Double post.

See, the hammer does damage when you slide because the sheer masculinity required to propel your arse forward at high speeds causes any science and reason that you may have surrounded yourself in to spontaneously combust on contact with any sane knight, thus causing damage.

On a serious note about Flourishes, you can still cut with a thin blade. Normally the blade would flex, and it'd be like running a sharp wire across the flesh of the target. It'd be more like a wip than a blade, at least that's my experience with Sabre Fencing.

*EDIT*
Clearly Battlegrinder is a more experienced fencer than I am.

I'm not sure what you mean. As I understand the question, you're asking if the point of the blade would do more damage then the sides? If that's your question, then the answer would be "it depends". Rapiers are still stabbing weapons first and foremost, and their ability to injury on a swing is more or less an afterthought. For most swords, you want to hit with the part of the blade that's around halfway between hilt and point (the exact reason has to do with physics and torque and how the blade is forged and shaped, but I don't have time to go into the full explanation). The Divine Avenger and Levi are great examples of a heavy duty slicing and hacking sword: they have a big blade with a lot of mass behind it, so they can cleave through their target. A rapier just isn't big enough to do that. Something like a katana or a clamore could do both, but that's because its very sharp, shaped a very specific way, made out of the right material, and can be wielded with 2 hands so you can put as much power into the swing as possible.

I suspect the only reason flourishes hit as hard as they do is because of superior metallurgy and physics (you can impart a lot more force with a swinging motion than you can with a stab, and the weight of your armor would add momentum to a swing instead of creating inertia to overcome like it does with a stab). However, a surface level slice will generally be less dangerous than a penetrating stab, especially since the sharpened edges of the sword will open up more wounds as the blade goes deeper, in addition to the ones inflicted by the tip.

Edit: ninja'd. We seem be thinking the same thing a lot of the time.

The 2* flourish always looked more like a rapier to me. The bell guard on a epee is still much bigger and more hemispherical, while the 2* flourish bell guard looks much lighter and smaller. Though it does look more like a epee then the rest of the line does.

It also occurred to me that the reason the third strike of the combo does more damage then the first 2 is because you do a full lunge rather than just a thrust (and thus put more force behind the attack) and because the first 2 strikes left your target gazes enough that you have time to aim for a more vulnerable point on the final hit.