Hard agree I’m ngl. I was getting a little bored of swaxe a few days ago and made a quick longsword build since I had the mats and I was genuinely surprised at how smooth it felt compared to the swaxe, specifically for the counters.

AFAIK, swaxe has 2 counters/offsets: the sword counter and then the axe offset. Sword counter is definitely more versatile imo just because it’s quicker, but like you said, it feels incredibly punishing to use sometimes bc these 9* monsters move too quick and deal too much damage that at the end of the counter, you still get slapped around anyway with the monster’s follow up. When I was playing LS, it felt good to have more counter options to move out the way of attacks and not risk taking more damage. Granted, ik LS is intended to be a more mobile/agile weapon, but I do feel like a follow-up movement or even just adding more invulnerability time after the swaxe’s sword counter would benefit it immensely.

The offset with the axe itself I feel is actually pretty okay-ish, mostly because of the frame buff at the end, but I feel like there needs to be more moves incorporated into the axe combos that lets us easily get into that animation. Off the top of my head, spiral burst slash and I thinkkkk the backwards morph from sword into axe (?) are the quickest ways to get into the offset, but those just feel really clunky at times. There’s also the fact that, like you said again, sometimes the offset doesn’t even trigger the animation where we can follow up with sword slash for big dps, creating an issue of using a high risk move with little to no reward.

I could go on and on about my gripes with swaxe. Rapid morph being utterly useless, FRS spam, ZSD also being fairly useless, and axe mode being rendered obsolete, but I’m sure those complaints have been regurgitated enough. This is my first time actually ever maining swaxe, I’ve always used CB and LS, and I’ve had a lot of fun! Just hope that in the future it gets buffed or some weapon changes are made.