God Tier Dual Mace Build – 1-shot Anything – Stoneshard

This guide is still a work in progress.
 
 
Maces are by far the best weapon in the game. So what do you get when you combine two of them at the same time? Pure unadulterated carnage.
 
 
# Why are maces so good?
 
 
Maces – [fandom.com]  have all the perks of every single other weapon except “range” like bows and spears. Maces can have bleed, daze, stagger, stun, knock-back, ma*sive armour damage, great body-part damage and even energy burn. In addition to the amount of negative status effects they cause on a very regular basis (and often multiple at a time); maces are also cheap, easy to find, very easy to train (there are only 8 skills needed to learn) and their base damage is VERY good.
 
 
Maces like the []Elven Flail[/url] are so insanely powerful that you often won’t even have to use skills/abilities to kill anything. Even a two basic maces with 21 crushing damage can hit as high as 60×2 damage at level 30.
 
 
To further explain why they are so good, it’s best to explain why all other weapons are inferior, starting from the other best to worst.
 
 

• Bows – Amazing damage, crowd-control (at a distance), good body-part damage but requires buying arrows and lost inventory space.
• Two-handed Maces – Same as regular maces + some improved crowd-control but very expensive skills and hard to train.
• Axes – Good body-part damage and decent bleed chance, but not very good armour damage so they suffer late-game.
• Spears – Decent reach and some nice knockback but energy expensive skills and bad for crowd-control.
• Two-handed Swords – Good damage and crowd control but expensive abilities and it’s hard to find a decent weapon.
• Swords – You get get bleed damage, which is pretty mediocre and dozens of enemies have good bleed resistance.
• Shields – Incredibly hard to find a good one, their damage reduction comes at a huge loss of damage and huge energy and dodge penalty.
• Crossbows – A worse version of the bow with additional damage, bleed and knockback at the cost of a mandatory lost turn..
• Daggers – Swords but less damage and you can burn some mana which isn’t really very useful.
• Staves – Obviously used for caster cla*ses and generally only for knocking enemies back into eg. fire and to make space.

 
So unlike all other weapons, maces have no downsides whatsoever.
 
 
# Dual Wielding
 
 
What’s better than one perfect weapon? Two of them of course. Dual wielding maces gives you the following bonuses: much higher probability of inflicting any of the above status effects, far higher crowd-control than having just 1 mace, additional skills from the dual-wielding skill tree, additional energy restoration and reduction cost and increased block chance (including a skill that guarantees blocking).
 
 
Whilst you don’t have to dual-wield them, you will get a lot of additional utility in doing so via the ma*sive crowd-control increase. Enemies are seldom dangerous alone (unless we’re talking bosses) so being able to deal with a bunch of them at the same time is really important.
 
 
# What character to pick?
 
 
Jorgrim is the best. Not only does he start with dual-wielding unlocked, his unique trait gives additional hands efficiency on every kill and it stacks. With two maces, you will be ripping through enemies and stacking that efficiency. Higher hands efficiency means higher damage/lower penalty from weapons.
 
 
# How do I spend my attribute points?
 
 

• STR – 15
• AGI – 26
• PER – 15
• VIT – 11
• WIS – 10

 
You’ll want to dump as many points as you need to unlock your core mace abilities and dual wielding abilities first. So that will be AGI.
 
 
The reason for this setup is as follows.
 
 
STR gives nothing really except additional weapon damage (we will have plenty already) and body-part damage (which you don’t get much of from maces). It’s also not really used for unlocking skills so you will get far more value out of other skills.
 
 
AGI – Is by far the most important as it increases your accuracy and reduces your fumble chance. Consistent fumble attacks is the main reason why you’ll die over and over. As not only do fumbles do half damage, they NEVER inflict status effects. As we are going to be focusing on inflicting status effects, we need to get our fumble chance down to <10% (preferably 0%). You need 26 points exactly for “More Blood” in the dual-wielding tree. The additional 15% crit chance you’ll get from 26 points is nice too.
 
 
PER – We stack this mainly for additional vision.
 
 
VIT – You won’t need this really at all. At max level you’ll have about 170 health which is really plenty. Your raw damage output, utility and high dodge chance will keep you alive if you actually put some minimum thought into using your skills.
 
 
WIS – An otherwise useless stat for non-mage based builds.
 
 
# How do I spend my skill points?
 
 
Prioritise unlocking the mace abilities with daze, stagger and stun first. Then invest a little into the dual-wielding abilities. You’ll get every single mace ability and dual-wield ability (as we want all the pa*sives). Your remaining skill points will generally go into:
 
 
4 in combat mastery – x, y and z (WIP)
 
2 into Survival – x and y
 
2 into Athletics – x and y
 
 
That’s all your points and these are the least important, but do help to buff your core abilities.
 
 
# What about shields, two-handed mace, other skill trees etc?
 
 
As I explained shields are only for players who want to be able to make a consistent amount of mistakes in combat. Not only that but shields are ridiculously expensive. If you manage to find a late-game tower shield or heavy shield you’re going to have to pay a small fortune just to get it repaired to be able to use.
 
 
Two-handed maces are good, but they are not as good as two one-handed maces. Whilst they can do more damage per hit, they hit less and therefore they have less chance to stack all the different brutal negative status effects you can give enemies. Not only this but their skills cost a LOT more energy and have a much higher fumble chance, with less block and dodge options too. Two-handed maces are also more expensive to buy and repair than two one-handed maces. Finally, they generally have less crowd-control unless you consistently hit criticals over and over for the 3 tile sweep.
 
 
Other skill trees are generally pointless. You’ve no WIS and thus use for any spells. More Athletics is just a meme and we’ll ignore all other weapon trees for obvious reasons.
 
 

 
 
I hope you enjoy the God Tier Dual Mace Build – 1-shot Anything – Stoneshard guide. This is all for now! If you have something to add to this guide or forget to add some information, please let us know via comment! We check each comment manually!