"The brandish charge is a line that does damage, the levi charge can protect you from groups of enemies(or at least it looks like it)"
Brandish and Levi both protect you from groups of enemies. The difference is that Levi pushes enemies in unpredictable directions where they can gnaw on your teammates, while Brandish gives you perfect control over where you push back enemies.
Both do area of effect, the difference is in the area itself.
I've never actually been able to fully utilize Acheron during my time of playing Spiral Knights, primarily because I had a Gran Faust made long before the buff was implemented. However, I've always been bugged as to why in the blazes does the Faust itself suffer from such a small increase in damage when going from 4* to 5*. The Avenger definitely receives a large increase in damage output when it is upgraded, as well as having a far more effective charge attack. I understand the the Faust/Gran Faust are the only two known weapons in the game right now capable of inflicting curse, but when I had upgraded my Faust to the Gran Faust; the only real difference I saw was an awesome-looking blade tied with a larger, and seemingly stronger, charge attack. However, the damage increase wasn't something I was impressed by, as it had the damage output of the Divine Avenger, judging by the damage bars, just in shadow damage instead of elemental. You would think such a "powerful sword" would do a little more damage than what it currently can, and the damage I was expecting would've been equal to a passive low damage bonus on the blade's current damage output. The knockback, especially on the second swing, is definitely a plus for the sword. However, wasn't it also dubbed one of the "slowest swords in the game" on the Wiki before? Regardless, I like the sword for its raw damage, although the Acheron buff now has the tables set in debate.
And Draycos preeeetty much summed up my thoughts on the Brandishes, after trying them out, to almost what I would've said myself in post #46. It's pretty bad how an entire party of 4 players, who can be unfamiliar with the mechanics of these debatable blades, can streetsweep any depth using any of the Brandishes. [Note: This is excluding Voltedge as I haven't crafted it yet, because I really don't enjoy the way PvP is, and Acheron, only because I have a Nightblade lying around in my Arsenal that I didn't bother to upgrade when I got the Faust made.]
Divine Avenger an Gran Faust inflict the same damage.
Maybe your issue is that your Faust still needs heat?
As far as I know a 4* weapon on level 10 does more damage than a 5* weapon on level 1, would be interesting to know what level the 5* weapon needs to have the same or more damage than a 4* weapon(very interesting for the deconstructor, so people might craft it for now).
About the Brandishes:
I'm currently working on a topic that contains a lot of gear(probably everything), the original thoughts, current use, possible fix, my thoughts and fixes...
I agree that it needs the damage of a leviathan blade(if that one doesn't need a buff), maybe a bit less(or only for charge, so acheron's charge is stronger).
Honestly, i say tgey remove buff, lower acherons attack speed, ir heighten gf's attack speed. I choose to not use my acheron in pvp because the one tine i did that after buff, it was literrally me vs four people(i was kiterally only one) and i won.
Gran faust is supposed to be a slow sword, so the speed shouldn't be changed. The acheron is a 3 hit sword that shouldn't have slower speed.
That's silly. Why would people use Acheron over Obsidian Edge if that happened?
While my Acheron is clearly better, I use both at once. In my opinion, the Gran Faust's knockback is just so amazingly useful in certain situations, however for the for the most part I strictly use my Acheron. Now, in a mission like Compound 42, I swap to my Gran Faust every time I am poisoned. Actually, I can say the same for any status effect. Gran Faust, while clearly weaker than the Acheron, still has its uses.
Now, I'm not trying to support Acheron, and I'd like to see it nerfed in some way (definitely not an attack speed decrease, though). But seriously, GF still has some uses over Acheron, it's just extremely limited.
Yay, nerd fight!
OOO made dumb decisions. Thats about it.
I know that the damage is more, but I didn't think that it would be almost over 100 more damage(didn't have a lot of time when i made the post)
Acheron would get a bit more damage, to fix that issue
The brandish charge is a line that does damage, the levi charge can protect you from groups of enemies(or at least it looks like it)
The "retrodes can release..." part is because Draycos said that you can insta shield cancel.
Leviathan gives you the free recipes, getting some of the fire/ice/shock materials can be a bit of a problem.(you get the sun silver from missions). I would say that both have the same difficulty to get, leviathan might be a bit easier.
Let's compare the "disadvantages"(i'm not using the current damage values of the line, let's say that they were fixed for this example)
Sk has 3 different enemy groups(i know there are around 6 in total) in most of the clockwork levels(i'm talking about the ones with the gear icon or arenas)
Beast/Slime
Elemental isn't too useful here, shadow works but you will probably have some more hits on the silkwings
Construct/Gremlin
Elemental:
Construct means gremlins, they can be very annoying(some of the most annyoing enemies for me and probably some other players), having to hit them 5 instead of 3 times makes a big difference.
Shadow:
very useful here, silkwings are rare in construct levels, so no big problem here
Fiend/Undead
Elemental:
Perfect here since you will deal more damage to undeads
Shadow:
Shadow had some advantages in the other level, but the less damage is noticeable here.
So, getting a acheron for the first sword might be a good idea, but it will make the fiend/undead levels harder and be less useful for vana(not sure if this is a problem with the new sk battlesprite update, but back then you crafted one sword and had that for the longest time.)