Hey guys.
I’ve posted before on changes for weapon skills that I thought the guardian could use, but this time I decided to focus purely on the sword, to highlight some of its issues in more detail as opposed to just mentioning it in passing in a longer thread.
1: Auto attack:
Now on paper, the Guardian’s sword auto attack actually looks decent, especially with its relatively large damage numbers. However that’s all it really does, damage. Unlike the sword autos for some other classes that remove boons, or apply bleeds, cripples or vulnerability, the guardian’s auto relies solely on its damage to remain competitive.
When you compare it to the thief’s sword auto, which does almost the same amount of damage, but also applies conditions on the third attack and cleaves better, suddenly that damage doesn’t seem as impressive anymore. Hell, even compared to the guardian’s greatsword auto, the total damage numbers are almost the same, yet the greatsword has the added benefit of applying might on the third strike, as well as having superior cleaving capabilities.
But there are other mechanical issues with the guardian’s auto attack that hinder it even more, and that is the third attack in the auto chain, Sword Wave. Because it counts as a projectile, it often has trouble hitting targets that normal melee attacks have no trouble with, even at point blank range. It also almost completely lacks any cleaving capabilities, unless you hit targets that are directly on top of or behind each other. Furthermore, it can be blocked or reflected by enemies with projectile blocks or reflects, causing the guardian to miss or even damage himself in situations where every other melee attack would succeed. The worst part in all this is that if Sword Wave does fail to hit the enemy, even if the attack is reflected or blocked, the guardian will continue to repeat it multiple times in an attempt to land a hit, thus further lowering the player’s dps and potentially causing multiple cases of damage reflection in a row.
To me, it’s completely silly to punish a guardians as though they were using a ranged projectile even though they are using a melee attack. It leads to a lot of unnecessary frustration and hinders the sword greatly as a melee weapon.
Changes to Zealot’s Defence:
Zealots defense is just a bad skill, so bad in fact, that I reckon most guardians who are experienced with the sword probably rarely use ZD, if ever. The main reason is because its damage relative to its cooldown and cast time is fairly low, to the extent that interrupting your auto attack to cast it will likely not even improve your dps at all and in some cases, might even decrease it. It also lacks the ability to cleave, so in cases where you’re fighting multiple opponents, using Zealot’s Defense would actually lower your dps by a significant margin.
It also doesn’t offer enough utility to make up for the low damage. Although it destroys ranged projectiles, that effect pales in comparison to similarly functioning skills like pistol whip, which cleaves, stuns and evades, or Blurred Frenzy, which cleaves and grants evade as well (evading melee attacks AND projectiles —-———> just destroying projectiles). What makes Zealots defense even worse is that despite offering inferior utility and damage to the above mentioned skills, it actually has a longer cooldown as well. I just really don’t know what kind of thought went into this design.
Lastly, even though the skill fires ranged projectiles, because of their lack of homing and their poor tracking capabilities, you’ll often find you’ll miss targets that are even moving at a snail’s pace at range. It doesn’t even count as a projectile finisher and has all the downsides of ranged attacks – like being susceptible to projectiles reflects or blocks – while maintaining very few of the perks (for example, because the projectiles trail along the ground, if you try fire it over a gap, instead of flying to hit the target, the projectiles fall into the gap and disappear).
But what about flashing blade? O_o
Flashing blade is awesome. I reckon its the only skill on the sword they got right, though it could stand to be a leap finisher. XD
Lack of burst capabilities:
Thanks in large part to the poor damage of Zealots defense, the sword is completely devoid of any burst damage potential. While its sustained damage with the auto attack is still good (mechanical issues aside), the lack of burst means that the sword’s overall dps is actually quite low. How low? Well, low enough that even the Guardian’s scepter out-damages it against single targets by quite a fair margin, which is actually quite sad considering you’re comparing a ranged weapon with a melee weapon.
(edited by Tenrai Senshi.2017)