Shattered Kingdoms

That is not a massive weapon issue. In fact, the penalty to block and parry massive weapons was reduced in a recent update. Swashbucklers don't need anything that continues the Arms Race© that started with specialization and fury. If anything, the accuracy bonus of specialization, bless and frenzy should be tweaked.

Only thing swashbucklers need is for taunt not to be negated by a single piece of jewelry enchanted with +intelligence.

I agree, but how do you solve the fact that they can't take a hit?

They can indeed, but it gets harder to do so when you buff the guy using them against you. Switch taunt to hit concentration instead of INT so that +INT items don't enter into the equation at all and so that you can attain more granularity between swashbucklers of different CHA than you can going by INT and, in addition, switch it to give an accuracy penalty and swashbucklers really don't need any other tweaking. If you want to make taunt more tactically interesting, you can do more and touch on some of the other ideas I brought up, but these two changes would get the most bang for the buck.

What makes you think a mercenary or barbarian can take a hit? They cannot - I killed a giant barbarian in three rounds and a human mercenary in two rounds on my last character. This is not a swashbuckler exclusive issue, which is why it does not make sense to continue the Arms Race© with yet another buff to melee - no matter the class.

Just increase the chance of landing a successful riposte and do like fin said with taunt decreasing max intel.

I believe you have never played a swashbuckler. Riposte triggers plenty.

From what I see, the problem is the egregious skew of buffs (spec, fury, [religious spell(s)], [cabal skill(s)]) and that (from what it seems from casual observation) defensive skills simply become obsolete/unimportant and take a secondary role to accumulating these buffs. Having mastered parry/eparry/etc is important - but all other things equal, I'd wager a mastered eparry swash with no buffs will always lose to a fair eparry swash with stacked buffs. I see this as a major problem when the swashbuckler class, in its entirety, revolves around defensive skills and play. There's no buff that improves parry/eparry/riposte higher than mastered.

They don't have the armor to play the damage reduction game a barbarian/mercenary can and the buffs scale offense way higher than they scale defense. Swashbucklers by design will never have a similar offensive output. Dexterity - one of their main equalizers - has been too easy to match since haste became a readily used buff. A merc/barb may be able to die very fast if not playing mood defensive, but a swashbuckler will die faster - even if their HP bases are much closer to each other than one might think.

Buffing taunt in the ways suggested will make swashbucklers more competitive in a game they will always lose. It's a game of offensive outputs and a swashbuckler never has and never should match the offensive output of a barbarian/mercenary. Whoever said that the swashbucklers don't have a role to fill in the current scheme isn't terribly off point. Start giving them different roles - by giving them more to do than taunt-and-pray.

TL;DR: Buffing taunt in this way won't do much to equalize swashes in what I think is the right way. Take a mix of pat and finney's suggestions: have taunt affect peak intelligence and give them something else to do in combat besides taunt. A stack of useless passive skills only takes one so far.

If I rolled a swashbuckler I'd probably spend a decent amount of time leading in group PvP from the third rank with a crossbow. Just sayin.

But yeah, taunt should lower peak intelligence.

So all this said taunt is still a totally killer skill, probably hands down the easiest and most reliable way to gank someone who's smart enough to stand behind a pet at all times but not diehard enough to be deaf all the time, and if swashes get buffed too much they're going to become absolutely nutso.

Truth. But I think there should be a middle ground between Edoras' interpretation (which isn't a bad one) and 'absolutely nutso.'