Using skills while moving would help greatly in PVP. Thatās part of why Cataphract and Doppel are the only real PVP-viable Swordsman classes, you can use Rush and Cyclone (with attribute) while moving so enemies canāt just move away from you constantly and kite in circles around a frost cloud or whatever.
However most Swordsman classes suffer from a simpler problem, which is they just donāt do enough damage for the drawbacks of their skills. Most Swordsman skills are on long cooldowns, they have tight melee range hitboxes, and they take too long to execute (which is partially related to being unable to use them while moving, but just being locked into an animation for a long time even if you can move is detrimental). On top of all that, most Swordsman skills have a pitiful multihit and no/low damage modifiers, so they scale abysmally. When you get to rank 7 you basically do no damage with your lower rank Swordsman skills because of this, while other classes continue to benefit from many of their lower rank skills because even if they do less damage they still scale enough to be worthwhile.
Also, weapon requirements combined with the lack of scaling on so many low rank classes means that very few Swordsman builds make sense. You end up being locked into a specific advancement track unless you want to just forget your early rank classes entirely - and despite all this, Swordsmen are often faced with awkward advancements where they either require a filler rank that wonāt add much of anything to their build, or they have to go backwards and take a lower rank class, because nothing else makes sense due to weapon/mount requirements.
On my Archer I prefer two-handed bows. Neither rank 7 class uses two-handed bows, which is a shame - but Iām not suddenly completely ā ā ā ā ā ā with my build, because I can just go Cannoneer and use a crossbow, even if itās not my ideal choice. Meanwhile on my Corsair, Iām just ā ā ā ā ā ā at rank 8 - Corsair has to dual wield and has to be on foot for most of their skills, and the rank 8 class choices are a mounted class and a shield class. Maybe they release a hidden class that requires sword+dagger for its skills - Iām still ā ā ā ā ā ā , because I have two ranks of Hoplite so now Iām giving up Finestra and Spear Lunge if I want to advance to that class. This is a uniquely Swordsman problem.
