Guild Wars 2

I feel like we should discuss offhand dagger, especially in comparison to our other offhand options.

Currently, I feel that offhand dagger is lackluster. The recent buffs to fire grab is nice and a step in the right direction, but I still feel that offhand dagger is really lacking.

Compared to warhorn it has:

Worse damage, worse group healing, worse utility, worse support, worse survivability.

Let’s start with fire. Ring of fire and newly buffed fire grab are actually good abilities, and maybe on par with warhorns ability to spread might/fury. Not sure if wildfire still does much more damage than fire grab + ring of fire, but I think they’re about equal now maybe when you compare all 4 of the offhand skills. Pretty nice.

For water, I feel like frost aura just doesn’t fit dagger offhand at all. Dagger offhand seems like the pure damaging weapon and frost aura doesn’t provide much healing(when traited with elemental basion) and requires being water 30 to really benefit your group. With warhorn being a much better support/healer weapon, I feel that frost aura is really out of place here. Cleansing waters is good, but outclassed completely by the 2 warhorn offhand skills. Tidal surge(warhorn 4) offers breakbar potential and a pretty ok heal, while wate globe is a great heal that causes a movable water field you can burst! Fantastic skill. Overall, warhorn provides much better group healing, self healing, self survivability, and offers break bar help.

Now we move onto lightning, where I think dagger offhands core ability comes from. I feel like ride the lightning is a fanstic mobility skill, and updraft provides some break bar utility. However, warhorn provides cyclone, which is a much better breakbar ability and lightning orb, a strong damaging ability that provides a DPS increase. Dagger offhand provides no such DPS increases. Warhorn again, wins by a land slide.

Finally, we move onto earth. For dagger, earthquake is an good breakbar ability but comes with a HEFTY cooldown of 45 whole seconds, this ability is also a nice blast finisher but again, 45 second cooldown. Churning earth is a pretty useless ability that you don’t use for anything besides blasting, and rarely that. Looking at warhorn, it provides AOE protection + magnetic aura + blast finisher + boon increase on it’s 4 skill with only a 30 second cooldown! Fantastic skill that helps out a lot defensively for you and your allies. It’s 4th skill, dust storm, applies apulsing bl ind AOE which again helps you and your allies with suvivability a lot. Two fantastic survivability skills vs daggers horrible churning earth and long cooldown break bar ability. Warhorn wins by yet another land slide.

This is getting a bit long, so for focus I’ll just say earth 4/5 provide unmatched self survivability and air 4 provides an incredible projectile field for all of your allies. You use this weapon in situations you need additional proj reflect and self survivability. Focus has unique uses and reasons to use it over warhorn(Mainly swirling winds).

I feel that dagger offhands best ability and only real defining reason to pick it is ride the lightning(RTL). That is the only real redeeming unique ability it brings, while lacking in every other aspect. It’s a real shame.

I think dagger offhand either needs to be the “mobility weapon” the “damage weapon” or something. I’m not sure – but right now it’s completely outclassed by warhorn in pretty much every situation in PVE, and when you need more survivability and projectile reflect focus completely outclasses it. Dagger offhand is not a jack of all trades weapon, it’s simply a subpar weapon, imo.

I hope anet keeps giving dagger offhand love, because it really, really needs it.

I’d say compared to other professions we’re pretty well off in terms of weapon variety in PvE, now that tempest has given us a viable way to play D/Wh and to some extent D/F and Sc/Wh. Don’t think it’s realistic to expect every weapon to be as prominent.

Also, for what it’s worth, offhand dagger has a very niche use in bursting bosses for record clears as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYEP6iFGYyU or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E78X1zyN4RE
Prestacking might as well.

As for PvP and wvw, offhand dagger viability is a good indicator of how much the game has changed, since it was a fantastic weapon for years, but since HoT it’s a lot less forgiving to play without offhand focus utility. I’d say in general it’s still a good weapon, and the attention it’s been getting (churning and fire grab) is overall quite good.

The only really substantial nerfs it’s had are the ring of fire nerf, which I’m personally in favour of, and the frost aura ‘normalization’, which cut the duration from 7s to 4s, which I personally really dislike. They standardized all aura durations to 4s for some reason, which left frost aura very underwhelming. It used to be a hidden carry for the weapon, which, while hard to notice, could keep you alive in wvw very effectively (both to outrun longbow rangers and get out of melee of thief/war/guard). Now it’s more or less just a button you press to get whatever aura-related traits you have.

OH dagger in pvp is crappy, it was buffed and is decent in wvw. warhorn is pretty crappy for both pvp and wvw and may have a place in pve but am not sure.