@super87ghost
You said it was a no-skill weapon (and you repeat it again at point 4). If it was a no skill weapon, it wouldn't have made a difference if they were bad or not, since you claim it needs NO skill...
SoT isn't a pure TDM game. 90% of sword users are either terrible at naval or have 0 awareness when it comes to board defense. Hard to die to them when they're bad at every other aspect of PvP.
Sword dash means you first need to 'charge' your sword, wich means for a couple of seconds you have almost no mobility and the charge will be cancelled with even the slightest of damage... So in battle, this only decreases your mobility and means you need to be skilled to even be able to use that ability. No other weapon requires that.
They mentioned sword dash as a means of mobility, you start talking about its viability in hand to hand combat.
How can there be skilled sword users, if it's a NO skill weapon? You are contradicting yourself already here... And then you also contradict your point that the sword is OP, since you claim 99% of users are bad...
The same way a pro CoD player can pick up a grenade launcher and stomp lobbies, or a pro League player can pick a no skill champion. Most people that use those things are terrible at the game, but it can be a big problem if a sweaty player picks it up.
This is especially true for SoT/swords, as all the things that gave guns counterplay were removed (one blunder, quickswap), guns are inherently unreliable with gunjam and hitreg, and there's an entire naval aspect before you even get to the TDM portion of a fight.
So if it's so OP, why do all good fighters use other weapons?
Because it's unsatisfying, boring, and is generally agreed to be no skill.
It feels much better to get a 2 tap on someone dodging and weaving than it does to swing at them a bunch while locking them in place. There's a lot of ego involved in high level PvP, people want to be the best and be seen as good players, can't do that while using a weapon everyone else sees as no skill.
Yes, it's not OP. Sure, it's a bit stronger on close range then the longer range weapons, wich makes sense because that's his core range, so it should be a bit stronger there. But it's useless at longer ranges, where the longer ranged weapons are way stronger. You keep making the mistake of thinking that long ranged weapons (like the EoR) should be just as strong in close range as a close range weapon.
It's definitely OP. It would be strong without half of the utility it currently has.
Being useless at longer ranges doesn't matter, because you have a second weapon slot that can fight long range. This is one of the main things that separates a sword bot from a good player. Sword bots need the stunlock because they have no idea what to do when someone sprints out of range. A good player will swap from sword to their pistol and spam them down until they close distance again.
Let's go over all of them:
It doesn't really matter how you rationalize all the utility swords have, at the end of the day no other weapon comes anywhere close to being as stacked as the sword. Every other weapon has a specific purpose in combat and 1-3 utilities that support that purpose. The sword has like 9.
Spamming left click works with all weapons... And just with other weapons: it doesn't make you effective when you do that.
Except spamming left click is very effective with swords. If you're anywhere near decent at naval and board an enemy while they have pressure, you can just run to where they're bilging and spam away until you win.
90% of sword users are bad and will never make it to that point, but the people that are actually good at the game and use swords will destroy most crews or force them to swap to swords themselves.