Do you think that conventional mainhand dagger should gain 3 targets on auto attack?

Conventional dagger being Spellbreaker, Soulbeast, Necromancer and Thief.

To make them hit 3 targets would also require a rebalancing for on ranger axes as they were reduced to 2 targets as well.Now if they made the axe bounce 3 times again, I know that would make my wife happy.

The entire point of the matter is bigger weapons cleave more, which already seems logical to me. Same way a rifle or a bow AA hit only one target. Remember those 2 targets can also change for every hit of AA, essentially allowing you to hit 6 different people with 1 chain (8 for ranger). The only thing upping this would lead to is powercreep all over the board for fights with more than 2 players, and with absolutely no offset.

No, its a choice you make when using daggers

@rng.1024 said:The entire point of the matter is bigger weapons cleave more, which already seems logical to me. Same way a rifle or a bow AA hit only one target. Remember those 2 targets can also change for every hit of AA, essentially allowing you to hit 6 different people with 1 chain (8 for ranger). The only thing upping this would lead to is powercreep all over the board for fights with more than 2 players, and with absolutely no offset.

Conventional greatsword autos hit 3 targets, swords hit 3, axes hit 3, melee staff hits 3, hammer hits 3. There are a few exceptions to this rule yes, but if your logic was true, all greatsword and hammer attacks would hit 5. Yet they don't. So I'd say it isn't logical at all.

@Lahmia.2193 said:

@rng.1024 said:The entire point of the matter is bigger weapons cleave more, which already seems logical to me. Same way a rifle or a bow AA hit only one target. Remember those 2 targets can also change for every hit of AA, essentially allowing you to hit 6 different people with 1 chain (8 for ranger). The only thing upping this would lead to is powercreep all over the board for fights with more than 2 players, and with absolutely no offset.

You forget the casting times. Every weapon that cleaves 3 have around 33% longer cast time. Daggers always were the fast weapons, and this 33% make up for that extra hit.

You also have to remember the weapon skills are tailored to make up for the AA limitations, they are meant to do medium damage while you wait out cooldowns. 3 targets has always been the cap, and works fine for weapons - like I said if they upped it to 5 your party would take 40% more damage in a 5v5 witgout getting any extra defense. When it comes to utility skills they have the 5 target cap because they can't be spammed and have longer cooldowns, again I see nothing wrong with that.

Anet has stated several times that the target cap is there to reduce server lag, and daggers have always been a finesse weapon meant for few players at a time - if you want to swing it like a hammer then naturally 2 isn't going to be enough.

No balance it some other way, if they underperform that is. A good way to achieve balance would be to make the same damage at the same rate. But nobody wants that.

I think it would make daggers more useful across the board if so. Youd think that having reduced cleave would give it a clear single target dps advantage when that is not the case for a majority of professions. Its also the only melee weapon that cleaves 2 targets which makes it the odd one out. Maybe if more weapons fit into this category it would make more sense, like mace or hammer for instance because theyre blunt or claw type weapons (as a new type). Weapons sets dont have to cleave the same for every profession either, so a warrior dagger might cleave 3 targets while a thief dagger could cleave 2 (but buff thief dagger to be BiS single target dps)

Standardising melee weapons though will make it easier to balance too. Daggers really dont get much of a benefit from having reduced cleave so a change to AA cleave will be a welcome buff or make melee weapons more diverse and unique feeling (that not going to happen). I was thinking all the while that the reduced cleave of dagger is not really necessary at all.

Right ... let's just dilute everything so it's the same ... so we have choice :astonished:

No thanks. Weapons need distinguishing features and stats, if if that makes some underperforming in some way.

No. Daggers should stay as 2 target cleave, but should receive a damage bonus (5%-10%) when hitting just one target. Make Daggers specialize in single target assassination.

oh gawd..... i always tot all melee weapon AAs cleaved everything in range.... why wouldn't they...??

(have never really looked at the AA tooltips, except to see condis / special effects)

@casualkenny.9817 said:oh gawd..... i always tot all melee weapon AAs cleaved everything in range.... why wouldn't they...??

(have never really looked at the AA tooltips, except to see condis / special effects)

Oh kenny.. xD Yeah it's often easy to overlook and slash, have done it myself way too often.

Switch to sword if you want more targets per hit

@OneYenShort.3189 said:To make them hit 3 targets would also require a rebalancing for on ranger axes as they were reduced to 2 targets as well.Now if they made the axe bounce 3 times again, I know that would make my wife happy.

And me. I still cry because of this change. :( Axe with 3 bounces was perfect for tagging mobs in PvE events. Piercing arrows feel less comfortable to use because of the positioning.

@Julius Seizure.4985 said:No. Daggers should stay as 2 target cleave, but should receive a damage bonus (5%-10%) when hitting just one target. Make Daggers specialize in single target assassination.

But that makes no sense for Caster builds where they don't always follow melee conventions. Like the problems seen in a lot of other skills, Cleave as a function is in a constant battle for relevance across multiple game modes that reward vastly different things. This is further compounded by the large upfront investment for build archetypes, and the limited options for delivery mechanisms that are directly tied to our choice of weapon. For instance.... single target skills are basically useless in Open world that controls difficulty through mob density. In contrast you have sPvP and 1v1 type situations, which directly rewards strong single target damage and mostly ignores the existence of cleave (even if the skill does cleave 5). To address the Open world issue, a weapon would need to do a substantial amount of single target spike damage that can be chained repeatedly as the player moves from target to target. This same set of Traits in sPvP would be utterly game breaking, because theres very little room for counterplay when the enemy has no down time and a short TTK. To address that, you'd have to precisely tune the spike to a specific threshold lower then most pvp builds (which means has to be less then 15k), and can't cycle if it fails a kill..... which doesn't work in Open world against Vets that have around 50k HP.

Cleave addresses both of these problems in at least half of the common situations that raise it, as Mobs will typically clump together regardless of danger, while players in PvP and WvW will tend to scatter at the first sign of substantial damage. You can cap the per target damage this way for reasonably easy for PvP balance, while also enabling to not be a terrible choice in Open world that uses waves of enemies as a vector for scaling.

So either Dagger needs to get much higher overall attack rate and general DPS (way higher then 5-10%), or they can simply increase the cleave to 3, so its competitive with other weapons for mob tagging. Alternatively they could make every dagger skill set have a 5 target multi-hit on 4-6 second cool down... but the balance implications in PvP are pretty obvious.

As you can see...... AOE is too important to the design of Open world play. The only way to fix that is to make every class emphasize stronger single target damage as their primary damage source, refocus AOE into area control, and re-balance everything around that new setup. That means changing tagging rules to account for the 80% target reduction, change mob durability and/or damage output so pulling more then 2 isn't auto suicide, completely rebalance skills for faster cycling, further balance AOE skills to make sure they aren't outpacing other skills in overall damage delivery per cycle, conditions are probably going to need another ground up DPS balance pass, as are control skills given the performance gap between single target and multi target application.

@OneYenShort.3189 said:To make them hit 3 targets would also require a rebalancing for on ranger axes as they were reduced to 2 targets as well.Now if they made the axe bounce 3 times again, I know that would make my wife happy.

Same here. Might stacking for days!

But keep daggers 2-hit. They're not a cleaving type weapon anyway.

@starlinvf.1358 said:

@Julius Seizure.4985 said:No. Daggers should stay as 2 target cleave, but should receive a damage bonus (5%-10%) when hitting just one target. Make Daggers specialize in single target assassination.As you can see...... AOE is too important to the design of Open world play.

There isn’t a single class that uses dagger that can’t immediately switch to a weapon that has better cleave/AoE potential.

And you bring up caster builds that use dagger. Ele has plenty of 5 target and UNLIMITED target (Dragon’s Claw) cleave skills on dagger. Meanwhile, Necromancer is the king of open world tagging/cleave damage.

What problem are you trying to solve?