From what I know of both heroes and paladins, swords are the weapon choice with more stable damage while the alternative axe or blunt weapon gives a more variable damage range. So why do pages choose to wield blunt weapons whereas I've never heard of an axe hero before? Or are blunt pallys just more vocal about their alternative lifestyle choice haha
Blunt weapon Paladins don't have a below average range of Damage Per Strike like Brandish with Axe does. If all things were equal, there wouldn't be much difference in DPS when comparing a sword Paladin to a blunt weapon Pa Paladin. On the other hand, axe Heroes have to deal with axes having a weird damage calculation for each Brandish attack. Over time, they hit less than if they were stick with axes over swords.
Yeah, in fact using a crushed skull 1h bw im pretty sure is a good option for pallys since I believe they can have up to 124 (?) atk clean in this game with the godly system. In contrast, 1h and 2h axe both completely suck compared to sword options. Although I believe for pally going the stonetooth route is still better than 1h or 2h bw, or 1h sword for that matter.
Crushed Skull is slightly better than going the ST route for Paladins, but if you're going to invest perfecting a weapon, you might as well go for an ST because thou can also use it on a Hero.
Gimli may not be holding his axe right now, but he begs to differ. It's mostly because Axes provide only concrete negatives and no positives. You are subject to the slash/stab ratio 100% of the time because of the way Brandish works, your weapons are all slower than equivalent swords and you don't get very much additional base weapon attack to compensate. Blunt Weapons have a solid end-game weapon in the Crushed Skull mentioned above to make up for the rest of the lacklustre nature of the weapon, which at least provides some sort of incentive to doing it.
Thanks for the responses guys it's rather unlikely I even end up playing a hero since I've got about 3 characters I want to play before I even consider a new one but thanks for shedding light on this!