amitst wrote: it has the potential to increase your DPS far beyond what any other weapon can do.
I disagree due to mob resistance to damage pike can far outshine other forms of damage in many situations. Lets take for example pierce+ignore vs slash+bleed.
Assume mob has 75% physical damage resistance to all froms of mele damage.
Say both weapons are 500 max damage and 30 hpm for ease of calculations. Lets also assume both weapons are hitting for max damage and use their respective dam bricks and ignore/bleed bricks.
Piker will do 1000 damage per hit and 30 hits in one minute is 30000. Or 500 damage per second.
Slasher will do 250 damage + bleed (unknown) and 30 hits in one minute without the bleed is 7500. Or 125 damage per second without bleed.
Since the exact bleed numbers are unknown (all we do know is that bleed is a factor of base weapon damage [i.e. no dam brick]) all we can say is that bleed will need to do 3 times the 750 damage per hit or 375 bleed damage per second to match the pike.
We all know that bleed does not meet those damage numbers and actually does far less. So the clear winner of Damage over time goes to the piker in this situation.
Lastly as for bleed slowing the enemy it does not. However I did ntoice that the writer of that was mentioning he does max damage. He may mistakenly be doing critical hits causing malus and just assumed it was coming from the bleed brick.