I’m thinking of switching from bomb knight to 3-swords-and-a-ranged-weapon night. Of course, I won’t stop being a sometimes-bomb knight, because it’s fun to play with different styles of weapons.

Today I experimented with covering the different damage types using various Brandish upgrades, and a Flourish whose recipe I finally found. Knowing each monster family weakness and being prepared to deliver such, as it turns out, is very important; bonuses can boost your damage up by 30 or more points, even at low levels on a weapon.

My equipped swords right now:

Fireburst Brandish

Mine has a UV of increased attack speed, which works for me.

Strong fire is only caused on a charged attack, but to me this isn’t problematic; if it had a chance of causing fire on each slash attack, that weapon would be death where Oilers are involved. Instead, I can safely carry around a fire weapon for all situations. This is rather important, since Undead can appear at any level thanks to Graveyards, and of course Constructs are rather popular.

The explosion caused by some charge attacks actually deals pure elemental damage as well as being what causes the fire status effect. I’ll note now that charging a Brandish line sword does not slow you down much, even at all; and since I’m used to kiting my enemies in this game, I’m fine with this.

Nightblade

Also part of the Brandish family tree, this sword actually deals both normal and shadow damage; for the longest time the tooltip was wrong. Still not sure if the wiki has fixed this or not. The explosion caused by some charge attacks deals additional pure shadow damage.

Useful for dealing with Slimes and with Gremlins, though for some reason Gremlin healers/menders are not weak to shadow damage. Humph.

Flourish

Quite fast and dealing pure piercing damage, Flourish is just wonderful against Beasts and Fiends. But in particular I love to use it with Wolvers, and it reminds me of the powerful three-bite attack of an Alpha Wolver: relentless. The initial strike of the three-hit combo has quite a wide swing, while the second two strikes hit straight forwards.

This forward movement can take you into spikes, making it less than ideal when dealing with spiky Clockworks level areas, but in a Wolver den you’ve got it made. And for some reason I deal well nowadays with maneuvering around spikes, even with the forward carry of Flourish, well enough to deal with a Dark City mini-arena.

Flourish is of course not ideal for other enemies, but then again, you have a sword or other weapon that deals normal damage, of course.

Alongside swordwork, any armor/helm in the Wolver line will be suitable, as each set either gives bonus damage or bonus attack speed (in the case of the Vog Cub set).

Is this set the ideal set of swords? Well, probably not. The ideal set probably involves either Faust, the Avenger, or Leviathan Blade. But I’m more than happy to make do with this set of swords, particularly since the Brandish elemental/shadow lines now go up to 5*.

My friends and I are getting good at robbing the first two levels of the Royal Jelly Palace, but we have yet to get the hang of the king himself. We need better, more highly leveled weapons.