“If you want damage take great sword or axe.”
So I did. These are my results.
Build;
Greatsword-sword/shield
0-20-20-10-20
Runes of the eagle
berserkers
(Flurry to fast hand swap on leg spec. to prime 100B)
Pro’s
Nice use of mobility. Good toughness. Handy immobilize for 100B set-up. Can have reflects. Short range quick stuns to rupt stomps and heals.
Con’s
They either have to stupid, lagging, AFk to get the entire 100B off. Usually it is better to fire off whirlwind half way through 100B animation.
Gets owned out right my sword/dagger thief.
Walks into every ele aura because you’re entirely melee.
PU mesmer just frustrates you until to gotta go to bed now.
Averages 4.2-7.1K 100B delivery (If you can get it all off.)
Sword is under whelming as a power weapon.
Savage leap often lands you miles away from your target.
Rush is not to be trusted under any circumstances.
Burst skill is unimpressive and on the 5% chance I landed rush, it hits for more than my burst skill.
Compared to hammer, fights take longer, you have little control, AI minion spam is hard to counter as your most effective means to cleaving it self roots you. Against newer people you can walk all over them 1 vs 1 provided they are average in abilities. Against better players it has all it needs to succeed, but the savage leap/rush misses eventually undo it. Any sort of turret/heavy necro marks/ high evasion will capitalize on these moments and it becomes down hill from there. It does have a surprise factor though when ppl actually see you trying to purposefully use 100B. It is such a rare skill to see that actually stuns them behind their keyboard for a moment.
Build 2
Axe/shield-sword/mace
0-20-20-0-30
Divinity runes
berserkers/valk gem
Pro’s
good mobility, reflections, quick stun for unsuspecting foe, knockdown, leap closer,cripple at medium range, leap finisher
Con’s;
All melee. Let’s hope engineers don’t have supply drop as their elite. Let’s hope thief’s don’t have an off hand pistol. Evis even when pushing the precision/crit dmg statics still fails to crit remarkably often resulting in an unimpressive 2-3K hit. High toughness will take the juice out of it because it’s your third hit that delivers most of the damage. Making hits 1 and 2 under perform so hit 3 strikes for a very average number does not follow the directive, “if you want damage take axe or….”
If you want (unimpressive) auto attack damage take greatsword or axe. After swapping traits/tree’s numerous times and taking slashing power and raw power or precision and assigning power runes over precision on dummies and in general play the changes in damage are hard to detect with the human eye. The numbers usually look the same and it doesn’t feel as if any major shift has occurred. If you want faster recharges go precision on GS, if you want increased power go slashing power, either way you’ll basically get the same numbers over and over again. So the notion that setting up your attacks to deliver more power is better than rinse-repeating attacks for less damage you’d be wrong. There is little discernible difference in taking power over precision and vise versa.
Basically if you want to be frustrated by multiple professions that run rampant when they don’t have to face AoE, if you enjoy investing heavily into damage and only actually see that damage appear sub 50% of the time, if you enjoy the celestial bodies deciding where you land on leaps and rushes then by all means play pure melee and use greatsword and axe. It is obvious why hammer/longbow has prevailed as the weapons of choice.
The actual truthful statement about wanting pvp damage is ‘take longbow-x’ There is very little room for pure melee play. Many animations are lost in the particle (Remember when they said they were going to tone it down cough-cough.) There is too many hard counters to those who need to stay in direct melee range with knock backs/blinds and AoE etc.
Maybe this will help highlight nerfing hammer was needed, but why did hammer suddenly become so popular and start face rolling?..because all the other weapons are unreliable on one, if not two or more other levels where hammer and longbow are fairly consistent in their behaviour and move sets.