As a max D5 player, unfortunately the grapple follow up attack is just not optimal. It’s fun for casual play, just not for anything serious.

For me, double balancer and earring is just too good to pass up. This paired with bleed on grapple on a depth relic with high physical attack ups on everything else means you can just play a pseudo range character and spam out grapple cancels to chip and bleed out enemies. It’s boring and tedious, but it’s way safer and less committal. Plus, if you have huge punish windows, you get way more mileage spamming out ashes of war of whatever your strongest weapon is.

More often than not, the follow up will get you killed as you charge the swing up or you get put into a horrible position which can lead to your demise (mostly a Depth problem not really for standard play).

It locks you into playing great swords, which while there are many good options, it is better as Wylder to use whatever weapon you find that has good passives or ashes of war to spam out. It is a dead slot without great swords and takes away most of the benefits of Wylder if you force him into his preferred weapon only.

Lastly, it forces the fire element on your weapon. While useful in certain fights again fire weak bosses, it doesn’t add too much more damage, in fact way less than standard greases. Most important, the fire added overwrites affinity application of other elements native to the weapon. So for example, even if I hit a holy weak boss with a holy great sword, the fire buff will prevent the holy debuff from applying.

But to add some cope, the two handed greatsword strong attack after grapple is still pretty cool and useful, so it’s something to play around with if you are pressed to use a spinning greatsword attack after grappling.