I think it's long overdue to rebalance the Long Hammer against the Long Sword, especially skillwise, because there isn't really a good reason to take on hammering right now other than being a fan of slower&lower damage.
The things that should change are the following:
- improve the maximum skill Rank of Beetle Crusher
I don't know why the developers didn't increase the maximum Rank of all Long Hammer skills to Rank 6 if they did it for all Long Sword skills, it's just unfair and imbalancing.
And it's not as if the skill itself is overpowered, it has a so-so damage and a really low knockdown rate boost, so I don't see the reason to prevent people from boosting this skill to Rank 6 to get more damage out of this skill.
- add an additional skill effect to Beetle Crusher at Rank 9 or above
I don't really care what it is, be it a second chainable Beetle Crusher after the initial one or the ability to chain into another skill,
e.g. Honeybee Sting, with the same faster charging ability as Stigma Hammer has if chained after Butterfly Swing.
This would solve two problems:
1. Honeybee Sting would no longer be a useless skill (the damage and knockdown chance are way too bad to justify standing and charging the skill instead of just chaining normal attacks into Stigma Hammer)
2. Beetle Crusher can then rake in damage/SP against opponents with short attack windows, allowing for a more stable damage output even with lower Attackspeed
- readd the XE-move animation as a new AoE Hammer skill with the same cooldown time,AoE [and castable during Shield Dash] as Focal Point.
Instead of casting Focal Point with a Hammer, but without the ability to chain it,
make Focal Point a Long Sword-only skill and use the previous Hammer XE-move animation to create a skill similar to Focal Point, but exclusively for Long Hammers.
The skill doesn't need the same chain-ability that Petal Toss>Focal Point has, but a way higher knockdown rate bonus would be appreciated (as the attack strikes from above, drumming the ground).
- improve the damage output of the skill Stigma Hammer
Currently the skill Amaranth Kick can be executed faster and deals nearly as much damage as a half-charged Stigma Hammer.
This shouldn't be, as it's harder to execute a Stigma Hammer and, while charging the skill, you lose time in which you could have dealt similar or maybe more damage just by using your other smash attacks[and due to the fact that your normal attacks can also crit].
To solve this problem, there could be two alternatives:
1. increase the base damageoutput of Stigma Hammer to 100% of Amaranth Kick and add additional damageoutput per charge by 50% of Amaranth Kicks damage, for a total of 250% at full charge. This would suffice to charge the skill even if you take a longer time.
2. increase the base damageoutput of Stigma Hammer to 100% of Amaranth Kick and make the skill have a unique crit system.
Stigma Hammer should have a default crit chance of 12,5%[ignoring your critical chance and the enemies critical resistance] that doubles every stage of charging, with stage 1 having 25% chance, stage 2 50% chance and stage 3 100% chance to land a critical hit on the enemy.
