Pikeman Set is the two-handed weapon specialist armor. Its 2-piece adds a flat +160 Maximum Health, and its 4-piece boosts two-handed weapon damage by 15%. Pair it with Halberd, Greatsword, or Musket builds that plan to absorb hits between heavy swings.
Set Bonuses
2-piece: +160 Maximum Health. This stacks on top of Vitality allocation and the Stout Frame talent.
4-piece: +15% damage with two-handed weapons. Multiplicative with weapon-scaling stat bonuses.
Pieces and Upgrades
Five slots. Pikeman is an ingot set sharing upgrade materials with Conquistador:
Lower tiers: Copper Ingot
Mid tiers: Foothills Iron Ingot
Late tiers: Mire Metal Ingot
Set Pieces
The Pikeman Set fills all five armor slots. Each piece is crafted and upgraded at the Upgrading Station, and the set bonuses activate once two or four pieces are worn together. The Pikeman's Armor entry collects the shared appearance and lore for the line.
Slot | Piece |
|---|---|
Head | |
Chest | |
Hands | |
Legs | |
Feet |
Who Should Use It
Two-handed melee players Greatsword and Halberd users see the largest direct gain from the 4-piece.
Musket users the musket is two-handed, so 4-piece Pikeman applies.
Tanky hybrids early game 2-piece Pikeman + 2-piece Conquistador is the standard survivability combo.
Synergies
Meaty Croc Kebab Epic dish for +20 Strength (Halberd scaling).
Stout Frame talent for +120 to +240 additional Max HP.
See Also
Conquistador Set
Visual Identity
Pikeman's Armor leans into the thick-plate look more aggressively than any other set. The helmet is a brute-force design with a low brow and reinforced jaw guard, the cuirass is wide at the shoulders with thick pauldrons, and the greaves and gauntlets have visibly reinforced joints. Where Conquistador's Armor uses ornate military engravings, Pikeman is deliberately unadorned, giving the impression of a working soldier's kit rather than ceremonial dress. The wider silhouette makes a Pikeman wearer read immediately as a frontline crusher at a distance.
Crusher Playstyle
Pikeman is built around heavy two-handed weapons that trade commit-time for burst damage: greatswords, war hammers, and the halberd family. The 2-piece bonus gives a Pikeman wearer a meaningfully larger health pool to absorb hits during long windups, and the 4-piece bonus raises the reward side of the commitment by boosting the same heavy swings. The playstyle pattern is patient, not reactive: read the enemy cadence, walk into the attack arc, and land a single committed heavy that deals enough damage to justify the incoming trade.
Frigate Boarding Context
Pikeman's crusher profile matches Frigate boarding combat, where multiple enemies crowd a narrow deck and a single wide halberd or greatsword swing hits two or three of them at once. The extra maximum HP lets the wearer trade into the first counter-swing and still survive the follow-up, and the two-handed damage bonus amplifies the area hits. A standard hybrid opening pairs 2-piece Pikeman for the HP with 2-piece Conquistador's Armor for the damage reduction, trading both four-piece capstones for rounded survivability during the gear-flux window.
Two-Handed Firearm Builds
Pikeman's 4-piece +15% two-handed damage applies to every two-handed weapon in the roster, and that includes both Muskets and Blunderbusses. A build that runs a musket or blunderbuss as the primary damage dealer and a greatsword or halberd as the melee swap gets the 4-piece bonus applied to every shot and every swing. That stacks on top of the weapon scaling stat for a meaningful damage floor that Marksman's +15% ranged bonus cannot match because Marksman only covers the ranged half of the loadout.
The Infantry Musket exception. The Infantry Musket is a two-handed musket that scales with Agility rather than Precision. Because its F-key bayonet is a melee strike and its shot is a ranged attack, both uses of the weapon are two-handed and both benefit from the Pikeman 4-piece bonus. Paired with a two-handed greatsword swap, this is the definitive full-Agility heavy-hitter build.
Trade the 2-piece for survivability. The +160 Max HP from Pikeman's 2-piece gives the build enough padding to absorb the first unavoidable hit during a musket reload animation. A musket reload leaves no parry window, and the Infantry Musket bayonet cooldown opens a similar dangerous gap, so the flat HP buffer turns a fight-ending mistake into a survivable hit. Hybrid splits that drop Pikeman to 2-piece only in favor of a 2-piece Conquistador Set give up the damage bonus but keep the survivability buffer intact.
Build Pairings
The Pikeman Set is the default best-in-slot armor for any two-handed melee build because the full set bonus of +15% two-handed weapon damage applies to every basic swing of a two-handed weapon. The bonus also covers special-attack effects that are flagged as melee and two-handed in the damage formula, so it pushes more than just raw swing numbers. The set is mid-game gear that becomes available before the strongest two-handed plague weapons drop, which means by the time the marquee weapon is in hand, the armor that boosts it the most is already farmed and ascended.
The most direct pairings inside the two-handed roster:
Plague Halberd: the headline pairing. Pikeman's +15% boosts every basic swing during Plague Echoes stacking, and crucially the boom on the special attack also benefits because the AoE explosion is treated as a melee, two-handed hit in the damage formula rather than a separate elemental tick. Any other set leaves measurable damage on the table for the Boarding Bomber playstyle.
Soul Eater: the second-boss reward two-hander used for the wide-AoE drain on a two-minute cooldown. Pikeman's bonus stacks with the same modifiers the Halberd uses, so a hot bar that swaps between Halberd and Soul Eater uses one armor set for both weapons without compromise.
Two-Handed Sword: a more straightforward straight-damage pairing. There is no plague-stack mechanic to manage, so the +15% lifts every cleave and every heavy from start to finish without a windup phase. Useful as the early-game slot before the Halberd or Soul Eater are unlocked.
Pikeman stacks additively with the other big two-handed multipliers in the build, so the math compounds rather than overwriting itself. Major buffs to combine: Major Ring of Bravery for melee damage, the Berserk low-HP rage talent, and the Momentum stacking-attack buff. None of these share a damage bucket with the Pikeman 4-piece, so each one adds its full value on top of the +15% set bonus rather than diluting it.
Two-Piece Mix-And-Match Builds
The 2-piece partial bonus of +160 max HP makes Pikeman one of the better halves of a split armor build, even on loadouts that are not primarily two-handed. The flat HP slab is more valuable per piece than most damage-percent halves because it scales with no other stat and applies the moment the second piece equips, with no setup or proc requirement. That gives planners a clean budget for hybrid armor splits: trade the +15% damage for a flat survivability slab when the build does not need every percent of two-handed damage.
The reference example is the Bleed Bruiser hit-and-run build, which runs 2 pieces of Tracker Set alongside 2 pieces of Pikeman Set. The Tracker half supplies the bleed-trigger conditions and movement utility, while the Pikeman half supplies the +160 HP buffer that lets the build eat the inevitable hit between bleed reapplications. Neither set is run at full 5-piece because the bleed weapon does not benefit from either set's 4-piece bonus, so doubling up on 2-piece halves is a strict upgrade over committing to a single full set.
Other useful 2-piece Pikeman splits include pairing with full-survivability sets for boss attempts where the player wants to push aggressive trades, and pairing with stamina-recovery halves for long boarding sequences. The Dominating Presence talent line synergizes well with these mixed builds because the bonus damage trigger is gated on standing close to the target, which the Pikeman HP buffer makes safer to do without dying mid-rotation.