Best practice for scaling static mesh in character socket

What is the best practice for scaling a static mesh in a character socket?

For example, imagine that I want to create an object (e.g., a sword). I create a blueprint called MySword inheriting from actor and choose SwordMesh as the corresponding mesh. There are at least three different places to scale this if I actually want it to work.

  1. In the MySword components under Transform–>Scale for the SwordMesh component.
  2. Under LOD0–>Build Settings–>Build Scale in the UE4 mesh editor for SwordMesh
  3. The only way I could get scaling to work was to add a dummy mesh as root in MySword Components and then make the SwordMesh a child of the dummy root component. The root comopnent has a Transform–>Scale setting. As far as I can tell only the Transform–>Scale under the SwordMesh in MySword actually matters.

Is the best practice to add the dummy root component and then modify the scale in SwordMesh as a child of MySword or is there another preferred way to do the scaling?

Thanks