The Counterweighted Axe - Most Broken Weapon in the Game? (Patreon)

So, after a recent solo campaign, where I decided to see how far I could push the Counterweighted Axe, I wanted to write a short think piece on this gear card.  I'm going to leave this one public because I hope that one of the design team reads it and they avoid making another weapon like this one in the future.  This piece is an echo (somewhat) of my previous piece on automatic-wounds last month, but I'll also provide some ideas on how to get the best use out of the CW-Axe in your campaigns.

So the power of the CW-Axe is very simple, because the perfect hit section triggers before drawing hit locations and because it also causes automatic wounds without drawing a hit location, it's a zero risk way of causing wounds.  

It's also worth noting that there is one other item in the game that shares the CW-Axe's ability and it's actually slightly less overpowered even thought it's only found in People of the Sun and it's harder to craft.

The only other methods of causing more wounds for less risk outside of automatic wounds are Savage and Devastating X, both of these add additional wounds to a successful hit and are key parts of tackling tougher monsters with nasty reactions.  (Lion God, DBK, Phoenix and so on).  However, these abilities require a hit + successful wound/critical wound to even trigger, so you always take the risk of failing (10% minimum risk) and the risk of drawing the trap.  The issue with the CW-Axe is that it doesn't have these risks - it mitigates them whenever the perfect hit is rolled.  In itself that means the weapon (in theory) is balanced, because if you hit without a perfect hit, then you'll have the risk

So, let's say you wanted to really make use of CW-Axes, how would you go about setting this up? Well all it really takes are 3 components; Timeless Eye, Sculpture and the Bone Witch.  Timeless Eye can be gained by chance, by beating the L3 Phoenix with Face Painting innovated or it seems that we might get another route to get it via the Gambler's Chest (speculation).  This means that you can't always pursue the Timeless Eye part of the strategy.  However if you do get Timeless Eye early, you should keep the survivor who has it safe in the settlement until you can get that FA onto Sculpture for the settlement to enjoy.

Next of all, you want to reduce your accuracy as much as possible in order to ensure that you roll less/no hits so you only get Perfect hits.  This is most effectively done via the Bone Witch, she will shred your accuracy in exchange for strength. But you can also get -accuracy via max courage or an eye patch (beat a L3 Sunstalker).  The Eye Patch even has a down red affinity to combine with the CW-Axe's puzzle affinity.

There are also other gear based ways of gaining -accuracy and the single most impressive and effective one is one of my top support items (which has gotten even better now that PotLantern's post watcher game has chanced).  The Gorm's Pulse Lantern.

You can craft multiples of these (though it isn't easy due to the resource requirements) and you absolutely should. Surging during the monster's action to knock it down is very powerful and then being able to make a positive use of the -accuracy token is even more potent.

You will find other ways to gain -accuracy, these include 'The Forest Wants what it wants', Overwhelming Darkness and others. 

Next we want to improve our speed. I've already mentioned the craziest way of doing this, which is gaining the following two cards:

I think you can see how those two work together, I've talked about it in the  linked article above and it requires the Lion God expansion + beating an L3 Lion God (article on Lion God coming soon, I've gotten beating the L3 down to an art now!) and the Legendary L4 Phoenix.  So it's not for the average player.

However, you can gain more speed via other methods and I'm going to drop a few of the more common ones down below:

Frenzy doesn't disable the Perfect Hit ability of the CW-Axe, so it's a (risky) option.

Very elegant and not too hard to get your hands on if you are antelope farming.

If you are looking to support the build with other characters, you can use a very rarely mentioned item from the Screaming Antelope/Stone Circle. It can even be used in multiples.

Imagine 2 CW-Axe survivors next to each other, both with this Mehndi spread on their bodies!

Before we finish, I do want to reiterate, that for those of you who get tired of the sheer abusive power of this item, you can fix it by changing it's text to match the Acid-Tooth Dagger.

This is still a VERY powerful ability, but it does not bypass all reactions and the Trap. So it's a balanced version, and it's my preferred text for the CW-Axe now.  Also, there is one area where it is more powerful, it's a bone weapon so it works with the Bone Earrings.  

Here's a fun build using it to finish this article off.

This build also touches on something you might not have considered before.  The game treats Century Gear and Calcified versions of those gear items as two different gear cards, so you can have both in your grid!

A survivor set up like this has 8 armor in the head, 5 armor in all other locations, a 10% (rising to 40% if you can squeeze in a blue affinity) chance of ignoring one hit, damage reduction. 5 Speed and 5 strength (but -2 movement), but if you set up for timeless eye/-accuracy it becomes really powerful indeed..  

Have fun exploring what you can do with the CW-Axe!