Yeah, you basically either need to abuse cadence (+ bounce knives), or win with a build that doesn't even use a weapon.

The main problem with them is that the game requires you to shoot to move, but the knives require you to move to shoot.

Getting cornered/surrounded is the worst thing about the knives. I don't think you can even manually aim them (ie. target specific enemies) to make a path. And IIRC they don't work at all with pierce or bounce. No idea why the dev thinks they are okay...

So, pulled this up as I hadn't played with them yet and just sorta fooled around.

I found a reliable way of throwing knives in exactly the direction you want. Pick up the "fire a bullet behind you" upgrade. The knives created by this will fly directly away from your cursor regardless of which direction your regular "forward" knives will go.

Aaand just got a win, recorded the whole run (my third). I set Darkness to +0 just to balance out the "new weapon, default character, figure things out" vibe rather than going with the deer druid and cheesing my way through Darkness +2 (the highest I've got so far).

https://youtu.be/5lAbdASvx1M

I forget that guy has the ability to reroll his perk choices and I'm still only very rarely disappointed.

Salvo Knife is quite good with Katana, it has the fastest reload speed among all weapons which lets you summon swords more often.

Originally posted by Sintonir:

Salvo Knife is quite good with Katana, it has the fastest reload speed among all weapons which lets you summon swords more often.

i found better synergy with the ice girl, myself. was a lot more survivable with sight magic, too.

Originally posted by Thundercracker:

Originally posted by Sintonir:

Salvo Knife is quite good with Katana, it has the fastest reload speed among all weapons which lets you summon swords more often.

i found better synergy with the ice girl, myself. was a lot more survivable with sight magic, too.

Same. I just got my first Darkness 2 Temple win with Yuki and Salvo Knives. Makes spamming butterflies a breeze, which gives you room to maneuver. If you can put Freezing on your bullets and then start stacking Freeze upgrades, it gets pretty absurd.

It's finally done! If you're also having trouble with the Salvo Knives on Darkness 15, Dasha + 999 ammo was the solution.

Originally posted by nul:

Yeah, you basically either need to abuse cadence (+ bounce knives), or win with a build that doesn't even use a weapon.

The main problem with them is that the game requires you to shoot to move, but the knives require you to move to shoot.

Haven't tried the knives for real yet, but Lilith is my go to for easy wins - I did the no shooting and no hits with her (different runs, of course). At some points you can even stand still. And if you get the double ghost boss upgrade - it gets even easier.

Lots of complete nonsense in this thread.

I have seen lots of "this weapon sucks" threads like this, and in 100% cases it was a user error fault, nothing to do with the weapon itself.

You can easily build knives into the game basically playing itself, so when you dash everything gets annihilated.
And you can build all weapons to do this, there are no bad weapons, only bad players.

999 ammo is actually the worst evolution of out 3 available.

Trick Knife is the best one, and might be the best in the entire game.

Kunoichi + Cadence + Trick Knife = total annihilation

The best character to pick is Hina, because her dash counts as movement, meaning it will lock targets for the knives. This solves the slow locking problem in the beginning.

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥ Goblin:

And IIRC they don't work at all with pierce or bounce.

You clearly have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

I've only won with these once, just now, on darkness 5.

I can see how with a good build they'd be very effective, they're just hard to use and kind of require you to do the opposite of some other very powerful builds.

Where many builds want you to be in the middle of a ring of enemies, the knives require you to be outside a ball of them. And because they can't be targeted manually, they make some bosses very tricky.

I've played this with Abby and beat darkness 15 with it.
If you Upgrade the Number of projectiles and Piercing, they are good.

I don't like Salvo Knifes, the Darkness 15 challenge took me a few afternoons. By my exp there are 2 kind of builds that make it a little easier:
1. Movement speed, Bounce, curse damage, raw damage and characters that generates adittional proyectils or have curse speciallizations.
2. Movement speed, Penetration, bigger proyectils, raw damage and characters that generates adittional proyectils or have increases in damage.
Another not optimal but viable build is done taking anything that damages everything around you, like the vision skill or the wind magic to supplement your daggers.
If you get frustrated use the character that transfors in a deer, it feels like cheating.

Abby + 999 knives is pretty fun to use imo, even in Darkness 15, but yeah, as other said, the best way to play the weapon is actually not to play it, using a summon build or whatever

I just outright used Dasher with the knives to get the 15 achieviment, meaning i didn't use the knives at all. Mostly for the speed bonus at lvl 20... also, both the character and the weapon sucks.