Parry & Reflect with a Sith Sword or Cortosis weave

[Kilcannon 177]

Can a pc parry and reflect with a Sith sword/weapon and/or a Cortosis weave or other special material item?

I say yes they can. However they can only do improved parry with said item not reflect.

[Donovan Morningfire 10,200]

With weapons that just have the Cortosis quality, I'd say no on Reflect, as the only thing the Cortosis quality does is prevent weapons with the Sunder quality (like a lightsaber but also the vibro-ax) from damaging those weapons.  Plus, none of those are considered lightsabers, and Reflect pretty clearly states that you need a lightsaber as in the weapon, not the skill used to attack with the weapon.  And since they don't qualify for Reflect, then by extension they don't qualify for Improved Reflect.  Plus, given how frequently ranged attacks are the order of the day in contrast to melee attacks, being able to use Reflect with a more mundane weapon as opposed to the very noticeable and obvious lightsaber gives that talent a bit more power, since in many cases it's worth suffering the three strain to avoid taking three wounds, given that strain can be more easily recovered in a fight, either through Advantages, via talents, or the simple after-combat recovery check.

 

The Parry talent already specifies that it works with any weapon that uses the Melee or Lightsaber skill, so one could use Parry with a truncheon or a vibrosword just as easily as they could with a lightsaber.  In fact, the Beta version of the Shii-Cho Knight can work very well as a defensive melee combatant without the PC needing to pick up a lightsaber (Sarlacc Sweep and Sum Djem are the only talents that call out using the Lightsaber skill).  Same with Improved Parry, which simply requires that the defender be able to activate the Parry talent.

 

As for Sith swords... right now there's nothing official because they've not been covered (odds are good they'll show up in a future splatbook, maybe the Warrior one if I had to guess).  But if I had to hazard a guess, they'd probably have some special rule that makes them an exception on Reflect only being usable by lightsabers, and said exception would probably extend to the Improved Reflect talent.