I've created a "Cleric" class, specializing in the mace, and I've heard that 3/3 Bone Breaker (maces ignore 75% of your opponents armor) is actually useless, as dragons aren't armored and bandit chiefs wear the same crap leather at all levels. Is this true? 3 points are a lot for something unless it's actually worth it.

As for Paralyzing Strike, is this worth it? I'm trying to picture how often I'd ever "backwards power attack" and I can't picture ever really doing this (I assume this means back pedaling while power attacking?) Worth it?

Firstly, Bonebreaker and it's identical perk in the Two Handed tree are rather useless, but not for the reasons you think.

You see, armored enemies have no actual armor skill and their armors are always unimproved, so even a bad guy decked out in Deadric armor with a shield is only barely going to have over 100 points of armor rating, if that at all. By the time you can get all three ranks in the perk (requires 90 skill), you'll be dealing enough damage with the weapons you'll have by then that enemy armor rating makes little difference.

Secondly, no, Paralyzing Strike is not a bad idea. Because of the time it takes to initiate a power attack, you can simply hold the attack button and then move backwards. Instead of moving, you'll just do the backwards power attack. To get the hang of it so that you don't worry, you can just try that on your own (the animations are easiest to see in third person) before getting the perk. But regardless of that, backwards movement is slow enough that if you don't time it right and begin moving backwards before you attack, you're still likely to connect.

The Bone Breaker/Skull Crusher perks with Maces/Warhammers have the most potential of any weapon "spec", but sadly, animals/monsters do not have Armor Rating, and NPCs rarely wear high end Armor, and even when they do, odds are their Armor Skill is crap. Bandit Chiefs are the most heavily armored NPC that you can regularly run into, but i have seen a random hostile "High Elf" wearing a full suit of Ebony. Couldn't say exactly how effective that was for him, considering i was using Mace of Molag Bal with 2/3 or 3/3 Bone Breaker, and killed him in 2-3 Power Attacks.

The Bladesman/Deep Wounds perk only considers the base damage with a Critical, and the Hack and Slash/Limbsplitter perk is a Bleed DoT, which some enemies are immune to (mainly Undead), and it rarely get's to see it's full duration before the enemy is killed. When a mod comes around that gives Animals/Monsters Armor Rating dependant upon their type, and NPC's better armor/higher armor skills, the Bone Breaker/Skull Crusher perks will be worth their weight in gold.

This remains to be confirmed hovewer; enemies do have classes with different skill multipliers, but how the multipliers affect their skills is unknown so far. For example, in the formula for calculating armor, NPCs have a much higher multiplier for skill level than players, so it might be that they do actually have armor skill.

Althrough even if the hypothetical 100 AR enemy had 100 Heavy Armor skill, it would increase his AR to only 240, which means only 28.8% damage reduction. With 3/3 Bonebreaker, you would cut that by 3/4, to 7.2%. So yeah, you'd be doing ~20% more damage than other weapons, but then again how many enemies clad full in Daedric Armor and with 100 Heavy Armor skill are there in the game?

tl;dr: yep, it's pretty much worthless, just like all the weapon-specific skills.

Well, I took the three sword perks, and one point in the axe perk. It's much of a muchness really.

If you are the type of person that anolyses things down to the nth degree to work out that x weapon is optimal, it could be an issue...If you are like me, and have a preference between running a sword through someones guts, or having to drag an axe out of their chest cavity, it isn't.

Eventually you reach the point, being a legendary character, that it doesn't matter what you use because you will win, so ultimately it boils down to what flavour eye-candy do you want...

the -75% armor is pretty much worthless. Putting those points into alchemy may very well benefit you more

as for the backwards power attack, only take it if you use shield and does not dual wield, otherwise you'll find yourself forgetting that backwards power attack actually exist

At least I do

Paralyzing strike can be tricky to land with a 1H weapon... I would suggest practicing as our ResidentPianist described. The longer range of a 2H weapon makes that version of the paralyze perk a little easier to connect with.

-Loth