[This is an informational post I made on reddit. I’m reposting it here because it’s useful information.]
For some reason, probably to do with the anniversary event, I've found myself explaining the use case for elemental weapons, and the suckiness of sundering weapons, multiple times in the past week. So I decided to port my martial damage spreadsheet to javascript, with a nice pretty interactive graph that visually illustrates the comparative strength of the weapon prefix options. Please feel free to link to this the next time someone asks about weapon prefixes: https://chthonvii.github.io/guildwarsmartialdamagecalc/
The TLDR for those too lazy to look at a graph:
- When a festival is going on, a decade weapon is the best all-around weapon.
- When a festival is not going on, a vampiric weapon is the best all-around weapon.
- When a monster has an elemental weakness, using the appropriate elemental weapon yields a very large damage boost, often even outperforming decade weapons. There is a very easy DPS boost to be had by simply bringing any elemental weapon on switch and using it when attacking Warrior class foes. Serious players can reap even larger DPS dividends by consulting the wiki to identify the most common elemental weakness(es) in a given zone and putting the appropriate elemental weapon(s) on switch.
- Sundering is utter trash. There exists no achievable set of parameters for which sundering outperforms vampiric.