Talk:Galatine/@comment-19627751-20131005080532

There's a lot of discussion about this weapon being 'the best' and for its availability it probably is - it's comparable to an Orthos Prime, but really easy to build. When I first got it it felt like it was hugely OP, but when you start critically comparing it to the Orthos Prime you start to realise where its weaknesses lie.

The main thing these two weapons compete on is charge time. The charge time of Galatine is a full twice that of the Orthos Prime, so simple maths will show you that the Orthos Prime has the same charge DPS as the Galatine. Of course the Galatine does gain on its innate charge crit chance, but the people talking about how amazing the charge builds are have to remember you use two slots to get those. The main problem here, is that whilst you are charing your Galatine for your oneshot, the Orthos already staggered the target(s) and is about to do its second load of damage. So the tradeoff here is slightly better damage for much more survivability - if you use Galatine at high levels (or at low levels with your low level frames, etc) you'll see just how much damage you take because of that charge time in reality. Dont forget also that the Galatine's damage is SO high, that a lot of the time its swings are massive overkill when clearing large groups of small enemies - something that melee is often used for - so you actually do less effective DPS than an OP or even a regular Orthos.

Then throw in all of these other factors: Galatine has a shorter range (actually really short range for such a big sword which is a bit weird), has terrible normal attacks both in terms of swings and damage (downward swings on heavies like the Galatine and Fragor are terrible - and the 'large AOE' the wiki mentions is indeed large but does almost no damage), has a really short slide attack, has a horrible long finisher animation you can get stuck in to name but a few.

All in all, I was really upset when they released the Galatine and felt like it was power creep. After really thinking about it and using it more, I think it's a completely fair weapon that trades in a lot of utility and gains some serious disadvantages in exchange for amazing damage.

Galatine is great for Ash and Loki at very high levels, who can mitigate its major downside of getting beaten to death whilst charging it. Galatine is also amazing fun. But don't worry about it overtaking OP.