I, too, thought I would always be rolling around with sword+shield. I like the shield, I admit it’s a little lacking but it has really saved the day multiple times and once you learn good times to use its skills, it’s not that bad at all.
Sword, however, I find it really disappointing, I love the idea behind Zealot’s Defense but it really isn’t reliable unless the target is motionless. Blocking projectiles is nice, however, they don’t even count as real blocks, so any traits related to blocking are wasted on it. I also love that it has a teleport but it’s not usable outside of combat and its damage is almost non-existant. The chain does good damage yes, it procs Justice often, yes but you can actually proc Justice almost as much, if not, equally as much as sword with good use of other weapons too. Heck, if you have five enemies lined up (which in pve is pretty easy) Wave of Wrath (staff #1) would proc Justice EVERY hit, any weapon with a symbol can also proc it really often so I wouldn’t really say it’s one of the biggest draws to sword for me.
Frankly, I hate to say it, greatsword seems to outshine it in almost every regard, it has a gap closing, aoe blind that does good damage with a similar cooldown; it has team support through boons, combos and symbols (which can obviously be traited various ways); it has MORE boons through its #1 chain which increase damage and synergise with traits (Altruistic Healing); self comboing condition removal and retalition and to top it off, a pretty good control move. All whilst doing much more aoe damage, you will pretty much always kill three things faster with greatsword than it takes sword to kill one thing.
Greatsword, as an offensive weapon, still brings far more to the team than sword does. I really hope sword gets addressed somehow as I really love its aesthetic.
“But Silver”, you say, “you’re forgetting offhands!”, well let’s look at offhands + sword then. I find shield works ok with it if you’re going for team support so that has nice team synergy at least but the combo field has a very short duration to cooldown ratio, which greatsword still beats after its revision (I’m not discounting the damage reduction and small heal shield brings though). Sword+torch is ok, aside from good damage, the only thing extra it brings to the team is a condition removal, very situational too though, as you’d probably prefer to burninate your enemies than burninate your buddy’s conditions, plus having a light field, such as Symbol of Wrath on greatsword, can still provide much better condition removal from allies without having to ‘aim’ it away from foes. Sword + Focus isn’t too bad as you get a blast finisher and some personal survivability, Ray of Judgement, whilst looking kinda lame is pretty handy. The drawback of sword+focus though, is that focus’ cooldowns are much longer than greatsword, with one 45ish blast finisher compared to greatsword’s THREE finishers with a 10, 15, 30 cooldowns STILL brings a little more to the table in regard to helping the team.
A lot of people would now probably say something like, “Sword supports the team by making things die”, true that but so does greatsword and probably to greater effect, especially versus a lot of enemies.
I know what I’m saying is quite subjective and looks like I’m completely praising the greatsword. I’m not though, I would really prefer to use sword+X over greatsword but greatsword still seems to offer so much more.
Sorry for the wall.
