So, you've equipped your "Devil's Claw" sword and hit the special action button. What should you know? First, you will do a short animation of you defending yourself. If at any point during this animation you are hit by a melee attack, you will continue to block attacks for a very small window of time, and then do a return attack (or, a 'Parry attack'). This return attack does quite a bit of damage, tends to hit the head area of things you're looking at, and has quite a bit more armor penetration than the sword has by default.

First, let's talk about the blocking half of the parry. This part does counts as you blocking (and is effected by block efficiency perks!) and can be done instantly as soon as you swap weapons. It takes the same amount of stamina to block with a parry as normally. There's an exception, though. If you parry within 200ms of starting the animation, you instead get a 'perfect parry' (there is no indicator of this) that significantly reduces the amount of stamina used. The Mauler's and Crusher's attacks will still significantly drain your stamina more than normal attacks even if perfectly parried, but it is very possible to block multiple overheads if you perfect parry all of them. If you parry an attack while at zero stamina, you will still block all of the damage, but get staggered, resulting in you not delivering the attack as normal. The only exception to this is both variety of ragers. You can parry the first attack in Rager's combos as normal, but if you attempt to parry attacks in the middle of their combos they will sometimes hit you 2 times in quick succession instead, staggering you and resulting in you not returning an attack. This is inconsistent, but parrying their first attack is always safe.


The attack half of the parry is not at all linked to the block half. Once you've triggered the attack, you are free to hit anything you want, and can even aim at a different enemy who's not even targeting you to hit them with the attack. This is especially useful if you need to deal with bigger enemies your parry sword would normally struggle with; you can get a small guy to hit you to get a very strong attack against a crusher stomping your downed teammate. Despite it's awkward strike angle, it's possible to cleave like you normally would with the sword as well, killing multiple weaker enemies per swing.

So, you've gotten pretty good at parrying. But you notice something; while you're attacking, you can't parry! This normally isn't an issue, but when you want to chain together parrys, or quickly react to a flanking enemy, your only option is to block.

... Or is it?

You can block to interrupt your attack, then parry directly after. This small fact does not seem significant, but given how powerful parrying attacks are, getting as many as possible in a short amount of time is significant. This also allows you to hypothetically melee tank anything in the game except ragers forever, as you can continuously parry and dodge attacks to effectively take zero damage no matter how close together the melee attacks are.


So, to make this technique clearer, let's list it step by step.

1) Parry an attack.

2) As soon as you begin swinging your sword for the parry attack, hold your block button. (Or you can begin to holding the block button whenever you realize you need to parry again.)

3) Press the parry button the moment you begin the blocking animation.

This should result in you parrying almost immediately after parrying the last attack, and is hypothetically fast enough to tank (and eventually kill, with that sweet parry damage) most bosses, including daemonhosts with proper dodging. Have fun!

1) Because parrying counts as a block and is affected by block talents, pyskers can take Kinetic Deflection to be able to parry with their peril instead of their stamina, making them easily able to fully parry Crushers and Maulers overhead attacks instead of just blocking the damage.

2) Dodging takes priority over parrying, so trying to use parry while dodging is pointless. However, dodging directly AFTER a parry allows you to avoid other attacks while doing your return attack.

I just wanted to share as much info as well as possible. If you have anything else I should know or notice something wrong with my guide please let me know so I can update it and I'll credit you here!

telepots - Video and technical information on rager hits and perfect parrying