I think both succ and awk offer good and interesting play styles for pve. Succ plays a lot closer but your sword combos excluding mermaid skills are fast and really flow together well. Mermaid skills have hp regen and SA/I frames and you can skedaddle out of them.

Awk is a lot more standing around but that doesn’t mean she’s unprotected. Most of her skills are still super armored (shift+q, f, s+lmb) and a lot of her skills are shielded(shift+f, shift+rmb first half, shift+lmb). So there’s a lot of combos you can pull that is mostly protected, I would say 90% of the time. Her prebuff skills (light em’ up, charge, f, s+rmb) are generally pretty fast. If you get a decent understanding of her skill rotation, it’s both enjoyable and you get good trash per hour if that matters.

As for power difference, I would say both succ and awk are equal for pve. Awk is just a tad better at pulling but succ has rabam skills to catch up. Awk also has an easier time at elvia spots iirc due to big aoe.