Heide Knight Sword not that good?

[Gyrdalf]

I've heard that the Heide Knight Sword is a really amazing faith weapon, and as I'm going for a STR/FTH build i thought I would check it out. I upgraded it to +7 and lightning and does 107+121 damage, while my Lightning Mace +7 does 142+142 damage plus 10 additional poise. What's all the hype about the Heide Knight sword about if it doesnt even level up to a mace. I have 30 STR and 22 FTH so is that the reason?

[KoalafiedKiller]

More faith will definitely help.

The mace is an incredible weapon but it has short range. As far as one handing/sword and board/knight builds not a lot of things out class the mace.

For my str/fth build I run a Sun sword as my main (uninfused) and a mace as my back up. I'm SL215, already finished the main game and working on the DLCs and the mace is still serving me well.

[Pyramid Bread]

Uninfused heide sword gets better scaling overall. A lightning mace will get hardly any scaling.

At +10 the sword is quite good for pve, I think with decent stats it gets around 350 AR. And it's really killer in pvp because of the heavy r1's that track on the thrust...

As for the mace, it's pretty amazing once its up to +10. The strike damage will beat up most enemies quite easily. Thrust and slash damage isn't quite as damaging as strike is, in most cases

[Gyrdalf]

Okay, my mace has B to both STR and FTH scaling and the sword has C to both of them, so shouldn't that mean my mace will scale better than the sword and outclass it further?

[Pyramid Bread]

The letters on infused weapons like the mace are unreliable. Expect to not get much scaling on it even if you pump faith

[Dr. Faustus]

Don't ever listen to what random people say; research it yourself. It's easier to google something than it is to post a thread, and yet.....here we are.

[Maggie]

22 FTH

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

[Gyrdalf]

I tried googling it and all i could find was "Heide Sword best weapon in the game!!!", even though the stats on my weapons didn't match.

[Pyramid Bread]

To put it in perspective. I have a char with 50 fth. The Pursuer's UGS, infused with lightning has B scaling. Gets 43 extra lightning dmg. My heide sword not infused, C scaling, gets 62 extra AR.

Stat letters are not reliabale after infusion.

On that char, I also have 40/40 dex/str, so heide sword gets 412 AR without extra damage rings. That means, I can get it up to 500+ AR with rings. If I do infuse the heide sword, the AR goes to 436, with a bigger ratio of lightning dmg

[Gyrdalf]

Wow, my mace has +33/+25 scaling while the sword has +34/+59. What's the point of letters if they're not even an accurate representation?

[Pyramid Bread]

It is what it is, and it's not like you're just going on the letters alone anyway since the numbers are on screen as well.

Just remember as a rule of thumb, weapons without innate elemental damage have letters that do no represent the scaling. It's more like half of what it says.

Weapons with innate elemental damage will have a scaling letter for the lightning/magic/dark/fire that is pretty much correct, but the str/dex scaling will be about half of what it says

[KoalafiedKiller]

Another thing to keep in mind is the Heide knight sword works really well with sunlight blade since it add 50 lightning damage then adds another 30% of total lightning damage, and since a lightning infused HKS has a lot of lightning that's a pretty big buff.

And concerning the scaling factors, at the end of the day the best way to test damage is just to equip a weapon, hit an enemy, equip a different weapon, hit the same enemy, compare damage. FROM added so much hidden math in the character sheets that's it's hard to rely on.

At 40 str, 25 dex, and 50 fth my HKS only does somewhat less damage than my +10 greatswords.

[mwcrane13]

The heide sword is really good. Right now I'm at 30 strength, 20 dex, 50 faith, and have both mace and heide sword at +10 lightning infused. The sword has 417 total ar and the mace has 416. If I had 40 or 50 strength, the mace would win out. But the move set of the sword is way better I think. The r2's are particularly brutal in pvp.

The sword does more lightning, but less physical than the mace at my stats. This means sunlight blade spell works even better on heide sword!

[GordoBoy]

Curved Nil greatword gets an S in every infusioooon....

[Dis-member]

heide knight greatlance is better, the heide spear is probably the best though

[.]

Advice from a rank 3 Heide Knight Sword main (I presume you plan to PvP at some point).

If you intend on making a build around it and have the spare materials, I definitely recommend carrying 2 versions of it around; 1 infused with Lightning and one uninfused. Use the infused version for buffs to minmax the lightning bonus you get from SLB, and the regular version for if you find someone using GMB (which will cripple the infused version).

The regular R1s on the 1-handed moveset are significantly faster than those of a regular straight-sword, and you can beat people to trades with them quite a lot. Make good use of those 1-handed R2s as well, because they absolutely destroy rolls and have some pretty absurd tracking. You'll also love those 1-handed running attacks, because they have the weird delayed-but-not-delayed moveset of the Axe class, which will catch people who panic when you sprint at them, every time.

If you have the VGR for it (and I usually make VGR-stacking builds of around 2.4k HP) then feel free to force trades with people, especially if you've got it buffed. When you 2-hand an SLB-buffed Heide Knight Sword, you can pull off some shocking damage if your build has been made correctly.

Recommended build is a Faith-heavy RoB Flynn, and maybe even Lightning Clutch if you have the extra space and REALLY want to squeeze every last bit of damage out from it.