Keep in mind I'm the developer, so take the following with a grain of salt. :)

The short answer is yes, I think the class is balanced.

The long answer is given the variety of classes and the large varience in their effectiveness, I did aim for something at the high end at the time, something between Berserker and Archmage levels of effectiveness, but well within the balance of the game. I'll note the game has evolved since the initial design, but I've mostly only done some tweaks to keep numbers in line with similar talents.

The only objective evidence I can offer is the character vault ( http://te4.org/characters-vault ). I'll note there's only one Nightmare win with this class at the time, and that was done by me. There's a handful of normal winners, about 20, but 6 of those were done by me at various stages of the game for balance testing.

For a quick view of balance considerations, I like to look at the ratios of characters being started, making it some intermediate level (say 10), and those making it all the way to 50. There's a number of other ways you could look at the data as well.

Looking at the character vault today, I see roughly 2,000 Spellswords have been created (i.e. were at least level 1), approximately 500 made it to level 10, and about 20 made it to level 50 (of which 6 are my own runs). Anways a ratio of 4 to 1 for level 1 to 10, and a ratio of 25 to 1 of level 10 to 50.

Compare that to the Doombringers (an official, but recently released class in the Ashes DLC) which have 36,000 at level 1, 8,600 at level 10, and 680 at level 50. Thats a ratio of 4 to 1 (again) for level 1 to 10, and a ratio of 12.5 to 1 for level 10 to 50. That means Doombringers are about as likely to get to level 10, but of those that make it that far, nearly twice as many go on all the way to 50 as the Spellsword.

So Doombringers are roughly twice as likely to finish out to 50, suggesting they are a more effective/stronger class later in the game. From discussions with people and reading the forums, I believe they are considered one of the stronger classes currently.

We can also compare to the average success of all characters in Tome 1.2.5.

There were about 375,000 characters starts, about 90,000 made it to level 10, and about 3,100 made it to level 50. Thats a 4 to 1 ratio again for levels 1 to 10 (seems pretty consistent), but a 29 to 1 ratio for 10 to 50. So Spellsword is somewhat better than average (25 to 1 vs 29 to 1), but not by a large fraction.

So in summary, based on objective metrics I have available, I'm rather happy where the class is at the moment, balance wise. Which I think is slightly better than average, but not nearly as powerful as some other official classes.

Also, I have not yet updated this addon for the 1.3.0 Tome release. There are reports that the addon is breaking things (at the very least when starting new Chronomancy characters, probably elsewhere as well). I need to find some time to update the addon. Until I make a new release of the addon, I highly recommend only using it only with the older Tome 1.2.5 release.

I've just pushed a 1.3.0 compatible version of the Spellsword addon, so feel free to try with the latest Tome 4 release.

sweet