Nyxanna wrote...
I know that swords have highest damage, maces give armor penetration and axes give crit. Crit is obviously RNG so I wanna go for a sword or mace. I don't know how well armor penetration does though compared to damage. I assume that it helps most on heavy armor enemies? If yes I guess it would be best to have the sword since it's better overall?
Any opinion on the armor?
Swords have the highest base damage, but mauls scale better with strength. You can see this on the attribute bonus on the weapon - mauls are 1.25 while 2h swords and axes are both 1.1. Basically what that means is that every point of strength gives about .1 more damage to a maul than to a sword/axe.
Since chasind great maul gets a +5 damage enchantment (as well as a bunch of other juicy mods that make it the best 2h weapon in the game), you only need about 45 strength before it deals more damage than starfang even against unarmored targets.
What armour you want to use depends on what you're trying to achieve with your 2H. If you just want to kill stuff ASAP then focusing on crits is the best way to do that (even though you've said you don't want to rely on RNG, a lot of the talents are autocrits so just things like warden commander chestpiece and cailan's gloves will increase the damage of mighty blow et al by 20%). If you want to tank then knight-commander's plate and other spell resistance gear (mostly the spellward and dweomer runes) to be spell immune.
Just as a final note,
Nyxanna wrote...
I also know that dual wield is better,
I've seen it in other posts but it's my first time playing and I don't
want to get a mod to change talents.
Dual wielding isn't better than 2H. They both have very different strengths and weaknesses.