Rethinking the Swordmaster

I have been revising my way of building a Swordmaster, which is still a viable tanking character. I was trying for a damage-dealing character in my previous post. Then I revised that to more of a balanced build, emphasizing both Strength for offense and Toughness for defense.

Now I have further revised my thinking into a very defensive build, emphasizing Toughness, which mitigates against melee damage, and Initiative, which reduces the chance of being hit by critical damage. I am not sure whether Initiative only affects melee damage or spell and ranged damage as well. My inkling is that it is against melee damage only, but I am frankly not sure.

An obvious weakness is against ranged and spell damage, but that is generally true of all tank classes.

I am also thinking that Warhammer is unlike other games (WoW in particular), where a tanking class can switch to melee DPS by using a 2-hand weapon. The Swordmaster is best suited to sword and board, adding the extra blocking, and using the protection tree in the build. The problem with using the Greatsword (2-hander) is that I was dying too often. With the protection build, I am not dying as often in RvR. The problem was not as bad in Tier 2, but when I reached Tier 3, the problem became very obvious, expecially as I was pitted against higher-level characters.