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Last time I covered the Sage, but this time I’m going to take a look at Swordmaster, one of the advanced skill classes in The Use of Life.
Hopefully this will help anyone who’s unsure about which skills to pick or how to build their character.
So with that said, let’s get started.
- Strong synergy with evasion, making this a class better suited for players who are somewhat experienced.
- Since critical hits and passives that trigger on successful evasion can drastically change the flow of battle, a lot of the fun comes from riding out those RNG swings. (Which is also a polite way of saying things don’t always go the way you want.)
- On the bright side, you never need MP recovery items at all, so resource management is very easy.
Swordmaster Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
- You can actively recover 1 CP with the skill “Crescent Slash,” and on top of that there’s about a 20–30% chance to gain 1 CP whenever you successfully evade. As long as your dodges are on point, you can keep firing off even the most CP-hungry sword techniques without holding back.
- Building around evasion naturally leads you to invest in SPD, which also makes dodges much more consistent.
- Meanwhile, the Samurai—its prerequisite class—has many TEC-scaling skills and abilities that significantly boost critical damage. Investing in TEC to make the most of those attacks also makes it easier to predict enemy actions… which, once again, helps your dodging consistency.
- When those dodges start landing one after another, it really gives you that “I’m getting better at this” feeling and boosts your confidence.
- And since the class doesn’t use MP in combat at all, deciding what to buy in shops becomes much simpler.
Weaknesses
- If you fail to evade, CP doesn’t build up properly, which can leave you in the sad situation of knowing powerful techniques but not having the resources to actually use them.
- If you’re running a build that stacks high-damage skills with critical hits, things can feel pretty rough when a big move fails to crit.
- On top of that, equipping heavy weapons or armor shortens the timing window for successful evasion, making it harder to play to the class’s strengths. So despite looking like a straightforward muscle-brained melee class, you often end up defaulting to light weapons and light armor. (Meanwhile, a Sage who’s heavily invested in VIT and focused on tanking is actually way tougher.)
Recommended Stat Distribution
Since the class can’t really function without consistent evasion, SPD is the top priority.
After that, your next focus depends on which side of the kit you want to lean into. If you mainly use the TEC-scaling Samurai skills, invest in TEC. If you prefer the STR-scaling Fighter skills, then put points into STR instead.
Between TEC and STR, TEC tends to make evasion play easier overall. The more TEC you have, the more detailed your enemy action predictions become—not just the action name, but even the direction of the key input needed to dodge. That makes it much easier to focus purely on timing your dodge inputs. Even just knowing the action name helps a lot, especially in boss fights where you’ll likely be retrying multiple times and can start memorizing patterns.
For the remaining points, splitting them roughly half-and-half between VIT and whichever of TEC or STR you didn’t prioritize tends to give a stable balance of offense and survivability.
As for INT, you can safely ignore it entirely.
Skill Impressions
Crescent Slash is great for actively generating CP
Its damage is only about the same as a normal attack, but Crescent Slash, which actively grants 1 CP, is incredibly convenient.
As a simple resource refill, if you’re ever unsure what to do, throwing out a Crescent Slash is almost always a safe choice.
You can use it starting from Swordmaster skill level 1, so don’t hesitate to spam it.
Iai War Dance is absurdly good as a counter skill
Iai War Dance, learned at skill level 2, is a hidden powerhouse.
While the effect is active, successfully evading an attack (Graze counts) lets you counter with Iai Slash. It can crit, and of course it benefits from critical damage bonuses.
Where this skill really shines is during boss rage phases. Late-game bosses often throw out four or five consecutive attacks in a single action. If you select the dodge command against those multi-hit moves, you can consistently evade the barrage while shredding the boss’s HP with repeated counters.
Iai Slash deals about 1/7–1/8 the damage of “Leporiblade”, the strongest skill available while sheathed. That means if the boss uses a multi-hit attack twice, you can deal nearly the same damage as the ultimate skill just by focusing on dodging, which is a huge advantage.
Hell Smash is simple and reliable
Hell Smash, learned at skill level 3, is just straightforwardly powerful.
It also doesn’t restrict your previous or next actions, so even a sloppy “I’ve got enough CP, might as well fire this off” style of play still works perfectly well.
Tachi 1 combo offers great buffs and strong damage
The Tachi 1 skill and its follow-up techniques, learned at skill level 4, are powerful—though they limit your action choices.
The follow-ups branch into two options:
- One restores 5 CP and applies buffs to all stats, or
- One requires a charge action and then unleashes extremely high damage.
The buff route is generally easier to use. The boost to both offense and defense is clearly noticeable, making it very reliable.
The high-damage combo, however, comes with a big drawback: you must spend the entire turn selecting actions related to the Tachi 1 combo. That means you can’t dodge, defend, or use healing items during that turn. As a result, the opportunities to safely execute it are pretty limited.
Since you learn it around the time enemy bosses become extremely aggressive, spending a whole turn purely on offense becomes quite risky.
Tranquility: looks flashy, but is extremely practical. Body Flicker… not so much
Tranquility blinds you, but restores 10 CP, massively boosts TEC and SPD, and prevents your sheathed stance from being canceled for a period of time.
At first glance it sounds like a high-risk, high-reward move—but in practice it’s shockingly practical.
The real insanity lies in just how much TEC and SPD increase.
Against every boss except the final one, your TEC becomes high enough that enemy action prediction reveals both the action and the directional dodge input. Meanwhile, the SPD boost slows the dodge gauge to what feels like near slow motion.
Because of that, the blindness penalty effectively disappears. You can just check the predicted action, press the key when the dodge gauge roughly reaches the middle, and land Perfect Evades with ease, rapidly building CP.
The huge TEC boost also significantly increases the damage of Iai Slash and Iai War Dance, so being forced to remain sheathed isn’t much of a drawback either.
By contrast, Body Flicker is pretty awkward to use.
Its 5 CP cost is heavy. For example, firing off two Hell Smashes with it requires 5 + 7 = 12 CP. Since your maximum CP at the start of battle is 10, you’d first need to land 14 Perfect Evades to trigger the “Detect” CP cap increase twice—which is an absurd requirement.
To make matters worse, even if you use an Attack Boost, the boost doesn’t apply to the second action granted by Body Flicker.
Because of all that, it’s generally more stable to just fight normally instead of trying to force Body Flicker setups. (There is one specific route where it’s convenient during the final boss gimmick… but that’s about the only time it actually helped.)
So with that, next time we’ll move on to the Swordmage run!!
Enjoy your gaming life!!
And thanks for reading all the way to the end!
