I went on the UESP to get the damage equation and found that if you have all 5 of the damage boosting perks for a melee weapon skill, and have 100 in that skill you get the dps equation as follows. [(base weapon damage+smithing boost)*3]*attacks per second Note that this is before any magic effects.

I then proceeded to compare a single dragon bone sword from dawnguard with a dragon bone battleaxe (Battleaxe and Greatsword have same speed, but battleaxe does more damage, hence higher DPS)

If you smith an item to Legendary, you get a 10 damage point boost unless you abuse smithing to go higher. So I took the base damage for the sword which is 15, added 10 from smithing, and then multiplied by 3 to get 75,and with 1 swing a second equals 75 DPS

A Legendary smithed dragonbone battleaxe has a base damage of 26, add 10 from smithing and multiply by 3 for 108, then times that by 0.7 attacks a second for 75.6 DPS!

If you were to abuse smithing you would get higher DPS using a single dragonbone sword than using a dragonbone battleaxe


I will make note that at lower skill levels and with less in the damage boost perks the 2 handers have more DPS, but one you max out it becomes roughly equal, and with exploits 2 handers become weaker.

2 Handers still have an advantage in higher stagger chance, and the sweep perk that allows multiple enemies to be hit with one power attack.


I just found this rather interesting and decided I would share my findings. All my data came from here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Weapons