Guild Wars 2

I was using dual dagger in Arah dungeon the other day and was fighting trash mobs, and felt very lack luster on multi target decimation. I recently switched from a sword dagger build, so the multi target on the sword was very nice in pve and even 1vXing in WvW. However, after looking at the dagger animations, and using some logic, I realized that dagger #1 should be able to hit two enemies at a time on A and B. C is a stab, so it makes sense that it is single target, but the other ones should seriously hit two targets (not three because they are daggers and should have the variation between things like swords and axes).

The AA doesn’t really need multi-target because it’s specialized for single target and Death Blossom gives you a reasonably good ability to deal with adds/small groups (especially with some condi boosts), but in general it’s intentional that Sword/x is slightly better at handling groups and D/D is slightly better at single target.

As a side note, though, I take issue with the way the game handles single/multitarget attacks in general. Attacks capable of hitting multiple targets (with some exceptions) should really deal primary damage to one target and reduced splash damage to adjacent targets to make the various sets feel a little less pigeonholing. Having it set up the way they do has a tendency to create larger than necessary gaps in the functionality of various sets.

If you need cleave then use the sword for that fight. If your build can’t suit both dagger/x and sword/x for PvE then have another look at it.

I’m not even all that sure Daggers deal more single-target damage when compared to Sword. A Cloak and Dagger + Backstab combo only hits for about 10.000 when running Arah. A single Pistol Whip will get close to that while only needing 2 seconds to execute.

Even if Daggers deal a tiny bit more single target damage in theory, once you account for the “frontstabs” and the odd premature Cloak and Dagger I’m sure you’ll find Sword mainhand actually being far more effective in PvE than Daggers.

I mean against most mobs all you need to do is spam Black Powder for melee immunity. That’s hard to top.