say that a sword have 20 dmg, and a mace have 20 dmg. Swords hit faster than than maces, does the sword still do more dmg?

depends on your perks and how much armor the enemy has.

Normally swords, except when you are just unlucky.


The super fast instant damage is truly important, and happen often enough to instagib a lot of enemies.

The crit with swords is also important versus mage NPCs whom normally don't have any armor, but whom will also give you only small windows of oppertunity to strike, and so you need to make the most out of it and hope you instagib them.

My first character was a Redguard one-handed axe + destro spell user. I abandoned him around level 20 because he just kept getting clobbered, even with a shield. My current char is an Imperial one-handed mace + shield user and this one seems to crit much, much more often than the axe user did, and also staggered the enemy more. (And this is with Hack and Slash on the axe but not yet reaching Bone Breaker on the mace.)

Perhaps the Redguard's skill just didn't increase fast enough to keep up because I mixed one-handed and destro, but when playing around with 2H battleaxe vs 2H battlehammer I had similar results where the heavier hammer was more devastating. But then again, Redguard starts with +10 to one-handed, so he should have done pretty well.

Maces are slower so it makes timing your swings quite important but I like that - it means I really have to be very attentive in battle, timing my bashes and swings carefully.

for me personally I like axes for one handed and swords for two handed

Maybe it's just my playstyle or imagination? Maces seem to get in a solid connecting hit for me. My axe seems to miss or not damage as much, even though damage of axe and mace are same. I thing I'll be breaking down this enchanted axe I found and put the enchantment on the mace.

From what i've seen the maces do the most damage, but I like using swords.

i have an ebony axe in my left hand and an ebony sword in my right both with fire enchant. do the stamina power attack.

One-handed sword + Shield hasn't let me down so far (level 41). I bash with the shield to stagger then power attack with the sword.

I think what you mean to be asking here is "is the listed damage the damage per hit or the DPS?". It's the damage per hit. Given a 20-dmg sword and a 20-dmg mace and assuming an unarmored target and no weapon perks, the sword will do more damage in a given amount of time because it will get more hits in. (But note that, for any given tier of weapons, the mace will have a higher damage per hit - e.g., a steel mace has a higher damage than a steel sword - to make up for this. In principle, the steel sword and steel mace should have roughly equal overall damage output, with the sword hitting more often for less damage per hit and the mace hitting harder, but slower.)

When armor and perks get involved, it can go either way, since the sword gains a crit chance while the mace gets to ignore a percentage of the target's armor. In general, with perks, the sword will shine against unarmored targets, while the mace will do better against those in heavy armor.

I prefer the quickness of the blade. Plus lopping off heads is cool.

It depends on what perks you choose.

I also must say that your question is stuffed up. The mace would have to be a lower-tierer material for them to do the same damage.

The rules for weapons made from the same material are the following:
Swords are weaker then axes, axes are weaker then maces
Swords are faster then axes, axes are faster then maces