Shattered Kingdoms

Thoughts on how to bring a swashbuckler up to par with other warriors.

Take riposte and add a component that bolsters the part of enhanced parry that allows for parrying of non weapon attacks.

One of the biggest drawbacks is the inability to parry anything but weapons to any degree, while a mercenary gets a shield that allows the warrior to make up for this.

So the main thought is build something into riposte that give the swashbuckler the ability to parry non weapons on a level closer to the merc with a shield.

Just roll a merc instead.

Eh, I would just rather have swashbucklers have a passive skill for a chance based on dexterity to take glancing blows in battle so their damage intake would be on par with wearing heavy armor and a shield.

Swashies need something that improves only their PvE potential, not their PvP.

Something directly tied to mitigating "unarmed" damage or drastically improving their chances to parry unarmed attacks would basically do this. 95% of the NPCs in the game are unarmed wildfighters. PCs are generally not going to try to punch a swashie to death.

They'd get better at PVE and not change in PVP.

Swashies don't really need another "general buff".

Their problems are strictly PVE related.

Taunt sucks and will never be an acceptable substitute for rescue.

Every NPC in the game is a wildfighter that gets 4-6 unarmed attacks a round. Eparry lets you parry these, but the effectiveness of this, for PvE, does not compare to a merc/barb having shieldblock, increased protection from wearing a shield, AND increased protection from heavy armor.

I think it was Pillars of Eternity where I saw that incoming hits are miss / graze / hit /critical hit and there were items or skills that convert grazes to misses and hits to grazes. Maybe something similar could be implemented for swashies. Dexterity based.

With all these suggestions to swash to make them viable, it’s got me wondering... is this the most important change in our eyes right now?
I don’t want to get the changes we ask for and then us be bitter, saying “yeah, sure they buffed swash. But they should have fixed necros instead” or something like that.

That's because I have no idea how to fix Necros.

The other part I wanted to see added to riposte which I am sure would be more difficult, is that when attacked by massive and only massive weapons, the swashbuckler gets a dodge bonus.

These are both ways to enhance skills the swash already has and is pretty much the entire class.

Again, necros I don't even know where to begin.

I wasn’t saying that the post itself was bad.
I was just curious if making swashies more viable is the biggest change we want to see in esskay right now.

Changing riposte to succeed while parrying unarmed Strikes seems like an easy change though. And it could have great potential.
I didn’t realize that you couldn’t riposte unarmed attacks.

Swashies could use a buff to their PVE survivability sure, but there are other classes completely useless in PVE
and even more there are classes completely neglected and even broken that need more immediate attention, like scouts and bards(or necros, don't know about them).