choice, pending your character and/or playstyle.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:One-handed#Skill_Usage

..in the end, it really comes down to what you want to use. Skyrim isn't complex enough to warrant any 'build' over another one, really. As long as you have a focused means of dealing damage and a means of guarding against or avoiding damage, you can excel at any difficulty.

[Fitness Lauch]

Maces are pretty bad because they reduce the armor which reduces the effectiveness of Marked for Death (unless you play on the unofficial patch which nerfs the entire shout to death anyways). Other than that it doesn't matter what you're using tbh.

Would also swap the shield for dual wield later on (once onehanded is level 70) and put skill points into restoration instead of blocking, it's far more helpful.

[Eternal]

Thanks a lot everyone for your reply, i think i will go with a sword since it's the fastest, so i can apply more enchantement damage (hp steal/burn) :) I will rush jagged crown and Dawnbreaker to get a good start :p

[John]

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

Maces are pretty bad because they reduce the armor which reduces the effectiveness of Marked for Death (unless you play on the unofficial patch which nerfs the entire shout to death anyways). Other than that it doesn't matter what you're using tbh.

Would also swap the shield for dual wield later on (once onehanded is level 70) and put skill points into restoration instead of blocking, it's far more helpful.

If you need marked for death to kill stuff you're doing something wrong, but you do you.

[Fitness Lauch]

Originally posted by John:

Originally posted by Fitness Lauch:

Maces are pretty bad because they reduce the armor which reduces the effectiveness of Marked for Death (unless you play on the unofficial patch which nerfs the entire shout to death anyways). Other than that it doesn't matter what you're using tbh.

Would also swap the shield for dual wield later on (once onehanded is level 70) and put skill points into restoration instead of blocking, it's far more helpful.

If you need marked for death to kill stuff you're doing something wrong, but you do you.

It's fun to use on higher difficulties like legendary tbh. Even tho it's overpowered it still feels better balanced than crafting.