Hand-crafted Czekan (the 29piercing damage warhammer) works much better than most of the other hand-crafted items, purely because PIERCING DAMAGE, more or less ignores armor. Sure swords and scimitars will land damage in 50s and 60s on cloth armor enemies, but they will only deal 20 or so damage on heavily armored enemies. Czekan = 40~60 damage guaranteed per hit disregarding armor.
Also, my argument for using the Czekan vs using the black mace (or any mace for that matter) is that it's THAT MUCH MORE SATISFYING to lethally pop a sharp hammer-tip right into someone's skull, than to only knock them out with a blunt weapon.