Guild Wars 2

Of course none of you has ever been killed by a 100b because you have to be terribly terribly noob… lol. If u dont have a stun breaker or inmunity On, u have a big trouble because the next ull see after ur useless dodge, is a shield stun and eviscerate (with whirlwind when he needs)

There are builds out there that make using hb even easier. Mace + Shield / Hammer, Unsuspecting foe, and switch into HB. Reliable damage every 10-ish seconds and great burst every 60. Also very easy to bait out stunbreaks.

In terms of pve, Greatsword wins again in general, but suffers when you have to damage on the move.

Axe + Mace is a very nice combo, the extra vuln is nice and the ability to ranged stun stunnable creatures is a nice touch. It outshines Axe + Axe unless you can hit 4+ targets with the whirl every time you use it. The whirl not only does minimal damage, but replaces your autoattack for the duration. Mace offhand on the other hand is pretty much fire and forget, giving more time to abuse the autoattack.

And the auto-attack from Axe does far more damage than the whirl ever would. It is rarely worth using at all. With a little maneuvering you can hit a lot of targets with the auto-attack as well.

Greatsword is also the most popular weapon of choice for mesmers due its fast long range auto attack and ease of use. I also see a lot of greatsword wielding guardians. Greatsword is pretty much no brainer for Ranger in WvWvW, because it offers the best mobility, decent chance for ranger to get away from trouble (assuming auto targeting turned off). Greatsword and more greatsword…

I find this both extremely boring and yet another example of bad game design. Greatsword wielding tends to look extremely goofy for all professions. I mean who an earth would be spinning around like a mad man in combat with such heavy long sword? Warrior wielding dual sword or sword + shield looks aesthetically much better than greatsword. Of course most players choose the greatsword as it offers two mobility skills: #3 whirlwind attack and #5 rush, while all the other melee weapons offer max 1 mobility skills! Whirlwind attack is cheap, good & effective against mobs. Warrior’s greatsword isn’t great on conditions: basically just vulnerability and cripple, but it does more direct damage than e.g. the dual sword or dual mace combination.

What the game “designers” of this game fail to understand: Direct damage is superior to condition based damage. Thus in order to make the weapons balanced the condition based damage should be clearly better.

Let me explain: There is no limit on stacking direct damage. If 5 players are attacking the same target, e.g. a dungeon boss, their direct damage directly applies to that boss. But for some weird reason there is 25 stack limit per condition. My dual sword warrior, who does crazy amount of bleeding and critical hits, can easily hit that 25 stack bleeding limit alone. It would mean that if any other character in a party would do bleeding damage, some of the damage would be ignored. Also there is a lot of condition removal. Bosses shrug off conditions. In spvp and WvWvW, all good players and teams have usually several ways to remove conditions, often many conditions at same time. Condition damage occurs in time. Slow conditions like bleed are not that effective in spvp or WvWvW, because they tend to be removed well before their full or even half effect.

The fix:
1. Re-evaluate the weapon skills. No need to do any drastic changes e.g. slightly reduce the cooldown/recharge of some of the less popular weapon choice skills.
2. Add some direct damage to weapons, which used to do most of their damage via conditions.

Now everybody would be happy. Greatsword wielding warriors, mesmers and alike could still continue their love with their greatsword, but we would finally see some variety.

But this is off course just wishful thinking, as I know very well that this forum only exists to vent: Arenanet couldn’t get less about its players. I have never seen a designer comment on any thread I have participated or reply to emails or bug reports or suggestions. There is almost no communication towards the players.

Let’s just rename the game into Greatsword Wars 2 or Thief Wars 2, because there is no variety. And none of the Arenanet developers read or comment this forum, except maybe once in a blue moon.

Deniara

As others have said, Forceful Greatsword. It’s the slightly less OP version of Guardian’s EM, yet only useful for GS…so guess what weapon is best for Warrior (PvE at least). That trait single-handedly determines what weapon Warrior should use.

I use Greatsword and Sword / Axe, for maximum AoE damage.

I used to do GS/axe/mace well actuly i been through all weapon combos. I love GS/Axe/shield. I altho will admit GS is good but the other weapons dont have anything major thus everyone uses GS. Simply put some weapon combos are terrible. All combos should be decent. Axe/axe is pretty bad for dps because axe 4 is meh and axe 5 dosent do much dmg for all that spinning. Mace off hand got vuln stacks of 4 on 4 skill and a knock down wave. Which is meh since its so easy to dodge. Sword off hand is nice but when you pull the thrown sword it does as much dmg as a normal attack from GS or axe.

Shield is awesome i wish shield bash was a shield throw with 600 range which did same as shield bash would look pretty awesome.

To be fair though, I once ran a sword + axe bleed build. The whirl can really stack up bleeds on big groups quite quickly when your crit is high enough (traits and sigil, ofc).

Other than that though, pretty useless.

100 blades only sucks vs 1 target. If you are leading the charge into a group you can hundred blade them all. I like to use rush to charge through a zerg to the back where all the softies are, then use invulnerability/fears/stomp, 100 blades, and whirlwind/dodge out. Its a good way to break up their momentum. or cause them to run.

Fox.3469:

eh dual axe is far better then greatsword

+ for GS: skill 3, skill 5, skill 4 – breaks cc, immobilize, cripple, more dmg then other weapons, 5 runs from zerg, 5 is also a finisher
- for GS: can’t move when doing 2, I very often have to cancel it to dodge, it doesn’t really do a lot of dmg at the begining. GS is mostly for cannons or if you play in small groups/alone etc.

+ for Hammer: great CC with specific builds, you can immobilize several opponents in front of you, knock them down, cancel their skills. It’s very good for supporting and shouting builds. Hammer also does have a good combo finisher, it stacks might with some classes.
- for Hammer: less damage, no “runaway” skill. Hammer is mostly good in combination with sword+horn or possibly sword+shield, so you can swap to sword and jump to your target, then slow him with 3 if needed.

So it rly mostly depends on your build. If you wanna play supportive tanky class, go for hammer, you can screw your targets pretty well. Use GS if you wanna be mainly a DD. But basically, having hammer, GS, sword+horn and rifle with you all the time is a must, Change it according to situation, play with it, you will figure out eventually.