Bonecrusher (BC) and Paradigmatics are two skills that complement each other wonderfully. I’m going to go more into detail later in this guide, but both skillsets give you good options for forcing failed actions, while BC also has some good stun potential, helping to give you that edge when it comes to outpacing your opponent’s curing.

In my experience, with one-handed knight specs, it is a better strategy to overwhelm your opponent with afflictions and venoms to build wounds, rather than just counting on doing more than a health application will heal. Because of this, I recommend using hammers with 280 speed, with all your remaining points in precision. If you’ve not played a knight class before in this game, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that the damage stat is completely useless for PvP purposes.

Artifacts always help, but it is my opinion that the nature of this strategy is such that it can be performed effectively without them.

Skill training recommendations:

• Bonecrusher: 80% Mythical+. BashBrain is a must. This is where most of our kills are going to come from. You’ll also want the other afflictions beneath it, of course. Pulp, the transcendent ability, you can do without. It’s a neat one, and theoretically gives you a bonus to your aff vs wounds roll, but for 4 power, doesn’t bypass stance/parry/rebound, it’s just too expensive to use in most cases.
  

• Paradigmatics: 0% Mythical+. This should get you up to ChaosAura, which will be integral to our plan to overwhelm our opponent. The skills beyond this sound nice, but in actual application are not going to be used much. Butterfly is too unpredictable for this particular strategy, where we have plenty of bread and butter skills that are going to be doing great already. Illumination is a possible kill method, sure, but a lot harder to pull off than our BashBrain is going to be. I’ll go more into that near the end of this guide.
  

• Athletics: Expert 50%+ for Strength. Technically you can go for this strategy with little to no athletics, but I’m going to recommend getting the strength ability. The extra strength is going to get you to the better afflictions faster. The faster you can get them to higher wound levels the better, as we will be counting on several abilities that fade over time.
  

• Combat: Novice 0%+ for Envenom. Venoms are crucial to the strategy. Luckily this one is very low, and is recommended for all knights in whatever situation. More combat is nice, but this is the one that is critical in this set. KeenEye at expert 66% is always nice, but you can do without if you need to.
  

• Beastmastery: Mythical 33%+ for Poison. This one isn’t a hard requirement, but it’s going to go a long way towards overwhelming our opponent’s curing. Spitting mantakaya at just the right moment can help us to get through stance/parry for a crucial hit. This, coupled with other abilities, becomes even nastier for Paradigmatics users.
  

Basic Strategy:


The core of this strategy focuses on overwhelming our opponent through several different means:

• At the beginning of the fight you should have EyeSnare (Paradigmatics) up in the room. This is going to passively cause some actions to fail and give them temporary insanity.
  

• Drop GreyWhispers (Paradigmatics) on your opponent. This is going to cause passive mental afflictions, as well as even more passive temporary insanity.
  

• Drop BadLuck (Paradigmatics) on your opponent. This is going to cause action failures, particularly when they are trying to focus mind or body.
  

• Optionally, you can also give them a Figment (Paradigmatics). I like a good slickness figment, as this is high priority to most systems and in this strategy we aren’t actually using senso. This is going to cause them to waste precious herb balances, putting them further behind, and forcing them to focus mind instead of eating pennyroyal a couple of times. As an alternative, I also sometimes use a TK vessel illusion. This is less reliable, but if the timing happens to be lucky you might trick them into sipping, letting your wounds get further ahead of their applications.
  

• With ChaosAura up, your hits have a high probability of giving your opponent some temporary insanity. Temporary insanity is cured two ways: eating pennyroyal, and focus mind.
  

• Use Dulak and Mantakaya for your venoms. Mantakaya causes paralysis, which allows your hits to ignore stance, parry, and acrobatics dodge. It’s traditionally cured with focus body. Dulak causes stupidity, which is additional chance of failed actions, cured by focus mind or pennyroyal.
  

All of this together is going to weigh heavily on your opponent’s curing. Loads of mental afflictions, huge amounts of temporary insanity, as well as the paralysis are going to force tough choices. Add in the fact that BadLuck is going to be causing a lot of focus mind/body failures and it really gets nasty. We haven’t even started talking about BC afflictions we’re going to give yet!

Oh yeah, all that focusing you're going to force on them is sure to net you some mana sips, so that's a good thing for overall wound building as well.

For BC afflictions, the big three in this strategy are BreakNose, BreakChest, and FractureSkull. The first two are stuns, and FractureSkull causes failed actions in the same way as stupidity. All three of these are on the lower end of the wound scale, light medium and medium respectively. All three can be hit when smiting down. BreakChest can also be hit when striking the chest, which makes it a very easy go-to for early, consistent stunning.

Stuns and paralysis are going to help us get through parry, allowing us to smite down much more often than we could otherwise. Add in a beast spit of mantakaya to the beginning of your smite down alias. This is going to help us hit paralysis as much as possible, also helping to ensure our smite downs make it through more often. Depending on your opponent’s cure priorities, paralysis, stupidity, tons of temp-insanity, stuns, failed actions, failed focus attempts, you may find that they become paralyzed for long periods of time, allowing you to just blast their head over and over. Otherwise, you are still going to have them hurting pretty bad, and critical head wounds should not be overly difficult to achieve.

Why I don’t try to illuminate: Throughout all of this you should be getting a lot of temporary insanity on your victim. However, temporary insanity also tends to be a higher priority cure when you get to moderate+, and as such it is difficult to get them to moderate, halt your attack to TrueName, then build back up to majorly insane, within the 1 minute you have before the Paradigmatics abilities you dropped on them start to wear off. Difficult, but not impossible; it all depends on their curing priorities. I’ve found I can sufficiently destroy people’s curing enough to achieve that if I put up VisionFlux during the fight, but this is an additional 6 power, meaning you have a 12 power buildup for an 8 power instakill…. If you go that route you will only have the power needed if you refresh power. VisionFlux also gives some afflictions that are counter-productive. Nothing quite as annoying as having an affliction (think shyness, claustrophobia) cause someone to zip out of the room while you are beating the crap out of them.

I recommend Aslaran for this strategy (lol, always recommend aslaran). The speed bonus is going to let you overwhelm your opponent more easily, while they also get an EQ speed bonus, helping you get that opening prepped faster. They have great dex to help you hit the afflictions you want, and their strength isn’t too shabby. If you don’t have the abilities or buffs to boost strength above their naturally high intelligence, you can use Polarize (Paradigmatics) to swap the stats, which even allows a Knowledge Karma blessing to give you +Str!

Not going to break down the maneuvers like I have for other guides in the past, rather I’ll just mention a few afflictions I don’t like to keep in and why, you can figure out what you don’t want for your own reasons:

• VomitBlood: This affliction just gives you some really low damage on a tic. It’s cured by choleric, and you just don’t have anything that’s going to stick with it to keep it on. Doesn’t help anything else stick either, so it just isn’t doing much for you. I’d much rather hit the occasional Wind, if I’m hitting gut. It isn’t too game breaking either, but with this strategy it doesn’t hurt, as they are going to be getting a lot of balance loss from BadLuck that you can extend a little bit. If I had to pick one BC ability that just doesn’t belong in the skillset it’d be VomitBlood, but that’s the envoys problem, and a discussion for another thread :P
  

• BlackEye: Now, this is a heavy head aff given on a swing that causes a brief blackout and blindness. Honestly, it isn’t too shabby an affliction. Blackout is fun because it makes people panic, and blindness is a great aff to stack up with all the herbs your opponent is going to be choking down already. Problem is, I don’t want to hit BlackEye more than I want to hit FractureSkull, so I personally leave this one out, because I feel the failed actions from FractureSkull are just more in-line with our goal in this strategy.
  

Hope you enjoyed!

Jealous of synergy.

Vessel illusions are kinda useless since the introduction of curing messages for vessels. One sparkle eaten and the system will know they have no vessels, and I don't think anyone prioritizes 1-3 vessels over any wounds greater than light if they happen to get sip balance back before sparkle balance (although some might for lack of tweaking priorities at all).

Yeah, like I said, the slickness message is more likely to result in something usable. However, it's possible to get a sip out of a vessel illusion. With max speed hammers, if the figment tics within the first two rounds of you swinging it's possible you have only light wounds spread out on a few bodyparts. It's also possible for it to tic just before the first time you swing.