what is the best sword?

What is the best sword,how much does it cost,best place to get it,and info on it.[pic if possible]

There is no 'best sword'.

Best sword is max damage, your favorite graphic, lowest req possible/that you need, best upgrades (+30 health pommel and either a 10/10 sundering hilt or a 10% chance of double adrenaline hilt) and +15% damage when health is greater than 50%. They typically cost around 1,000,000 gold, and can be purchased in lion's arch district 1 from other players. See the picture below for an example:

Well if you want to get technical about it, yeah.

How could that sword be 1 million gold? The +30 health upgrade is only 100k, the 10/10 sundering is probably close to 100k as well, so that would mean the long sword with +15%>50 would have to cost 800k, maybe less if the upgrades costed more than I listed.

And +5 armor is more efficient than +30 health in terms of productivity.

If you add upgrades on an item does it change the color? Like a clean longsword and you add a fortitude +30 would it change to blue or purple or gold?

True. That sword could probably cost around 500K, anyhow.

A similar fellblade will go for around a million and a crystalline for..well...a huge amount(3M)

psst...you shouldnt reveal the efficiency of armor +5 upgrades. I have been collecting them for a while, before more people realise its better than health +30 and price skyrockets

I don't care what anyone says, those numbers are absolutely absurd, considering the small amount of difference it will make in the long run.

I don't think I'll ever understand the demand for sundering. It's so strange...

And yeah I'm saving +5 armor upgrades too. Don't spill the secret just yet.

Sundering is trash, Fortitude is trash. Defense is better than Fortitude but still trash.

Prefixes to use:
Zealous
Vampiric
Fiery/Icy/Shocking (with Conjure)
Ebon

Suffixes to use:
of Swordsmanship
of Enchanting (with non-maintained Enchantments)

I don't understand why defence is better than fortitude given the sheer number of attacks which ignore armour.

Moving to Questions & Answers.

What is the basis for that claim? You know, I have wondered about it myself, but I don't know that there is any empirical research on the point, and I believe the claim is far from intuitive. I don't think prices will ever get as high for +5 defense as they do for +30 fortitude even if, on average, the kinds of attacks and hexes and opponents you will be facing merit armor over health, anyway though, because the +30 fortitude is extremely rare. If an sword upgrade happens to have fortitude, there are 11 possible amounts (+20, +30, or anything in between). If it happens to be a pommel of defense, there are only 2 (+4 and +5). A perfect +30 fortitude pommel is thus much more rare than a perfect +5 defense pommel.

As for my longsword, it would sell for a fortune if it were not customized, and part of the value is the time it takes to get the parts and the base. It's impossible to say what it would cost, but "around" 1 million is what those kinds of swords (longswords, fells, and crystalines, the three most popular) go for ON AVERAGE. Longswords are the best looking, fellblades are the most popular, and crystalines are the rarest. All are great, and longswords may go for only 500,000 while crystalines may go for 3 million, as someone earlier guessed, but the rnage I remarked on was "around" 1 million, which I stand by.

Right. If you are going to claim one is better than another, give us some reasons. Give us the situations which you feel favor one over another (PvE? PvP? Straight physical attacks? Against warriors? Against mesmers?) Some statistical evidence would be nice, too . . .

Calculate the numbers and you will realize how much it helps for attacks that armor does absorb (last time I checked most attacks are absorbed by armor). And how often does one survive by 30 hp or less? If your healing cannot keep up with damage taking, that extra 30 hp won't keep you alive. Having armor that lowers the damage you take makes this healing to damage better. But in general, lower armor characters benefit greatly from the +5 defense mods (such as non-warriors or warriors who don't use a shield). A Elementalist using a Defensive Staff of Defense will take about 10% less damage (note that this means your healing is also 10% more effective because if you heal 100hp, you can take 110hp worth of damage compared to if you don't have the staff, all those people who don't bring defensive skills/stances don't know this and piss the monk off). A warrior using a shield and stances will probably find the +30hp slightly better because he can make that 30hp last for a few seconds. Play with the damage calculator on the site, but the +5 to defense is definitely very good and rivals the +30hp, but costs much less.

---

On another topic, the Sundering upgrade isn't as strong as it seems. It deals about 10-15% more damage (calculating from armors), 10% of the time. So in total you have about 1-1.5% more damage dealt. But some people are willing to invest a fortune in this 1% improvement simply because there is nothing else to spend money on in this game.

Some more of the illogical thinking of the common GW players: Weapons with upgrades in them become alot more expensive than the same weapon and the parts separately. Take a 15%>50 bow worth 150k, and a 5:1 Vampiric string worth 75k, put them together and you can sell for 350k, although the separate parts are worth much less. Package deals suppose to be worth less, since the consumer has less options. Also, a rare "gold" item isn't any different in looks from a "blue" one but it is automatically worth much more.

I wasn't claiming one is better than the other. I was saying that, although everyone says that +5 armour is obviously better, I can't see why.

So +5 armour gives you about 9.05% damage reduction (ie 2^(1/8) -1). This actually means that you are taking only 90.95% of normal damage which increases your expected survival time by about 9.95% (ie 1/0.9095) against attacks which take accout of armour, slightly less against armour penetrating attacks (I'm not going to go into details, it is negligable IMO), and does nothing against attacks which ignore armour.

This list of damage that ignores armour is quite long:
- Most if not all mesmer spells;
- Most if not all smiting spells;
- Most necro spells;
- Damaging conditions (burning, poison, bleeding, disease).
There are probably more, I'm not trying to give an exhaustive list, the point is that armour ignoring damage is hardly uncommon.

Whereas +30 health gives you a boost 6.25% boost on your basic health (ie 30/480). This increases your expected survival time by a straight 6.25% against all forms of damage.

So you can have a 6.25% boost in survivability or a (9.95% * x) boost in survivability, where x is the proportion of damage which is mitigated by armour.

Now, if x is below 62.81% (ie 6.25/9.95) then health is better, otherwise the armour is better.

So what is x? It's impossible to say, which is why it is impossible to give a definite answer and why I wouldn't even try to give one. Also, this is of course just a rough calculation, it's not really possible to perform a full analysis.

What I will say is that armour gives roughly between a 0 and 9.95% boost to survivability whereas health gives roughly a pretty flat 6.25% boost in survivability.

You pay your money and you take your choice but there isn't an obviously better one IMO. I would tend towards the health, but that is a personal preference.

Excellent Analysis, SJG. Right or wrong, it has details and statistics, which is what I wanted. I was agreeing with you earlier, not challenging you. I was, like you, taking issue with people who claim one is better than another without support.

My tendancy is to give fortitude upgrades to my rangers and warriors (who already have high armor) because I view it as the better and more flexible upgrade (extremely useful in PvE and especially useful in PvP where you are fighting mesmers, necros, lightning eles, smiting monks, poisoning rangers and bleeding warriors who aren't as concerned about your armor). And I use +5 armor defense for my casters (monks, mesmers, eles), who have less armor anyway, so the difference is more noticeable, and who tend to get targeted by warriors a lot. I think defensive staff heads are valuable, and fortitude grips and pommels are valuable.

As for the best hilt: if you use adrenaline attacks extensively, furious hilts are clear winners. If not, sundering is better than anything else (with the minor exception of the ele secondary who is using conjure for an elemental damage bonus*). Vampiric hilts feel a little buggy and laggy to me, and you have to have a second sword to switch to between fights. Zealous can be very useful with very specific builds, but it ends up just making energy behave like adrenaline.

* I agree that conjure combined with an elemental weapon modifier is extremely powerful. I have a R/E who has a beautiful shocking storm bow (+15%>50%) and uses conjure lightning with barrage. It honestly feels like cheating the massive amounts of damage she deals out to groups.

To get through the dribble, read the second post or below

Survival time is one way to look at it, but there are many other variables. For example, if you use a superior rune, then the percentage that survival time increases is much higher (because you have lower hp to begin with) for the +hp and still the same for the armor. A slightly better model would be survival time based on healing rate, and it's a non-linear relationship. If you are getting healed 10hp per second, and you take 12 damage per second, you will die in about 250 seconds. However, if you take 11 damage per second instead, you will live twice as long, even though you reduced damage by less than 9%. In actual game play, the difference in the items is minimal, if you ever went down to 30 hp or less, you probably survived because you were lucky. You didn't plan on surviving by 30hp, just something went wrong that caused you to take so much damage. When those necro/mesmer skills stack up on you, having the right build will save you, not that 30hp or the +5 armor.

Another good point and good perspective. Thanks, Noble Paladin. I do think, though, that lots of battles do get VERY close, and that surviving is a matter of living through a tough spike of damage. I like health (fortitude) for warriors and armor (defense) for casters because of who typically attacks each: warriors don't go toe to toe with other warriors until the casters are dead. Casters, though, get surrounded by the warriors. 3 elementalists spiking me with chained lightning are ignoring my armor, but 30 extra health just might keep me alive long enough to get healed again. And then the tides have turned because of their exhaustion . . .