Long story short, I have a lvl 25 dual wield Redguard who has 6 perks to invest (i'm indecisive) I'm using swords at the moment with no perks in the 'specialty' areas of the 1h tree. I'm curious on what would be better.

Dual wield maces with an eventual ignore 75% armor after I'm perked into it
Dual wield swords with an eventual 20% chance for critical hit after I'm perked into it.

I have a save just before a giant camp with 2 giants where I've been equipping my two best swords/maces speccing into that and then comparing. Probably a bad test considering giants don't have armor on but I have yet to find a nice heavily armored bandit chief or anything yet.

I'm curious if anyone is in the know and if one is considerably better than the other? If they're similar I'll stay with swords since most of the kill animations (ie the cutting off heads) just makes more sense to me with swords equipped and are far more eye pleasing.

Thanks in advance

bonecrusher sounds more badass

2H would have been a tough choice as the 2H Swords have some of the best finisher animations, but 1H I'd strongly favor maces for the armor reduction. Plus, as the previous poster said, bonecrusher sounds more badass.

2 handed daedric mace + elemental fury + bonecrusher = winning

I would say go for Bladesman, as Bonecrusher seems to be more situational, in that not every single enemy that you fight will wear armor, whereas you will always have a chance of performing a critical hit to any enemy you encounter.

Bladesman for sure. Crits do double damage if I'm not mistaken, and double damage of a legendary upgraded sword every 5 swings is nothing to laught at. Also, from what I've found, the toughest enemies don't tend to have armor, so that leaves maces as being specialty weapons.

Sorry all, it's called bone breaker for the 1h tree, not sure where I got bone crusher from.

Anyway I'm leaning bladesman if only for the fact that as you said, not all enemies will be wearing armor. It's tough to pass up bone breaker though, ignoring 75% armor, especially on 'bosses' like bandit chiefs is nothing to sneeze at.

From a purely aesthetic view it has to be bladesman as the kill moves just seem cooler with swords equipped, slicing behind the leg on a giant so he drops to his knees then shoving your sword through the bottom of his chin out the top of his head is awesome sauce in a can.

The only other downside aside from the kill moves looking odd using maces is that the 'feel' shorter than swords (they are in reality I know but some gamnes treat the attack 'length' of a sword and mace the same) they aren't all that much slower than swords, they have a slightly better chance to stagger as well, which is always a plus.

Do you know of any threads that actually discuss the math on either of these two perks. I'm wondering if the 20% crit chance with swords won't even out with the 75% armor reduction with maces based simply on the speed of swords. Like I said, if they are fairly similar in damage output I'll more than likely spec swords.

Thanks for the input so far!

I would go Mehrunes Dagon dagger on left hand and Sword on right hand for max attack speed, a power attack like this is about 1/3 faster then using 2 swords, use absorb stamina on the sword so you keep spaming power attacks, btw bonebreaker is completly useless, because just about everything in the game doesnt use high amounts of armor, what u have is enemys with large amounts of Hp, so the faster your attacks the better in terms of dps.

ps: For enemys that actually have high armor use the kill shout.

stills sounds badass

Don't even non-armored enemies have some sort of "natural" armor rating?

nop dont think so, and even if that is the case its low lvl of armor in 80% of the cases, then you have high lvl draugs or some bandit chiefs that have better dmg mitigation, that still isnt enough to defend against power attack spam. so yeah the most comon defensive atribute for all mobs you fight is larger and larger pools of Hp has you lvl up.

So offhanding any dagger increases attack speed or just Mehrunes Dagon dagger does that? I often wondered if offhanding a dagger actually increased your speed because all the assasins that attack you seem to have a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other.

I've got ebony swords atm and lvl 28 now, nothing really can do much to me except magic users, fighting more than one frost troll at once and the odd dragon. I'll hold off on the absorb stamina enchant since I have plenty of potions to quaff but when I do get into a hairy situation I can just pop adrenaline rush and wreck things.

If the key to speeding things up is just offhanding a dagger then I'm game.

So far it's looking like bladesman for the 1h perk tree. Maybe I'll make another frenzy warrior who uses maces after this one.

As far as ive seen, ithose perks really depend on which weapons you think looks better....I love the look of Dwarven Maces but not the look of Daedric or Ebony maces but i Love the lock of Dwarven Axes and the lock Daedric Axes.

not enough information to make that call from a mathematical perspective yet. i, at least, haven't been able to find data on how much armor different creatures come with.

im 36, dual-wielding maces, one-handed skill is at 64, and only have 7 perks put into the one-handed tree, including 2/3 bone breaker. and i absolutely tear sh*t up when it gets close to me.