Game Mechanics

The game is fairly straightforward, but nonetheless a deeper understanding of how the game works will benefit you.

Damage
Damage is calculated as follows:


 * (attack - sum of your armor) + (elemental attack - sum of your elemental resistances)

In other words you'll notice that you linearly take less damage the more armor you have, until a certain point at which you take no damage. Note that you still build up rage even if you take no damage! This means that if you know the fights ahead then you can plan out which fights to go all-out on rage.

There's been no real info yet about resistances that enemies might have. However, based on the way that elemental resistance on armor works (it's added together, not done separately), it seems that it's likewise the sum. Meaning that if an enemy has for example 50 fire resistance, and you have a weapon that does +75 fire and +75 fire, then you'll do a total of 100 fire damage to it.

Weapon Types
The different weapon types, such as a long two-handed axe versus two smaller axes, does indeed affect game play.

The weapons that look longer visually have greater reach in the game. That means that you can hit enemies that are further away. However, they are also slower.

Two weapon sets, such as Dragon breaker, provide on average 115 attacks per minute against a wall without any monster interaction.

A Two-handed weapon, such as the General's Spear, provides on average 108 swings per minute against a wall without monster interaction.

Additionally, if you use the Dash skill then both weapon types can perform 14 full 3 dash attack combos in one minute. However, the heavy weapons (General's spear, etc...) only manage a maximum of 10 hits per chain and the lighter weapons (such as Dragon Breaker) manage 14 hits maximum per chain.

(Source)

Crit Chance
The crit chance is not a static percentage. Until you build up some combos the crit chance is virtually nil. Once you build up 35 or so combo hits then the crit chance starts to increase.

This can be tested by taking a weak weapon (with no crit chance) to Spider's Lair and just hitting the first wave of spiders over and over again. At first you won't see any crits, with the first one around a 35-40 combo or so. Then the crits start happening faster and faster, and it becomes harder to count them.

At around a 100-hit combo you'll count 7 or so crits.

At around a 200-hit combo you'll count 20 or so crits, but they start happening so fast it's hard to tell.