Corpse Wax Cutters black flame burn effect deals 2.5% of the enemies max health. Don't believe me?

Make a new character, get Black Flame, cheese the Gargoyle to get the Gargoyle Blacl Blade.

Go find Greyroll and test Black Flame to Corse Wax Cutter.

I used a Clawmark Seal+4 and a Gargoyle Black Blade+2 for this test, had minimum stats to use both.

Black Flame - about 2200 damage
Corpse Wax Cutter - about 2070 damage.

pretty easy to get early if you're patient with black flame spells. use the sanctum as cover and slowly whittle away at him with black flame

This thing destroys dragons cuz the blade beam can travel at an upwards angle allowing you to headshot dragons ridiculously easily. I prefer it over blasphemous blade purely because it looks cooler. Is great dual wielding with blas blade.

Love how they buffed the ash of war. Hate how they left it with the black flame effect instead of the dark red one it uses on every other attack.

The only black gargoyle weapon worth using

It's like the balsphemous blade and black knife had a baby

On my lvl 1 wretch (usable via radagons sorseal, two fingers talisman and faith cracked tear then 2 handed) has over 800 ar with golden vow and sacred scorpion charm which is allot of AR for a lvl 1 character, plus the weapon art has the useful black flame dot and comes on faster than the black knife which helps overall survivability allot to get back to dodging quivker, great for taking down late game bosses at lvl 1 if you are into that sort of thing

I personally don't enjoy the weapon. It has the standard boring greatsword move-set, split holy damage is the worst (duo to most bosses having higher holy resistances) and the weapon art is the weakest of all the black-knife/red-black fire ones.
Besides that: The weapon isn't necessarily bad. But duo to the high amount of choices when it comes to split faith scaling weapons - I wouldn't necessarily advice to pick this one. There is better stuff out there.
If you still feel interested in testing that weapon, I would agree with the other commentator a bit below me: The black flame fireball strategy worked out great. Killed him at level 50'ish with like 5 mana flasks just doing the fireballs.

the original tip of this weapon is part of the gargoyle's greatsword. it looks like a much nicer bronze, and the weapon itself doesn't have faith scaling. the skills are pretty similar too, vacuum slice is like a not-holy version of the corpse wax cutter; or maybe corpse wax cutter is just a death version of vacuum slice. i guess being in league with maliketh, and the proximity to the rune of destined death makes some adjustments.

interesting that both weapons were mended with corpse wax, but only this one suffered from it. makes me think that despite the name of the skill, corpse wax isn't the source of that death damage, and maybe its the devotion to maliketh, or the rune of death, that blackens a blade.

You can get this fairly early if you have the patience to throw about 25-30 black flame fireballs over the course of 30 minutes. Simply throw one (or two) at the gargoyle's back, immediately run into the sanctum and crouch behind the second pillar to the right (looking at Gurranq from the doors). Afterwards, wait for him to reset his position (he will always walk to the door twice) and then repeat.
On an unrelated note, the AoW can easily hit the head of a dragon and does quite a bit of posture damage, enough to break its posture if you start spamming it while it's doing the the roar they always do when the first see you.