If you use the delay on scintilatting sun shards, you can actually deal decent damage to devilites quite easily just by strafing about and spamming. The unfortunately rescued knights are still a problem, but less of one when you're hardly aiming the bomb. If you are aiming shard bombs, you're doing it wrong as you will be punished via losing damage to invincitinks. For this, sun shards is probably the best bomb. That being said, voltaic tempest + DBB works fairly well and can take care of more enemies on the whole.

Only Dark Briar Barrage with CTR Max! and Range Very High will help kill devilites.

>>> Go for Divine Veil set and be completely lacking normal defense (and still taking fairly bad damage in the upper T2 as well as being blasted by Trojans), or run Valkyrie and die from the fire not shadow damage.

Don't be obsessed with sets. Combine Divine Veil helm with Valkyrie Mail armor.

- keeps the DB
- saves some Normal resistance for you
- kills the Fire vulnerability

Attune your sprite accordingly if you want further protection or CTR.

I see the NPC knights as a good way to practice comboing my attacks with allies. If you have difficulties with NPC knights' knockback, you probably miss your attacks with regular knights, but they deal enough damage that you don't care (also it doesn't happen as often because most players don't blitz).

I personally enjoy their company, and I think it makes shard bombing fiends easier. I use them as decoys, then circle around while shardspamming, then disengage.