The good weaponskills are worth dumping a merit into if you want job versatility. I currently have axe, great sword, dagger, h2h, merited, with 5/5 in dagger and 1 in the others, leaving me 7 merits left to allocate. I'm working with many jobs now and haven't done much abby exp ally since capping combat skills and exp on over half my jobs, so I just merit as i get exp from normal play. Most of my jobs are fully merited in t1 and 2 job specific and all basics are covered, so the last ws merits will come soon enough. But there are some merit weaponskills that are pretty terrible even at 5/5. I know firsthand that apex arrow is one of them because it only has a 3.0 fTP mod, whereas sidewinder carries a 5.0 tp mod. Even if I merited apex to 5/5 the agi mod wouldn't be enough to make up for the weaker mechanics. The current bows have such insane base damage to begin with, and with the way bow fSTR mod works it's better to spam sidewinder than merit apex, so long as i can hit. I've tinkered with 1 apex merit but the difference between sidewinder and apex was pretty huge. The scythe weaponskill is another lackluster choice, which is why dark knights nowadays don't even use their iconic weapon much and mostly stick to spamming resolution. However if you wanna merit 6 or 7 or even 8 weaponskills and keep only one or two maxed out, the new mods make it much more forgiving to do so. 1 merit provides the equivalent of more than 4 merits under the original specs, so there's a lot of leeway for personal preference in the merit skill category. It's much more forgiving to work with many jobs and many weaponskills now than it used to be. Some people dislike the weaponskill changes, but I'm fairly content enough with the system as it is now.
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