100% chance to explode from beginning, 5% more damage scaling at base, an additional 5% when combining into legendary, a small attack speed buff, and an increase in explosion size might make it pretty good on artificer, and not suicide on other characters.

@@MetalMockingjay I'm about 90% sure the melee attack of the plank, even when the explosions don't trigger, are still considered explosive damage. So, it has a flat 75% damage increase overall. From the character. And... Even in that case, there still really isn't another character that can use the weapon well. It needs the explosion size increase from the Artificer, and no other character really has any synergy with explosions. The Engineer can't really use the weapon... I mean... They could, but why? The Mage could scale it with elemental damage... But, I can't see that working any better then the Artificer. There's maybe something weird with the Gladiator? Maybe one of the economy characters like the Entrepreneur, Explorer, Lucky, Farmer or Mutant could make it work? But, at that point, it would just be the fact that economy effects are strong... And each of those characters would be better off with some other weapon. Also, that's kinda my point: From a design perspective, the Plank should be strongest on the Artificer. It's an explosive weapon that also scales with Elemental damage... *Exactly* the type of weapon that the Artificer wants to use. But, it's still not good.

What you are talking about is the recursive cluster bomb tower from bloons TD6

To be fair, if the turret carried it is hardly anything plank helped with haha

It is fine, it is easy to think it would be good due to the damage down penalty but is largely bait. The character is just better if you take 12 normal weapons and stack damage %.

Its an in game setting. Cant remember what it is called

@@DuckNatic I actually decided to check the settings right after making this comment and I found it lol. I should’ve checked before making the comment for sure

In this game, if a weapon needs to be carried, it is bad. No other weapon truly needs to be carried in the same way. In a game of relativity, it is the only outlier.

that would make the weapon even slower due to the cooldown mechanic of the game. the longer a melee weapon in in flight, the longer it takes to come back, the longer it takes for the cooldown to start, the longer it takes for you to make a second attack.

The screwdrivers themselves only do 1 damage though.

lol

It's -100% damage with anything that does not have the "Explosive" tag (or mines and turrets, as they don't care bout % Damage). As long as the weapon is tagged "Explosive" (so Plank, Shredder, Rocket Launcher, Power Fist, Nuclear Launcher, Plasma Sledgehammer... and I think that is it?), they are technically at +75% Damage. And as a note, Shredder is absolutely the best starting weapon for Artificer: Explodes more frequently, is ranged (less danger with the poor Armour scaling), and scales well on a single stat.

Counterpoint, 100% melee damage scaling. Hatchet isn't great, but it is infinitely more usable than plank.

​@@Retromation I did some test runs and technically you are correct. The caveat is that a ridiculously small number of characters can start with Hatchet: Wildling, Multitasker, One-Armed, and Loud. Hatchet is a poor fit for Wildling and Multitasker because it is one of those weapons that doubles in base power with every tier. It's extra bad on Wildling where his -3 melee damage means Hatchet starts with a laughable 2 damage. This is a surmountable problem in theory, but it is a struggle to accomplish while getting the other stats that a 125 range melee character tends to need. I'm not even going to talk about One-Armed. I tried 3 runs: plank artificer, hatchet loud, and hatchet wildling. Of these, hatchet loud was the most pleasant and hatchet wildling was the least pleasant. So yes, hatchet is better in theory... but in practice, only if you're playing on Loud.

@@Retromation So I've played a lot more Plank runs and Hatchet runs since this comment to try and get to the bottom of why Plank feels better than Hatchet to me. Here's some things I found: Plank functions kinda like Community Support in that it does a great job of scaling damage based on need. When you're against more enemies, you get more overlapping explosions, allowing you damage the same enemy potentially several times per weapon per swing. Additionally, against elites, with a little finesse you can have regular enemies running into range as you're attacking the elite to damage the elite with overlapping explosions, too. Because of these mechanics, you can avoid flat damage on Planks entirely, and you should, because it's terrible. Instead scale defenses, plank upgrades, explosion damage, attack speed, damage%, and you could even toss in crit. In the last 1/3 or so of a run, you can start tossing in some flat damage. I find this strat completely consistent and pretty comfy to play. Now for Hatchet, I've come across a couple more shortcomings that weren't obvious to me at first. For one, Hatchet is the *only* melee weapon to gain neither cooldown nor scaling per upgrade. It only gets flat damage. At Tier 2 it goes from 5 to 10, which hey, double damage right? But since Melee Damage can scale it, too, it really only like gaining 0.8 Melee Damage... which, uh, is questionable to ever be worth spending money on. Tier 3 goes from 10 to 20 for twice the money, so essentially the same. Tier 4 does finally gain a bit of a cooldown reduction, but you have to waste a bunch of money first to even get to that point. Secondly, Hatchet is the only swinging melee weapon besides Hammer with no special properties. The special properties of the other weapons tend to mask that swinging melee weapons are actually awful. They start out better than thrusting melee weapons, but once you have 6 of them, it's impossible to hit the same enemy with more than 4 swinging weapons at the same time. This results in miserable damage against elites, or in any case where all of the enemies are on one side of you, which also makes them bad any time you're attempting to play safe. This is all on top of Hatchet's low damage and uniquely low range (somehow even shorter range than unarmed!)