There are some standout strength handles. Pipe Wrench (PAYBACK, HO!), Holy Sword of Ark, Frozen Feast, Police Baton, and I personally like Exploding Pickaxe. I haven't used Noblesse Oblige, yet, but it seems like it should be solid with the potential S scaling. Pistol Rock is also really fun to use.

Police Baton Handle alone can carry you through the whole game, and it unlocks early. Just combine with any head that has a single-hit fable and grab Conquering Amulet when it shows up.

Only thing about Motive vs Tech that I've noticed is that motivity weapons seem more dependent on fables to get their damage out. But as long as that bar is blue, somebody's gettin' bodied.
(And fable generation can pretty fast if you build for it.)

Sorry but no tech weapon will ever hit the satisfaction of holding your weapon overhead for 2 seconds before instantly stance breaking that mf for like 2.2k damage

Live puppet handle my beloved

Motivity is just varying levels of bonk, effective but a bit boring.

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

Motivity is just varying levels of bonk, effective but a bit boring.

Holy Sword of the Ark, though?

Originally posted by Netsa:

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

Motivity is just varying levels of bonk, effective but a bit boring.

Holy Sword of the Ark, though?

That weapon, it was very hard to put down on my first run due to how comfy it was to use, ended up swapping to frozen feast as i wanted to try something different, but still stick to a greatsword move set, sadly when i reached the end i found out all the best greatswords were technique.

Though i must say, the pale knight from the dlc is an amazing and fun weapon to use. And from my light testing, the silent evangelists' mace seems to have a really good moveset too, but those are rather late dlc weapons.

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

all the best greatswords were technique

What do you mean? Weapon scaling is only on handles.

Uhh... *checks wiki*... Dancer's Curved Sword has a nice moveset, but it relies on mastering Guard Parry. Acidic Curved Sword is really nice, but it's an Advance weapon by default, so it has so-so Tech scaling. Spear of Leeroy Jenkins, perhaps?

Originally posted by Netsa:

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

all the best greatswords were technique

What do you mean? Weapon scaling is only on handles.

Uhh... *checks wiki*... Dancer's Curved Sword has a nice moveset, but it relies on mastering Guard Parry. Acidic Curved Sword is really nice, but it's an Advance weapon by default, so it has so-so Tech scaling. Spear of Leeroy Jenkins, perhaps?

Acidic is only partly advance, and we cannot forget the booster glaive, or the azure dragon glaive, puppet ripper too. The spear has a great move set but is still a spear.

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

Originally posted by Netsa:

What do you mean? Weapon scaling is only on handles.

Uhh... *checks wiki*... Dancer's Curved Sword has a nice moveset, but it relies on mastering Guard Parry. Acidic Curved Sword is really nice, but it's an Advance weapon by default, so it has so-so Tech scaling. Spear of Leeroy Jenkins, perhaps?

Acidic is only partly advance, and we cannot forget the booster glaive, or the azure dragon glaive, puppet ripper too. The spear has a great move set but is still a spear.

But... but those aren't greatswords...

EDIT: Spear counts as a Greatsword if you're going by the Blade classification. Puppet Ripper isn't, though, it counts as a Sword.
(Still, I have to shake my head when someone considers glaives the best greatswords. Glaives aren't swords!)

Originally posted by Netsa:

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

Acidic is only partly advance, and we cannot forget the booster glaive, or the azure dragon glaive, puppet ripper too. The spear has a great move set but is still a spear.

But... but those aren't greatswords...

EDIT: Spear counts as a Greatsword if you're going by the Blade classification. Puppet Ripper isn't, though, it counts as a Sword.
(Still, I have to shake my head when someone considers glaives the best greatswords. Glaives aren't swords!)

Glaives are more of a pole sword, but each of those weapons have greatsword attack patterns, well not the azure dragon glaive, but the rest attack like a greatsword on basic attacks.

When i first played the game, i wanted to main greatswords, so i chose motivity, and got the greatsword of fate, underrated weapon btw, and progressed, i loved having a perfect guard skill but i wanted a better blade, the booster glave blade was not bad but it could not stab, therefor made the fate handle less useful with it, so i kept looking for the blade to put on that handle to make my weapon.

Due to the moveset of that handle doing both slash and stab evenly, it made putting a new blade on it difficult, then i got the arc greatsword, and i was going to use it until i found a weapon i built to replace it, but that did not happen, that greatsword extended was super comfy to use, but i still wanted a handle with a slashing moveset that had perfect block on the handle, that ended up being the acidic greatsword, a technique weapon.

Motivity has the best damage, frozen feast would stunlock just about everything and looked good with the alchemist outfit, but it got boring to use as well due to its very simple moveset.

That is when i realized that technique had all the most fun weapons, therefor was better.

Originally posted by zmanbuilder:

Glaives are more of a pole sword, but each of those weapons have greatsword attack patterns, well not the azure dragon glaive, but the rest attack like a greatsword on basic attacks.

When i first played the game, i wanted to main greatswords, so i chose motivity, and got the greatsword of fate, underrated weapon btw, and progressed, i loved having a perfect guard skill but i wanted a better blade, the booster glave blade was not bad but it could not stab, therefor made the fate handle less useful with it, so i kept looking for the blade to put on that handle to make my weapon.

Due to the moveset of that handle doing both slash and stab evenly, it made putting a new blade on it difficult, then i got the arc greatsword, and i was going to use it until i found a weapon i built to replace it, but that did not happen, that greatsword extended was super comfy to use, but i still wanted a handle with a slashing moveset that had perfect block on the handle, that ended up being the acidic greatsword, a technique weapon.

Motivity has the best damage, frozen feast would stunlock just about everything and looked good with the alchemist outfit, but it got boring to use as well due to its very simple moveset.

That is when i realized that technique had all the most fun weapons, therefor was better.

So you ARE just talking about Acidic! D:

I'll give you Acidic, but Booster is really questionable, and especially not Puppet Ripper. Booster's bread n' butter is the charge swing, it's like 90% of the what anyone does when they use the weapon. The normal swing is also a little bit fast for a greatsword, even compared to Puppet Ripper (and Fate, which I agree is underrated).

Anyway, fun is subjective. I've been having a lot of fun lately putting Rapier Blade on basically every handle, but that's because I've been doing a couple of NG challenge runs lately. The first was light-weight + tech-only, current is all stats must level evenly (not as hard as I thought it would be, but it's fun to be able to use anything).

I actually highly prefer Motivity, and used Frozen Feast for the whole last quarter of the game the first time I played this. I even landed the finishing blow on Nameless with it. The "simple" moveset is what makes it fun, because it's about maximizing the damage and uptime on BlazBlue mode.

That's why I mentioned above that Motivity weapons seem to be more reliant on dishing out Fables. Tech weapons can just rush in, dance around the enemy, spam attack until the bar turns white, then instantly trigger stagger. Motive weapons thrive on flinching or even knocking down enemies and otherwise building Fable Charge, since they want that one big hit to even out their DPS with the lighter, faster weapons.

Holy Sword is a good example of this, since the Alter basically just turns it into a Tech weapon but with Motive scaling. The glaive form feels better in normal combat because it's faster and less expensive on stamina (at the expense of damage). When you need to kill multiple enemies, you don't want to spend 5000 years on each individual swing.

The sword form, however, is POWER. Extremely slow, but you specifically get a Strike Chance buff when you switch from glaive back to sword (which isn't consumed if you combo into Alter!). Because that's the whole point of Strength weapons: as soon as that giant sword comes out, it's time to slam. Watching a boss or miniboss's health bar just disappear on one well-placed swing is where the fun is, not the animations on the attacks themselves.

TL;DR
That ended up being longer than intended. Basically this:

Originally posted by Agoraphobic Meep:

Sorry but no tech weapon will ever hit the satisfaction of holding your weapon overhead for 2 seconds before instantly stance breaking that mf for like 2.2k damage

Live puppet handle my beloved

Id agree. the moment I hyperfocused tech weapons my playtstyle came through really well and I did waaaay better.

Advance is the only way to play the game suckers.

Originally posted by Gearwar:

Advance is the only way to play the game suckers.

I have not done an advance run yet, though i still want to.