I heard now several opinions. What is “better” for hit-detection on a sword, line trace or collisionbox?
What drains more performance and how is the reliability?
Would be nice if you could say 1-2 sentences…
Unless you are either swinging a hundreds of times a second or simulating a battle with hundreds of people swinging swords, I don’t think it matters performance-wise. Collision box will take more performance than a simple line trace though.
Collision box will probably be more reliable since a line trace could miss but you might still see a sword clearly hitting the enemy. If reliability is an issue you might upgrade to a sphere trace or something with a little more depth.
It depends on the size of your sword in my opinion. If you just have a needle, then a trace from bottom to top would be sufficient.
Clouds sword from FFVII on the other hand, might be too broad for a single line trace 
Perfomance wise, there shouldn’t be much of a difference.
There isnt that much of a perfomance difference between a trace and a collision box, for my melee combat prototype im just using traces for all my melee weapons ( using a custom, optimized methods so i can have a higher number of traces without a perfomance hit ) … I only use 2 sockets ( start, end ) make up the rest using simple math and they are distributed along the weapon blade… And so far its been pretty reliable and precise
Quick and dirty example of the system in work, As DennyR said if you have a massive weapon like clouds sword from FFVII then it might be much better to use a collision box instead of a huge line of traces tho
Did you write that line tracing in blueprints?
Any video tutorials out there regarding - sword collisions?