Psycho Knife

Hold it, stop moving, and you fade out over about a second. The bonuses do not snap on at the end, they ramp the whole way up, so a swing taken halfway through is worth roughly half the payoff. Fully faded, your melee damage and critical chance are enormous next to anything else you own at this point. The price is that you crawl, and sprinting does nothing, since it drops to walking pace.

Landing a hit ends it and there is a brief lockout before you can start again. Switching items, taking any damage and climbing onto a mount all end it too. What does not end it is swinging at empty air, and once you are fully faded, walking does not either. The dangerous stretch is the ramp: move or swing before it completes and the whole thing resets. The rhythm in practice is stand, wait, land one very large swing, back off, wait again.

The drop in aggro is not cosmetic. Most walking and flying enemies will not chase a faded player who is not using items, and the ones that shoot hold their fire. In multiplayer they go after your friends instead and your health bar dims out of their view. Standing still in the middle of an eclipse doing nothing at all is genuinely safer than running, which takes some getting used to.

Dashes and grappling hooks do not cancel the fade, so you can reposition without paying for it. Better, a dash that does damage on its own, from solar flare armor or the Shield of Cthulhu, collects the stealth damage bonus. That is a way to spend the charge without walking into contact range, and about the only reliable way to land it on something that refuses to stand still.

This is the finisher for the parry weapons. Take the strike buff off a Brand of the Inferno or a Sergeant United Shield, swap across while already faded, and both multipliers land on the same swing. Against a boss with a predictable pause in its pattern, that one hit runs into the thousands. In Expert and above, banners count for considerably more, so a farmed enemy with full damage gear behind the swing produces some of the largest single numbers in the game.

• It takes almost nothing from melee speed gear, so speed reforges and attack speed accessories are close to wasted on it. Legendary is the reforge, and Light matches it for speed alone while giving up everything else.
• Its stealth overrides the shroomite and vortex versions rather than stacking with them, so wearing both gains you nothing but the knockback.
• The slowdown applies to flying sideways too, so you cannot kite while faded. Vertical flight is untouched.
• Every melee weapon benefits from the stealth stats, which sounds exploitable until you remember that switching weapons cancels it.