You must sub a job that has Sword Skill, such as RDM or WAR, to get halfway decent damage form a sword. And that is all it will ever be, halfy decent.
As a RDM I have pretty decent dagger and Sword skills, both capped capped when I go BLM/RDM. I wouldn't even try a sword as BLM. My dagger twice is twice as high.
While making this at goldsmithing lvl 1 and smithing lvl 26 I got a .2 skillup to smithing and a .1 skillup to goldsmithing, which proves this does have a goldsmithing sub.
I'm a bit puzzled about the Tuck. I know a BLM can't normally use swords, except for some, like the Tuck. After reading some enthousiast postings from BLM collegues about how great this Tuck sword was, I decided to buy one from the Bastok vendor (costed my about 13K on Hades server). Much to my surprise, it performed way worse than my usual and trusted Bastokan Dagger.
Basically this is strange because the stats of the Bastokan Dagger are 11 damage with 173 delay (this is a good 0.064 damage per tick). The stats on the Tuck are comparable: 15 damage with 226 delay (or 0.066 damage per tick). I would have expected the Tusk te deliver higher damage blows, at longer intervals than the Bastokan Dagger, but in the long term doing the job equally well. Not! When fighting Crawlers and Yagudo's outside Windy in Sarutabaruta my Bastokan Dagger did an average of 25-35 damage per hit, the Tuck barely delivered 15-20 damage per hit. Also, with the dagger I have about one critical blow every three hits... the Tuck never hit critical. My BLM is lvl 30 (subbed with WHM capped at 15). My dagger skills are at 48.
Strangely enough when equipping the Tuck I don't see any mention of Sword Skills (since I only played WHM and BLM, they probably are still at zer0), only Dagger Skills (and the other like Throwing, Scythe, Evasion, ...).
Could this be the reason the Tuck is so poorly in combat with me? (i.e. the lack of Sword skills). If so, how can a BLM level up his Sword Skills? Or is the behaviour of the Tuck related to the the stats of the Dagger Skils?
I'm lost in this and at the moment very disappointed in my 13K Tuck that performs no where near my free (conquest points) Bastokan Dagger.
You guessed it, the reason why the dammage is low is because you have a very low sword skill. I know that black mage can level dagger skill but I don't know if you can level sword skill as a black mage or white mage. If you want to really to be able to use the tuck, you'll have to level it with another job, you may want to consider redmage or a mele class. Your skill with a weapon deffinitly affects you dammage.
Yes, the fact that Black Mage doesn't have any skill in swords is why your damage is lower.
Perhaps if you subbed war, or another job with sword skill, and had sword skill raised, it would improved your damage. I don't think that's a good cause to be subbing a useless job considering your main being BLM. :P