This has been said before, but it bears repeating - especially in a thread dedicated to calling its balance into question, rather than a thread in General Discussion in which multiple weapons are discussed.
I sent an email to support, hoping they'd forward my thoughts to the devs. They told me to instead air it all out on the forums, where the devs are more likely to see it.
So basically, as has been said before, the Cold Iron Vanquisher is completely outclassed by the Leviathan Blade. In Tier 3, I've found that the 4* Ascended Calibur will perform better than the 5* Cold Iron Vanquisher in most cases, despite the statistics. Shockingly, the two will perform roughly the same against undead as well.
I was hoping, when I crafted the CIV, that I would get a weapon with the same raw power as the Leviathan Blade but with the added bonus of doing extra damage to undead. Perhaps that's a little selfish, but I thought it would just be a reward for those willing to track down the recipes and get (what I consider) rarer materials. This is obviously not the case, as I've just crafted a very underwhelming weapon made completely redundant by its counterpart.
Now, despite the title, I don't think numbers are needed. They would be nice as they're transparent and easy to understand, but they aren't essential to be able to gauge which weapon is better than another for what you're looking for. I don't think we can hope to see numbers in the future anyway, because a member of the support team just responded to my email with this:
"I'm sorry, but in general we avoid discussing the actual numbers behind the weapons because we like to encourage players to discover it themselves."
Which is more than a little aggravating with the wildly inaccurate stats we have presented to us now.
Anyway, discuss.
Mmm, if the Carver is really doing the same damage to undead as the leviathan, then yes, it is broken, and a study should be done to show this and be presented to the devs. Once I max out my gear, I'll do a comparison study utilizing the same gear minus the sword and take some numbers down.