Shattered Kingdoms

why not add enhanced dodge, with the changes to taunt? That seems to boost defense, add a debuff to accuracy, and give swashies a counter to massive weapons. As long as its coded right, shouldnt make them broken. Plus its a dex perk so giant swashies wont get broken by it.

Edit. Granted swashies live on parry for riposte. But wouldn't that even the field a little

No, nothing needs to be added to melee period - no matter the class. The Arms Race© needs to stop now - tweak the accuracy bonus of frenzy, specialization and bless. Or make accuracy from buffs work like endowment enchants - only the largest bonus is used and the rest are ignored.

Just give taunt a small chance of forcing the person to leave a formation like headbutt can cause an instant kill.
This would make them more powerful against casters, which as I understand is the idea of swashbucklers and not really stronger against the other melee. It would give them something amazing in group combat that people would be a little worried about but really not have a huge impact in overall balance.

Add Dodge projectile. And parry projectile that has a chance of redirecting bolts back at the shooter!

Yup, this a million times. Make Alshain's religion spell best, frenzy a close second, bless well behind, so that people still get something out of better, rarer buffs.

I think that making battle whips and maybe something else that reaches finesse weapons would be the only thing swashes really need: trip is fantastic with all that fly debuffs, especially if accuracy bonuses were all enhancement and thus didn't stack. Swashes can taunt, dirt kick, and trip in combat, their main downfall is having to be front row to do any damage.

This, this, this, this, times 5 million.

I agree that enhanced dodge or whatever is the wrong route, but this is still incomplete. There is simply no justification for taunt giving victims an accuracy bonus. It doesn't make sense IC or in terms of game balance. It also doesn't introduce a new buff; it removes an inappropriate buff. I can see a damage bonus being appropriate, but not an accuracy bonus.

Yeah, If I was taunted, I'd imagine I would hit harder but not necessarily with accuracy. Not sure about all this focus on taunt though, as there are other routes that can be taken as well to properly bring swashbucklers up to par.

The focus is on taunt, since once it is changed to lower peak intelligence swashbucklers will be fine.

Yeah, given that you can now enchant for intelligence, you can pretty easily enchant a single piece of +10 INT jewelry (Start with +4 innate, enchant +6 onto it) and completely counteract taunt for casters. That's really quite silly.