Combat is an art, not a science. As such, much of the information herein is the subjective opinion of the Runeknight who authored it. That said, I have tried whenever possible to account for this, and to discuss as many different styles as possible regardless of my personal opinion.

There are no tier lists nor numerical ratings here. I don't necessarily think every weapon is equally powerful but I do think the scale is fairly narrow, narrow enough that familiarity and preference are going to be the most important thing. Additionally, equipping the most optimal build to try to maximize your chances of winning every play-through will get old once you master one particular style.

Therefore, the best style and build is the one you personally can perform best with. To give an example, I was using a Ritual dagger in my dominant hand and Vestal's in my off-hand and I found I was missing blocks from Empowered Knight's empowered combos while trying to block with both. So I switched to exclusively blocking with the Ritual dagger in my dominant hand and didn't miss a block again. Technically, it should be easier to block with two weapons instead of one, and blocking with Vestals does more guard damage so technically that would have been optimal. But what's 'technically' better doesn't matter, what matters is I personally could block better using only the ritual dagger, therefore in that moment that was the best style.

So, if that's the case, why have a guide at all? Because while you might be most effective with whatever style you happen be most comfortable with, there are certain optimizations you can make within that same style. Additionally, it's good to branch out beyond your comfort zone and try out new styles to see if you like them. Not every run needs to be about equipping the most optimal setup and trying to win, experimentation and self-challenges can also be fun.

Discussion and insight is welcome, but it should be kept constructive. There is a difference between "I think Fate's End is easier to use than a lot of people think, here's what worked for me..." and "Fate's End is easy, if you're having trouble with it maybe this game just isn't for you." The first is constructive the second is just being demeaning. Comments that are uncivil or nonconstructive will be removed.

Otherwise, feedback and civil discussion is welcome.

Main-hand: The weapon you will use to deal health damage in critical strike combos on guard-broken enemies. Generally, a weapon with good base stats, but in the case of heavy or two-handed weapons they often lack in utility. Usually wielded in your dominant hand, though this is up the preference of the individual Runeknight.

Off-hand: The weapon you don't primarily use to deal health damage via critical strike combos. Usually has lower base stats but good utility or a good super to compensate for it. We will still attack the enemy's guard with it, and will block with it if it's capable of blocking. Additionally, if it has a good super we might want to combo with it to recharge the super against weaker enemies or in a 1 v 1 against the last enemy in the room to recharge our supers.

Note: While it is generally true that most builds will have a main-hand and off-hand, there are exceptions. The Gemini Stranded is the most common example as it has a bonus for alternating during your critical strike combo.

Dominant/Non-Domiant hand: Refers to which hand the Runeknight has a preference for. Usually referred to as being Right-handed or Left-handed. Usually Runeknights will use their main-hand weapon in their dominant hand, but this is not by any means a hard rule and is entirely preference.

Additionally, the gap in function between the two hands will be different for each Runeknight. They may have a strong preference toward the dominant hand or there may be very little difference. Some Runeknights might find it easier to focus on using their dominant hand for critical strike combos, whereas others might prefer blocking with the dominant hand and attacking with the non-dominant.

Note that unlike Beat Saber, Until You Fall does not have a left-handed mode that reverses the combos. The tutorial asks which hand is your dominant hand to place the arming sword in your dominant hand for the first level since you can't access your load out yet. Past that, the game does not know or care what your dominant hand is, and it does not reverse the combo patterns for left-handed Runeknights. As a result, certain patterns may be easier or harder to block with 1 weapon builds depending on which hand the weapon is in.

For the record, the author of this guide is left handed, and has had no issues blocking solely with 1 weapon in the left hand.

Utility: Anything that makes the Runeknight themselves rather than the weapon it's tied to stronger. The most important is combo, as starting a run with only 1 combo is pretty miserable. I personally like to start with at least 3 on most builds, but there are a few exceptions. Dash charges and health are also utility bonuses. Some traits are utility bonuses, such as Nimble from the Keenblade. You could consider a strong super, like Soul burn on the ritual dagger as a kind of utility. Basically, if something would make you better even if you never attacked or blocked with the weapon the bonus is on, it's utility.

Guard damage: Damage that hits the enemy's guard. We typically want this on both weapons because we can spam attacks against non-guard broken enemies as much as we want and we'll usually block with both weapons if they are capable of blocking. It's merely a question of how much we are willing to invest and sacrifice into it.

High guard damage lets you guard break enemies more quickly, which lets you combo them more quickly which lets you kill them more quickly. The faster you can kill enemies the less likely they are to pile up on you and the less of a time window you need to isolate enemies when they do pile up on you.

Health damage: Damage that hits the enemy's health. The two ways to deal more damage in a combo is either by increasing the amount of health damage you do per hit, or increasing the number of hits you can make via higher combo. In general higher health damage in a lower number of hits is stronger because you can deal that damage faster, but an experienced Runeknight can very consistently and very quickly land even high combos. It's up to your preference. (You will hear that a lot in this guide)

Mobility: Anything that helps us get around. This is typically dash charges and the traits Nimble and Fleet.

Mobility provides many benefits, both offensively and defensively. On nightmare in particular, enemies are extremely aggressive about covering each other when low on guard or guard broken. Mobility lets you get around to reposition and try to create gaps where you can engage 1 v 1, as well as escape bad situations and flanks. It also lets you chase down spellweavers, which can be vital in tiers 2 and 3.

You also have the option to dash into an enemy and deal your initial damage, then when the enemy begins attacking dash out and back in to repeat the process, sometimes guard breaking them without having to block.

Mobility is particularly important for the final Aether horror fight, and since this is by far the hardest part of the run on Nightmare, building and planning for it is important. That said, it's completely possible to deal with the Aether horror with just 3 dash charges and no mobility traits. I would advise not taking juggernaut unless you have extra dash charges or nimble, though, as only 3 charges + juggernaut makes things dicey. Additionally, Fate's End has a -1 charge penalty and it's highly recommended you do not go into the Aether horror fight with just 2 dash charges.

Tiers 1, 2, 3: The campaign is broken into 3 tiers, each tier having a boss fight at the end. So tier 1 would refer to the levels before the first Aether horror fight, tier 2 is the levels between the first Aether horror and the Rokai Honor Guard fight, and Tier 3 is the levels between the Honor Guard and second Aether horror fight.

Each tier ups the challenge and has implications in terms of augments. Most augments have a limit to how many times they can be accepted per tier. Keep in mind this only applies to how many times you actually take the augment. You could theoretically be offered combo every single room, but you can only take 1 combo per tier. The game does allow you to 'catch up', so if you never took combo in tier 1, once you get to tier 2 you could take up to 2 combo.

Dash Impact: Dash impact is basically a guard damage bonus more than it is utility, though strictly speaking it does fall into the utility category since it is not tied to any particular weapon. Generally we want to be able to dash into enemies and guard break them as quickly as possible. The two ways we can do that is via increasing the guard damage on our weapons, or increasing dash impact damage. Dash impact is generally more effective for this, as each augment is 5 points (More if you dash from max range) and has no additional cost in terms of health or augment slots unlike other forms of guard damage increases.

You can gain up to 15 base dash impact during a run from 3 shards of ferocity, 1 per tier. Juggernaut can also increase effective dash impact, though comes with a cost of longer cooldown on your dash charges.

Combo: As a noun, refers to your critical strike combo limit, or how many critical strikes you can make against guard broken enemies. As a verb, refers to the act of dealing critical strikes to guard-broken enemies. It is completely doable to consistently land high number hit combo with light weapons, though it requires a lot of practice. As such it's up to you to take how much you are comfortable with.

The main method of increasing combo is shards of guile, which increase it by 1 and can be accepted once per tier. The frenized trait also provides +2 combo but is extremely rare.

KBC: Abbreviation for Knight-Blooded Crest, a weapon. Discussed more in that weapon's specific section.

The flow of combat is the general way you should engage enemies. This is a high level strategic overview, individual sections will break down the specific tactics to use to achieve victory.

Start with a brief tactical assessment of the situation. How many enemies are ahead of you? Which ones are the biggest threat? Would you be able to kill one before the others can engage you? Is there terrain to abuse? What supers are available to you, if needed? Can you activate some enemies without activating others?

These types of questions will become more easy to answer once you have more experience. And if you have enough you can just dash in and brute force everything just by being really, really good. But until you get there, learning to assess the situation first is a powerful tool and will help expand your knowledge.

Once you decide to engage an enemy, ideally initiate combat by charging into them. This deals your dash impact damage and very briefly staggers them allowed for some quick follow up attacks. After that moment they'll begin blocking and you'll deal little to no guard damage. It's best to just stop at this point and either dash out and back in, or stand your ground and begin to block.

Once you guard break the enemy, you'll combo them, hopefully getting in all your strikes. Once they recover they will have a stagger and recovery animation during which time they are invulnerable. They will be vulnerable again once their guard bar completely refills. It's best to let them stagger backwards while you backpedal a bit, so once they recover you can get another max range charge in and repeat.

The following sections will break this down into more detail.

Recall, Runeknight, that defending oneself is always the most important thing in battle. You are one against many. You can deal hundreds of blows and yet fall to only a few. Therefore, you must learn to defend yourself and avoid trading blows with the enemy.

More than anything else that can be taught, the most important thing is simply building muscle memory of the enemy combos you will encounter. Don't worry about fancy technique. Just focus entirely on defense until you guard break the enemy via blocks.

Individual enemy attacks are not random, rather there is a set number of patterns each enemy uses. Once you become experienced enough you can read the first attack and know where the rest will land. This is absolutely required for Nightmare difficulty, as you simply don't have the time to read each individual weapon attack and react to it. You will instead learn to react to patterns. If you've played Beat Saber, it's a similar idea where on harder difficulties players aren't reading each individual note, they're reading patterns of notes.

When you can block almost all enemy attacks in a 1 v 1 scenario then you are ready to try more advanced techniques.

By far the easiest way to keep yourself defended is with two light weapons, focusing entirely on defense. Use whichever weapon is the most convenient for blocking depending on what side the attack lands on.

Mastering two-handed blocking comes down to attacking with one weapon while blocking with the other. There are two ways to do this. You can either block with whichever weapon is easiest to block with based on where the attack will fall, or you can have one dedicated blocking weapon and one dedicated attacking weapon.

A dedicated attacker and blocker generally works best with a heavy/light combo, with the light weapon focusing on defense and the heavy focusing on offense. However this does mean you will occasionally have to awkwardly move your arms across your body. In such cases I usually keep my attacking arm low and just swing back and forth horizontally down low so my other arm is unimpeded to block with.

The other consideration is that single weapon blocking is significantly more difficult, especially while trying to do something different in your other hand. It's basically patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time.

Using the 'convenient' weapon is a easier, especially for more difficult combos. In this method you block with whichever weapon is better positioned to block that particular attack, while attacking with the other. Mastering this style you can use both weapons to block in a combo while also weaving in attacks. This works best for dual light weapons because the difference in guard damage means it's usually not a big deal which weapon is attacking and which one is blocking. Also, if you have the alternating strike augment this is the style most likely to activate it.

Understand that you do not need to dedicate yourself to one style or another. You can change up depending on the enemy and situation. For example, the Aether horror uses a lot of attacks with 2 blows landing on the left and right after only a brief delay. These attacks are far more difficult to block with a single weapon than other attacks, and you may want to adjust your technique accordingly. Consider also your situation. As you racing to kill one enemy before another reaches you, or are you in a 1 v 1 versus the last enemy in a room? Are you low on health and need to focus on defense? Do you want to spam attacks with a specific weapon to recharge it's super?

Your own judgement and experience will guide you on which techniques to use in which situations. It can vary by enemy, room, or even by which individual combos the enemy uses. Being familiar and comfortable with all of them will give you more tools to work with and let you pick the best one for the situation.

Two-handed weapon blocking is an entirely different beast. The Greataxe and Hammer are both not that much more difficult to block with compared to a single 1 hander, but by the time you unlock them you'll need to completely relearn your muscle memory. All you need to do is place your hands on either side of the blocking indicator and you'll block. Because you have leverage midway up the weapon, it's fairly responsive. It's just a bit departure from single hand weapons.

Fate's End, on the other hand, is by far the most difficult weapon to block with. Unlike the other two weapons, your leverage is entirely on one side, which makes it unstable and slow to adjust. The 'trick' is to block using the hilt, just like with other two handers. It's still much slower and a lot less stable, though.

I would recommend trying out two-handers eventually, they are a great change on pace and fun to master. But it does take a lot of time to become skilled in them, so decide if and when you want to take that on.

Empowered Combos

Blocking empowered combos works just like any other combo, it's about learning the pattern and practicing until you have the muscle memory to execute. It's more complicated and more difficult.

Empowered knights have 2 different empowered combos. One begins with a lunging attack that will often not show an indicator until just before it lands.Therefore, position your weapon to guard a vertical attack on your left. You can also determine which combo it is based on the stance of the knight before the first indicator appears. The attack that begins with the lunge on the left side will have the knight standing upright with his sword crossing his body as he strikes. The second pattern will involve the knight crouching low and holding his weapon out to the side.

The Aether Horror's empowered attack is actually easy once you know which attacks are coming. It is just very difficult at first because the pattern is so unlike every other pattern in the game, and mostly relies on being tricky more than difficult. The pattern can be broken down into a few stages:

The first is an H shape pattern. This is awkward but not too difficult.

The second is a tricky phase where you have to dodge down and to th left while blocking down and to the right and then immediately block up and to the left. This trips people up because it pulls your attention into 3 different directions. But once you know it's coming it's an easy combo to block.

Next last phase is roughly an N shape. Start with the center of the N and drag your block down and to the right to block the second attack then quickly move to the left to block the last hit.

After this, just duck and backdash and wait for the AoE to go off, then dash in and land the critical.

While enraged the Aether Horror attacks much more quickly which makes his random patterns far more difficult for block. For this reason, it's actually far safer to allow the Aether Horror to use it's empowered attack instead of interrupting it. It's much better to have your enemy making predictable attacks than unpredictable ones.

One of the most important aspects of how you fight is where and when you fight. Positioning is about avoiding bad engagement while forcing your enemies into ones that are good for you.

Generally, 1 v 1 fights are the easiest, when you can focus your entire attention on one enemy. While it is possible to combo one enemy while blocking another it is incredibly difficult, especially on Nightmare. If an enemy attacks you from the flank on nightmare you simply will not have time to turn, read the attack, and block it. In such cases it's best develop the muscle memory to instantly backdash whenever you see the danger indicator in your peripheral.

When positioning, the most important thing to do is commit to either dodging or engaging. One of the perils of positioning is enemy attacks that are just barely on the edge of being in range. Enemies will only begin attacks when you are in range, but will usually continue the attack if you move out of range, and many enemies will continue trying to get back into range even as they attack. Since enemy attack indicators don't appear for attacks that are out of range, this can create a situation where an enemy begins an attack, you move just out of range, then immediately before the attack lands the enemy reenters your range and lands an attack that did not have an indicator.

This is why just backdashing away from enemies is not always the best course of action. If they are on your flank it is a bit safer because then you are moving at an angle away from them, but moving backward in the same direction they are traveling will often cause these no indicator attacks to land. If you have to dackdash it's recommended to double backdash to ensure you are out of range.

Terrain

Terrain is one of the best ways to separate enemies. If you have two enemies approaching you can use even a small piece of terrain to get the second enemy 'stuck' behind the terrain and the first enemy. You can abuse the enemy's pathfinding to find the sweet spot where one way around the terrain and the other are both nearly equally long, and then 'wiggle' between them to force the enemy to pace back and forth. In some cases, you can also use terrain to guard against enemy spellweavers, provided the terrain is high enough. Be cautious when doing this, however, as their fireballs often curve out far to your flank before coming back in and occasionally can get around cover that way.

Guard breaking

When you have guard broken an enemy it isn't always best to start comboing them. Instead, consider taking advantage of the time they are stunned to separate them and focus on a different enemy. One common example is a spellweaver with a knight defending her. You can guard break the knight and then instead of trying to combo the knight with the spellweaver shooting fireballs at you, use the time the knight is stunned to dash into the spellweaver and eliminate her 1 on 1. Even if you have to guard break the knight again it should be easy to do so since it will now be 1 on 1.

Other times you may just want to kite one enemy backwards while the other is stunned.

Supers

This is fairly obvious but many supers can give you breathing room to engage enemies. However some may do so in ways that aren't immediately obvious. For example, concussive blast isn't generally seen as a crowd control spell, but it knocks back and staggers enemies. If you stand between two enemies can you easily knock them far enough apart that you will have a good amount of time to engage one of them while the other recovers and travels back to you.

Multiple enemies

It may not be obvious but one of the ways you can block an enemy is with another enemy. If two enemies are side by side instead of dashing directly into them, consider dashing to their flank so one is behind the other. If you have strong enough weapons you can often guard break and even combo the front enemy while the one behind has to path around them. With some practice you can rotate around one enemy while engaging another to keep the second one unable to engage you.

Before we begin, let me note that the information and structure herein this is just how I personally conceptualize my builds. There are always exceptions, and experimentation is part of the fun. This is an art, not a science.

Two things impact your build: Which weapons you bring, and which upgrades you select at the end of each room.

This section will mostly be about what you bring, whereas the next section will mostly be about what you select during the run. But since the two are closely related, there will be a bit of overlap.

There are a total of 20 rewards in each run, separated into three tiers. Tier I is the first 6 rooms, Tier 2 is the first Aether Horror fight plus the next 6 rooms, and Tier 3 is the Honor guard fight plus the next 6 rooms. The final Aether Horror fight isn't really part of any tier since there is no reward.

Some rewards are capped by tier. For example you can never have more than 2 super upgrades in Tier 1, and never more than 4 in Tier 2. This doesn't mean you can't be offered super upgrades more times than this, just that once you hit your cap, the game stops offering more.

Not all supers are created equal, some gain far more value out of upgrades than others. For example, Statsis Strike is a good super, but it's utility lies in it's ability to crowd control and upgrades do not improve that. Conversely, Soul Burn at level 1 can't even kill a single Spellweaver on it's own, but Level IV can kill two of them in one use while recharging 25% faster. As such, there is considerably more value in upgrading Soul Burn than there is in upgrading Stasis Strike.

Since rewards are limited, we want to maximize potential value. For example, if we bring two weapons that have supers we don't really want to upgrade, we can expect a lot of rooms where super upgrades will be offered and that offering is essentially a wasted opportunity to get something useful. On the other hand if we bring a weapon worth upgrading and we happen to get offered 2 super upgrades early into Tier I, we can take them and remove super upgrades from the pool for the rest of the tier.

There's also some important damage breakpoints to consider. The magic number to remember is 35.

Knights have 35 health, so if you want to kill them in a single combo, that's the amount of health damage to hit. You probably won't have this at the start until you have your weapons upgraded, but you do want to consider how easily you can get there. For example Arming Sword + Keen Edge once you have them upgraded enough to provide full combo is 5 combo at 6 damage each, meaning you either need +1 damage to the Arming Sword or +1 combo to get there. On the other hand, dual daggers has 6 combo at 6 damage each which gets us there from the start.

Captains and Empowered Knights have 70 HP, twice as much. This means the 35 damage becomes the breakpoint to be able to 2 combo them, so it remains highly relevant.

Empowered Captains have 105 Health, 3 times as much. Additionally, the Aether Horror on nightmare has 100 HP per phase, so if you can one combo Empowered Captains you can one combo each phase. Because of this, 105 damage in your full combo is generally your 'soft cap' on damage, because beyond this nothing can survive a full combo from you anyway.

Outside of Nightmare, the Aether horror only has 50 HP per phase, which actually makes him fairly easy to one combo. I would recommend trying for 70 damage though, so you can one combo Empowered Knights and Captains.

Let's say we're going with the Arming Sword and Keen Edge. That starts us at 5 combo at 6 damage per hit. We know we can get up to 3 shards of guile per run, so our ending combo will likely be 8. How we can ensure we get all 3 is a subject for the next section. But anyway, let's see what we need to hit our goal:

Two 25% health damage boosts = 72 damage
One 25% heath damage boost + Heartseeker or Enkindled = 70 or 74 damage
One 25% heath damage boost + 1 Shard of Wraith = 70 damage

And obviously there's other, ways too, this just gives us an idea. We're basically going to need 2 upgrades to get there, and one of them is really going to need to be a 25% damage boost. The only consistent one is Weighted. Pristine could work, too, but one mistake and we lose it.

Now what if we swap out the Arming Sword for the High Arcanist's Blade? Well, our combo and base damage remains the same, but now we have Enkindled adding 14 damage to the end of our combo. That brings us to 62 damage. So, we really just need 1 bonus to our damage, and we're there. Even a single shard of wraith gets us there. We are no longer reliant on finding Weighted, which means we will hit our goal far more consistently. We don't even really need to rely on trait slots at all, since a single shard of wraith does it.

This means we can be a bit more aggressive in filling slots, which is nice since upgrading shardstorm has a lot of value. And Sharstorm is a better super overall, and we're still using a dual light weapon build, so we don't suffer much defensively beyond the loss of Bulwark. As such we can conclude that the High Arcanist Blade is a superior choice. The only thing we are losing is 1 base guard damage and the guarded trait but we're gaining a far superior trait in Enkindled which gets us halfway to our damage goal by itself.

Now let's look at Heartsplitter + Keen Edge. 8 base damage and 7 combo is 56 damage. Then factor in weighted and 56 x 1.25 is 70. Plus heartseeker is 80. We're already there, we don't even need anything except the combo. What happens if we swap out the Keen Edge for the Ritual Dagger? Now our max combo goes down to 6, bringing us to 48 damage, x 1.25 = 60, plus Heartseeker = 70.

So, we know we only need an offhand with 2 combo to hit our goal. So swapping Keen Edge for something like Ritual Dagger still gets us to our goal but gives us more utility and a stronger super. By considering our goals from the start, we can better optimize our loadout.

So another way to look at it is how many upgrades does each weapon need? The Arming Sword needs 2, and one of them has to be a 25% bonus. The High Arcanist Blade only needs 1. And Heartsplitter doesn't need any.

Again, I want to emphasize that damage breakpoints are not the end all be all, but this is a good starting point.There's tons of different ways to build, like Mistcutter guard break builds that don't care how many combos it takes to kill because the enemy is going to be chain stunned, or builds that lean more into supers.

So, to sum it all up a good build should have at least 1 strong super that gains a lot of value, and you want to try to optimize so that you can hit that 70 damage breakpoint as easily as possible. Eventually, you can start doing these same calculations with the 105 damage breakpoint but I wouldn't bother considering this until you're on nightmare difficulty. Even then, hitting that usually requires either a heavy or two-handed weapon, or 1 HP builds that stack Pristine/Tenacious, so it's not something each build can do, or needs to do, really.

Trait selection is equally, if not more important, than which weapons you pick. With a few exceptions, every trait is viable in some situations. The important thing to remember is that what you are offered is random, and as such you will only rarely get the very best traits. Good selection isn't just about knowing which traits are the best overall, but rather what you best option is for the situation.

One thing we almost always want to do is ensure we get 3 shards of guile, plus whatever we need to hit our damage breakpoints goal. Generally we'd also like to upgrade one of our supers to IV.

So, how do we ensure we get all 3 shards of guile? The answer is to fill all our slots and end rooms at full health to maximize our chances. This doesn't guarantee it but it increases the odds considerably.

Here are the options for what rewards we can get:

1. Aether Shard: This can always spawn
2. Shard of Vitality (Health): If you are full health, this cannot spawn.
3. Shard of Resolve: If you have 10 Heath, this cannot spawn.
4. Super Upgrade Crystal: Limit of 2 per tier. Also must have an empty slot in a weapon that doesn't already have 3 super upgrades installed.
5. Trait Crystal: Must have an empty slot in one of your weapons
6: Shard of Guile: Limit 1 per tier
7: Shard of ferocity: Limit 1 per tier
8: Shard of Wraith: Cannot spawn if max health is 1
9: Shard of Courage: Cannot spawn if max health is 1
10: Shard of Foresight: Cannot spawn if max health is 1

Trait shards are unique in that they are the only reward that can be offered more than once in the same room, as long as it's two separate traits. This makes traits essentially 3 times as likely to spawn because you're rolling that chance per slot, not per room. Or to put it another way, if you roll for a Shard of Ferocity on your 1st slot, it can't roll another in your second or third slot. But if you roll a trait in your first slot, you can still roll another trait in your second slot, and potentially even a third in your last slot.

As a result of this, once you fill all your trait slots, the reward pool shifts dramatically. Traits and super upgrades both are removed from the reward pool, making other options far more likely.

Additionally, by ending rooms at full hit points (hopefully) shards of vitality can be removed from the pool. This means if we end a room with full HP and all traits occupied our options are Aether, Resolve, Guile, Ferocity, and the 3 -1 health shards. This is 7 options, and we'll always get 3 unique options. Because Ferocity Shards are also limited at 1 per tier, if we get unlucky and get those before we get Guile, we can remove those from a options as well, making it 3 out of 6 options. I don't have data on what the odds of each option spawning are, but assuming it's equal it's a 50/50 at that point.

The only way to do better than this is to block Shard of Wraith, Courage, and Foresight from spawning by dropping to 1 HP. This can guarantee Shards of Guile spawn if you also hit the cap on shards of ferocity, because at that point there's only 3 valid options. That said, it is absolutely not worth doing this, you are far more likely to succeed with 5-6 HP and less combo than 1 HP and full combo. (Full Disclosure: This is how I play, but I do it specifically to make things more challenging)

Due to this, you should be considering how many empty slots you have left when deciding to fill a slot with a mediocre option or not. If it's getting late into Tier 2 and you still have a lot of slots open it's a good idea to start filling to prepare yourself for the transition to full slots.

Let's say we're going with a dual dagger build. The Keenblade has 4 empty slots, and the Ritual Dagger has 5. So we'll need 9 trait + super upgrade slots to fill our slots. We probably want the Ritual Dagger to have Soul Burn IV, so we should plan on 6 traits, 4 on the Keenedge, 2 on the Ritual Dagger and 3 upgrades.

I use the term 'progression' to refer to choices that move us closer to this goal. For example, taking a shard of ferocity gets us closer to removing them from the pool entirely, so that is a progression decision. Taking a shard of wraith is not a progression decision because it does not get us closer to this goal. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad decision, but we need to keep track of this.

That's 9 of the 20 accounted for. And obviously we want 3 shards of guile, so that's 12. We also want to account for the shards of ferocity so we can take them to remove them from the pool and make shards of guile more likely to spawn, so that's 15. That means I need to make a progression choice 15 out of 20 rooms. But of course this gets us there right at the end, and rooms where we take healing aren't progression rooms. So we might want a bit of leeway on this.

Because of this, I want to pace myself as I go through and try not to take too many 'non-progression' options too soon into a run. There will definitely be rooms where non-progression is the right call, often because you got really bad traits, or because something like a shard of Ferocity is needed to hit a breakpoint. But if I notice I had to take a lot of non-progression options early, I will take mediocre traits, sometimes even useless traits just to fill slots so I can make sure I don't end up at the end of the run with empty slots.

Conversely, if I've done well in my progression I might hold out on filling the last slot on my main weapon in the hopes that I can get a good trait.

Alternating Strikes: Alternating Attacks with your other Weapon causes this weapon to deal +50% Guard Damage

This trait is extremely potent for any build other than two-handers and the spellsword's charm. Most augments provide only a 25% bonus, this provides a 50% bonus at the 'cost' of having to alternate attacks. This is trivially easy to do, simply spam attacks after charging in and before/between enemy combos and get a massive 50% guard damage bonus. This augment can be placed on either your primary or secondary. Your primary likely does more base guard damage so it's better there, but slots on your primary are also generally tighter, so putting it on your secondary is fine. This augment can appear twice, and putting it on both is also viable.

Arcane: Super Charge Gain for both weapons is increased by 2x.

Arcane is a rare but amazing trait. Double super charge for both weapons is incredibly potent, regardless of the type of build you are running. Unless another rare super powerful trait spawns or you really can't afford the slot, this should be an instant pickup. Note that this is a different trait from Arcane Focus, the unique trait of the Spellsword's Charm that does the same thing. This means it can stack with Arcane Focus. It is also possible to receive this augment twice and stack it on each weapon, but I've had that happen exactly once in 300 hours of playtime.

Balanced: Critical Strike Combos remain active for 20% longer

I personally don't find this trait to be all that useful, usually as I can consistently complete difficult combos. However this generally means using positioning and CC so I can combo uninterrupted. If you're trying to combo with one weapon while blocking with another then this can be useful, but... I'd generally avoid trying that. Still, we can't always count on ideal circumstances and this can be useful. I also found it a bit more useful while I was practicing comboing with my non-dominant hand, so for newer players who can't consistently hit high combo numbers it can be good.

Bloodthirsty: Dealing Health Damage to Enemies grants this Weapon x2 Super Charge

If the weapon you are using to combo has a good super and you can afford the slot, this is one of the better traits for recharging your super. Health damage recharges supers fairly quickly, so doubling that results in a lot of extra charge. You can often get it so a single complete combo completely recharges short cooldown supers. While it's better on the hand you'll be comboing with, you can always sneak in some attacks with your off-hand to recharge your super, if you have extra damage and can secure the kill anyway.

Chrono-Locked: Finishing a Combo with this Weapon inflicts Stasis (I)

This is a rare trait, and rightly so, given how powerful it is. Applying a 7 second crowd control automatically after a combo is amazing. Even more so given that enemies are staggered after coming out of stasis, which allows you to deal additional guard damage to them, making it possible to just chain crowd control. Unless you really can't afford the slot or something else very, very good spawns this should be picked up.

Enkindled: Finishing a Combo with this Weapon inflicts Soul Burn (I) upon the enemy

Another rare and strong trait. Soul Burn I inflicts 14 damage over 7 seconds. This is quite a bit of additional damage even with the caveat of it being over time. It also activates Flame-Starved which can be quite good in certain builds. Another instant pickup, assuming you have the slot and nothing else rare and amazing is in the other two offerings.

Flame-Starved: Attacking enemies affected by Soul Burn with this Weapon deals +50% Health & Guard Damage

A 50% bonus that applies to both guard and health damage is totally bonkers. The downside is you need a certain build to take advantage of it. If you don't have a super capable of applying Soul-burn then I don't recommend you take this hoping you'll get Enkindled or Sparklight because the odds of that are fairly low. But if you already have one of those traits or a super that can apply Soul-burn then by all means, go for it. Remember that concussive blast IV and Empowered Strike IV both apply Soul-burn.

Fleet: Slaying an enemy with this Weapon restores 3 Dash Charges

I value mobility highly, but the most powerful use of mobility for me is the Aether horror fight, and Fleet doesn't really help here. It's useful for the summon phase and that's about it. That said, mobility is still great for getting to the Aether Horror, and if you have a lot of dash impact damage you can use this trait to chain kills. As such, I'd say it really depends on your build. I tend to consider this a middle of the road trait. I'd generally not be sad to see it but there are many other things I'd prioritize over it, depending on my build.

Frenzied: +2 Combo Limit

This really comes down to your build and how comfortable you are with higher combo ratings. Generally a very strong trait though, as 2 extra combo is going to result in a considerable combo damage increase, provided you can land your combos consistently. If you can't, then it may be better to focus in increasing damage per hit instead. You rarely get the luxury of choosing exactly what you want, though, so it's hard to pass this up when offered.

Guarded: Blocking with this weapon deals +25% Guard Damage

Guarded is a middle of the road trait. We're going to be blocking, and more damage when blocking is of course a good thing. But, we'd generally prefer more offensive options that prevent the enemy from getting to attack us in the first place. If I have a lot of space on my off-hand I'll usually throw it on there. I have put it on my main hand if it's fairly late in the run and I don't expect I'll fill all my slots otherwise.

HeartSeeker: Finishing a Combo with this Weapon deals +10 Health Damage.

Health damage increasing traits are fairly rare. This is a solid one. The only downside is you either complete the combo and get all the damage, or you don't and get nothing. This can be annoying when engaging multiple enemies if your combo is interrupted. Still, it's powerful enough to be a fairly high priority pickup and the lower your combo is the stronger this is.

Honed : This Weapon gains +4 Guard Damage

Honed is a great trait. Base damage increases are very potent because they make your percentage based increases better. So that +4 guard damage becomes +5 with a 25% bonus trait or +6 with a 50% bonus trait. Compared to shards of courage you do lose a slot, but shards of courage cost a point of health and this doesn't. So if you come out ahead here or not really depends on how tight you are on trait space. If I can afford it, I almost always take this when it appears.

Hungering: This weapon gains twice as much as Super Charge whenever an enemy is slain

Hungering is a solid super recharge trait, with the unique property that it's equally useful on either your main hand or off-hand, because it doesn't matter which weapon dealt the killing blow. So it's one of the few ways you can increase the super charge of your off-hand weapon without actually attacking with it. As such, I usually stick it on my off-hand, if I have the space. Also very good on any weapon with Soul-burn, at level IV you can get two activations of soulburn and if you use them to kill two enemies with it you're getting x4 the charge back for 1 activation.

Juggernaut: -25% Dash Recovery Speed, +50% Dash Impact

I personally avoid this one in most cases. I value mobility far more than I value dash impact. This is because dash impact, ultimately, is just guard damage and I can increase my guard damage in many different ways. Improving your mobility, on the other hand, is much more difficult. As such, trading guard damage for mobility is, in my opinion, generally a bad trade. A bit less dash impact just means an extra swing or block, whereas running out of dash charges very often means you take damage.

Kinetic Siphon: Dealing Guard Damage to Enemies with this Weapon grants it x2 Super Charge

On one hand, guard damage doesn't generate a lot of super charge. On the other, it's pretty easy to spam attacks against enemies with either weapon and we're going to be doing that anyway. So, it's easy to take advantage of, but the return is lesser. That makes it a fairly middle of the road pick for me.

Lethal Elegance: Successive Critical Strikes with this Weapon deal +1 Health Damage, Stacking

This is THE damage trait, especially so with light weapons that have high combo, but even at only 4 combo we're breaking even with Heartseeker, except we get part of the bonus damage even if we fail to complete the combo, so really, we're ahead. As such, this is almost always taken when it appears.

Nimble: +35% Dash Recovery Speed

A very powerful trait in experienced hands. I value mobility and Nimble is a simple mobility improvement trait with no strings attached. Generally I'm taking Nimble when it appears unless one of the other two options is a rare trait or I have a build where I have 5-6 dash charges and don't need more mobility. Note that it can appear twice and does stack on two different weapons.

Pristine: While at full Health this Weapon deals +25% Health and Guard Damage

A 25% health and damage bonus is great, the caveat of losing it if you take damage is not. It's a bit of a 'win more' trait in that it rewards you when you aren't taking damage in the first place. That said, dealing more damage so you can more quickly kill enemies is one of the best ways to avoid damage in the first place. As such, it's highly dependent on your own skill and playstyle.

Resonant: Blocking with this Weapon grants it x2 Super Charge

Resonant has the same problem as Kinetic Siphon where guard damage doesn't really generate much super recharge, and then on top of that add the fact that this only applies to blocks and you have a pretty bad trait. I'd really only take this as filler if I want to stop traits and super charges from spawning, or it's getting late in the run and I don't expect my slots to fill anyway.

Serrated: This weapon gains +2 Health Damage

A very strong trait. When the average light weapon does 6 health damage, a +2 increase is very significant. This matches Heartseeker at 5 combo, but provides the damage on each hit instead of only if you complete the combo. A very strong trait, I'll usually pick this up if at all possible.

Sparklight: Attacks with this Weapon have a chance to inflict Soul Burn (I)

This is an interesting one. On one hand, a random proc to deal 14 damage is pretty good, especially since you can just throw it on your off-hand and it'll trigger during your attack spam. On the other hand, it's completely random and can be a liability if you're trying to manipulate enemy HP to prevent an empower. I'm fairly comfortable dealing with empowered enemies and blocking empowered knight combos but a lot of players are not which makes this a significant potential liability. Then there's the potential to enable Flame-Starved, which is yet another consideration. So all in all, this is really up to the individual Runeknight if this is worth the risk or not. I personally like it, but it's not for everyone.

Stalwart: +2 Maximum Health Crystals

More health is almost always a good thing. I generally take this unless I'm tight on spots or the run has given me a lot of shards of resolve already. I feel +2 health on your off-hand is usually worth the slot.

Staggering: Attacks with this Weapon deal +25% Guard Damage

An easy and straightforward guard damage increase. Good trait, and can be put on either weapon. I rarely can't find a place for this, outside of situations where I'm tight on slots.

Tenacious: While at 1 (or fewer) Health Crystals, this Weapon deals +25% Health & Guard Damage.

While the bonus is nice, the caveat of having to be at 1 HP is not. I consider the use case to be too narrow to take this most of the time. Unless you're intentionally reducing your HP to 1, which you should only do for the challenge.

Unyielding: You can now Block Attacks that normally must be Dodged.

This is the only trait I would say is worse than an empty slot. A big part of progressing through Nightmare is memorizing enemy patterns so you aren't so much reacting to each individual attack but rather reading the first few, recognizing the pattern and then going off muscle memory. Unyielding messes this up entirely by changing all the patterns that involve dodges, and because unyielding is such a rare trait you don't get to practice on them all that often.

Not only this, but it's dubious if having to block instead of dodging is even an advantage. There is one combo from knights that chains dodging and that is slow enough to be fairly easy to dodge. Beyond that it's almost always a single dodge that's fairly easy to execute. Dodging lets you counter attack with your weapons while you dodge, whereas blocking forces you to use the weapon to block.

As such, I think this is a legitimately bad trait that is counterproductive. I avoid it if at all possible. That said, it is still preference. Maybe you have a lot of trouble with dodges but find blocking to be easier.

Weighted: Big Swings with this weapon deal +25% Health & Guard Damage

One of the best martial traits, a 25% bonus to both guard and health damage for big swings is a huge deal. Almost all attacks should be 'big swings' because this term more refers to a clean hit as opposed to wiggling, it doesn't mean you actually need to make a huge arc. This is usually my number one trait I hope to see. Immediate pickup almost always.

Void Scarred: Breaking an enemy out of Stasis with this Weapon deals 5 Health Damage, bypassing their Guard

Even if you are using a build with supers capable of stasis, 5 damage is so little it's often just not going to make a difference. Sometimes it can, though, so it's certainly not a useless trait, but I generally consider it a lower priority.

Void Touched: Breaking an enemy out of Stasis with this Weapon inflicts +100% Guard Damage

The main purpose of this augment is to be able to chain a stasis into a guard break. You can often do that anyway if your weapons do enough guard damage. If they don't, this can help with that but there's a very narrow use case here where your guard damage needs to be low enough that you can't already chain a stasis into a guard break while also being high enough that the 100% bonus makes the difference. However, the Aether horror is an exception, and an important once since it's the biggest challenge in the game. It has enough guard that the additional guard will be meaningful.

There's another niche use for this, which is with a weapon that has Chrono-locked. If you combo an empowered enemy and deal enough damage for them to empower, but then Chrono-locked stuns them they cannot empower until after the stasis wears off and they recover from the stagger. This means with very high guard damage you can chain them into another guard break and prevent them from empowering entirely. This does take a lot of guard damage and this trait is one of the ways to get there.

Supers are all tied to weapons and as such when discussing them we need to also discuss how well they function with the weapon they are attached to. Additionally we need to consider if the super is situational or able to be used offensively, and how long the recharge is and thus if we can count on it being up regularly.

Super recharges are all seperated into three catagories: Short, Medium and Long. However, some supers have upgrades that reduce their cooldown, meaning that in effect not all supers neatly fit into the three categories. For example, Empowered Strike and Concussive Blast are short cooldown supers with a 50% recharge bonus available in their upgrades, making them even shorter than short.

Additionally, certain supers have the ability to partly recharge themselves via their effects. For example, if I use stasis strike to stun one enemy so I can focus on another, I can recharge stasis strike while that enemy is stunned. However if I activate Bulwark I cannot recharge Bulwark until after the effect expires.

This is because the game doesn't allow you to recharge supers while they are considered 'active.' However, 'active' doesn't necessarily mean the super effect is ongoing. On many weapons, the 'active' state is the time between when you press the button to activate the super and the when you actually release it. So for stasis strike, once you press the super button, it is now 'active' and as soon as you hit an enemy and stasis them, the active phase ends and you can regain super. But with Bulwark the active state begins immediately when you press the button and ends when the effect does. Some supers have no active state at all, for example Concussive Blast. Concussive Blast fires as soon as you press the super button, so it's never 'active.'

You can this on it this way: Imagine a theoretical ability with a 20 second duration and 30 second cooldown. If the cooldown begins the moment the ability is active, then it will be active during 20 of the 30 seconds of the cooldown. Thus the update is 2/3rd of the time, 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. But if the same ability didn't begin the cooldown until after the effect ended, the uptime is greatly reduced. It's now 20 seconds on, 30 seconds off, which is much less. While this analogy isn't perfect because recharge in UYF is not time based, it's the same general idea.

Most magical builds take advantage of supers that can 'recharge themselves' to maximize uptime. As such, supers that can't do that are generally ill-suited for magical builds and are more utility supers.

Here are the supers and their recharge rates, including available reductions:

Short (-50%): Empowered Strike, Concussive Blast
Short: Stasis Strike, Titan's Strength, Vicious Strike
Medium (-25%): Soul Burn
Medium: Shardstorm
Long: Bulwark, Void Trap

Supers that are present on multiple weapons will have their own section, to prevent having to duplicate information in multiple places. Supers present on only a single weapon will be discussed within the entry on that weapon.

Bulwark
Available On: Arming Sword, Captain's Warhammer
Cooldown: Long

Bulwark I: Gain 2 armor for 20 seconds. When the last armor is used, knock back and stagger the attacker.

Bulwark II: Blocking with this weapon while Bulwark is active deals 25% increased guard damage

Bulwark III: Increases armor charges to 4 and duration to 25 seconds.

Bulwark IV: Blocking with this weapon while Bulwark is active deals 75% increased guard damage

Bulwark allows Runeknights to experiment with trying to block combos while having a fail-safe to prevent damage if they make a mistake. This makes it uniquely suited for learning difficult enemy attack patterns, especially empowered knight combos. When Bulwark uses up it's free hits, it will knock enemies back, stunning them briefly. This means if you fail to block an empowered combo, the combo will be interrupted. So, it's a risk free way to train on difficult combos.

The main downside to Bulwark is it's massive cooldown. Not only is it a long cooldown special, but Bulwark cannot earn super charge in any way while active. This is quite bad because you can't take advantage of the super to recharge the super like you can with a lot of other supers.

As they say, the best defense is a good offense, and Bulwark can also be used to allow a Runeknight to finish off an enemy or rush down spellweavers in situations where this would normally be too dangerous. However, this is more like a consolation if anything, because many other supers get you through those situations far more effectively and with a far shorter cooldown, so they'll be available more often.

Bulwark IV's 75% increased guard damage on blocks is absolutely massive, especially when you consider the Arming Sword comes with Guarded already. The issue here is the cost. 3 slots for this effect is a big ask, especially for a super that will be available so little due to it's massive cooldown and recharge mechanics. Sure, you can guard break enemies after only a few blocks but then you aren't recharging Bulwark while you do it. You also have to consider on what weapon and what build would you want to invest 3 super upgrades into Bulwark? That's generally something we want to do either on a utility off-hand or the super we're using as our primary in a magical build. Bulwark is very ill suited for magic builds and you'd just be way better off spending those slots on upgrades to increase guard and health damage. About the only time you'd consider this is if you are using the Arming Sword as your off-hand, which is not really a traditional build but it's terrible, either.

Bulwark II is rather unimpressive, which makes the investment to reach Bulwark III and double the charges far less exciting. It's a more reasonable cost for a better updside than Bulwark IV in my opinion but I'd still generally pass unless I was just looking to fill slots.

So overall, Bulwark is great for learning attack patterns and has some utility for diving enemies, but it's long cooldown coupled with the inability to recharge really limits it's potential. Even using it offensively to dive the long cooldown means it can get less done than most other supers.

Stasis Strike
Cooldown: Short
Available on: Rokai Keenblade, Duelist's Edge

Stasis Strike I: Inflict Stasis on the next attack, knocking back and trapping an enemy for 7 seconds. Breaking stasis deals an additional 20 guard damage.

Stasis Strike II: Breaking Stasis deals an additional 50 guard damage

Stasis Strike III: Breaking Stasis deals an additional 75 guard damage

Stasis Strike IV: Breaking Stasis deals an additional 100 guard damage

Stasis strike is a good utility super. Being able to remove an enemy from the fight is a huge advantage that makes engaging multiple enemies far more manageable. Because it's on a short cooldown it'll often be up when you need it. While the listed duration is 7 seconds, enemies do have a recovery time after stasis breaks of about 1-2 seconds.

It's upgrades are a bit lackluster, which is a double-edged sword. On one hand this means we don't have to worry about super upgrades, it performs just fine at level 1. On the other hand, you're going to get offered super upgrades regardless, and if you have two supers that don't need them you'll never be picking those upgrades and removing upgrades from your reward pool.

If the weapon you have the super on is being used as an off-hand utility weapon then taking the upgrades is still fine, if a bit unexciting. On the other hand if you're using it as your primary weapon it's better to funnel the upgrades to your off-hand.

You might be wondering if we could use Stasis Strike as a super in a magical build to guard break? Well, theoretically. Certainly having 100 guard damage bonus means you'll be able to stasis into a guard break fairly consistently, and the short cooldown means you can get a lot of the cooldown back afterward.

The problem is the knockback. When you hit an enemy with stasis strike, you will knock them back. This is good when you are using the ability as crowd control as it lets you engage the other enemies without accidentally hitting the stunned enemy and breaking it. It also makes the effective time you are removing the enemy from combat longer as they'll need to walk back to you to re-engage.

But if you plan to stasis strike and then attack the enemy you just put into stasis, this is really bad, because that enemy is now behind the enemies you are engaging. This means charging into that enemy is going to be putting yourself into a flank. In some cases you could circle all the way around, but this costs additional dashes and might activate enemies further into the room. Probably the most effective way is to try to get to the side of the enemy, knocking them to the side and then trying to finish them while they are somewhat separated, similar to what you'd do with concussive blast. The problem is, it's much less effective here. Concussive blast knocks back all nearby enemies, so if you are between two enemies you are doubling the distance you create, whereas here you are only knocking one enemy back. Also the terrain isn't always going to be such that this is possible.

Therefore, I really don't recommend trying this. I've always felt it's too clunky to be consistent and we need it to be consistent to build around it. When used simply for crowd control the super performs very well, so no need to reinvent the wheel here.

Soul Burn:
Recharge: Medium
Available on: Ritual Dagger, Vestal's Wrath

Soulburn I: Fire a homing projectile, dealing 2 damage on impact plus an additional 2 damage per second for 7 seconds. (16 damage total)

Soulburn II: Soul Burn charges 25% faster. Impact damage increases to 7 (21 damage total).

Soulburn III: Duration increases to 14 seconds. (35 damage total)

Soulburn IV: Increases number of projectiles to 2.

Soulburn is a great super, the only one in the game that gives a powerful and consistent ranged attack, though it does require investment in the form of super upgrades.

At level I, Soulburn only does enough damage to kill husks.

At level II, the damage becomes high enough to kill spell-weavers in a single activation. As such you generally want it to be at least II by Tier II, because killing spell-weaver easily is one of the best uses of Soul-burn.

At level III, the damage becomes enough to Knights, provided you can kite them for the full 14 seconds. Also, empowered knights enrage when they have 35 health or less remaining, so at level III you can ensure Soul Burn will always kill an enraging empowered knight.

At level IV, you get two projectiles. This is incredibly strong in Tier II when you still fight a lot of knights and spell weavers. It does fall off a bit in Tier 3 where you fight more empowered enemies but even there 35 damage is a big chunk of their health, and many rooms will still mix in normal knights and spell-weavers that you can pick off to make things much easier.

One tricky part about soulburn is that it chooses which target to lock onto based on where your head is looking, but the angle of the projectile is based on how you swing your arm. Use your dash indicator as a kind of 'crosshair' to aim at the target, and then swing your arm to curve away from other enemies that might intercept the projectile. There is a fair bit of leeway in aiming as well, so if you want to hit an enemy on the far left or right side of a pack, just aim a bit to the side and it'll target the nearest enemy.

At level IV, soulburn allows you to fire twice, with each attack happening after you swing the blade. Hitting an enemy already inflicted with soulburn will deal the impact damage again and then reset the 14 second dot, it will not apply the dot twice. You can activate soulburn, swing once, then 'hold' the charge to let it tick before swinging again. Technically, you can still block while doing this but in reality it is likely to register the rapid movement of blocking as a swing. One way to ensure you don't accidentally discharge the second projectile is to dismiss the Ritual Dagger until you want to release it. This comes with the obvious downside of not being able to attack or block with it, but combining this technique with kiting can be effective, as it's capable of bringing an empowered knight from full to dead if you can kite it for the full duration twice (28 seconds).

However, be aware that you cannot generate super charge while soulburn is consider 'active', which is after you activate it but before you fire the projectile(s). Once the projectile is launched (the second projectile in the case of level IV) it can gain charge again, so make sure you fire the second projectile before the first enemy dies, and if you will kill an enemy on impact with a charge make sure you kill them with the second charge. Otherwise, when the enemy dies Soulburn won't gain charge from the kill.

Soul-burn is also an activator of the Flame-Starved attribute. This comes already packaged on the Ritual Dagger, and provides a huge 50% guard and health bonus against enemies inflicted with soul burn. As such, this super can really help even against high hp enemies like empowered guardsmen. You can activate it before comboing with a flame starved weapon and deal massive damage, usually enough to one cycle almost anything. This on demand burst can be quite potent.

Shardstorm
Cooldown: Medium
Available on: High Arcanist's Blade, Gemini Esper

Shardstorm I: Creates a bubble that does 40 guard damage per second for 5 seconds.

Shardstorm II: Increases duration to 10 seconds.

Shardstorm III: Increases guard damage to 60 per second

Shardstorm IV: Adds 3 health damage per second

Shardstorm is a very potent but often misunderstood super. The first time I used it, I was of the impression that it was fairly useless. Thankfully in doing research and testing for this guide, I discovered it is actually an extremely potent super, when used correctly.

Shardstorm is technically a ranged attack. It will always travel in the direction you are looking when you fire it, not in the direction you swing your weapon. It will continue traveling straight in that direction until it either encounters an enemy, or a wall. If it hits an enemy it will pause in it's path until no enemies are inside it, and then continue until it again hits a wall or enemy. If it hits a wall, it dissipates immediately. However, there is some leeway in that the central part of the 'bubble' must make contact with the wall, the edges to a certain degree can impact walls.

Enemies inside will constantly take heavy guard damage, however this damage triggers 'wiggle protection' like other types of guard damage. This means enemies will pause and take almost no damage for a time until they drop the protection again. This does not apply to the health damage at level IV wiggle protection only applies to guard damage, not health damage.

Shardstorm cannot guard break. If it reduces an enemy to 0 guard, they will be guard broken the next time you deal guard damage to them with your weapon.

The health damage from Shardstorm IV cannot damage guard broken enemies, but it can damage enemies with 0 guard that aren't guard broken. If those enemies are in melee with you, they'll attack you which forces you to block which will then immediately guard break them and make them immune to the health damage. The health damage bypasses effects that grant guard damage immunity, such as empowering animations on empowered knights and guardsmen.

Shardstorm does not break stasis, meaning you can stasis an enemy and then shardstorm them to deal the health damage. However even if you get the full 7 seconds out of it it's just 21 damage at the cost of both of your supers, which is a bit underwhelming. It can be useful occasionally, especially to stop an empower but it isn't always the best way to deal damage. If you can use void trap to potentially get multiple enemies the value increases, but this is fairly tricky because of the distance between traps. If your not careful trying to land the shardstorm between two trapped enemies will just result on it moving past both of them.

It's important to note that the damage numbers on the super are more theoretical than realistic. You won't keep enemies inside for the full duration generally unless they're in melee with you, and if they are in melee with you, you'll likely guard break them extremely quickly. It's really more about decreasing the number of ticks to guard break and increasing the impact on secondary targets that only take 1-2 ticks before moving out of the effect. But 1 to 2 ticks is really all you need, 2 ticks at level III is 120 guard damage, afterall.

The best way to use shardstorm is usually on enemies in melee with you to quickly strip guard and crowd control the enemies behind them. While being in melee the enemy will generally be locked onto you and usually have their guard stripped away in seconds. Enemies behind will approach and take heavy guard damage which you can often follow up on after killing or at least staggering the enemy you were in melee with. It can also force those other enemies into the guard damage immunity wiggle protection which will make them stop moving, giving you more time to focus on your immediate enemy. Once you hit IV, the health damage can often soften up approaching enemies, letting you single combo them when you normally couldn't.

You want to ensure an enemy is stuck inside the effect so it doesn't travel into a wall and dissipate. If using against a guardsmen who knocks you back be sure to charge right back in before it can move out of the effect.

Be aware that shardstorm can create a lot of 'visual noise' which can make it more difficult to see block indicators. Enemies will occasionally attack while inside the effect which can catch you off guard if you aren't ready for it. I've noticed this behavior especially with guardsmen who have the reach to sometimes attack you while still behind another enemy.

Shardstorm destroys fireballs, however in my experience, it is too finicky to rely on. Spellweavers generate fireballs some distance in front of them and I've seen ones inside the effect still successful launch fireballs because they appeared in front of the area of effect. Sometimes fireballs can skirt the edges as well, because soulweaver fireballs often will 'flank' out to the side before homing back in on you.

It's possible to use shardstorm to snipe spellweavers at level IV, but this is highly inconsistent. Spellweavers are completely unpredictable in their movement. Sometimes they'll stand there and let shardstorm kill them. Other times they'll somersault around and dodge it entirely. The more spellweavers their are and the tighter the quarters the more likely it is to work, but you generally shouldn't rely on it.

In Summary: Use shardstorm as crowd control and guard damage of enemies in front of you in melee and the approaching enemies behind that enemy. At IV, you can additionally use it to soften up enemies to finish them off or just reduce hp enough to single combo them. This is particularly effective on empowered knights because you can damage them during their empowering animation. If you try to use Shardstorm like Soul Burn against distant enemies expect it not to work most of the time.

Concussive Blast
Cooldown: Short
Available on: Knight-Bloodied Crest, Gemini Stranded

Concussive Blast I: Deal 50 guard damage in an AoE, knockback and stagger enemies

Concussive Blast II: Deal an additional 5 health damage

Concussive Blast III: Charges 50% faster

Concussive Blast IV: Inflict Soul Burn I (14 damage over 7 seconds)

Concussive blast is a very powerful super, with different levels of utility depending on how many upgrades you invest.

At 1st level, concussive blast does a respectable amount of guard damage while pushing enemies back, staggering them, and destroying fireballs. This is useful for interrupting and isolating enemies. Since it also deals guard damage you can concussive blast your target, separating them from their allies and then charge in and guard break them while staggered. You then have a window to combo your target while the other enemies are still recovering.

At 2nd level, concussive does 5 health damage. This isn't a ton, but it's AoE and can be useful for finishing off weakened enemies.

At 3rd level, the already short cooldown becomes even shorter. This really enables you to spam the ability, especially if you invest in some recharge talents.

And finally, at level IV concussive blast really kicks up a notch. Adding 14 damage on top of the 5 base gives you 19 AoE damage, which is massive. Since this applies Soul Burn, if you have a weapon to leverage that with Flame Starved you can really go nuts, enabling the combo on a very short cooldown which then allows you to deal massive health damage to recharge it.

On the KBC, Concussive Blast is generally a utility super, used to get you out of a tight spot. It's quite good at that, easily breaking up enemies and giving you breathing room, with a nice short cooldown. It benefits greatly from upgrades as well, so if you aren't planning on upgrading your main weapon you still have a use for those super upgrades you'll find.

On the Stranded, it can be used in a similar way, or used as part of a magical build. The general idea is to try to set up so you can activate concussive and then kill an enemy while everything is staggered and get enough charge back from a single kill so you can do it again. This is also what monk of rokar builds try to do, but it's much harder since they are reliant on the KBC. With the Stranded it actually works very well. Be on the lookout for Bloodthristy or Flame-starved if you go this route.

Void Trap
Cooldown: Long
Available on: Mistcutter, Spellsword's Charm

Void Trap I: Pushes back all nearby enemies and creates 3 traps that inflict stasis on enemies that touch them for 7 seconds.

Void Trap II: The traps deal 20 guard damage and 5 health damage

Void Trap III: The traps deal 40 guard damage and 10 health damage

Void Trap IV: The traps deal 40 guard damage and 20 health damage

Void trap is a very potent super but it's long cooldown regulates it more to a utility pick than a primary super for a magical build. It has the advantage of being able to turn a fight with strong crowd control, but the downside is the long cooldown means it isn't available as often as other supers.

Void trap benefits well from super upgrades but doesn't particularly require them. Even just having 3 traps for the crowd control is a big impact. The added damage can be rather helpful though, especially once you get it to IV. 60 damage total from a single super is pretty decent value.

Though the super doesn't mention it, activating Void trap will push back all nearby enemies. This is primarily because the traps spawn some distance in front of you, and if there was no knockback you'd be spawning the traps behind enemies already in melee with you. But this knockback means you can use void trap when you're already swarmed to bump enemies back and then create a wall of traps in front of them. However, even though the knockback serves to place enemies behind the traps which spawn in front of you, it is not a frontal cone, even enemies behind you or to your side will be knocked back.

Be careful when using this near walls, as obstacles will block the traps from spawning.

Enemies cannot see the traps and will not try to avoid them, even on Nightmare difficulty. This makes it fairly easy to lure enemies into them. If you have void trap from the Spellsword's Charm you can also use it's pushback to knock enemies into it.

If you are using the Mistcutter, you'll deal 5 damage to enemies you attack while trapped, due to the Void Scarred trait. This lets you squeeze some additional damage out of your traps.

Be careful when making wide swings as you might accidentally free an enemy while aiming at another.

At IV, your traps deal 20 damage which is enough to kill spellweavers. However, this is of somewhat limited utility because spellweavers are very unpredictable and so it's hard to force them into the traps. In most situation where you can force them into traps you could also just kill them. There can be times where this is handy though.

One popular use of void trap is to skip phase 3 of the Aether Horror fight. This does work, but due to the long cooldown it likely means you aren't going to have it for the summon phase. It's up to you to decide where it's going to be more useful for you. I used to use this on Phase 3, but now that I have the Aether Horror's empowered combo down I tend to use it for the summon phase.

Balanced: Critical Strikes last 20% longer
Guarded: Deals 25% more guard damage when blocking

The Engraved Arming Sword is one of the starting weapons, and it is quite well suited for being the primary weapon of fledgling Runeknights. There's nothing complex about this weapon, it performs more or less as expected. That simplicity is a strength for newer Runeknights, but limits the weapon's potential in skilled hands.

Bulwark is a fitting super, allowing newer Runeknights to safely attempt to block more difficult combos, but definitely falls flat when compared to other supers for more experienced runeknights. This really just reinforces the idea that the Arming Sword is a great beginner weapon.

Some Runeknights might prefer using the Arming Sword as an off-hand, to have an off-hand light blocker that's capable of dealing more guard damage than a traditional off-hand like a dagger. This is certainly an option, but be aware that while your guard damage will be higher, the arming sword has significantly less utility, only providing +1 combo and 10 dash impact. A better choice might be the Gemini Esper which provides +2 combo and a dash charge and while the base guard is only 10, it has alternating strikes which means it will usually be an effective 15 guard damage. If you do want to stick to the arming sword off-hand, it's best to pair it with another light weapon that provides at least some combo and utility.

The Engraved Arming Sword is uniquely frontloaded when it comes to upgrades, again speaking to it's suitability as a starting weapon. 6 health damage at level 1 is about the same health damage we'd expect from most light weapons at level X. Then hits it's max guard damage at only level VI. I would recommend pushing to VII for the Guarded trait and stopping there until you've had some time to branch out and try other weapons.

Overall, the strength of the arming sword is it's ease of use and mastery. The downside is limited potential. Since it has Bulwark as it's super it can't really leverage super upgrades or super recharge traits very well. This makes it completely reliant on getting good martial upgrades. If it does, it has a very narrow edge over other light weapons due to it's above average guard damage. If it doesn't, you're just in a lot of trouble.

Just for comparison, the High Arcanist's Blade has 1 less guard damage and trades two fairly mediocre traits in exchange for a much better super and two very strong traits. The High Arcanist's Blade built for martial will perform nearly as well, but build for magic or hybrid will strongly outperform the Arming Sword.

So for practice or a challenge or just because you like it, the Arming Sword is fine. It absolutely can clear nightmare. But, for pure optimization it does fall a bit behind other options. Still, it has it's place, especially for newer Runeknights.

Nimble: Dash charges regenerate 35% faster
Void Touched: Breaking an enemy out of stasis deals +100% guard damage

The Keenblade is the second starter weapon, and is a utility weapon, often used as an off-hand in martial builds. The main benefit it provides is it's high combo bonus, being the only weapon in the game that provides a +3 combo bonus. This makes it especially good when combined with heavy or two-handed weapons, which usually do high base damage but have poor combo. Additionally, Nimble is a solid trait that will improve mobility which becomes especially useful for the final Aether Horror fight.

It's special, Stasis strike, is useful primarily for the crowd control. The upgrades don't extend this or reduce it's cooldown, they just increase guard damage when you break the control. The idea here is being able to stasis into an immediate guard break. This can be useful sometimes but if your weapon is sufficiently powerful (as it often will be in martial builds) you can do this anyway without the super upgrades.

Note that Void Touched only applies to the base guard damage of the weapon, it does not double the bonus guard damage from Stasis Strike. That is to say at level 1 stasis strike does 25 bonus guard damage when you break stasis. Void Touched will double the guard damage on the dagger itself (from 10 base to 20 base at level 10) but will not double the 25 bonus guard from 25 to 50.

In terms of combos, this weapon works well with heavy and two-handed weapons, allowing you to start with 4 combo and giving you a light weapon to block with. Heavier weapons also tend to have dash impact bonuses, and Nimble naturally works well with that. One of the first combos newer runeknights will likely use is the keenblade in the off-hand complementing Heartsplitter, and this remains a solid option even as other weapons become available.

Because we don't care so much about upgrading the super, it's slots can be used for a lot of utility picks, including ones we wouldn't normally take when slots were tighter.

In terms of upgrading, getting it to III for the Nimble trait should be a priority. This will help immensely with mobility and AoE and isn't too expensive. At VI, it gains the +3 combo bonus and that's about as high as you'll really need it until you have the Aether to really invest in bringing it to X.

So, the keenblade is a strong utility off-hand pick, especially for heavy and two-handers as it provides much needed combo for these weapons, and in the case of heavy weapons, a light blocker. The downside is the base damage is pretty low, and the super doesn't benefit a whole lot from upgrades. But for what it's designed to do, which is supporting heavy weapons, it fulfills that role very well.

Heartseeker: Finishing a combo with the weapon deals +10 damage
Weighted: Big Swings with this weapon deal +25% Health and Guard damage

The aptly named Heartsplitter is the first heavy weapon unlocked. It sports high health damage, great traits, and a decent super. This makes it quite good for both martial and magical builds.

It's health damage is tied with Mistcutter for the highest of all the one handed weapons, however this is somewhat deceptive as Heartsplitter gets Weighted for free at level V, meaning it actually outperforms Mistcutter assuming you are using big swings, which you should be. On top of that, right at the start it has Heartseeker which provides +10 damage at the end of it's combo.

The guard damage is low for a heavy weapon, but bear in mind the built in Weighted trait means it's actually dealing 15 guard damage on a big swing. That said, the lower base damage makes percentage based bonuses weaker, so a shard of courage or the honed trait is a good pickup for this weapon, especially if you plan to make good use of the super.

Starting with two top tier martial traits makes this weapon both powerful and consistent. Even without extra traits it's starting traits are good enough to kill the Aether horror. It has a super that benefits a lot from super upgrades but at the same time the weapon isn't carried by the super. So if you get a ton of super upgrades, you're fine. If you don't, you're fine. You really don't need much luck on your augments.

One thing to bear in mind is that the 'wiggle protection' guarding enemies do is not bypassed by supers. If an enemy is actively blocking and you use Empowered Strike, they will take nearly no guard damage, though the health damage is always fully applied. What will often happen is a newer runeknight will dash in and deal their initial combo. Then while low on guard the enemy will begin blocking. Since normal attacks are no longer dealing guard damage the runeknight will then try to use Empowered Strike to guard break and it'll just wiff and do no guard damage. Instead, yo should anticipate that you don't have enough guard damage to guard break before the enemy blocks, and use Empowered Strike immediately after charging. Alternatively, stop attacking and wait until the enemy begins attacking and then use it.

Empowered Strike is a short cooldown and can recharge itself due to how good it as at breaking guard. Before upgrades, Empowered strike is fairly underwhelming, but at level IV it deals triple guard damage and then deals 34 health damage on top of that when factoring in the soul burn damage. That said, the ticking damage from the soul burn effect is far less useful when you need to be in melee to apply it. Soul burn lets you apply the damage from range and kite or use other enemies to screen you. Empowered Strike requires they be in melee.

Empowered Strike II has insane value, both increasing the guard damage from 200% to 300% and reducing the cooldown by 50%. For this reason I'd strongly consider at least going to II even if you don't plan to fully upgrade it.

While a lot of people focus on the health damage, the 300% guard damage plus a brief stagger is also quite useful. I'd recommend just spamming the hell out of this, with how much health damage Heartsplitter does and it being a short cooldown with an additional 50% reduction at level II it's a super that begs to be spammed, not held.

If you run it like a Martial or Magical build is really more down to which augments you take rather than what you pair it with, unless you're running a KBC or Spellsword Charm. The Keenblade makes a good pairing and is flexible enough that you can respond to whatever augments the game gives you to either focus on the super or just build it out for weapon damage. Even if you go all in on the super though, it'll play more like a hybrid build than a pure super build, the damage just isn't there for it to carry, but it can absolutely be a powerful complement to your damage.

Overall, the Heartsplitter is a solid weapon, with the only real downside being the mastery required to use heavy weapons effectively. Master it, and the weapon will perform very well for you.

Flame-starved: 50% damage bonus when attacking enemies effected by Soul-burn.

The Ritual Dagger is versatile weapon, boasting impressive utility bonuses as well as one of the best supers in the game. Unfortunately, it's base damage is fairly unimpressive. With the Flame Starved bonus it can occasionally hit above it's weight class, reaching numbers almost on par with heavy weapons. Keep in mind though that you won't have soul burn up all the time, so while this is nice, it is by no means an 'always on' bonus.

The ritual dagger can fit into any type of build and be used both as a primary or secondary.

As a primary, you would be running a magical build, generally either with a spellsword's charm or Vestal's as your offhand. While the base stats are low, you can try to build around Flame-starved and with a bit of improvement the Ritual Dagger can work as your primary. This does require a bit of luck on your augments, though.

With the spellsword's charm you will recharge soulburn very quickly and also have void trap for crowd control, which is quite potent. The downside to this build is you can get in trouble if you run out of supers at a bad time. Without your supers up, you are left with just a 10 guard damage ritual dagger to recharge them and that's not a good situation to be in. Using Vestal's instead alleviates that problem but creates others. You'll have no trouble dealing guard damage, but you also won't recharge your soul burns as quickly, and I feel soul burn + void trap is generally better than double soul burn. Plus, double charge on one super means your good to go with 3 upgrades, whereas if you split the power with 2 weapons you need 6. Still, it's a safer build because you can more easily get out of trouble and have 2 weapons to block with.

Another option for an offhand is the KBC. It provides much needed guard damage and has concussive blast, which at level IV can apply soul-burn to all enemies, activating flame-starved. The main issue is you have no additional super recharge by default, and you really need both supers upgraded which you can't do until Tier 3 and even then you have to hope the RNG doesn't go against you and not offer enough super upgrades. As such, this build can be very hit and miss depending on what the RNG gives you.

As a secondary in a Martial build, you leverage it's utility and save soul burn for tactical usage. It gives you a strong super to deal with spellweavers or finish off weakened enemies you couldn't quite kill, like empowered knights. The utility is also quite good for martial builds, two combo and an extra dash charge is pretty solid. Dash charge bonuses in particular are pretty hard to find. Any weapon works with this, though you probably want one with high base stats since the Ritual Dagger is providing the utility you need.

For upgrades, At V you'll have the +2 combo bonus and 3 empty slots so you can fully improve soul burn, which makes that a good stopping point for using it as a utility off-hand. For the primary you'd want to invest all the way to maximize the health and guard damage.

All in all, you can pretty much combine the Ritual dagger with any other weapon, and while it might not always be the best choice, it'll pretty much never be a bad one. It gives you everything you could want, combo, mobility, and a great super.

Enkindled: Finishing a combo inflicts Soul Burn I upon the enemy (14 damage over 7 seconds)
Bloodthirsty: Dealing health damage grants x2 supercharge

The High Arcanist's Blade can be deceptively tricky to use, as it requires you to really make use of it's super, Shardstorm. The general flow is to use Shardstorm to break guard, then combo to deal health damage and restore super charge via bloodthirsty, with Enkindled adding bonus damage if you complete the combo. This makes it a pretty good all around weapon that can hit a bit above it's weight class in terms of health while having a super for guard damage and a trait to help recharge that super faster.

For more information on this, see the section on Shardstorm.

Using a ritual dagger as your off-hand is a common suggestion, the idea being taking advantage of Enkindled to apply soul burn and then using the ritual dagger with flame starved for the damage bonus. Keep in mind though, you're mostly just looking at extra guard damage when attacking with the ritual dagger in your off-hand after the first guard break, and only if you are able to focus the same enemy after completing a full combo. That will happen of course, but it's not an always on bonus as some people try to sell it. The soulburn from Enkindled only lasts 7 seconds so re-breaking their guard and then comboing with the ritual dagger for extra health damage is often difficult. Still the ritual dagger is just good anyway, so even ignoring this combo it's a fine choice.

The Spellsword's Charm is also a pretty solid pick and lets you really spam the super. Thanks to Bloodthirsty you can often guardbreak with shardstorm and then get most of the charge back from the subsequent combo. You could also go with the Gemini Esper for double Shardstorm, which is not quite as horrible an idea as it sounds.

For newer runeknights, the fact that the Arcanist blade starts with Enkindled and it's a flat damage bonus means it's health damage is uniquely frontloaded, which makes it a strong pick for newer runeknights when their weapons are lower level. In terms of improvement, all levels are useful as the increased base damage is helpful. Getting to IV to pick up Bloodthirsty is a big power bump and fairly cheap, so that can be a good breakpoint.

All in all, how much you get out of the High Arcanist's blade depends mostly on how well you can master Shardstorm and manage the rotation of stripping guard with it, then comboing to recharge it. Used properly, it definitely has the potential to perform well. I can and have melted entire rooms in Tier 3 with this weapon. It's quite strong, but also a bit more involved than just face rolling with a powerful martial setup.

Martial Focus: Cannot block, +50% Guard damage to other weapon
Sucker Punch: Every 20 seconds, attacks deal 300% guard damage and interrupts basic attacks.

The Knight-Blooded Crest (Henceforth referred to as the KBC) used to be the most dominant weapon in the meta, by virtue of it being bugged. Prior to the two handed weapons update, it's listed bonus was 30% to your primary weapon's damage. In actuality, it was providing a 130% bonus. This meant pretty much nothing in the game could compete with it and the meta was entirely Martial builds using the KBC. The two-handed weapon update fixed this, changing the bonus to 50%. The KBC is still quite good, but now other weapons and combos have a chance to perform as well.

KBC is often thought of as a non-weapon but this isn't entirely accurate. At level X it deals 10 guard damage per hit, which is on par with the utility daggers, As such, taking the KBC isn't trading away your ability to attack with your off-hand. It's trading away the ability to block with your off-hand. Thus your overall offensive potential is much higher because you're getting +50% guard damage on your main hand and still getting an off-hand that deals dagger level damage.

While the KBC works better with higher base damage weapons, it only has +1 combo. This means usually starting at 2 combo with heavy or two-handed weapons, which can result in a slow start and really cripple you if you get unlucky on finding combo.

Concussive Blast is a great super, both at level I and at level IV. The level 1 interrupts every enemy attack, even the Aether Fiend's final empowered combo. It's primary use is to scatter and stagger enemies so they can be dispatched 1 at a time. At level IV however it also provides a good deal of AoE damage. A strong super that can benefit from upgrades is exactly what we want on our off-hand with a martial build, so this is great.

The KBC does not do particularly well as a primary weapon. It's guard damage even fully upgraded is fairly mediocre, and it's health damage is just plain awful, remaining a 1 until level 10 when it manages to reach 3 and be half as good as most weaker weapons.

KBC can be used with any primary in a martial build, but there are a few it really shines with.

The first is the Heartsplitter. This shores up Heartsplitters weakness of lower base guard damage. This gets even better once the KBC is level V and gets +10 dash impact, letting you start with +25 dash impact combined. The downside is the KBC only adds +1 combo which means it is somewhat weak at the start, though having built in heartseeker does help alleviate that a bit.

The Mistcutter is my personal favorite to combo with the KBC. Chrono-Locked is an amazing ability, which lets you effectively chain multiple combos together without the enemy getting any opportunity to do anything once you break their guard once. This we want to be able to break guard as quickly as possible, and the KBC is the best way to do that. On top of that, soul trap is a strong defensive crowd control option to let you really focus down enemies and help alleviate the defensive issues of using a single heavy weapon.

The Duelist Edge is used for the most glass cannon-y of the glass cannon builds. The weapon gets a bonus while at full health, so the strategy is to combine it with the KBC to blitz down enemies with the high damage bonus, thus never giving the enemy a chance to land a hit. This is a favorite of speedrunners and it's just very strong in general, but of course requires a high degree of skill as a single point of damage taken ruins the strategy.

The KBC doesn't quite work as well in Magical builds. The bonus to guard damage is less impactful and you probably need your super upgrades for your primary weapon. You also need to answer the question of why you'd bring the KBC over the Spellsword's charm on a Magical Build.

Resonant: Blocking grants x2 Super charge

Vestal's Wraith is the second unlocked heavy weapon. It boasts extremely high guard damage, but it's health damage is standard for a light weapon, despite being a heavy. This means it can guard break easily, but hits under it's weight class in terms of damage. It also has basically no utility, giving nothing but a single point of health.

Vestal's can be used as either a primary or secondary.

As a primary you generally run a magical build, using Vestal's massive guard damage to break guard so you can deal health damage and recharge soul burn, which will make up the bulk of your damage. If you get lucky enough to find Flame-Starved this build can really shine. Flame starved on the ritual dagger with 10 guard is one thing, flame-starved on vestals with 20 base guard damage is just nuts.

As a secondary, it works surprisingly well in melee builds with a light weapon primary providing utility. Vestal's 20 guard damage being spammed can give even the KBC a run for it's money in terms of guard damage potential. To give an example, if you're using an Arming Sword, the KBC will provide 13 x 0.5 = 6.5 bonus damage, and you can still attack with the KBC for 10 damage for a total added damage of 16.5. Vestals out of the box is already beating that at 20, and Vestals gets double the benefit from traits like Alternating Strikes or Staggering that the KBC would. The KBC obviously provides more utility and combo, so it's not that Vestals is a cut and dry winner, but anything that can give the KBC a run for it's money is a competitive option.

Although Vestal's works as an off-hand with light weapons, this is usually because light weapons have utility and combo on them. So trying to pair Vestals with a primary heavy weapon will lead to issues of low utility and combo. For that reason, I personally avoid it, though it is up to you. Heartsplitter can help alleviate this as starting with heartseeker is kind of like having an extra combo. You may also get lucky and find combo and Frenzy early, and if you do the double heavy build can absolutely decimate but it's miserable at the start and inconsistent as you'll be at the mercy of RNG to provide you with combo.

Vestals should be given guard damage improving traits when used as a secondary. One of the best is alternating strikes with anything but a two hander or spellsword's charm. This beefs Vestals up to 30 guard damage, which is crazy for a one hander. Staggering is also a good pickup. If you are using Vestal's as your primary then you can either improve the health damage, improve super charge and use Soul Burn for your damage, or balance the two. Which you pick will likely come down to just what the run offers you.

A big part of the strength of Vestal's is soul burn. More information on the super and how to use it is described in the section for the Ritual dagger.

All in all, Vestal's Wraith is a surprisingly versatile heavy weapon with a great super. It suffers form a lack of utility though, so pair it with a weapon that can cover up that weakness.

Arcane Focus: Cannot Block. Both supers recharge twice as quickly.
Abyssal Pulse: Striking an enemy repels them. 20 second cooldown.
Call of Oblivion: While at 0 Health Crystals, grants an additional x2 super charge and +25% Health and Guard damage.

The spellsword charm is the bread and butter of magical builds. The recharge rate bonus is fantastic, letting you use your super much more often and thus enabling it to be used as part of a normal 'rotation'

There is however a massive downside to this. Not only can we not block with the spellsword's charm but we also cannot even effectively attack with it, unlike the KBC. It's reach is awful which makes it awkward to attack with and even if you do at max level it only deals 2 guard damage. So, while we do get very fast super recharge, we are definitely paying a lot for that.

Void trap is an incredibly strong super. Being able to crowd control up to 3 things, or one thing 3 times is just fantastic. Having it on a weapon that gives itself double cool-down reduction is even better. Out of the box at level 1 it's quite good, and level IV it does very good damage on top of that. So much so a single cast at level IV can solo an Aether horror phase.

The pushback with the gem can also be useful when mastered. It will interrupt combos and push an enemy back into a short stagger. This can be used for crowd control or just to dash back into the enemy and get your dash impact damage again. However, it is a bit inconsistent as the lack of reach means you often whiff your attacks.

While everyone focuses on Arcane, and rightly so, it's important to point out that the charm has a lot of utility just in general. 2 dash charges, 2 combo and 1 HP is a ton of utility.

Call of Oblivion is a nice cherry on top but we hope to never have to use it, and so it's not really why we bring a Spellsword's Charm.

So Spellsword's charm is THE magical build offhand. It's great on any primary with a strong super that can deal damage. There really isn't much else to say about it. Use it with a primary that has a strong damage dealing super like Soul Burn and go nuts spamming the hell out of it.

Untouchable: While at full health this weapon does +50% health and guard damage

The duelist's edge is a weapon that provides high risk for high reward. It's base stats are as low as it gets outside of the KBC and Spellsword Charm. However, while at full health it gains a 50% boost to all damage, creating a play style where the goal is to blitz the enemy down without ever taking damage. Prior to the KBC fix, this strategy was far more powerful than it is now, though it remains a powerful option. It's a bit more reliant now on finding the right traits and bonuses to stack up, but it still works well when you get them.

The reason why you really need stacking bonuses is because lower base stats plus a percentage base bonus means anything that increase flat damage is stronger. Since you are getting +50% damage, a shard of courage is effectively +3 guard instead of +2 with the bonus active.

You also generally want to pick up pristine for an additional +25% at full HP. To really live on the edge you can work your way down to 1 HP via shards of wraith and courage and pick up Tenacious for another 25% bonus. The advantage to this is if you take a hit you'll heal back up to 1 HP at the end of the room. Of course, if you take two hits you're dead, but you can't have it all.

Another use for the Duelist's edge is a dedicating farming weapon. On Relaxed you heal 1 HP at the end of each room so an occasional mistake can be ignored, and together with the KBC you can blitz through to the first boss, defeat them, then end the run and repeat to rack up Aether quickly. This works with any loadout of course, but the Duelist's Edge can do it faster and as a light weapon it's easy to use.

It also has a place as an off-hand utility weapon focused on mobility. The only other weapon that provides +2 dash charges is the Spellsword's charm which means losing your ability to block and effectively attack. But the Duelist's Edge can provide that mobility to you while still having a strong off-hand attacker. It does suffer from a -5 dash impact penalty but if you want the charges for mobility it's a good trade to make.

Void Scarred: Breaking stasis with this weapon deals 5 health damage
Chrono-Locked: Completing a combo inflicts stasis

Mistcutter beats Heartsplitter on base damage but as it lacks Weighted and Heartseeker, in practice Heartsplitter does outdamage it. But what Mistcutter gets in exchange is Chrono-locked. Automatic stasis on enemies after comboing them is incredibly potent and makes engaging multiple enemies far easier. Against single targets you can deny them the ability to fight back completely if you can get your guard damage high enough.

As such, we generally want to build into a Martial build here to really enable chain guard breaks and stasis. Staggering and of course Weighted are great pickups, as well as Alternating Strikes if you have an off-hand you can attack with. The high base damage makes these percentage based bonuses very strong. Shards of courage should also be considered. While reducing health can be dangerous with the Mistcutter that bonus guard can mean more guard breaks and thus more ability to chain stasis and thus never give the enemy a chance to hit you in the first place.

Of course using slots for guard damage means not using them for super upgrades and void trap is quite strong upgraded. This does mean you are less at the mercy of the RNG because if you don't find good guard damage traits you still have super upgrades to fall back on. Alternatively, improve guard damage on your off-hand instead to save slots on the Mistcutter for super upgrades.

Mistcutter is commonly paired with the KBC so you can more easily guard break and chain stasis. However, utility off-hands also work, with the usual suspects being the Keenblade or Ritual Dagger.

Void Trap is an excellent super and having it on a weapon with great base stats means it can be recharged fairly quickly. Don't be afraid to use it when facing multiple enemies. Sometimes Runeknights have a habit of holding long cooldown supers like this for the perfect moment and as a result end up using it far less than they should. Learn to recognize difficult rooms in Tier 3 and know when to use it to get you through.

Like with Heartsplitter, the only downside is being heavy and thus harder to block with. But again, if you can master it, you will dominate the battlefield with it's control ability.

Rending Strikes: Alternating attacks with your other weapon causes this weapon to deal +50% health damage
Heartseeker: Finishing a combo with this weapon deals 10 health damage

The stranded is a very unique weapon in that it's a light weapon with a good amount of utility that also hits above it's weight class in terms of health damage. Generally light weapons are bad at health damage, and all the weapons that are good at it come with the cost of almost no utility. The Stranded breaks those rules and as a result it's a very unique option for a lot of builds. Don't be of the mindset that it only works paired with the Esper, that's simply not true.

It also gets concussive blast as it's special, which is amazing. The thing about concussive blast is most Runeknights are used to it on a KBC, which you rarely ever deal health damage with and if you do it's about half of what a light weapon does. But this is Concussive Blast on a light weapon that can deal heavy weapon levels of health damage. This means it charges concussive blast fast. At IV, concussive deals 21 AoE damage and with some recharging traits you can get concussive to recharge pretty much every combo. This enables the strategy of triggering concussive to scatter and stagger enemies, using that opening to guard break and combo one, then using the health damage from the combo to recharge concussive and do it again. This is how Monk of Rokar builds work, only the Stranded just does it way better because it's a stronger weapon that the KBC (as a damage dealing primary weapon).

The obvious combo partner is the Gemini Esper, and as expected it works fairly well. The Esper has higher than usual health damage so swapping off works well.

The Stranded can also work as a main-hander even without the Esper. It has 12 guard damage which is certainly good enough for a light weapon plus heartseeker built in. It's decent here, with the main draw being concussive blast. I really like Vestal's in the off-hand for this. Vestals will wreck the enemy guard, opening them to be combo'd by the Stranded to recharge concussive. The stranded has enough utility to support Vestals, and if you find Flame-Starved you can really go nuts with this build.

Stranded also does okay as an off-hander, usually paired with a light weapon primary that needs help in the health damage department (which is most of them). Out of the box it will do 19 health damage on a last hit, 6 + 50% + 10 from heartseeker. So you can use it on just the last hit of the combo, or alternate.

If you are using the Stranded as an off-hand with a heavy weapon primary be aware that you may be losing damage alternating with it. For example the stranded does 6 + 3 = 9 health damage at X. Heartsplitter does 8 but when you factor in Weighted it comes out ahead. Mistcutter does 8 so Stranded can beat it, but pretty much any improvement to Mistcutter will cause it to come out on top. So it's really only Vestal's as a heavy weapon where alternating makes sense.

Alternating Strikes: Alternating attacks with your other weapon causes this weapon to deal +50% guard damage
Kinetic Siphon: Dealing Guard Damage with this weapon grants 2x super charge.

The Esper has a good balance of utility and guard damage thanks to alternating strikes built in. 10 guard damage isn't much but when spamming it after a dash or between combos you'll get the alternating strikes bonus and hit 15 effective guard, which is great for a light weapon, especially one that provides +2 combo and a dash charge.

If we are alternating with the stranded, we will do 12 damage per hit on the Stranded then 15 damage per hit with the Esper. 27 / 2 = 13.5 damage per hit. So, we're about on par with the arming sword.

In terms of health damage, we get 9 on the Stranded and 7 on the Esper if we alternate, which comes to an average of 8. This is pretty good, we're basically hitting at heavy weapon damage with lights.

If you have an odd number for your combo bonus then be sure to guard break with the Esper and land the first critical hit with the Stranded. If you have an even number, it doesn't matter which weapon guard breaks and the Esper should be the first critical strike hit.

The second trait is Kinetic Siphon to charge our super faster. We'll be spamming alternating attacks with our main weapon, so we actually will be dealing quite a bit of guard damage. Unfortunately, Kinetic Siphon isn't that great because you regain considerably less super charge from guard damage than you do from health damage. Still, it's something.

The Esper grants +2 combo and +1 dash charge which is exactly what a Ritual Dagger gives. However the ritual dagger has Soul Burn which I feel is generally more useful than Shardstorm for both most builds. The Ritual dagger is also easier to block with, and has the Flame-Starved combo for high burst when you need it.

On the other hand, the Esper is getting Alternative Strikes for free, which means a basically always on 50% guard damage bonus over the Ritual dagger, which has a bonus that will be active far less often. So the Esper is very similar, with slightly less utility but more guard damage potential.

All in all, the Esper is kind of a sleeper pick. I didn't think much of it until I used in order to be able to speak accurately about it for this guide and found it to be surprisingly effective at boosting your guard damage while still providing enough utility to be a viable option.

Two-Handed: 50% of the other weapon's damage is added to this weapon.
Staggering: Attacks with this weapon deal +25% guard damage
Indomitable: +40% Dash Impact

The Captain's Warhammer is a strong two-hander, boasting the highest base guard damage in the game, at 22 base + 50% of the off-hand weapon, plus staggering built in. The general strategy is massive guard damage so you can dash in and quickly break guard without even having to block any attacks.

Combining this weapon with the KBC gets rather silly. The KBC provides 50% of the hammer's guard damage, which is +11. Then the two-hander trait means the KBC's base stats provide +5 guard damage, for a total of +16 guard damage. Add that to it's 22 base damage and we have 38. That's before factoring in the bonus from staggering, which I won't do because I don't know exactly how the math works. This is insane, nothing can really match this in terms of guard damage.

That said, with a KBC you only start with 2 combo. This is fine though, you break guard so fast that an extra cycle barely matters. There's just nothing anything can do against you in a 1v1 and even against multiple enemies you guard break so quickly you can get hits in.

Using an off-hand dagger is also a solid option. This solves the issue of the low combo and while you won't be able to guard break as easily, you'll be able to take more advantage of it when you do.

The Keenblade lets you start with 4 combo and gives you nimble to leverage the extra dash charge and indomitable trait. The Ritual dagger starts you with 3 combo and gives you an extra dash charge plus a solid super.

You might consider taking Juggernaut to leverage the dash impact bonus. I'm not personally in favor of this, because you already do so much guard damage that I don't think it's worth sacrificing mobility for it.

So, the warhammer is a pretty straight forward weapon. Dash in, spam attacks, do massive guard damage, repeat. The obvious downside is having to learn to block with a two-hander. Then again, dead things can't attack you, can they?

Oh yea, it has a super, too, I guess. It can come in handy for those Tier 2 empowered knights if you're going with the KBC build as you might not have the damage to 1 combo them yet.

Two-Handed: 50% of the other weapon's health and guard damage is added to this weapon.
Vengeance: +25% Health damage after taking damage. Lasts until the end of each room.
Beserker: +15% Health damage for each point of health below your maximum.

At first glance, the Cold Iron Greataxe does not impress. It's base stats are fairly poor for a two-hander and the super just seems rather bad. This is deceptive, however, because the strength of the weapon lies the super and it's unique traits.

Vicious strike may be the worst super in the game at level 1, and the best at level IV.

At level 1, the cost of a point of health makes it basically unusable unless you're playing on relaxed. At level IV, this super does 40 damage, instantly, AND it heals you on a kill AND it gives you +25% health damage for the rest of the room on a short cooldown super. This is insane.

Some people will argue that level IV is bad because it has 'anti-synergy' since you want to be at low HP and it heals you. I strongly disagree. You cannot activate the super when at 0 HP, which means you really don't want to be there. And if you're playing at low HP intentionally, you'll only be able to take a few hits before you're there. So having the heal makes it way easier and safer to play the low HP style by being able to heal back any unintentional damage. And if you do find it heals you to the point where your HP is higher than you'd like, you can just take a hit on purpose. It's not like losing HP is hard.

That said, I don't think staying low HP is a good idea most of the time.

By default the failure state in Until you Fall is running out of HP. And it's the only failure state. Nothing else can cause you to lose the game. Now, if you have meta objectives (such as beating the game within a certain amount of time) then you can 'lose' without running out of HP and in this case sacrificing HP for those meta goals may make sense.

But otherwise, either you're going to finish the room without taking damage, meaning you won, or you're going to finish the room having taken damage, meaning you ended up with the exact same amount of hp, but now you have that room behind you.

You also have to consider run progression. Not being at full HP means there is a high chance that one of the 3 things you are offered at the end of the room will be a heal. This means less chance of getting the things you actually want. This absolutely will add up over the course of a run.

There may be times it might make sense to reduce your HP. Hitting a breakpoint to avoid empowered knight's empowering for example, or needing 1 less cycle on the Aether horror. It's also probably fine just to speed things up on the first or second boss since you get healed at the end anyway. But outside of that, make the enemies work for the damage you take.

I want to circle back to the 40 damage the super does, because that part alone would make this a great super. It's basically an 'execute' mechanic except that 40 HP is incredibly high. This is enough to instantly kill knights from full HP. Empowered knights have 70 HP and enrage at 35 or below, meaning this can kill any empowered knight while enraged or even potentially prevent the enrage entirely.

Like all two handers, it has 3 traits and 6 trait slots, meaning you only start with 3 empty slots, leaving no room for anything but the super upgrades. Additionally, taking shards of foresight means reducing max HP and thus reducing potential damage bonuses.

Speaking of, the easiest strategy with the Greataxe is simply taking Shards of Resolve whenever they are offered. With enough health you get into a win/win situation where either you don't make mistakes and so you win, or you do make mistakes and as your hp reduces your health damage increases to the point where things get much easier. If you are 5 HP below max and have taken damage that round you have double health damage. This is just totally absurd, and completely doable since pairing with a KBC will start you at 6 HP.

Even so, I recommend avoiding trying to build this like a martial weapon by ignoring the super and just trying to melee with it. The Captain's Warhammer fulfills that purpose far better. The strength of the Cold Iron Greataxe is it's super, and it's super is only good with upgrades. So picking it and not upgrading the super is wasting the weapon's potential. This is a weapon that just doesn't really need improvement, it's a total wrecking machine due to it's traits and super.

I recommend pairing this weapon with a Spellsword's charm and really going ham with the super. It creates a really unique play style of self-healing that is a lot of fun and very potent. Alternatively, you can use the KBC to improve it's guard damage, and let beserker's damage bonus do the work for you as far as health damage.

Two-Handed: 50% of the off-hand weapon's weapon's damage added to this weapon.
Felling Strike: +10 Health damage per combo above 1. Crits always finish combos.
Charge: Two-handed stabs while dashing deal 40% of dash impact damage to health, bypassing guard.

Fate's end is an interesting weapon, and there's a lot to say about it.

It is the most difficult weapon in the game to block with. Two-handers in general are difficult to block with but the Greataxe and Hammer have better leverage due to the longer handle placing your hands nearer to the center. Fate's End has a hilt which places both hands on a far side of the weapon, making it far more unwieldy. My recommendation to deal with that is to block with the hilt, not the blade. Keep your hands just far enough apart that they rest of either side of the block indicator and try to put the center of the indicator between them, as you would with the other two-handers, just with your hands closer together.

The Charge trait states that dash stabs deal 40% of your dash impact damage as health damage. This is not entirely accurate. Dash impact damage varies with range of course, but even at max range factoring in that I'm not exactly sure how the math works, but it ends up that at max range you do 50% of the listed dash impact damage normally, or 60% with indomitable (It might actually be 60.25% but I don't know for sure because health displays are not exact). I assume Juggernaut works the same way, but I'd still consider it a trap because more dashes is better than stronger dashes.

Next up, let's talk about the Felling Strike ability. This deals 10 additional damage per combo above 1 and ends your combo once you hit an enemy. This means unlike most weapons where you deal your health damage per combo point, the base health damage only applies once. This means there is very little benefit to increasing base health damage via shards of wraith or the serrated trait. However, percentage based damage boosts like Weighted or Flame Starved do increase the base 10 per extra combo damage, giving you the expected damage bonus.

Felling Strike applies to all critical strikes, not just ones as a result of a guard break. So, for example, counters on Captains will apply your full combo. Additionally, any hit will consider the combo completed so traits like Heartseeker, Enkindled or Chrono-Locked all apply.

So yes, you could counter a charging empowered captain and deal full combo damage and chrono-lock them. Needless to say this is really good.

The true strength of this ability though is you don't really need a window to combo enemies, you can combo fully in a single hit. No interrupted combos is obviously a massive advantage.

There is a bit of tech that I'm not sure is a bug or intended. If you guard break an enemy and then charge stab them, you deal your swing damage plus the Charge trait damage, but you do not end the combo and can then attack for full combo on top of it. This lets you get to the breakpoints you need to kill more powerful enemies far more easily. Mastering this bit of tech is key to using the weapon, especially once empowered knights start showing up. You absolutely do not want to try to block an empowered Knight's combo with Fate'd End. It can be done, and I have done it, but I'd be lying if I said I could do it consistently.

The super is underwhelming. I tried a lot to like it but I generally end up only activating it very rarely and every time I've tried to play around it I've been disappointed.

It has the Bulwark problem of being unable to regain charge while active. So yes, you can potentially deal a lot of damage, but none of it will help you recharge the super. This also guarantees downtime no matter how fast your recharge is.

The second problem is having to juggle your grip. I don't want to say it's 'hard' but it can be awkward, especially in the heat of combat. If the enemy is in the middle of a combo and Titan Grip is expiring it can be tricky to shift your grip mid-combo, and if you don't shift fast enough, Fate's End becomes dead weight, likely resulting in you taking a hit.

I also find the super upgrades rather unimpressive, and combined with the fact that you only get 3 empty slots it's hard to justify them. The 20% damage going through guard sounds better than it is. Assuming level X and a 6 health damage off-hand you'll have 13 base damage, 20% of that is 2.6 damage per swing. It would take 18 swings to kill a knight. So the use case for this is finishing off low HP enemies, but we can already do that for free via Charge.

Fate's End has no player bonuses. At all. No health, no dash impact, no combo, nothing. But it does have a penalty, and it's a big one, -1 dash charges. As such, everything we get will come from whatever weapon we partner it with. The next section will cover my advice on how to build it and why.

Since Fate's End has no bonuses, everything we get will be from whatever weapon we partner it with. This means we simply cannot get everything we want.

So, there's two main ways to play it that I've found.

The first is to dump combo and go all in on guard damage, mobility and Charge. This, I feel, is the strongest option but requires a radically different play style to nearly every other weapon.

The second is to build a bit more balanced and play more traditionally. This works, but I don't think it's as strong an option.

The last option I attempted was max combo, but that doesn't work for reasons I will get into.

For the maximizing charge option, pair it with the Captain's Warhammer. It gives us pretty much everything else we want. It provides +1 dash charge to bring us back up to 3 and +10 dash impact on top of that. No other weapon in the game provides both a dash charge and a an impact bonus. So if we want to have 3 dash charges (And we do) the only option to start with a dash impact above 10 is the Captain's Warhammer.

Indomitable gives us a bit of extra charge damage, which is nice, but even just the extra guard damage is incredibly helpful. We start with 40 guard damage dashes from the start, allowing us to dash in and quickly guard break. This means less time spent engaging enemies and less blocking. Additionally, Fate's End inherent's 50% of the Warhammer's guard damage thanks to the Two-Handed trait, which is an extra 6 guard damage compared to using a 10 guard light utility weapon. That is not insignificant.

The obvious downside is 1 combo but we still do 12 damage when we dash into enemies. This means dashing into a knight, breaking guard, retreating and dashing back in again and comboing will kill them, no problem. And it'll do it pretty easily due to how good our guard damage and dash impact is.

Once additional dash impact and combo come online the build really holds it's own. We especially want Nimble and Fleet, but they aren't strictly required. On the occasion where we trigger an empowered knight by accident we can use Titan's Grip for blocking, or activate Bulwark. We even get a couple extra points of health, which is very welcome.

Initially I dismissed this option as being too RNG reliant, but having done more tests with it, I found even with poor luck I was still winning, and far more easily. I had a run where I got absolutely no combo or dash impact and still nearly won, dying on the empowered phase on the the Aether Horror. I also did a few test runs where I intentionally never got my combo above 1 and not only did I win, but I won far more easily than with other builds. When you do get 3 combo and 3 dash impact improvements it's even stronger, but you don't -need- them.

The biggest thing that lead to this being viable was the technique of breaking guard, backing off, and then charge stabbing in to get additional damage. Even against Empowered Knights with 1 combo I could kill them without them empowering by dashing in, back out, back in and break guard, back off until my dash is back, then dash in again and get my stab damage plus combo. Even if they survive that I can get a 4th dash in while they are staggered and empowering. This will kill an empowered knight if you either have 2 combo or a single dash impact bonus. You'd have to be quite unlucky to have neither by tier 2.

The next option is the Ritual Dagger for a more balanced and traditional build. This build lacks the higher guard damage of the warhammer build, but gets a very useful super, a light off-hand emergency blocker, and starts with 3 combo. The Ritual Dagger also provides a dash charge, bringing us back up to 3 where we want to be.

This build plays more like a traditional build, we dash in, deal our initial guard damage, block until the enemy guard breaks, and then combo. You can still take out Knights in a single combo plus 1 charge, so it works. If you ever need to block, like for example an empowered Knight combo, you can choose to dismiss Fate's End and block with the Ritual Dagger. This isn't ideal, as you'll do so little damage you'll likely need to survive two empowered combos, but it's an option. I do find this very useful for the Aether Horror's empowered combo, since blocking it instead of interrupting it lets you counter, and with Fate's End that counter is a whole combo. It's also pretty useful for the fireball transition, as I find it much easier to block with a 1 hander.

Speaking of, Soul Burn is a great super because it can be activated from range. The issue with supers on two-handers is you need to shift your grip and summon the off-hand weapon to use them. This can be difficult in the heat of battle. With Soulburn this is much less of a problem because you can do it from a distance, or retreat first. Soulburn is also just a very good super in general and for Fate's End it's a good emergency valve for when you just barely don't do enough damage to finish an enemy.

So all in all, you get a pretty balanced build with the Ritual Dagger. This is the strongest build via the conventional wisdom, though I will say this wisdom doesn't necessarily apply as well to Fate's End.

I am of the opinion that if I have to choose between high guard damage or high health damage I'll take high guard damage almost every time. Consider if you had infinite guard damage and low health damage versus low guard damage and infinite health damage.

With low guard damage you'd be struggling to break through their guard. Sure, once you do you kill them in a single combo, but getting to that point can be difficult on nightmare when enemies begin to pile up and start retreating to cover each other and recharge their guard. You can easily get into difficult situations where your high health damage can't help you.

With the reverse, you just dash in and guard break them before they can even attack you. And if another enemy shows up, you just guard break them, too. Guard broken enemies can't hurt you, so does it matter how many times you have to combo them while they are stunned and not a threat?

And I feel this is especially true with Fate's End, because it's extremely difficult to block with, meaning we really don't want to get into prolonged engagements with it. We also have an alternative method of dealing health damage in the Charge trait, so dumping combo doesn't hurt us nearly as much.

Some might ask how I can say it's a low guard damage build when Fate's End will have 24 guard damage at the start. Two daggers doing 10 guard each gets us to 20. Then factor in that you can block with 1 dagger while attacking with the other. And you're eligible for alternating strikes. We're already pretty much on parity except dual-daggers isn't a high guard damage build either, it's a double light build with guard damage as it's weakness.

As such, I don't recommend the Keen blade off-hand because this creates that type of low guard damage high health damage build that I don't think is actually very good. You can make it work, you'll need a lot of practice blocking with Fate's End though which is just going to be higher effort for similar results. Additionally, you are stuck with only 2 dash charges. Sure, you get Nimble, but you get nimble with 2 dash charges. And bear in mind, you can find Nimble during a run. You can't find extra dash charges.

Ultimately though, this comes down to you and your play style. I've discussed what works for me, feel free to find what works for you.

Primary: Rokari Keenblade OR Ritual Dagger
Secondary: Ritual Dagger OR Rokari Keenblade
Style: Dual Lights

Strengths:

• Extremely high combo (6 starting)
  
• Strong defense with two light weapons
  
• One strong offensive super, one strong utility super
  
• Good mobility (4 dash charges + nimble)

Weaknesses:

• Lackluster guard damage
  
• Relies on being able to land high combos consistently

The first decision you must make with this build is which weapon will be your primary and which will be your secondary. There are advantages to both.

The Keenblade as the primary is the more traditional option. We don't really care about upgrading Stasis Strike so all the empty slots on the Keenblade can go to martial options to increase our damage. Meanwhile all the super upgrades can be fed to the Ritual Dagger for that sweet Soul Burn IV double activation and the remaining 2 slots can be for faster recharge or utility.

If going with the Ritual Dagger as the primary, we generally are hoping to leverage Flame-Starved. However to do this effectively we really need to find Sparklight (Or Enkindled, but this is very rare) and there's no guarantee that will happen. Otherwise we can only activate Flame-Staved with Soul-Burn which which works but leaves you less likely to have it up when you really need it. That said, Even at 6 base damage and 6 combo with Flame Starved active you are doing 54 damage if you land the full combo plus the 16 damage from the Soul Burn itself. 70 damage is enough to kill Captains and Empowered knights, and that's the worst case scenario with just what you start the build with. So basically, if you activate soul burn right before you combo you can choose to one-combo almost anything in the game, likely for the entirety of the run assuming you don't get extremely unlucky.

So the choice is yours. The Keenblade primary is more consistent and less reliant on luck. The Ritual Dagger primary has better burst and if you get lucky and find Sparklight it can really get out of control.

For traits, we really want guard damage. Alternating strikes works quite well, but even staggering can help quite a bit. A couple shards of wraith also go a long way with this build because the increase in health damage is essentially multiplied by your combo and we start with 6. Lethal Elegance is of course the best trait you could find and if you do find it it will singlehandedly provide enough health damage for the rest of the run. Dash impact is also quite good considering we have the mobility to leverage it well. I generally go with less health for this build as I'm quite comfortable blocking with two dual-lights but you should take whatever amount of health you personally feel comfortable with.

This is also a good build for learning to fast combo and land high combos consistently. If you get Frenzied and all 3 shards of guile you can get to 11 combo with this build and it is possible to land 11 hit combos. Being able to combo more quickly will help you with all weapons, as it can be the difference between sneaking in a killing blow versus being forced to back off a combo early.

Primary: Cold Iron Greataxe
Secondary: Spellsword's Charm

Style: Two-handed

Strengths:

• Insane health damage potential
  
• Great mobility (6 dash charges!)
  
• Healing

Weaknesses:

• Lackluster guard damage
  
• Very tight on slots

The vampire berserker build uses the spellsword's charm to leverage the power of the Cold Iron Greataxe's super. For this build, we want to rush to Vicious Strike III in Tier 1 as soon as possible and to Vicious Strike IV in tier 2. Make no mistake, this is a magic build first and foremost and we're going to be putting Vicious Strike to good use.

But not immediately. At first, Vicious strike should not be used at all, not until you upgrade it to II. At I, it always damages you, and this will mean health will spawn in place of potentially more useful things. No, we want to get through rooms with full HP. Once you have vicious Strike II, however, the health loss is refunded on a kill. Now the plan is to start each room by deleting a husk immediately (Vicious Strike II deals 20 damage, they have 15 health). This technically deals damage to you, but heals that damage immediately. And that triggers you to have +25% health damage for the rest of the room. This is enough to one combo knights with your starting 3 combo.

Once you have Vicious Strike III (Which if you are lucky will be early in Tier 1) the damage is doubled to 40. Knights have 35 health. So now you can just delete one knight, kill a few husks, and then delete another. You can also use it to finish off Captains if they are low. Because Vicious Strike recharges so quickly you should generally use it on cooldown unless you are fighting the last enemy in the room, in which case you should hold it so you can use it immediately at the start of the next room to get your +25% health damage online.

Once you are into Tier II you want to grab Vicious Strike IV and now the fun begins. You should still use it similar to before but now when you take damage you heal whenever you execute an enemy with it. The goal here is to end every room with full HP. Now, people will say "But don't you want to be low HP for the extra health damage?" To which I would respond: "Why?"

In Tier 2 you are fighting Captains, Knights, Spellweavers, and Husks. Everything on that list except Captains you can execute in a single activation of Vicious Strike, or a single combo once the 25% bonus health damage is online. Even Captains you might be able to one combo by Tier 2 if you've gotten lucky on your room rewards. Well okay, there's also potentially empowered knights but an enemy that enrages at 35 HP and below is a lot less scary when you have a super that deals 40 damage. Just combo + vicious them.

So, why exactly would you sit at low health, making almost every room effectively only reward you two items because healing is taking up a slot? You wouldn't, I hope. Also consider this, if the extra healing means you end every room with full HP you are winning anyway.

That said, feel free to take hits to tank your health on bosses. You get a free heal at the end of the room anyway.

In Tier 3, you might consider beginning to sit at lower HP. I've never found the need to, but it's certainly an option. This is because the Cold Iron Greataxe only has 3 slots and we're dedicating all of them to super upgrades anyway. So, it's not like we're going to be missing out on much. You can take a shard of foresight and fish for a really good trait like weighted or even staggering to help out your guard damage, but it's not really necessary and keep in mind every shard you take is one less empty health crystal you could have. Dash impact is quite nice since we have 6 dash charges and really could use the guard damage.

For the Aether Horror this is where you start playing with lowish HP. I say lowish because I'd recommend you stick around 3-5 HP depending on what your max is and your damage potential is. Essentially you want just enough damage to one cycle the Aether Horror. Going down to 1 HP to be greedy is counterproductive, because if you get hit once you will go to 0 HP, and once you are on zero HP you cannot activate Vicious Strike.So lower your HP enough that you can once cycle the horror but don't greed and get yourself killed.

For your Spellsword's Charm, it's up to you if you want to go with super upgrades or utility. I generally don't worry about it too much and just take what the run gives me.

All in all, this is a really fun build. I like being able to take the occasional damage and still end every room with full HP.

Primary: Gemini Stranded
Secondary: Vestal's Wraith

Style: Single Heavy

Strengths:

• Great Guard Damage
  
• Good Health Damage
  
• Two great supers
  
• Magic/Super hybrid that's strong at both

Weaknesses:

• Awkward defense with a Katar primary and a heavy weapon secondary

This build seems strange at first but is infact a very powerful magical build. We run a Gemini Stranded as primary, and the goal is to get to Concussive Blast IV and use this as our primary damage method. This is a similar strategy to Monk of Rokar builds, except we have two weapons that are actually good.

Most magical builds have a problem of weak to middling guard damage. This build has no such issues. Vestal's 20 guard damage is incredibly potent, and if you find alternating strikes it becomes 30 and will be enough guard damage to carry you through the whole run. Not that it's guard damage is by any means weak even if you don't. This means when your supers are down you can still consistently guard break.

That's where the stranded comes in. Once the enemy is guard broken we combo with the stranded and because it's a short cooldown super with 50% charge rate built into it's upgrades we can get it to the point where a single combo completely recharges concussive blast. This means we can just constantly AoE and stagger enemies while quickly guard breaking and comboing them.

And the stranded is pretty good at it, because it starts with Heartseeker which is a great health damage trait. On top of that we have Rending Strikes, though you don't have to make use of it. It's kind of rare that the extra damage will be enough to reduce the number of combos on an enemy. So don't feel like you are forced to alternate. Also be aware that if you break the enemy guard with an attack from Vestals (and you probably will given how much guard damage it does) the first hit in the combo will qualify for Rending Strikes. So this can be a 'free' +3 damage even if you don't alternate.

That said, having the option when you need is nice, particularly if you want to combo with Vestal's to recharge Soul Burn.

Speaking of, Soul Burn isn't even really needed for this build. If you get the extra super upgrades you won't be sad upgrading Soul Burn, but on the other hand if you don't the build still works. If you can get your hands on Flame-Starved then the run becomes totally insane. You can have very good uptime on Flame-Starved via Concussive Blast IV alone, while still having Soul Burn on your secondary for when you need it.

Focus on health damage and super recharge traits for the Stranded and go nuts spamming the hell out of concussive. It's a crazy fun build, as long as you can get used to the slight awkwardness of having to use a Katar and a heavy weapon to block.

There is a variation of this build that uses the stranded + spellsword's charm but I never found that to work particularly well. You do get to charge concussive very fast, but your guard damage is awful and having only a single katar to block with is incredibly cumbersome. Adding Vestal's instead in the off-hand was my solution to those issues and I've found it works out very well.

Husks, like all enemies come in 2 versions. The weaker can be dispatched in two swings, one to guard break and a second to kill as they only have 5 HP. Normal Husks are a bit more hardy, usually taking several swings to guard break and 2-3 swings to kill.

In general, Husks aren't much of a threat on their own, they are there to distract and flank. As such, take them out when they are isolated or try to race them down before their backup can save them. Proper positioning and not allowing them to flank you will make them fairly trivial.

Husks are a good way to get easy damage and kills to recharge your super. Consider comboing them with your off-hand if you need a recharge.

Knights are quite a step up in threat from husks, and though they are the second enemy type you'll encounter they are by no means any less of a threat than Captains and Spellweavers. Knights are extremely aggressive on Nightmare, and their combos are the hardest in the game to block outside of the Aether Horror itself.

As such, Knights are usually a high priority to kill and get off the field, which makes being able to 1 combo them important.

Knights love to jump into combat to protect a guard-broken ally and will also occasionally leap backward to retreat when low on guard. When dealing with multiple knights, positioning is key. Use the terrain to your advantage or barring that try to get one knight hung up on another. Crowd control supers are also very useful, there's no shame in using one on a knight.

Knight combos can be very complex and difficult. Learning them so you can block with muscle memory is key to blocking their attacks on harder difficulties. Additionally, it's nearly impossible on Nightmare to block a knight attack from your flank. In such cases, simply dash away to safety.

Empowered Knights are infamous mostly for their empowered combos. These combos are far beyond anything else the game throws at you, and are generally a big wall for newer players.

There's essentially two ways to deal with it. The first is avoiding the combos, the second is learning the block them. While the combos are difficult, there are only two of them, which makes learning them not as difficult as one might initially think.

If you decide to avoid them, there are a few methods to try.

First, there is avoiding an empower by intentionally ending your combo early. Bring them down to 1 hit away from empowering, let them recover, and then kill them in one combo. This is fairly easy, but does require you to have the damage to pull it off and if you mess up the combo you can be in trouble.

Next, there are supers. Supers can either finish them off after they empower, or interrupt the empowered combo. After empowering, knights will almost always immediately launch into their combo. Depending on how fat away you are they'll either just start the combo, leap in and start the combo, or push you back and then leap in and start the combo. Once they begin the leap you can use a super like concussive blast or Soul Burn to disrupt them, ending the combo.

Another option is dodging the combo, however this must be done careful. Simply backdashing away will likely just result in the knight landing a lot of hits that are not telegraphed because they land just as the knight comes into range.

Instead, dodge past the knight diagonally as it leaps toward you. Keep your weapon in position to block a vertical slash on the left as you do so, that will give you a bit more leeway if you dash too late.

Lastly, be aware that using a super just to interrupt the combo, or dodging the attack will still result in an empowered knight to deal with. Even outside of the empowered combo, they still attack like knights, only faster which makes them still very dangerous.If not killed quickly enough, they can also empowered combo again.

Captains tend to be intimidating for newer Runeknights, due to their imposing size and the introduction of the dodge mechanic. However, once you have their patterns down, they are really just big piles of HP that are generally less dangerous than Knights. Their attack patterns are considerably easier and they are slower and less aggressive. They also offer up counters in their patterns which helps quite a bit to mitigate their massive HP pool.

As such, they are generally best left for last, though of course individual situations vary. In a group of mixed enemies it's better to take advantage of knights being faster and more aggressive to lure them away from Captains and save the Captains for last.

Empowered Captains are a whole other story. They're still slow, but now they have a charge to close the gap. While they don't have an empowered attack combo like Empowered Knights do, empowering does considerably increase their attack speed which can make their normally fairly easy patterns quite difficult. On top of that, while empowered they can AoE in a huge radius which can be difficult to dodge or interrupt if they do it while you are already engaged with other enemies.

As such, you really don't want to allow a Captain to empower outside of a 1 on 1 situation when you can possibly help it. Otherwise you run the risk of them AoEing while your attention is elsewhere.

Generally you should try the same tactics as normal Captains. Try to use the difference in speed to separate them. If needed you can guard break them and leave them guard broken to help create some distance. You can also bait out the charge and then separate enemies while the charge is on cooldown.

If you do allow a Captain to empower while engaging other enemies do your best to maintain a clear line to the Captain and be ready to charge in and counter the AoE the moment it begins. Once you counter it, you'll have a brief window while the AoE is on cooldown.

The charge will always result in a horizontal counter being available, and assuming you aren't distracted it's incredibly easy to counter the charge for some free damage. After comboing an empowered captain, it's best to back off and let them charge you so you can counter it. There's also a small chance they'll AoE, but that's okay, too as it's easy to counter if you are waiting for it.

One last note is that when you counter the AoE, it will refill the captain's guard meter. I am unsure if this is a bug or intended.