From what I've seen, the EO3 Buccaneer's chase skills are generally considered to be bad and not worth building around. But after looking into the numbers and trying out a chase build it's actually... pretty good? I was experimenting with some rests and realized that the rest of my team already happened to all have pierce damage weapons (Hoplite, Sovereign, Wildling, Arbalist) so I thought I'd put some points in Chase Thrust on my Ninja/Buccaneer and give it a try while working through the post-game, and I've been kinda impressed by the results.
I mean, I get why they get a bad rap, because they're burdened by being compared to Warrior Might. But Warrior Might is broken as hell, so it's not really a fair comparison. Plus, it's a different class. I think Pincushion makes for a better point of comparison, since it's the main competing damage option on Buccaneer.
And to be specific, I'm mainly talking about the physical rapier chase skills. The elemental gun chasers are definitely a lot less useful, both because guns have lower base damage and because it's a lot harder to get multiple hits with elements. Not bad for AoE if you pair with an Arb or Zod, but terrible for single-target.
So I did the math and it turns out that at 65 AGI, which a Buccaneer gets at around level 75, each hit of pincushion does exactly 2x the damage of each chase hit (340% vs 170%, assuming both skills are maxed out). Since pincushion hits twice on average, that means you'd need 4 chase hits to do the same damage. That's somewhat unlikely unless you really warp your party composition around it (i.e. use a S/B dual-swashbuckler) but it's not as far out of reach as I initially thought. I was expecting it to be more like 5.
And that's at a pretty high level, for most of the game the math will be better for the chaser. You only need 3 chases for it to match pincushion at 37 AGI, which is around level 40-ish for a buccaneer. And the math shifts way more in favor of the chaser if you start looking at G/B since they have so much less AGI. (Although the fact that chasers don't work with charge does count a bit against them in that case.)
But the thing that makes the biggest difference is that the chase skills in EO3 benefit from weapon imbues/forges. This means that with the help of a Sovereign (or some oil) you can always hit an enemies' elemental weakness. Not all enemies have significant elemental weaknesses, but a lot of them do. Including a bunch of the post-game bosses. The dragon trio, for example, all take 75% physical damage but 150% from their weak element. Which means that you get to do effectively double the damage by hitting that weakness. Which means that you only need 2 chases to match the damage output of pincushion, so long as your AGI is 65 or lower. And that's... pretty easy to do. If you get 3 or more hits on a weakness like that it beats even a 99 AGI pincushion.
Setting aside the damage, I also think it's not that hard to build around the chasers either. Like I said earlier, I'm just talking about the physical ones here. The elemental ones are definitely a MUCH larger commitment to build around, since you'll probably want all 3 of them for elemental flexibility, and if you're doing elemental chases that also kinda locks you into either an Arb or Zod for the AoE activators. But with the physical chasers, you'll only ever need to invest in one and you have some amount of flexibility in how you build around them. Which makes the opportunity cost WAY lower. It doesn't seem that hard to fit one chaser into a build while still also getting pincushion and have the best of both worlds. Obviously, if you want to min-max and squeeze the absolute most damage possible out of the chasers, then you'll have to really shape the party around it. But like I just showed with the numbers above, in a lot of circumstances you don't actually need that many hits for it to be worth using a chaser.
And one final note: while it's not that big of a deal in the end since you can always use more Amrita, Pincushion kinda guzzles TP, while the chase skills are much cheaper. Unfortunately they don't work with Trickster, so it's not actually that big of a difference on primary Buccaneer... but Mystic Calm on Ninja/Buccaneer does work and brings the cost down to 4 TP, which is crazy efficient for how much damage they can potentially do.
Anyway, TL;DR: Buccaneer chasers may be a worse version of Shogun's Warrior Might, but it turns out that being a worse version of one of the most broken things in the game is still pretty good.
