The title makes today’s talking point fairly straightforward, so let’s add one point of clarity before proceeding. There are very, very few genuinely bad weapons in this game. Even weapons which are hopelessly outclassed are still themselves usable, probably even pretty good in some cases. So take “bad” in this context with a grain of salt. The only truly ‘bad’ weapons in this game are clearly intentionally bad, such as the Handmaiden’s Ladle or the Broken Sword.

Let’s begin.

Fifth Worst: Crescent Sickle

A player with a steady hand can make this thing work, but that player also needs a bit of a nose for a pretty pointless grind. You either need to progress a difficult, minimally active covenant to get this, or you need to go to New Game Plus and then make fairly significant progress to reach a mid game merchant who only sells it on NG+. The return on investment is not great. This weapon is stumpy, has a sweetspot mechanic, and has mediocre scaling. The damage output can be alright if said sweetspot is hit, but it’s just never going to be worth the hassle.

Fifth Best: Grand Lance

This is an amazing weapon for the early game in particular. This game was balanced fairly poorly around its amazing early base damage, so even players who barely have the stats for it are going to be one or two shotting everything early on with it. It does drop off slightly towards the end of the game, but even then, it has well above average base damage, perfectly usable scaling and perfect synergies with the best melee rings in the game. A player can easily just use this thing right from start to finish. It is very user friendly, perfect for newer players. The best part is, it is extremely easy and completely free to acquire, available in the Forest of Fallen Giants right after defeating The Last Giant.

4W: Rampart Golem Lance

This is going to be about that time where I remind readers that these weapons aren’t necessarily horrible for the most part, sometimes being completely eclipsed by other options to the point of redundancy. If this list was about stylish weapons, this one would be closer to the top than bottom for sure. However, fancy aesthetics cannot make up for requiring 20 points of Dexterity and giving zero scaling whatsoever off of that investment. This Lance deals and partially scales with Magic damage and Intelligence, so this ends up being a weapon for Strength/Intelligence users, a playstyle which basically doesn’t exist in this game. This Lance would’ve been pretty acceptable in Elden Ring, perhaps.

To make matters worse, this thing is only available from the DLC, and not reliably at that, needing to farm fairly rare enemies just for a chance at receiving it. A pretty stark juxtaposition from the easily acquired Grand Lance.

4B: Shotel

This one is going to be the real eyebrow-raiser of the list for sure. The Shotel has so many tiny little hidden secrets that culminate into a surprisingly powerful weapon in this game. Most curved swords can succeed in this game, but the Shotel gets the edge for having built in anti-shield properties, magnificent for PvP and PvE alike.

Other than circumventing shields, the Shotel can actually be powerstanced with thrusting swords, such as the Rapier! Doing this is the true secret to unlocking its true potential, as choosing to specifically powerstance a Shotel offers the Rapier user a slashing attack option, which can be great for beating enemies the Rapier may have a tough time with that resist thrusting. As well, the Shotel can be used to parry with one hand, affording versatility that can really come in handy during PvP. You will be capable of parrying with either weapon in your hand, giving you a genuinely meaningful unpredictable element.

In summary, the Shotel is still a fairly decent weapon even on its own. But, its true potential is unlocked if powerstancing it with a Rapier. Choosing a Shotel as a partner for the Rapier can honestly be better at times than powerstancing two Rapiers.

3W: Pike

Existing as a thrusting weapon can be tough in this game. Competing with options like the Rapier, Estoc, Black Scorpion Stinger, Ice Rapier and more is like a Mom & Pop grocery store competing with Walmart. Unfortunately, the Pike is the Mom & Pop grocery store in this scenario. It is a fine weapon, and will get the job done at the end of the day. However, only one can be had per playthrough, the player has to go out of their way to get it, and it ends up being almost completely outclassed by other, more easily acquired options. Weaponsmith Ornifex sells infinite amounts of Partizans, another spear which 100% outclasses the Pike, and yet itself has issues standing out in this game. Blacksmith Lenigrast, the first merchant selling weapons available in the game, sells the Spear, which is nearly a copy/paste of the Pike. The Pike is merely pedestrian, with below average scaling compared to other thrusting weapons, the exact same base damage and no distinguishing qualities. Why would you choose the Pike when many, many other options exist and will be far easier and earlier to get?

3B: Basically any Ultra Greatsword

Seriously, pick your favorite and roll with it. Many of them do have different stat requirements and scalings that should be respected, so any given build will have a UGS that fits them better than the others. For example, straight up Strength builds will be best with the Fume Ultra Greatsword, while hybrid Strength/Dexterity builds should use the Pursuer’s Ultra Greatsword. Want to incorporate the elements into your big-stick smashing endeavors? The Ivory King Ultra Greatsword, either flavor of Smelter Sword or Crypt Blacksword are perfect. These weapons do generally require significant Strength investment, but every single one is worth it. Even a UGS which one could argue is technically on the outclassed side, like the Old Knight’s or Drakekeeper’s UGSes, still absolutely shreds health bars like no tomorrow. Again, pick your favorite and enjoy!

2W: Malformed Claws

Ah, the “big, meaty claws” of this game. Well, outside of being used to attract mates, this fist weapon comes up woefully short compared to its peers. Its peers sadly themselves are not super splashable to begin with, leaving this weapon in a clunky, middling damage-dealing state of affairs. Like others shown on this list, the player seriously has to go out of their way to get this weapon too. It requires going to New Game Plus and farming enemies in No Man’s Wharf that show up in a tiny quantity, and don’t appear until the end of the area and in the boss fight as well. Unless you’re trying to make a Eugene Krabs cosplay, it simply isn’t worth it.

2B: Basically any piercing sword

Once again, pick your favorite and roll with it. The Rapier is ultimately the easiest to gain ludicrous amounts of value from, but the Espada Ropera available late in the game does technically barely outclass it across the board. Then there’s the Ice Rapier, infamously used by no-life gamers to invade new players with at Heide’s Tower. Thrusting weapons in this game in general have aged like a fine wine, fitting today’s society perfectly. You just mash the R1 button over and over again, watch the damage number escalate more and more until your target is dead. There is no complexion, no deeper meaning, no skill mastery to be achieved here. It is simply brainrot personified in the form of a small blade.

“Dis”Honorable Mentions:

Any halberd that isn’t the Blue Knight’s Halberd- this is sort of like a reverse situation that the Pike encountered. The Blue Knight’s Halberd is easy to get, early in the game. It outclasses the competition so unbelievably badly that players would be unlikely to notice if other halberds straight up were removed from the game. More on this to come.

Daggers in general- Daggers have always been intended as general sidearms. In Elden Ring, you might keep a Misericorde in your back pocket to net huge numbers on a riposte with. There are no bosses a player can riposte in this game, and regular enemies get smoked by regular weaponry when getting riposted by it anyway. As well, daggers being light and easy to meet the stats for would be good and fun, but the exact same thing can be said about basically any piercing sword. Daggers don’t come into the same zip code as competing properly with piercing swords. They aren’t unusable, and can be built to succeed, but the average pokey stick generally surpasses even a really good dagger, and with less hassle and investment.

Gyrm Greataxe – This is the black sheep of Great Axes in this game, which are a mostly pretty formidable class of weaponry. This one is stumpy, slow, has a sweetspot mechanic, and has just a ridiculous stat prerequisite of 50 Strength. This weapon is easy to get ahold of, which is basically why it, and not the Crescent Sickle, avoided the main list. But it’s simply not worth using.

Honorable Mentions:

Craftsman’s Hammer- There are a surprisingly high number of enemies weak to Strike in this game. As well, this weapon requires Twinkling Titanite and not Titanite Shards to upgrade, often making it easier to accommodate in the early game.

Basically any Greathammer- They are pretty stamina draining and do tend to have hefty stat requirements. But as just mentioned, there are plenty of Strike-weak targets for these lumbering beasts to smash into.

Longsword- If you’re getting tired of generic pokey stick #2837 in your DS2 game, the Longsword offers the thrust capability of the Rapier and friends, while also being a longsword and offering a different “feel” to the player’s experience. Note, the Longsword, and not the Shortsword or the Broadsword, has a two-handed thrusting attack, so this specifically chooses the Longsword.

Worst: Spell-Casting Melee Weapons

This was a pretty weird era in From Software gaming, reflective that Dark Souls 2 as a whole was not made by the same people responsible for the rest of the franchise. Hard to knock the B team in general, because they had a lot of ambitious ideas and a lot of them were pretty well executed on. However, trying to mesh spell-casting and melee as one was flying a little too close to the sun. These three pictured weapons, the Blue Flame, Sorcerer’s Twinblade and Pilgrim’s Spontoon, have serious identity crises which aren’t very surprising. They deliver well below average results as both casters and melee attackers, which was likely intentional to prevent their versatility from outclassing the rest of the game. There is no reason whatsoever to use these weapons. Pick a melee-focused alternative and put an actual casting catalyst in the other hand. They can be kind of fun to use, but they return below average results in every single capacity.

I know I said there aren’t many genuinely bad weapons in this game. These three weapons are probably the only weapons From Software wanted to be good in this game, that simply aren’t. Even the other picks for bad weapons in today’s list can put in work if the player is good enough. These three are just embarrassing.

Best: Blue Knight’s Halberd

There are two things I will assert as fact with this weapon: it is the single best weapon in Dark Souls 2, and it is easily the most underappreciated weapon in all of Dark Souls 2. When glancing at this halberd, one will initially notice that it’s base power unupgraded embarrasses nearly all of the others, while it has better scaling than almost all of them too. In fact, the only Halberd which comes even close to Blue Knight’s in terms of raw stats is the Wrathful Axe, which is not available until the DLC anyway. Is the Wrathful Axe a worthy challenger to the Blue Knight’s Halberd?

Nope! Even if the game handed you the Wrathful Axe right from the start of the playthrough, Blue Knight’s wins in the end by pulling out one big “F-you” trump card that it can pull on every other melee weapon, period: this thing is so unbelievably good with infusions, that I have to imagine some From Software B teamer was asleep at the wheel when initially designing this halberd.

Ordinarily, when every single other melee weapon in the game receives an elemental infusion, there is a drastic consequence of a big loss to physical base damage. This is a balancing maneuver clearly, as weapons would be overpowered if they could just receive free damage without taking a hit in return for gaining some versatility.

The Blue Knight’s Halberd, inexplicably, completely ignores this rule. The halberd receives a laughably tiny penalty to its base physical damage when being infused, and receives the full benefit of the infusion. It is, quite literally, just free damage that this weapon gets to receive and output. The scaling is also left mostly untouched too! Perhaps Blue Knight Targray himself was some kind of a genius blacksmith as a side hustle when he put this thing together. Well, his ingenuity is exactly why I tell new players to kill him every playthrough, so that he drops this magnificent armament to them.

It does require an elemental infusion of some kind to get the most out of. Even without an infusion though, this would still clearly be the best Halberd in the game, with its strange interaction with infusion catapulting it into ‘best weapon in all of DS2’ territory. It cannot be said enough: infuse this weapon with something, anything (except Raw/Mundane), get creative with it!