I’m working on becoming a spear guy and I’m close to dropping the heavy stab perk on the end of Sweep. To me it animation locks you and on paper the damage isn’t amazing. I feel like I will almost always do more damage with perforate which also staggers them as they are coming out of the knockdown. When with it being on cool down, I think a charged heavy attack doors more damage without the animation lock.
Bleeding Sweep equalizes this a little bit but even on a weapon, the base damage of Perforate outclasses the damage of Sweep even including the bleed. With the bleed it does do more damage than a charged heavy, but only on the back end through the bleed and if the bleed is cleansed then it doesn’t matter.
This obviously doesn’t include the utility that Perforate gives (rend stacks and Fortify stacks) or using Skewer on them when they’re knocked down instead (Enfeebled, big bleed, big empower, etc).
All this was said to ask this: When is the third perk of Sweep worth it and am I missing anything?
I’ve recently been using Bleeding sweep on my spear and I find it fun and quite strong in some situations. On a weapon, it does 17% weapon dmg for 8 secs if I recall well. This is equivalent to an attunement perk proccing continuously for 8 secs. One of the main advantage is that it helps charge heartrunes faster, aside from applying pressure on the opponent.
I actually run a sort of bleed build on the spear, with sweep bleed, keenly jagged and skewer bleed. My other weapon currently is GS which can also apply bleeds, but I mostly use it for burst following the spear bleeds.
So to to answer your question, to me, one useful point about the 3rd perk is that it enables bleed stacking and faster heart rune charging while pressuring ranged opponents. I find this useful against BB/IG and the sort who tend to try to kite. So if I get a combon on them, they will still receive dmg while I am trying to get close to them again (while charging my rune).