To Greatsword Mains - Raw or Elemental?

[Zap2Strike]

I have never played with a Greatsword before but I've always wanted to eventually try out all of the weapons in the game but this is one of the things I'm unsure about regarding the weapon.

I know that Elemental damage is what seems to be the meta right now so it absolutely rocks with some of the faster weapons, but is it better to focus on pure raw damage or do elemental Greatswords still have some merit? If yes, why? and if not, why not?

[Zelph]

With sunbreak, pretty much every good weapon option is elemental because element values are much higher then they generally were in the past. Raw is still the biggest deciding factor for greatsword though.

For instance, goss great sword, iirc, is the "meta" choice for greatsword. its elemental, but used because of raw/sharpness.

[DaBa]

Zero merit at all, unless you're aiming for a meme build go Pure Raw. Even with so many changes made to make elemental Great Sword better, it's still an irrelevant factor. You should never look at the element when you're choosing a Great Sword, any benefit you get from it is not noticeable.

[pho_kko]

Originally posted by DaBa:

Zero merit at all, unless you're aiming for a meme build go Pure Raw. Even with so many changes made to make elemental Great Sword better, it's still an irrelevant factor. You should never look at the element when you're choosing a Great Sword, any benefit you get from it is not noticeable.

I was curious about this as well, does this apply to surge slash?

[Zelph]

Originally posted by DaBa:

Zero merit at all, unless you're aiming for a meme build go Pure Raw. Even with so many changes made to make elemental Great Sword better, it's still an irrelevant factor. You should never look at the element when you're choosing a Great Sword, any benefit you get from it is not noticeable.

I want to go over why this isn't completely accurate in Rise.

Using the fine kamura cleaver, a non charged hit does 260. A charged hit does 683. That is with purple. 330 raw.

Using the wyvern gnasher, rarity 8, 290 raw 63 element with white sharpness: 242 uncharged 610 charged.

Dragondance parasol+ 269 uncharged 667 charged, white sharpness. 310 raw and 104 element. 285 charged with purple 704 with purple.

So while raw is king, as always, element shouldn't be flat out ignored. There are nuances that alter this as well, like frost craft, attack boost(which generally benefits higher raw weapons), and affinity(which also naturally doesn't benefit element unless using crit element.

But in the end, most end game weapons are close enough in viability that almost any choice will barely cost you any real damage.

[QuantizedAnson]

Originally posted by Zelph:

With sunbreak, pretty much every good weapon option is elemental because element values are much higher then they generally were in the past. Raw is still the biggest deciding factor for greatsword though.

For instance, goss great sword, iirc, is the "meta" choice for greatsword. its elemental, but used because of raw/sharpness.

To elaborate this further for post creator :

Goss Harag GS been one of the best GS ( and meta for Rajang hunts, even on speedruns ) since base game, and stayed that way,
until later Sunbreak title updates starts to introduce more weapon augmentations
where the bonus element starts to fall off in a highly-skilled solo play environment focused on Strongarm Spamming.
( reason why status weapons are becoming more and more meta, is because of weapon augmentations, however Status scaling becomes really bad as there are more players in the hunt as the game auto-scale the breakpoints, takes way longer time
and needs more RNG gambling to trigger status buildup, making Element by default the more consistent option )

High Raw, decent sharpness, has element for more damage, only thing held it back from being best GS was the small negative affinity.
Since people usually go for max crits on solo speedrunning sets it does make not as good ( more quest abandons on non-crits )

---

And about element,
since it's very easy to gem in Element Attack decos while it is harder to get LV2 deco offensive skills into sets in comparison ( until we get LV4 attack/wex/criteye jewel eventually I guess ) ,
even on GS I see myself spending some LV1 slots on Ice Attack.

Surge Slash for me feels like they completely missed the point of GS.
Not only you're stuck on a sluggish weapon to do repeat hits with, it defeats the advantage of the weapon ( tiny sharpness consumption )
If I want to do quick slashes I'd rather play Switch Axe ( which feels amazing in Rise compared to previous entries, even if we ignore the new counter move it's really good )
and Dual Blades ( which has natural stack-able Razor Sharp integrated into the weapon by default. )
( Sadly I like base MHGen's Adept LS and older title's LS over any version of LS later on, not interested in Counter playstyle except on Lance. )

For me personally, since I love the comfort and versatility of Rage Slash which doesn't rely on Wirebug cooldown,
( I hated World changing GS into a TCS tackle spam combo weapon anyway )
so I am free from having to gem in Offensive Guard and Guard Up LV1 into my sets.

Rage Slash is particularly really good for Goss, Diablos, Rajang and especially Tigrex.
I've seen people on speedruns even using a mixture of Strongarm TCS and Strongarm Rage on Anomaly Tigrex !

[Soran]

Originally posted by phokko:

Originally posted by DaBa:

Zero merit at all, unless you're aiming for a meme build go Pure Raw. Even with so many changes made to make elemental Great Sword better, it's still an irrelevant factor. You should never look at the element when you're choosing a Great Sword, any benefit you get from it is not noticeable.

I was curious about this as well, does this apply to surge slash?

People seem to under estimate how strong surge slash is with element/status effects, in short it can be "viable?" not great but there's worse builds you can make with it, raw is still better in most scenarios though especially since skills like charge master are sorta underwhelming.

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Zelph:

Originally posted by DaBa:

Zero merit at all, unless you're aiming for a meme build go Pure Raw. Even with so many changes made to make elemental Great Sword better, it's still an irrelevant factor. You should never look at the element when you're choosing a Great Sword, any benefit you get from it is not noticeable.

I want to go over why this isn't completely accurate in Rise.

Using the fine kamura cleaver, a non charged hit does 260. A charged hit does 683. That is with purple. 330 raw.

Using the wyvern gnasher, rarity 8, 290 raw 63 element with white sharpness: 242 uncharged 610 charged.

Dragondance parasol+ 269 uncharged 667 charged, white sharpness. 310 raw and 104 element. 285 charged with purple 704 with purple.

So while raw is king, as always, element shouldn't be flat out ignored. There are nuances that alter this as well, like frost craft, attack boost(which generally benefits higher raw weapons), and affinity(which also naturally doesn't benefit element unless using crit element.

But in the end, most end game weapons are close enough in viability that almost any choice will barely cost you any real damage.

That's exactly what I wrote. Elemental Great Swords are a domain of meme builds, or however you want to call them. In a normal build that focuses on Great Sword's strengths and when a Great Sword is played properly the amount of extra damage you're going to get from the element is negligible, unless you're doing a specific side by side test and looking for a differnece, like you did, you're not even going to notice a meaningful change in an actual hunt. It will be the same, you will see the same number, the hunt will take just as much time.

This is why I said it has no merit at all and you should not pay attention to it, because to a normal player that's not a speedrunner who wants to squeeze every last percent of damage out of their weapon it has no merit, it's just unnecessary noise. Choose a great sword based purely on it's raw capabilities, and you will make a good choice in the end. Posting paragraphs of theory that has no practical application only serves to confuse your average player.