Played around with a 2h build which focused on stagger.
Weapon - Brutish Crudgel
The biggest issue with a melee build is the lack of mobility, this is why dagger and gauntlet builds play so well in the campaigns, but 2h feels lackluster in comparison. Brutish Cudgel’s attack has you leap at the enemy, the mobility has you spend less time dodging attacks and being on top the enemy.
Runes: Frontflip Kick (for leveling), Crushing Slam, Wallbreaker
Wallbreaker is your spam rune ability. It hits hard and attacks quickly. Crushing Slam will do way more damage than a light attack and they have the same animation, but only use late game with Battlecry Ring due to the cost.
Leveling Build(chapter1)-Build Planner – No Rest For The Wicked Tools
You don’t need to use these exact gems, but the idea is to have quick stamina recovery, and enough poise to trade hits if needed. Barrier out of combat can be good if you want to drop the EXP gems - the EXP gems help you stack over leveled for the content as there isn’t any other option that would give you significant short-term output.
For attacking you are primarily using Light Attack → Frontflip Kick → (if still alive) Light Attack. If you have focus, you could initiate with Crushing Slam instead, often 1-shotting the enemy.
Leveling Build(post-chapter 2)-Build Planner – No Rest For The Wicked Tools
By lv30, you should have all of these stats collected. Ideally you’ve also found some high rolls, but its more important you actually have the enchantments. Depending on the rolls you may need to do a lot of Radiant Ember farming.
The Bread and Butter of this build is to stagger enemies in 1-2 hits, usually 4 hits for bosses. You will still be using Light Attack + Frontflip Kick combo until you have the Battlecry Ring. You can go right for a Mundane weapon if you find it, but Blunt will also be a good second option.
Endgame Build(0 echo crucible)-Build Planner – No Rest For The Wicked Tools
By endgame we’ll have dropped stagger affects as we’ll usually kill bosses before we can stagger them, as our damage scales faster than our poise damage. You will no longer be using regular attacks and Rune attacks 90% of the time.
Crushing Slam is the normal initiator into a Wallbreaker spam. For Echo Knight mounted, after they’ve done their charge do not Crushing Slam into him as he can stop the attack while you’re in the air, so its better to do a regular attack into Wallbreaker.
Your DR and Movement will be high enough that you’ll no longer need to dodge. Your stats have changes that you are not always heavy weight.
Once you have all of the stats, Radiant them all to cap, and then Exalt, hopefully into damage% and crit%.
By default we are 5% over armor pen cap due to gems. You will want to Exalt gear by Weapon → Helmet → Body → Gloves → Pants; before you Exalt your pants, if you are at 85%< armor pen, change out armor pen on pants for increase damage by 15% after sprinting.
Changes:
Weapon enchantment- Damage% → RuneDamage%
Gloves Enchantment- Stamina on Stagger → Critical Chance, Heal on Stagger → Physical Resistance