Guild Wars 2

Now that HoT has been released, has anyone actually sat down and done the math for which is better and by how much?

I have a reaper that I run with D/Wh & Staff. But I just got reamed by some elitist for not running greatsword since it’s “TWICE AS MUCH DAMAGE AS DAGGER”.

It was my understanding that the dagger was roughly 10% weaker than gravedigger spam. And vastly superior in all other situations. This is assuming one could even successfully do gravedigger spamming since the place I got yelled at was in fractals where there’s aegis and blinds everywhere from the instabilities to interrupt one’s gravedigger spam in addition to dodges. Not to mention sustain is somewhat more important than stack and DPS.

According to the wiki and some calculations is the coefficient/second of the greatsword auto 1.2 and of the dagger 1.33333… now add the 10% weapon strength bonus of greatsword and you get 1.32 vs 1.3333 auto attack alone. Gravedigger has a coefficient/second of 1.5 so with 10% bonus is 1.65 so gravediggerspam is around 24% stronger. Also nightfall has a coeffecient of 2.8 which is very good considering the cast time.

I just run the best of both worlds in fractals, D/Wh in one set and GS in the other.

Since release i was hyped with gs and ran only with it. Soon i realized that if i want to spend most of the time in shroud, then gs offer too little lifeforce generation.

Also, gravedigger is great… if it hits. Pretty much everything in new maps constantly dodges, stealths or interrupts. If it was any faster, maybe instead of lame life siphon in Soul Eater trait give us some short quickness ?

It’s best to think of GS for Necro like a hammer for other classes. It’s a Heavy hitting weapon with skills that emphasize control and debuting alongside damage, but it isn’t speedy.

I love GS on Necro and use it as my go-to PvE weapon. In PvP, though, I tend to use a scepter or a dagger because they’re easier to land hits with.

Lmao, twice as much damage? Where do people even get this information? This game needs meters in a big way.

Now Tim are you factoring in aftercast a into that, plus the possibility of locust storm combining with dagger spam? Though to be fair we would also need to factor in nightfall to the equation if we did that. And the fact if not hitting below 50% gravedigger goes on an 8 second cooldown….man I hate metrics, I sorta wish we had a dps meter now.

TheLastNobody.8319:

Now Tim are you factoring in aftercast a into that, plus the possibility of locust storm combining with dagger spam? Though to be fair we would also need to factor in nightfall to the equation if we did that. And the fact if not hitting below 50% gravedigger goes on an 8 second cooldown….man I hate metrics, I sorta wish we had a dps meter now.

I just used the times that wiki are displayed in the wiki for the auto attack chain, so the aftercasts should be included. For gravedigger spam I assumed an aftercast of 0.75 seconds which matches my experiences.
The modifiers/second is just the damage in the animations so I did not consider cooldown and such. Also the nightfall vs locust swarm argument, nightfall is better in both damage and cooldown untraited (traited damage is better for locust swarm) while having the same cast time. The missing of gravedigger does not matter since I only calculated the damage done in the animation.
The results still speak for themselves the dps of greatsword without gravedigger is around equal to that of dagger/warhorn, every time you use gravedigger you are just improving it.

Uhh… I have no hard numbers but Dagger certainly feels superior above 50% in single target or cleave situations. GS wins out at 50% because of Gravedigger spam.

IMO Dagger/GS is still the best for full damage.

Dagger has a faster auto attack, the rest is garbage for PvE compared to GS. Give me GS 2-5 over Dagger 2,3 and whatever offhand you chose.

I honestly see no reason not to take a dagger/warhorn to pve, cast locust before a fight, and then camp gs and deathshroud. That said…you’re only using the dagger/warhorn for locust precast.

I personally prefer D/F over D/W, always have and probably always will.