(Just finished Coda 2)

Terror Knights and Swordmasters (and even Divine Knights) seem to be unique in that they both seem to have some reliance on good mental stats since Mind dictates the proc rate of debuff spells. Of course, they'll never be as good as a dedicated mage, but when I roll out my LV 50 Terror Knight and they only have a single digit percent chance of inflicting stunning wave or sleep, it makes me wonder why even give them access to those spells at all if they're never going to be worth the risk compared to just hitting something with a 2h sword. Testing in a training battle right now, my LV 50 Terror Knight has a 7-37% chance to inflict Sleep (between a Ninja and a Golem respectively - the average between other human units being around mid teens and low 20s) against LV 49 units. When the enemies are anything over one level higher, which is usually the case for most story battles and dungeons, so like most of the game, that rate drops off a cliff. Earlier in POTD, my LV 50 vs LV55~ unit had a whopping 0% chance.

Really the sword master is exactly the same but more granular in my eyes; they get buffs and debuffs so its much less of an issue but it again runs into the problem of "why waste mp on this that has a chance to do nothing when i could reliably do damage instead" - if an option only works like 8% of the time when Fearful Strike and Falling Blade work 100% of the time, it's not an option. And that sucks, because if all I wanted was damage I wouldn't have deployed a class that is designed around control and damage - something the actual spellcasters can do both reliably, which of course makes me question "then why didn't I just bring a lich?"

The only things that seem obvious to me short of Ogre Blading around is turning a unique into a terror knight and piling Mind charms on top of them. Or to stop looking too far in to this and accept that as much as I want to like the classes, I just can't.

At the end of the day though, strip all of this away and the Terror Knight is still the only class that can reliably inflict one of the deadliest debuffs in the game, and Swordmasters really don't need debuffs working for them to be good, though you really have to build them for either buffing or nova damaging because getting an effective balance between both is difficult.

Does anyone have any advice or experience in trying to build these two classes, or to just forget they have these abilities entirely because their proc rate is abysmal?