Greatsword is one of the weapons you will use because how great it looks, but always will be dissapointed in it’s performance.
I love how Soldier’s greatsword skin looks, I play with it from time to time, and it is always the same, I thinking, “Maybe I playing it wrong? Maybe there is the way?”, I tryed many talents, propeties, some subclasses have talents that compensating some flaws, but that is not making it good weapon. Every time I pick almost any other weapon I feel myself much more effective in combat, even with sword and shield, can you imagine? (I playing on legend.)
This weapon have not enough damage to reach any meaningful breakpoints.
Its attack speed is low as well.
Heavy attacks against armor does very low damage, especially headshots.
It is anti-infantry weapon, you will say, but it is not good against infantry too. Weak enemies exept slaverats die from two light strikes, but this is true for other weapons as well, and those weapons have higher attack speed. Attack speed is not only about dps, it is about how fast you can apply stagger to control enemies too.
Heavy attacks? Well, heavy attacks have a good cleave, but exposing you to hits from the horde (especially against beastmen). With current state of dodge it is quite a challenge to use heavy attacks against the horde even with good ping. And with damage heavy attacks does you cant even kill marauder with heavy strike, no matter what properties you use, so what the point?
Also, due to short stagger duration heavy attacks does not receive benefit of mechanic because bonus is wears off before consecutive hit make it way to the target. It is true for most weapons. Is it supposed to be that way?
The ONLY buff this weapon needs is more armor damage on heavies. It would kind of be a waste of the somewhat unique property of being able to cleave armor was useless because it did so little damage. As for being exposed for using heavies, I don’t agree, small movements away from your enemies will keep them trying to fill slots and not readying an attack yet while you prepare your next heavy strike, this doesn’t even require dodging in most cases but you always can if they look aggressive. I don’t think the weapon really needs to be able take advantage of it’s own stagger damage bonus, that’s what your teammates are for and that’s why it has higher cleave (how many enemies attacks will damage, different than stagger) than any other weapon in the game. Also the fact that light swings fill the same role as heavies make them kinda pointless, if you wanted to spam light attacks, just use exe sword. If they changed the light attack pattern to involve some kind of ap attack that combos out of push attack and heavy 1, it would give us something else to do other than push attack spamming armors
Consecutive greatsword attacks also apply bleed damage, but it’s not really enough. I do thing that Greatswords must be tweaked a bit. In my post Elven Gratesword improvements ideas I suggested to give all the greatswords a unique feature that the damage is almost not reduced with consecutive targets. That way it would still be relatively weak against armored targets, but would carve into hordes wich is what they are for
I agree with you, Greatsword needs a buff. Imho it should be an halfway between Exe Sword and 2H Hammer.
Greatsword should have less damage but more stagger than Exe and more damage but less stagger than 2H Hammer, with the heavy combo. While, during light combo, its attacks could have less cleave/stagger than now, but more speed, in order to let them to kill trash/low density/alone enemies.
Just give this weapon a thrust or some overheads in its light attack pattern, or something, jfc…
It doesn’t have to have greathammer’s AP potential, but accessible headshot damage and literally anything to get it out of xsword’s shadow would be so good for this weapon.
You can’t even make the excuse that it’s supposed to be the “horde clear CC” weapon when nearly everything else does that and then better.
This is one of those “It’s much better then it gets credit for, but…” weapons.
-It has great cleave.
-It’s push attack is great vs elites.
-With Swift Slaying up it’s an absolute blender.
-With practice, you can get multiple headshots per swing, even against armor.
But…
-It doesn’t benefit much from stagger, as OP said, due it’s slow duration.
-Therefore, it needs more damage to compensate for the enemy HP buff.
As a dedicated anti-horde weapon, it should really be more effective against said hordes.
Just give it bleed damage on all strikes. At least that way, cleaving into hordes with armour will eventually kill everything. It’s one of the few weapons that doesn’t stop damaging enemies after it hits armour. It continues to cleave through, but the damage is garbage.
I’m probably the only person in the world who prefers the 2h sword over executioner. I guess it just fits my playstyle better. There has already been some good discussion about it here and how it can be changed for the better, so I don’t have much to add. I just wanted to throw it in here that it isn’t objectively worse, just underperforming in its role.
That weapon alone literally saved me from beastmen nightmare in WoM-launch. To be honest, I played a lot of greatsword post-WoM, specially on cata, and I would say it’s on good spot right now. The thing about its damage - it has big cleave, so even if it’s vs infantry, single target damage is supposed to be mediocre. However, most of meta weapons struggle with cleave. And that’s why quickplays nowadays struggle with hordes, because nobody brings weapon with good cleave.
I’m bold to say, that greatsword is S-tier weapon to face hordes (which is supposed to happen). However, it doesn’t really play like most of the weapons:
Like flamethrower, it benefits when you face enemy from one angle.
Usual “vs horde” attack cycle must include walking back and forward in same pace as swinging. Like playing with 2h-hammer, but much faster because you don’t always spam charge attacks in cycle.
Charge attacks are very powerful, and while they are not the best versus one armoured enemy, you can cleave through several armoured enemies, or armoured enemies that are included in horde (while hitting horde as well), which is a huge deal and shouldn’t be underestimated.
If you are facing single armoured enemy, your go-to strategy is to spam push attack (which is overhead) with precise aim for headshots. But that makes extra requirement to build stamina (instead of BCR potentially) and stamina recovery.
All of that makes pretty unique gameplay, which does take a lot of time to practice compared to other weapons, so I would like to keep it as how it is.
I’m not really against buffs though. Slight buff to make it more appealing to new players would be good, but I think you can make it work anyway. I would suggest trying it with zealot first and then try on mercenary.
I wouldn’t say the Greatswords are bad, but they are underwhelming in practice, even if they’re fun to play. I could imagine it being really powerful on Saltz with Flense, though Rapier does it better.
Maybe give it a third heavy attack, a down-angled slash (not the exact vertical of XSword) that can be skipped to after a push attack, so you can get some follow-up damage against armor. If it was at the angle of a keyboard slash \ it could maybe hit more than one enemy for decent damage, but also be something you could hit armored enemies with.
yeah but theres nothing wrong with that.
2h sword can just do less dmg compare to exe swords.
if exe swords takes 2 hits to kill cw, then let 2h sword take 3 (all head shots*).
I’d say give the Greatsword a few small overall buffs, nothing major, just a small increase in a few categories.
I’d apply the following buffs.
10% attack speed increase (it currently seems a bit slow at times), 10% damage increase (helps with breakpoints), and 50% less falloff damage when cleaving through multiple targets (uniqueness factor vs hordes/elites).
These small changes (especially the falloff reduction) would improve it decently without outshining the Exe Sword.
Eww no, make it a light attack. I don’t wanna be spamming heavies into a horde and have to block cancel to avoid a slow overhead swing that’s gonna get me destroyed if I use it.
Historical greatswords are vastly misunderstood - they were not giant cleavers, like an axe, but fast precision tools closer to a polearm - except every inch of the weapons surface area was potentially a deadly contact surface.
I know that’s not what we’ll get because in-universe lore, but I’d love to see it get a nod just by increasing the light attacks speed. This would give it a style difference and make it a more mobile, reactive, exciting weapon compared to the Xsword and give it the needed DPS increase to deal with 2.0