The Rapier has been nerfed several times, but none of the low quality aspects of the weapon have been tweaked or changed. This just makes it a mobility offhand tool rather than much of a respectable weapon.
Let me start by mentioning the Riposte. Why does this take so long to actually trigger when someone hits it? Not only can players bait it out (actually outplaying me) but even when a player does hit it, they have enough time to react and dodge out of being countered. No punishment for outplaying themselves. Even when they DO get hit, “freedom” allows them so much reduction even with the bonus stun duration from maxing riposte, they can always escape anything relevant you might want to do, like a fully charged heavy or finishing a flurry for the final stagger hit. You can essentially only confirm Fleche as soon as humanly possible against people spec’d for PvP. It seems the crit bonus after a dodge from 300 Dex only works when you finish the animation completely, which means you can’t even roll then Fleche cancel it for a front-facing crit in time, a further nerf for Light Armor since the dodge roll takes the longest to finish.
It’s not good. The counter should be lightning fast if the parry actually gets hit, not this slow, overly reactable elbow smack. Baiting it out should be the way to avoid it.
Secondly, any of the light followups that are attached to abilities need improvement. The one out of evade can straight up miss enemies right in front of you when you evade forward or sideways, because of how bad the reach is, from very simple things like the enemy doing an attack animation that moves them slightly, or simply being average sized. This means you will trigger “Momentum” on one of the crappy side swipes with a bad damage ratio rather than the initial thrust. For evade, the thrust should track and attempt to hit the center of the model your cursor is aiming at. The animation could look something more like this -
You could also adapt a similar animation with actual reach to the light followup on Fleche. Currently, if you want to hit a target who is close with the followup (like after a riposte), you need a really high dpi on your mouse and to swivel the camera super fast. There is ZERO range or reach to the followup, meaning you need a frame-of 180 spin the second you pass through any player sized or smaller target. This is simply bad. Give it a brief delay then a similar thrust to the one above, so you can gap close without needing unfriendly mouse adjustments more akin to a FPS game. Built-in skill followups shouldn’t require peculiar settings or user inputs like this, they should work reasonably.
Back to Evade. It seems the followup light cancel also “locks” the tracking of the double swipes afterwards to wherever the facing of the initial light came out of. Earlier, I mentioned changing the light to a new animation that actively seeks your cursor for this reason as well. When you are using a sideways Evade and light attack cancel, your character will sometimes make a weirdly angled light stab that goes sideways rather than toward your cursor, but then your followup double swipes will ALSO swing into the air at that bad angle, rather than tracking to your mouse cursor aiming at an enemy. This should be fixed, but it also highlights how poor the horizontal range on these double swipes are. So please, at least make each portion of the Rapier’s basic attack pattern track your cursor’s aim properly. You are supposed to aim all of your attacks, but this weapon forcibly ignores your aim and makes you miss in situations you shouldn’t.
Evade also isn’t triggering any shirking or dodge related procs, when it’s called “Evade”, but has passives in the talent tree that trigger when you dodge attacks with it. So clearly it has the ability to recognize triggers based on dodging with it, but doesn’t work with all the evasion based effects? Objectively that doesn’t make any sense.
Looking at the history of the nerfs done to this weapon, it’s tragic how many fundamental flaws exist on the weapon that weren’t improved in compensation for that. If you’re going to make the weapon worse, at least pay attention to other areas it could be improved. I would like the weapon to function within reasonable expectation as a primary melee weapon rather than be a “swap fleche cooldown stick”.