i'm going to assume that the maul in question is the long maul. on it's own, the weapon has some severe downsides: turn rate and swing speed are abysmal, and every time the user goes for an upswing you can spam faster than they can retaliate. the bonus is, you get crushthrough on a weapon with a long reach. i think that the reach benefit coupled with crushthrough make the long maul the most effective of all the mauls, and if you center a build around using crushthrough and don't choose the long maul, you're probably giving up on a ton of potential damage output. I'd also like to think that on its own, long maul isn't as effective as a standard weapon, i think it excels in groupfights and especially strat defenses where the faults in the weapon can be supported with teamplay (hence its popularity).
are there any counters?
Weapon modifiers
- Crushthrough has a chance of ignoring block on overhead strikes. This depends on strength and weapon weight. There is also a random element.
the strength and weapon weight work both ways. if you want to minimize your chances of getting crushthroughed, you can increase your own strength and use weapons with higher weight. however, we have done a long of tweaking with shields. access to them has never been better and both movement penalties and skill point distribution have been tweaked to the benefit of the shielder. this, however, has reduced shield weight across the board which can easily negatively impact 1h/shield performance against mauls. that being said, there are still quite a few shields that have high weight values, perhaps getting people to get some of those shields for strat can improve the plight of the shielder against the maul.
im trying to be fair about this, but i understand that fighting the mauls is frustrating. me the BOYS beat a team in a 3v3 tournament years ago, and the way the tournament was structured sent them to a lower bracket in semis where they beat another team and then came right back to finals for a rematch. they brought a long maul and we couldn't stop the crushthrough/knockdown. feelsbad. i blame really dumb tournament design.
Poll