A lot of it is really just what we had ideas for. We've been gathering edge ideas for all classes for six months or more in a fairly undirected fashion; someone has an idea they like and it gets tossed in the pile.

In retrospect, we didn't come up with much for mace specs (although Skullcrusher seems really really good to me, so maybe that's a balance) or axe specs this time around. I don't think there's any point in which we sat down and said: axe specs don't need as many edge options as spear specs. It's just the ideas we had. Hopefully we're getting to a point where there's enough good general options out there and more edges you want than you're able to pick that it's not the end of the world if there wasn't a "better at whirl guy" edge in this batch.

The sword spec has always been kind of an odd duck as specs go. You look at a spec like dagger, and the skills in general have a theme that a high dex is good and other stats don't so much matter. No one is playing fire dagger spec, or if they are, it's not because they expect it to excel with the dagger skills. If you're an arial dagger spec, all the skills will work pretty well for you.

Conversely, both the fire giant and the arial make effective sword warriors for completely different reasons, and both are writing off a good chunk of their spec skills. If you're a giant, jab, flourintine, and riposte work crappy because your dexterity isn't high. If you're an arial, doublethrust and flurry work crappy because your strength isn't high. (And both are probably giving cross an odd look. The first time someone busted out cross on me in a PK, I sat there slack-jawed staring dumbfounded at the screen while they got away. I've seen people make some clever use of it since, but pincer it ain't.)

So it's easy to say, okay, what about an edge that would make jab, not anywhere near as good as it is for an arial, but maybe usable for the low-dex fire giant and interesting in some way?

Sword also has some of the biggest use times for non-lagging skills, which lent it to some interesting edge ideas that involve taking some generally non-optimal actions. Take a look at Furious Whirlwind for example -- to use it in a PK, you have to want to flurry and be tanking a bunch of people. If using flurry in a PK is a good idea, probably you're a giant sword, in which case you're not all that great of a tank and you're going to lag yourself four rounds while tanking a bunch of people. I'd be hard pressed to think of a warrior (possibly excepting Faltarn) that I've seen in the last few years that would be able to pull that off and make it actually seem like a good idea.