Hello. Sienna has been my favorite career since before release. I love all of her weapons, and in my experience they are all devastating - except for one.
I’ve never been able to use the flame sword effectively. What am I missing? It’s a cool weapon with fun attacks, but it doesn’t do a lot of damage like the dagger, hit lots of targets like the mace, or provide safety like the 1h sword. I just can’t tell what it’s good at. It just kind of slaps things around, even on Unchained.
Anyone care to shed some light? This has been on my mind for a while.
It is somewhat hard to use alone, true. I’d say the trick lies in figuring out when to use the light attacks for their speed (to either slay a small number of targets quickly, or to give yourself enough space to do something else in a tight spot) and when to use the wide arcs and infinite DoT of the heavy attacks. “Jousting” with the heavy attacks, in the style of Two-handed Axe/Hammer, helps some. While I don’t quite agree that it’s “poop tier” (then again, I’m far less likely to consider things useless anyway than many people), it could use some tweaks to be more in line with the other weapons.
It is an overlooked weapon for two reasons: Sienna has only one anti-armour/super armour ranged option, being the bolt staff, which in itself is hardly ever used, and you don’t want sienna to be on the frontline, at least neither as Pyro nor as BW.
The flamesword does complement the bolt staff very well and I do think it is a very effective combination, solely for the reason that the flame sword makes you virtually untouchable during hordes or ambushes where you cannot position properly to use your staff, and it absolutely deletes hordes. It is, imho, one of the best CC and horde clearing melee weapons in the game. The sweaps are wide, it cleaves very well, it knocks down mobs, it has high attack speed even on charged attacks and it deals significant damage over time. If you put swift slaying on that thing as Pyro and have some overcharge running, you can become quite the force to reckoned with.
It could use some tweakins and would benefit from reliable anti-armour attacks - and I’d also like to see the initial clawing attack on charged to deal more damage (and an overall slight damage increase wouldn’t hurt).
The problem especially in legend is the minute you come across anything armoured its terrible. Doesn’t help the first charged attack is also bugged against armour and does no damage …