Pirate Kai on Aug 21, 2017 wrote:

Hello! I am currently thinking about starting a swashbuckler, but I'm a bit confused. I see a lot of the max level swashbucklers using weapons that give bonus from strength, while I know swashbucklers use agility. When they use a weapon like this do they use strength instead of agility or keep using agility? Is there a benefit to using weapons that give strength bonus instead of agility?

Those swashbucklers do use a strength buff to help with their weapon. No, their agility is of no help to them with a strength weapon. They believe this enhances their overall damage, when the reality is, if they used an agility weapon their damage would likely be the same if they used equipment that enhanced their main stats.

I'm assuming the max bucklers you were looking at were members of the pvp crowd. Yes, in some cases it's good to use a strength based weapon (namely Dragon Axe of Doom or Axe of the Minotaur Lords). When facing musketeers, whose lowest stat is strength and whose highest stat is agility, it's very helpful to use a strength based weapon. Since muskets have high agility like you, and have access to all the agility buffs, their agility will almost always be higher than your agility. So, to increase the odds of getting relentless and bladestorm chains, a strength weapon is used. You'll almost always have more strength then they do, so you'll have greatly increased odds of chaining and landing critical hits. In addition, these people with strength weapons may be attempting to run a relentless 2 bladestorm 2 setup for pve, which requires the kraven blade, a strength weapon. They also might be using a turn the tide 2/3 setup, which requires the Dragon Axe of Doom (or a double tide pet). Finally, they may not have gotten a good agility based weapon yet.

Thanks everyone for the help! it really cleared things up for me