Need some help on short swords

[Ris]

Does anyone know which short swords are best for early game and which path to take on upgrading? Also some tips for shorts swords would help.

[Zephyr]

I assume by short swords, you mean knives.

I would say to try to make at least one of every avaible to you and upgrade them along their "main" path, without changing their element. At first, it's not very important to have elemental weapons seeing everything will pose little threat, but as the game goes on, you will NEED to always have weapons avaible to exploit elemental weaknesses of your ennemies.

The fire drill is a bit underwhelming at first, but once upgraded into its rank 5+ forms, it becomes a powerful tool. For others elements, I find comfortable with the chill knife and the spark knife, due to them having a nice set of skills.

The main problem I have is divine weapons, because most of the divine knives have skills I find pretty terrible and useless. The gem sword is a weapon with little combat skills and which seems made for farming, so it's only good if you only have that. I tend to go with the Rigoletto, because at rank 6 I think, it gets an attack boosting skill. Otherwise, it only gives double jump and bonus to mid air attack, which is only good against some ennemies.

As for how to use them, I would say is to take a buckler and pretty much only try to dodge. The knife uses almost no stamina, meaning you can sidestep to your heart content. You also can sidestep in the air, which is really good. Know when you can attack, and when you need to get out. Sidestepping toward an ennemy will put you in his back, so you can use that to dodge their attack. You can also use your airtime to deliver a lot of punishment to big ennemies. A combo you can use is running toward an ennemy and doing a light attack. It creates a move that make you slice upward, while getting in the air. From then, you can do a 3 hits combo. To stay in the air, you can follow with a devour. Then you can do an other 3 hits combo, and other devour, and if you are able to, a powerful attack which will create a downward lunge which will put you on the ground and usually out of reach of the ennemy. It's particularly useful against Quadrigas and the scorpion type ennemies.
If the ennemy is about to attack while you combo, air dodge out of the way. If the ennemy moved, you can also air-dash to follow him and keep hitting.

For the rest, it's the usual thing. Use your devours to get burst and stay in burst by refilling the bar, even if it's just with quick devours or sidestep devours. Use charge devours when the ennemy is down or held, or when it's busy eating. Use the aragami bullets on your teamates to give them burst too. If you aren't aiming to destroy some part, try to stay behind ennemies to attack the rear legs, or their side/backs. Play safe with an harassing state of mind. Learn the tells of the attacks. Remember for some ennemies, you will need to rely more on your guns anyway, and there is nothing wrong with that.

[Ris]

@Zephyr thanks for the combo that you stated, turns out i've been doing the correct way of using knives but i still have to work on my dodging ability. I was thinking of going along the wild sword: yang since it has a hold, do you recommend it? (i was thinking of upgrading to laoyang but it has no elemental attributes) If not, i guess i'll try on the elemental short swords that you mentioned. Thanks for the effort and time that you took to reply

[angelsenvy228]

Some of that advice is kinda sus, if you are only going to try to dodge you should take a tower shield for more armor not a buckler, a buckler is only good for the fast deployment if you are planning on blocking. Even then it is kinda worthless because tower shield can have faster guard skill so it deploys pretty much like a buckler anyway, with a ton more armor.

The move to get into the air is RB + Light attack, you don't need to be running at them (although if you are SPRINTING you are holding RB anyway so yes, running at them and light attack will do it, but no running is needed just RB + X on xbox).

The air combo is fine although instead of only doing some hits and an air devour you can spend your double jump and air step to extend further in the air before doing the heavy attack dive to come back down. the full combo can be like 17-20 hits including devours from ground to air to back down, assuming you can get through it all without getting slapped out of the air. I try to use my double jump/air step to reposition myself around the aragami during my combo to remain a little safer. You can also continue a ground combo from the dive so it really can go on indefinitely.

Finally short blades are nice because you can dash -> light attack -> dash -> repeat to get across the map quickly, I think you need to be in burst though for it to work properly its been awhile. Although the charge spear also allows you to do a back flip that you can manipulate to send you speeding across the map in a similar way as well. I think those are the only 2 weapon types that really give you extra mobility, although the charge spear doesn't get an air step which makes me sad, you can do the flying charge instead but its not really good for getting around the map.

They are called "short blades" to be exact although some are named "knife"