How do gunblades work?

[EdwinLi]

Some of the gunbreaker ones do have normal barrels. The Ronkan manatrigger being an easy one to see. Weather the Ronkan were the not-garleans of the first i do not know. The gunbreaker itself doesn't make use of the barrel often. the LB3 fires something out of the end to form the shield, but it might just be a magic puff as the same thing gets done on a lesser scale with Heart of Stone.
In a lore friendly way I assume the blade acts like a focus and directs the aetheric charge, or quickly dissipates it in the case of explosive hits. It can be assumed it needs reloaded often, but that is something we don't do in game for MMO reasons. Just from observation of the models at hand, i also assume the flintlock looking ones are very early designs requiring muzzle loading of charges.

That is just vanity use only and very few as the majority of Gunbreaker Gunblades will not have a Gun Barrel designed into it since the Primary use for the Ammo is for infusing Magical Energy into the blade FFVIII style. Strongely advised not to confuse the Gunbreaker Gunblade with the Garlean Gunblade simply because a few designs have Gun Barrels in them.

The magic energy released from the Gunbreaker Gunblade is only dispursed magical energy and cannot maintain a solid form for a long time which is why the only projectile released from Gunbreaker's Gunblade are Barrier Magic and Healing energy (GNB healing regen skill) they can apply to themselves or to allies. The Magic energy from the cartridges cannot form a offensive attribute unless it is from the blade itself which is why Gunbreaker Gunblades can only release small burst of magical energy as Defensive Magic if released as a Projectile. Along with everything offensive can only come from the Blade itself.

Garlean Gunblades, on the other hand, is specifically designed to have a functioning Gun Barrel since it follows the Real Life Gunblade design thus instead of the energy being used to infused the blade with magical attributes, it release the magical energy as offensive projectile attacks instead. (Fun note: Real Life Gun blades used Muskets as their Guns. We don't see much of Gun Blades in history because they never last very long in history and was discarded from production due to horrible handling issues and other problems)

The two weapons greatly differs from each other by how they function with their ammo with Gunbreaker Gunblade can only use it offensively by infusing the Blade with magical energy from the cartridges and Garlean Gunblade will just directly fire the magical energy as offensive projectiles and Projectile Magic.

(Another fun note, The revolver of Garlean gunblades is similar to Webly Revolvers used in WW1 which is not just because of "Revolver" from FF8 but there are a few historical "Pistol Sword" made using a Webly Revolvers by the British back in WW1 but very few)

[Seraph522]

Although in-game it looks like you're just slashing with explosions.

That's fairly true to the original FF8 gunblade animations; when you had Squall (or Seifer, for the short time he's in your party) use Attack, pressing R1 at the right time during the animation would add an explosive effect to the attack and trigger a vibration in the controller. Same thing occurred during Squall's Limit Break, Renzokuken, except that there you had a bar onscreen to more clearly show the timings. Since not everyone uses a controller for FFXIV, adding the vibration effect might not be as easy for this, though it would be pretty cool if a vibration was triggered every time you used Continuation (Disclaimer: I play with KB+M, so I have no idea if vibration effects occur for controller players, so take that with a grain of salt).

[Jandor]

Although in-game it looks like you're just slashing with explosions.

That's better anyway IMHO. The whole magic vibrations for damage and using recoil to increase speed always sounded a little bit silly to me anyway.

It's a sword that explodes, do we need anymore than that? I feel a magic exploding fire sword explains itself.