it was buffed several times form release, and now its at the point where i feel like its armored damage is 100% justified by strengths in other fields (mobility, armor cleave, stagger, horde clear).
Yeah, but on difficulties below cata, the armored elites die easily even to greatsword now. And because you have armor cleave and good stagger, its very safe too. Its only real weakness is monster fighting, or soloing chaos patrols.
i’ve seen zealots doing amazing with greatswords. If you min-max, of course certain careers (like WHC you mentioned) will have some optimal weapon choices, and choices that suit them less.
greathammer and greatsword are very 1:1 in power for me. Exec is potentially better damage-wise but loses a lot of safety and cc.
I have an explanation for this: content creators usually play twitch mode or solos, in case of twitch you fight a lot of mini bosses, the aspect that greatsword struggles most with (cleave stops at the monster, bad monster DPS). Its also a specialized weapon, not so good for solos. That leaves official difficulty pub gameplay, or modded difficulties (where it scales well).
It gives more than just horde clear, in a mixed elite+horde fights, it performs really well, thanks to armor cleave and stagger. Also i never find the horde clear to be excessive on cataclysm, but maybe its because i run all greatswords with opportunist, and not swift slaying. You can handle a lot of berserkers with that good reach and stagger.
I would disagree with this assessment, and you can read why i like the design here.
Also if you want to see greatsword be changed to resemble the bret sword, then why not just play bret sword to begin with.