>>Seven winds: Slight advantage
It's a pretty big deal, actually. Consider you can activate it by fighting an outer (trivial melee ability) and redirecting to whoever attacks you. This is a situation that occurs with extreme regularity. Works against anyone with minions, and you can also get deflect henchmen to ruin their day even more.
>>Seasoned traveler: Convenience (Healers)
A healer isn't always nearby, especially one of your align or one you can get to easily while wanted, etc etc. Even when you can easily get to a healer, it's a time sink in a game where *when* you attack is often a huge deal. This edge cuts movement costs by so much that you can always afford to engage even if you're using a skill that drains your moves like flurry, or fighting an enemy with hamstring, iceball, energy drain, etc. It also saves you the time and gold you'll spend on healers and pills so you can put that toward getting real preps.
>>Healing edges: Convenience (Healers)
Again, finding a healer is more than just an inconvenience. It hinders your gameplay overall. Also, healing more while fighting mid-battle and running/re-engaging is never a bad thing. Especially when you're raiding and have to rest in between goes.
>>Swiftstrike edges: Slight-medium advantage
It's a decent advantage, yeah. Riposte+swiftstrike with edges is pretty nuts, considering with swords you'll parry enough to make swiftstrike more awesome. For the other, making some swiftstrikes while blinded imo is a pretty big deal.
>>Wise recovery: Convenience
See above
>>Speed flurry: I wouldn't even take this unless on an arial, but I haven't done elf so I may be wrong on its efficacy
Even on an arial, I experienced some mediocre times with it, but it can really shine when you're fighting people who won't parry half of it. A work-able flurry is essential to any sword spec who wants to land kills with regularity, but even more so to ones that can't rely on bashing.
>>Furious Whirlwind: Sounds like a big one
Despite it only being 1 hit to everything else fighting you, I put this here because it's landed me kills before on multiple characters. Say you're dirt kicked fighting a warrior with some barely-prepped and injured thief backing them up. You can get some good rounds with seven winds ripostes, and finish them with the flurry hit + parting blow sometimes.
>>Gift to the Departed: Slight advantage
Yeah, I added this because of: how often parting blow has gotten me kills; the fact that even perfected parting blow fails quite often and you can lose kills as a result.
Overall, the strength of a character with and without these edges will be striking, and yet not even as much as the bard/assassin examples. When you talk about being competitive it all really depends on what you mean by it. I would say they're necessary to be competitive in the sense of working toward having a very strong character with good presence that can fight and land kills on as many other characters as needed. You would say 'but I can still land kills and do well without these edges', and you'd be right, but once you know what you're missing you don't really feel this way. You start to look back on your losses and say 'wow if I had this edge I probably would have won that'.
