nago wrote:(a very personal concern that is very secondary is that -1 m&f means now gsc has really no reason to exist and that is most probably better to not use gc for any Og except Be)
Possibly this should be its own thread instead, but:
I posit that, practically speaking, it's almost never optimal to attack with a triple sword, bardiche, great mace, executioner's axe, or giant spiked club.
Bardiche and executioner's axe, compared to glaive and battleaxe, trade 3 base delay (and 3 or 2 accuracy) for a 20% increase in base damage. It takes
twice as many skill points to reach minimum delay for a bardiche or executioner's axe as it does to reach minimum delay for a glaive or battleaxe, and at 20 skill a glaive or battleaxe is always better than the equivalent bardiche or executioner's axe under reasonable conditions (i.e. not "0 fighting and 1 str against a stone giant"). They typically break even between 22 and 24 skill. And since the bigger weapons are much rarer, usually you aren't comparing a bardiche to the equivalent glaive; you're comparing the bardiche to a glaive with
better enchantment/brand, especially since you should have been putting all your enchant weapon scrolls into that glaive.
So to justify a triple sword over a great sword, a bardiche over a glaive, a great mace over a dire flail, an executioner's axe over a battleaxe, or a giant spiked club over a giant club, you not only need to be lucky enough to find a really good one (better than the 20 glaives that generated first), you need to justify an experience investment that is extremely disproportionate to the damage increase (100% more xp for 20% more base damage), compared to the investment you made to use, say, a battleaxe at min delay instead of a war axe at min delay (70% more xp for 36% more base damage) or a war axe at min delay instead of a hand axe at min delay (36% more xp for 57% more base damage). Unless the bardiche you found is so good that it's better than all your glaives even at low skill, but then you have to get even luckier - this pretty much only happens with acquirement.
There is one other situation where a bardiche is way better than a glaive: when your skill is very low. At 0 skill, bigger weapons are pretty much always better. Great maces are even better than dire flails at 0 skill, which is impressive considering that they're often worse at 20 skill...
Unfortunately for those big weapons, the part of the game where you are likely to have a bardiche/triple sword/etc. has no overlap whatsoever with the part of the game where you are likely to have less than 10 weapon skill. (Unless your character never planned on training a weapon skill at all, but in that case doesn't matter what you wield anyway).
The obvious response to this is "but duvessa then why do i always see you wielding triple swords???" and the answer is that I value killing things in fewer keypresses, enough that I will gimp my characters' actual power for it. It's the same thing that leads me to train skills to 27 or get level 8+ conjuration spells. I imagine it's the same for a lot of other players. There might be some misinformation about, or memetic value in, the biggest weapons as well, but I think the effect of that is small (most of the people who don't understand melee damage end up wielding smaller weapons than they should, not bigger weapons than they should).