Board Thread:Dark Souls III/@comment-64.138.247.38-20160421180135/@comment-73.218.24.188-20160702034602

Raw, without a doubt. This sword has very poor scaling, but high base damage and infusing raw takes great advantage of that fact. It's not worth infusing it with extra scaling gems(refined, heavy, sharp) because once you've made enough of a stat investment to surpass the straight raw base damage, other weapons become significantly better options, including almost every other straight sword.

It's great for using weapon buff spells on as a raw weapon with just the minimum stat requirements. While not meeting the faith requirement doesn't appear to reduce its damage on the stats screen, it will bounce off anything with decent armor and do severely reduced damage if you don't have 12 faith.