Dear Funcom,
I have been maining a 2h sword for about… 3 years. My whole deal with Conan is I like to fight the giant bosses solo without cheesing the boss or getting help from pets/thralls. I’ve been getting into pvp little by little and am not too shabby at it. But big bosses and big swords are what I know and love best.
Now, animation canceling by un-wielding is pretty much required for you to be able to make the 2h sword viable. Not weapon-switching, but un-wielding and wielding again. There was roughly a 1 second delay that prevented you from being able to swing the weapon, but that was an acceptable and fair price to pay for being able to move again, because cancelation freed you from being stuck.
That 1 second delay meant you couldn’t spam-attack by this method, either, so that was good too. (sadly, it seems like some people found a way to get around this with offhand weapon-switching, so the rest of us have to bite the bullet.)
Now, you could learn and use many other tricks, learn to chain the right combos, master the use of the downward chop (mainly only good for pvp or ending non-boss mobs quickly) but at the end of the day, that weapon depended on canceling to grant it much needed mobility.
The reason for that is the long delay between when your attack ends, and when you actually move again. Somewhere between 1 second and 2 seconds. All the attacks are this way, except for the last hit of the heavy attack, which is fast for some reason when, really, THAT should be the slowest one.
And I notice this bizarre and backward timing issue on other weapons, too. The first heavy attack on a spear is faster and has a shorter recovery than the light attack, second heavy of the hammer is faster than the first light, etc. These aren’t the weapons I know best, so I’ll refrain from citing any examples… except for the hammer, as a comparison.
So here’s some quick benchmarks:
Time it takes to do 1 light or heavy attack and be able to move again: 2 seconds.
Time it takes to do the fastest possible combo (light-heavy-light-heavy) and move again: 4 seconds.
Now, let me put this in perspective:
The HAMMER’s light attack, that big hunk of metal, is about 1.75 seconds. It’s somehow faster than the 2h sword.
What I can tell you is that with the removal of animation canceling, it is very hard to be maneuverable in PvE, especially against bosses. Even with the best optimized build I can put together, the duration of the fights can sometimes extend well into the half-hour to 1 hour range because now there is less room to maneuver, less time between the boss’s attacks to land hits or arrange a counter-attack, etc, because I’m either stuck in place trying to conserve stamina while my character does nothing except pose after he has STOPPED MOVING… or, I roll, and lose a ton of stamina, and I have to wait.
I can now only rely on sprint attacks for hit and runs. Sprint attacks resolve in about 1.25 to 1.3 seconds, and unlike the other attacks, you can actually move soon after your weapon stops moving.
Using this, you can only safely get one hit on a boss. If you use a normal attack, then you’re back to needing to wait a long time to recover. You also need to use up a lot of stamina and build up a run about 3 seconds in advance. You can’t slip a quick light attack in every 1 or 2 seconds by being maneuverable. Hit and runs are not very viable anymore.
For PVP, there’s the totally separate but also very important issue of how much time there is between when the attack ends and when you can actually move. This is the period where you are strictly vulnerable to counter-attacks with no offense of your own to discourage enemies. Again, it’s weirdly slow for no real reason. Your only choice is to attack again and eat more stamina to try to keep people from coming at you, roll to get away fast (but eat up a lot of stamina) or wait it out and hope you got lucky.
In conclusion:
Funcom, if you are going to take away the only means to make a weapon viable, I would like you to actually balance the timings of the weapon as well. Specifically, adjust its earliest attacks so that their recovery period matches their effort: aka, light attacks and earlier attacks recover faster, heavy attacks and later attacks recover slower. Also, please just reduce the vulnerable period for the earlier attacks.
You can leave a slow recovery as the combo continues so that the only way out after you commit is a roll, but 1 or 2 attacks should be less committal. 1 attack should be totally non-committal… and it should not require building up a sprint attack just to have that single non-committal attack…
Doing so will encourage mobility and maneuvering quickly at the start of a fight and turn your focus and decision-making on when to begin the engagement, when to back off and re-adjust, and when to commit, and it will leave the dodge roll in the position it’s meant to be in: an emergency escape when all else has failed.
As a closing note, let me read the in-game description of the great sword:
“Great swords are faster than many other two-handed weapons, and their great reach makes them ideal for fending off groups of opponents.”
That reach thing is only sometimes true. The claim of being fast used to always be true, but now it’s just a joke.
Funcom, please fix. Thank you.