Best Sword

Check out this link: (Its the guildwiki swords page)
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Sword

and also here for weapon modifiers:
http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Weapon_Upgrades

Any sword except quest rewards and green items can be upgraded
Any sword except quest/green or collector items can yield item mods (if they have) when expert salvaged

There is absolutely no difference between a longsword you pick up off the ground that has a fiery mod and a fiery dragon sword (all other stats being equal) other than appearance.

Poster # 4 says x dragon swords (there are x=fiery or icy variants) can do pure elemental damage (true) and can have 2 mods (false) every sword can have two mods, however in the case of dragon swords the prefix mod is already used by the fiery or icy. So to answer the last poster, no you cannot put a 10/10 sundering on an icy dragon sword, since it has an affixed icy mod, but any suffix can go in. A new suffix can 'replace' an old one as well. So in the case of the icy dragon sword with swordsmanship mod, you can just apply say a +30 health mod and it will replace the swordsmanship (although the swordsmanship mod will be destroyed). Also you CAN salvage out the elemental mod from fiery or icy dragon swords, but cannot 'upgrade' them.

I like to have multiple type weapons in my weapon switch slots so I can switch to optimize damage for an opponent. Like a general sundering mod for ignoring armor some, a zealous for energy gain, maybe a vampiric, or different elemental damage weapons. Generally the suffix modifier will have no impact on damage except in the case of the +1 to <swordsmanship> types. there are +armor +health etc often...

so, let me get this strait, ice damage fire damage and so on, do not differentiate the amount of damage you can deal out amongst max swords?
ie: a max firey dragon sword is going to do the same amount as an icey dragon sword?

true number wise, but an opponent such as a fire imp for example will take less damage from fire (better armor vs fire) and more damage from ice. If you only want to ever use one weapon type, most folks prefer a utility mod such as sundering or furious (for swords)

It depends on target foe armor. FDS deals fire damage, IDS deal cold damage, both are elemental damage. So if the target foe has + armor vs elemental, FDS and IDS deal less dmg than other sword with slashing damage ( physical damage). And if target foe has +armor vs fire, FDS will deals less damage than IDS, same with + armor vs cold.

OK cook, so in other words, the best set up is to have a max FDS a max IDS, and a max regular sword,like shadow blade max, all with +30 and 10/10 so that you are up for any situation? lol

thats the most efficient usually, best is play whatever you have the most fun with
semantic point only heh

best sword setup would be :

one zealous
one vampiric
one elemental (not realy needed, but nice against warriors)
one furious (to use between battles, as it does not have degen, can be used to build up adrenalin aswell)

i prefer +30HP over +5 armor, cause a warrior already has lots of armor, and the actual damage armor reduces decreases when your armor is higher (the damage difference between 60 and 65 is a lot bigger than between 100 and 105)

weapon mods are debatable, but i prefer 15>50. some say 15 while stance is better cause you pretty much always use a stance when spiking, but seriously, if you're using frenzy when <50 you could aswell just suicide :P

BE CAREFUL
This thread was started over a year ago. pretty much all the information on page one of this topic is outdated and incorrect.

The "best" sword does not exist.
However, you can get good swords.

A good sword is a sword that helps you do whatever you want to do in the best way possible.

Miniguide on how to get a good sword (or the best one of what you are doing)

Our max damage sword will be this:
Now, we want to do a lot of damage, therefore we need to customise it. Customising will make it do 20% more damage (don't know if it will actually do that but whatev..)

Our sword will look like this:

Our sword is nice but it's not really "perfect" yet. We want a perfect sword. Perfect usually means that it has an extra thingy that says "damage+15% while health is above 50%"
Some players don't like this and want +15% damage while in stance or enchanted or even better... unconditional.
Unconditional damage is hard to find but I'll talk about that later.

Let's say we want to have damage+15% while health is above 50%.
We can't put that on our sword, we need to buy one or find one.
We can buy one of those swords in Droknars forge. It is small and ugly but it has 15^50.

This cost 5000gold but for another 10gold, you can customise it for the 20% extra damage.
It will look like this:
Now, depending on what we are doing, we will need to add modifications to it. Swords have pommels and hilts. Lets say we will fight monsters that are weak to earth elemental damage.
We will need an ebon sword hilt. Buy or find one and add it to the sword by doubleclicking the hilt and then clicking on our sword.
It will now be this:

As you can see, it no longer does slashing damage but earth damage. Slashing is physical and earth is elemental damage. Our sword now helps us kill monsters and players who are weak to (earth) elemental damage.

We added a hilt, now we need a pommel.
The most popular ones are "of fortitude" and "of defense". We want to kill tengu though.
Tengu are those birdlike monsters.
We could add a sword pommel of tenguslaying!

We wanted to kill a tengu warrior who is weak against earth damage (is that even right?). The best sword for the job is our own customised ebon gladius of Tenguslaying.
Does that mean that en Ebon Gladius of Tenguslaying is the best sword in GW?
No, obviously not.

But for those who want "really good all purpose swords", i'll make a list:
"Sundering sword of fortitude" is worth a lot of money but sundering itself is, in my opinion, not worth the 30K you'll pay for it.
Vampiric, zealous and elemental hilts are good. Some like furious.
Pommels: of fortitude is good, of defense is good too. Some players like to use "sword pommel of swordsmanship+1 (20%chance). Those are usually players who use a boatload of swordskills though.


I hope this helps those who wanted to know this stuff and hopefully it will prevent players from using a Sundering spatha of pruning in Thunderhead Keep =P


(I got bored)

edit: I almost forgot about unconditional.
Some weapons have stats like these:
damage+15%
energy-5

This means you always have -5 energy but you will always have the 15% extra damage.
Others like this:

Dmg+15%
Health regeneration -1

Dmg+15%
Energy regeneration -1

Dmg+15%
Armor-10
(never seen one though)

There's other damage mod types too:
Dmg+20% (while hexed)

Dmg+20% (while health is below 50%)
etc...

THANK YYOU SO MUCH! that thread was by far the most helpful, couple more questions, can you get a sword that steals enemy hp, but not yours... and what does health regen -1 mean?

vamp mod, best available vamp hilt for a sword is 3/-1

Meaning you steal 3 hp every time you hit. The adverse effect while you have this sword equipped, is that your health will degen at -1 pip on your health bar.

Like Rotten and I alluded to earlier thoug if you have BOTH a vampiric AND another sword say a fiery dragon sword, the common way to optimize is to only switch to the vampiric weapon while you are swinging (to minimize the amount of time you have the health degen without the positive effect of life stealing). Whenver you arent currently swinging on opponents you swap weapons to the non-vampiric. But whenever you are wielding any vampiric weapon you will have a -1 health degen.

lol, i still dont know what +15% -1 health regeneration means, im not stupid, i just cant tell that you answered it with the last two replies, what if you have a sword with just -1 health regeneration, what does that mean?

Dragon Swords are NOT good, despite the fact that they can get elemetnal damage and 2 more modifications.
Why? Because most GOOD swords get 15^50 +2 modifications.
All a dragon sword is doing is sacrificing the 15% extra damage for fire damage BS.

EDIT: From what people are talking about, you might want a Victo's Blade.
It gives +30 HP, +15% Damage, and Max Life Stealing.
They go for cheap these days too.

To anwer you Malvagit,

So you can get a sword with (non upgrade) modifiers on them.
examples are : +11-15% damage while in stance or while enchanted
the downside to these is they are conditional.
the upside is no negative effects, just not always +damage

example is http://loptastru.org/images/FDS01.jpg

there are ALSO (non upgrade) modifiers which are less frequently found in my experience
+11-15% damage with
-10 armor while attacking OR -5 energy

example is http://loptastru.org/images/handaxe01.jpg

The downside: the -armor or energy
the plus: always/non conditional +damage

LOLOLOL i feel like im talking to a brick wall, can anyone tell me what health regeneration -1 please?!?!?!?!?!?

well the guy singing the praise of a FDS did so more than a year ago so I find that OK lol. what's kind of lame is this thread being resurrected... can't we have a statue of limitations or insta-ban someone ressurecting a topic more than a year old

but also same... huh so swiftness pommels did exist?
missed that... yummmmmmmy... or it woulda been :b

-1 health degen means that for as long as you wield that weapon, your hps will go down by 1 every second. If you wield a vampiric weapon and walk outside of a town and stand there, you will eventually die unless you have some sort of healing.

this is a basic mechanic of the game
have you ever been hexed or poisoned or diseased yet?

have you noticed those little '<' and '>' showing up on your health and energy bars, different levels at different times? when you're healing up more '>>>'s?

these are 'pips', +/- regeneration levels. we'll stick to health per your question.
every second for health you get +/-2 health per 'pip'.

normally you have no health pip. if you're at 'health generation -1' you're slowly losing health, 2pts a sec.

get it? got it? good

thank you, that answered it perfectly, so why the heck would someone want a sword with health regen -1 and NO life stealing? cause ive seen those, and that would be stupid

for the +11-15% damage always that they'll also posess

The best sword is a Low req max dmg sword which has been customized for yourself and modded with 20/20 15% dmg health +50% and fortitude 30hp

Thread necros are bad.

Sundering swords are worse.

if you gonna pve i recomedn you to get sskai sword,forgotten sword or what people say "perfect" would be max 15-22 meet your attributes requirement like req9
15^50 +30hp

No there really is a best sword. The unconditional prenerf 15% swords they do different damage then the rest, but I think very FEW have ever existed let alone exist uncustomized. I really wish I could see one.

Anyways charr undead emerald gothic runic are all great sword skins . Try them ull liek em.

Ok guys, listen up. We cannot continue to tell people to use search and then when they do holler, "old thread". If you think his answer sucked, then give a better one. So, either contribute to the thread or stfu.

If you want something thats fairly rare and looks unique go with the Cerulean Edge.

As for looking the best everyone has a different opinion. Top for me would be..

Undead
Crystaline
Fellblade
Icy Dragon Sword
Charr Sword
Oni
LongSword
.
.
.
I could keep going but you get the idea, many of the swords look great depending on what armor/shield you pair them with.

It's one thing when someone resses an old thread to ask a question or find information; it's another when someone necros a thread to answer an old question. In addition, this topic isn't unique (pretty sure there's been a Q&A thread about swords in the past week) and it attracts all sorts of garbage or opinion answers.

I don't feel sundering swords are as bad as most people make them out to be.