Its pretty good for clearing pure chaff hordes but it has no way to compete with a slayer simply because slayer has a semi permanent 57.5% attackspeed & 30% raw damage boost going.
He hits harder and he hits faster.
Handmaiden does bridge the gap to a degree with a similarly highly active 35% attackspeed boost and the ability to use power from pain for 25% more crits. She can also use asrai alacrity to close up further but slayer still has 10% more attackspeed or 15% more power up his truck then depending on his weapon choices.
Being able to spam jump to stagger hordes nonstop and just hack away at them without ever really having to dodge much also helps him along.
Today I learned the elf greatsword has a second “heavy” attack.
Due to heavy 1 chaining into heavy 1 if you just spam long hold I honestly never even noticed it had a second heavy attack. Especially as heavy 2 looks very similar to light 2.
I loved this thing when I first started playing the game but fell out with it as I pushed into harder difficulties. Recently been playing around with it again and still didn’t notice it had a heavy 2 until I read your post and logged into check.
Kinda mind blowing that the game doesn’t even show attack patterns/combos.
It isn’t really a heavy, in the sense of slow and damaging. It was part of the regular combo, but taken out at some point in the past (turned into a follow-up ‘light’) after community request, to allow the weapon to more easily chain stabs against elites. Which is apparently hard enough as is, what with the wonky hitbox, but them’s the breaks. The animation doesn’t really make too much sense without the swipe, but I see the point.
It’s just listed has “Heavy 2” in armoury mod, and also why I used quotes, as you say it’s more of a light 3 that’s only available after Heavy 1.
I did take a 1+ year break at some point, so it could well have still been regular Heavy 2 when I started playing and it’s only this past week that I’ve even picked up the great sword at all since then.
Honestly, it flows well and I can see why it was requested.
It just makes no sense that the existence of these attacks is not shown in-game at all by default. The same goes for weapons that have special attacks too I guess.