Weapon Defence: Block, Parry or Neither

You are not required to parry. That belief is the most common reason people bounce off Sephiria, and it is wrong for five of the six starting weapons. Each has its own answer to an incoming hit, no two work alike, and the great sword has no answer at all. Playing a weapon with the wrong habit — dashing away from a blow you were meant to catch, or waiting to catch one on a weapon that cannot — is what makes the difficulty feel unfair.

The six answers

Weapon	Defensive action	Shape of it
Default Sword and Shield	Block	Held. Take the hit on the shield and keep standing
Quarterstaff	Riposte	Tapped. A counter thrown into the incoming attack
Dagger	Parry	Tapped. Success arms a much bigger attack
Blade	Sheath and Draw	The switch itself turns attacks aside
Colossal Crossbow	Distance	No defensive button; the only starting weapon that shoots
Steel Greatsword	None	Dash, spacing and the stats you build

All four defensive moves live on the same weapon-action input as the special attack, which is why they are so easy to mistake for one. Each page in the weapon database lists its moves with the exact input beside them.

Sword and shield — the only one you hold

Hold the action button and the shield goes up. This is the one weapon where standing still is correct, and where a mistimed defence still partly works: a blocked hit lands on the shield instead of you.

It is not free. Each blocked hit spends MP — 10 at base, halved when you raise the shield into the hit rather than before it, which is a perfect guard, and lowered further by block durability resistance. A blocked hit also staggers you, and the heavier the blow the longer it holds you: around 0.2 seconds for a light hit, 0.33, then 0.46 for the heaviest things in the tower. Those fractions are what kill shield players — you block the first hit of a volley and are still recovering when the second arrives. A Guard Break state can stop you blocking entirely for a while, so a shield is a resource, not a wall.

From behind the shield, the attack button becomes Cleave for 15 MP. Blocking and attacking are the same stance, which is why the sword and shield rewards holding ground more than any other weapon.

Quarterstaff — a counter, not a wall

Riposte is tapped into an incoming attack, not held in anticipation of one. Timed onto the hit it becomes a perfect guard, and several artifacts pay you for landing those. The staff attacks in a long chain, so the natural rhythm is chain, counter, chain — you are never more than a beat away from being able to answer.

Dagger — the one that really is a parry

Parry is tapped, costs MP, and on a success grants Trance. While Trance is up the same button becomes Fury instead. That is the whole design: defending is how you unlock your heavy attack, so a dagger player who never parries has half a kit. This is the weapon people mean when they insist the game demands parrying — it demands it here, and nowhere else.

Blade — the switch is the defence

Sheath and Draw looks like a stance toggle, and it is, but the transition itself turns attacks aside — the game’s own weapon training asks you to block using Draw or Sheath. While sheathed, your attack button fires Heavy Slash for 5 MP. Defence and your biggest melee hit share one motion, so the blade plays as a rhythm of sheathing through danger and drawing into the gap.

Colossal Crossbow — range is the answer

There is no defensive move, because the crossbow is the only starting weapon that fights at range and never needs one if you keep your spacing. Power Arrow costs 10 MP and spends no ammunition. What you manage instead is the magazine: ten shots at a 0.33 second interval, then a two second reload during which you do nothing at all. Reload in a gap you chose, or it will happen at the worst moment for you. Its dash attack plants a mine rather than swinging, so even your escape leaves something behind.

Steel Greatsword — nothing, and that is the point

The greatsword has no defensive action. Whirlwind is charged on the action button and released, costs 15 MP, and cannot come round faster than once every 1.2 seconds. Everything else is your feet. Players who pick it up after a shield weapon die repeatedly and conclude the game is badly balanced; what has actually happened is that their defensive verb was removed and nothing replaced it.

Its real answers are spacing, the dash, and building the stats other weapons can be lazy about. Defence pays best early — 40 Defense removes 30.8% of every hit, and the curve flattens sharply after that, so the first defensive artifact matters far more than the fourth (the curve in full). That cushion does the job a shield does elsewhere.

Your weapon also decides how often artifacts fire

There is a second, quieter difference between the six. Every artifact that rolls a chance when you hit something reads a value belonging to the weapon, not the artifact: how much one swing counts as an attack. Against the sword and shield as the baseline:

Weapon	One swing counts as
Steel Greatsword	150%
Colossal Crossbow	120%
Default Sword and Shield	100%
Quarterstaff	90%
Blade	82.5%
Dagger	68.75%

A greatsword swing is worth one and a half sword-and-shield swings to a chance-on-hit effect; a dagger swing is worth barely two thirds of one. The same artifact, in the same bag, rolls its chance more than twice as often per swing on the greatsword as on the dagger.

It is not the whole story: the six swing at different speeds and their chains are different lengths, so a fast weapon with a low value per swing and a slow one with a high value can land in a similar place over a fight. What the number settles is that procs per swing and procs per second are different questions, and that an “on hit” artifact is judged by your weapon first.

The practical version: on the dagger and the blade, prefer artifacts paying per second, per kill or per combo over ones rolling a chance on each hit; on the greatsword and the crossbow, chance-on-hit artifacts are worth more than their card suggests. And the value never changes as you upgrade — see how upgrade routes work.

The dash is a resource, not a defence

Every weapon starts with two dashes and dash invincibility, and it is tempting to treat that as the universal answer. It is not — dashes run out, and recovery is slow enough that a panicked double dash leaves you standing in the next attack with nothing. Swiftness adds a dash at level 5 and widens the invincibility window at 20; costumes rewrite it outright, and White Wolf’s Infinity Dash comes with dash invincibility disabled. On the greatsword that leaves you with nothing at all — read the trade on the costume list first.

Evasion is rolled separately from all of this. Dash invincibility, guarding and shields are not part of the evasion check, so stacking evasion does not improve your block or your parry. They are independent layers, and a weapon with no defensive action only has the one.

Upgrades can take your defence away

Most upgrades change a weapon’s numbers and leave its moveset alone. Some replace moves outright, and if the move being replaced is the one keeping you alive, that matters more than any damage figure attached to it. The blade’s Solis Ekli rewrites the sheathe action; the sword and shield’s Stone Sword turns Cleave into a Shield Bash and changes what a successful block does. Neither is a bad weapon — but pick one blind and your muscle memory stops working mid-run.

So read the route first. The weapon upgrade map shows what each step changes against the weapon it came from; if your weapon’s defence is its special attack, that is the line to check. And skills and special attacks share one MP bar, with the sword and shield’s block drawing from it too — active skills and MP covers what else competes for it.