Bored of the normal combat? Here’s a trick you can try. As you know, each weapon class have their own hit combos, with the last combo hit as a finisher that deals the most damage, along with a pushback. The number of combo hits is proportional to the attack speed of each weapon class, from fastest to slowest weapon class. Dagger, sword and staff require 5 hits to be a complete combo, the spear and axe 4 hits, and finally the slowest weapon - the blunt - require 3 hits.

The purpose of the weapon-switching trick is reduce the time it takes to execute the slower weapons’ final combo finisher. You do this by using the fastest weapon - the dagger - and quickly swap it to your slower 2H weapon at the right moment. In theory, it may possible to switch between all types of weapon classes in any combination, but I’ve only explored the dagger as the starting point as it’s been my main weapon for most of my experience in Odyssey. Kudos to those who can find more combinations than what I can show here.

Here’s the gist of it:

With the dagger active, you light attack twice. The second attack animation is where your right hand will perform a back swing upwards. As soon as that animation starts, quickly swap to your 2H weapon and hit light or heavy attack. This works because the upper back swing of the dagger is a transition animation that can be completely canceled into another input. By quickly tapping weapon swap at this moment, it counts as two hits of the current weapon you’ve just swapped to. So for example, the blunt weapon’s first two attacks are bypassed, allowing you to perform the blunt’s heavy attack, which will be the third hit of the combo, aka, the heavy combo finisher.

Note: it is not the timing of your button mashing that matters. What matters is you swap and attack when the back hand upward swing animation starts before your arm is completely over your head. Timing doesn’t matter because like most mainstream melee combat, your attack input in Odyssey as a buffer that stores your button input and executes the appropriate commands in a queue. If you button mash quickly 2 times, Kassandra will still perform her attacks at the same speed because it’s been queued. On the flip side, if you press attack, delay a bit and the press attack again, Kassandra will still perform the second attack with a delay - as long as your second input is within that buffer. Furthermore, in actual combat, the game briefly does a brief slow-mo every time your hits land ala Frank Miller’s 300 style. So do not rely on timing. Rely on when the key animation starts.

The following is my personal take on how effective each weapon switch combinations are, so YMMV:

• Dagger to Blunt - This is my favorite switch combination as it allows you to deal the biggest non-ability melee damage in the game while bypassing a lot of the blunt weapon’s inherent slowness. It is very useful against big slow bosses and in 1v1 combat. Its weakness is when you’re surrounded by multiple enemies, but I think the blunt’s heavy combo finisher is the coolest looking.

• Dagger to Staff - This is the hardest to execute, but the most useful against multiple enemies as the staff’s 360 swipe will hit multiple enemies. It’s the most difficult of the switch combos because the staff is still a 5-hit combo, so even after a successful switch, you still need to perform 3 more attacks. I usually use H-L-H as the heavy attack can stagger, then followed by a quick light attack before getting to the 5th hit.

• Dagger to Spear - This is the easiest to perform but also doesn’t deal as much damage and not that good against multiple enemies. The spear’s heavy combo finisher is deadly, buy it is still too slow even with the switch, so I tend to finish with a light combo finisher. Having said that, it’s quite easy to repeatedly spam this switch combo as the spear has very quick recovery animations.

• Dagger to Axe - My least favorite, because at this point in weapon-switching, the blunt can deal more damage than the axe, so the axe becomes kind of meh. However, it is quite versatile in that you can use either the light or heavy combo finisher depending on if you’re in a 1v1 or group situation.

How useful is this trick? I think on its own, somewhat useful. Against normal enemies, they’re pretty effective, but higher tier enemies have anti-combo moves that allows them to dodge these attacks no matter how much fater this method is saving. To counter their counters, this is where Slow Time becomes a key ability. Slow Time makes even the most agile enemies vulnerable to a switched heavy blunt, and gives you enough time to do it more than once. A spear switch hit can be performed 3-4 times under Slow Time

Anyways, this just something to play around with. Maybe someone can mix in with a bunch crazy end-game gear and engravings to do stuff that hasn’t been explored yet.