I started playing OSRS last week mainly due to the nostalgic factor. However I never realised before that I've never seen a player fighting with a battleaxe (in the F2P world atleast, can't say about Members worlds).
Which is odd because stats-wise it would be the perfect middle-ground between scimitar and 2H swords.
| Speed | Slash | Strength Bonus| Battleaxe | 4 | +48 | +64 | 2H Sword | 3 | +69 | +70 | Scimitar | 6 | +45 | +44 |
I've used the stats from the rune weapons, because that's the strongest set in F2P.
So why is the battleaxe so rarely used?
Source for weapon attack speed
Battleaxe stats
2H Sword stats
Scimitar stats
Best Answer
I can speak for the members side of things, and battleaxes are still rarely used. I think the reason is mainly due to the speed of them. Yes they are stronger than certain weapons, but let's analyze an example situation here:
Let's examine how many times you would perform an attack across 36 game ticks using a battleaxe (roughly 22 seconds).
36 game ticks / 6 ticks per attack = 6 total attacks
Now let's do the same with a scimitar:
36 game ticks / 4 ticks = 9 total attacks
Thus within the same amount of game ticks, you would be able to perform three additional attacks using a scimitar compared to a battleaxe.
Another problem with battleaxes is by the time you are ready to use the stronger variants (such as rune and dragon), you will end up paying more for them than you would for their scimitar counterparts.
For example: The dragon battleaxe is currently around 120,000 gold, where the dragon scimitar is about 60,000. Attack bonuses for both of these weapons are nearly the same, with the battleaxe only having a +3 advantage (in regard to using the slash style). This also doesn't consider the fact that you need to do certain quests to use both of these weapons. The Dragon Battleaxe requires a significant amount of prerequisites while the Dragon Scimitar doesn't require as many.
The max hit with a dragon battleaxe at 99 strength with no other items is a 26 (see this calculator). The max hit with a dragon scimitar at 99 strength with no other items is 22. Consider the situation above again, except this time we will use the total number of attacks to calculate the total damage that can be dealt in this time span:
Divide those numbers by the time in seconds (~22 seconds):
If you managed to max every hit, the dragon scimitar would be able to deal more damage over the battleaxe in the same amount of time since it has a higher DPS.