Mace
Mace
The more modern descendant of the ancient Club, the Mace is more powerful than most Clubs, but also more expensive and takes longer to make. Maces can be found fairly commonly on mid-later game pirate/outlander raids, and they are the only other melee weapon in the vanilla game (as of A15C) which does blunt damage (not counting bionics). The standard DPS for a mace is 4.76, but of course varies from material to material. Unlike Clubs however, Maces can only be made out of metals and wood, as opposed to additionally stones in Clubs.
Here's a table below which compares damage figures between all possible materials a mace could be made out of (assuming normal quality and full durability)
Wood | Steel | Plasteel | Silver | Gold | Uranium | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Damage | 9 | 11 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 15 |
Cooldown | 1.89s | 2.1s | 1.68s | 2.1s | 2.31s | 2.835s |
DPS (to 3 dp) | 4.762 | 5.238 | 6.548 | 5.714 | 5.628 | 5.291 |
Mace vs. Club
Going back - although Maces are generally superior to Clubs, it could be argued that a Jade Club is superior to all maces of the same quality, here's a table below which compares metrics of a Jade Club to Plasteel and Silver maces. All the figures are assuming the damage output at Normal quality and full durability.
Jade Club | Plasteel Mace | Silver Mace | |
---|---|---|---|
Damage | 17 | 11 | 12 |
Cooldown | 2.64s | 1.68s | 2.1s |
DPS (to 3 dp) | 6.439 | 6.548 | 5.714 |
As the table shows, damage output figures are indeed very close between the Jade Club and Plasteel mace, with the Silver Mace generally being left in the dust compared to the former two weapons. It could be argued that a Plasteel Mace has a slight advantage over a Jade Club, however this is highly contextual, being dependent on target armor, melee accuracy, etc. It's worth noting that the Jade club is one of the slowest competitive melee weapons in the game, so a miss can be quite punishing. On the other hand, Plasteel maces do much less damage per hit, which can be good or bad, depending on whether you care about keeping the target's bones intact.
Prior to Alpha 17, Jade was considered a small ore while having the same market value. This meant crafting with Jade was prohibitively expensive even compared to plasteel, as it used 10 times the materials. Now however the situation has reversed: a Jade club uses a mere 200 silver worth of jade while a Plasteel mace requires 1050 silver worth of plasteel by comparison. This makes the Jade club much more viable.
Mace vs Longsword
While in terms of pure DPS longswords beat maces by a fair margin, maces deal blunt damage, making it more likely to down a target than killing it, as well as being more effective against most armored enemies (which are usually poorly protected against blunt damage).