Of course! I did a test today before publishing this.

It's a bit icky because the Gran Faust combo ended up at 849 damage and the opponent had 840 health. I should probably redo it with a wider gap to more sufficiently prove it.

Edit: I just did 1605 damage against a single striker using three Triglav charges. I had max damage, and my target was wearing Chaos+Skolver. Thanks to Redblades for volunteering for this.

Most of the entries have a row labeled "Chaos".

For piercing weapons, check "No armour".

There weren't any Chaos entries for Combuster, so I just added them. Thanks for reminding me!

@Cradarc
But if you manage to kill opponents using more hits to get more damage out of them, you will rub it in their face extra hard how much better you are than them. In fact, you should almost feel ashamed about needing max damage!

Why would you announce anything? Just switch your weapons around. Open the fight with a Nova shot, hit them 3 times with Flourish and then hunt them down with your Faust as they'll no doubt try escaping at 1% health. This can easily be worked into your rhytm if you're serious about your damage farming.

1) 2) 3) and 4)

When people flaunt their damage score, it's not usually under the implication "Look at how lucky I got with this damage score! I got sooo lucky!"

Instead, they usually imply "Look at how much better I am than other people. Including you! I'm much better than you!".

These people, if they are indeed better than anyone else, should have no trouble using this method. They're better, after all! Risk vs Reward.

4) No. You will notice how I didn't give an example of how you can reduce your opponent's HP to 1 before dealing the final blow, even though could devise several such methods: All of them are too slow. Opening a fight with a Nova Driver shot before you close the distance for 3 FF hits and then finish with your heavy sword, this is a quick method. You can train yourself to act in this manner without even thinking about it.

2) and 3) This is how you'd do it under ideal conditions. I'm not telling you to perform every single kill you make like this. Indeed, in practice that's nearly impossible. You would have to calculate and have ready a method to optimally milk strikers without pentas. Recons. Guardians. With and without pentas. Mabe some of them only have trihearts! Maybe some of them have unexpected defence UVs! Maybe most people you meet are hurt in advance? Maybe they're hazebomber! How are you gonna FF hazebombers with any kind of expediency?

I can't tell you how things are working out in practice. All I can do is describe an ideal, theoretical scenario and then you can worry about bridging the gap between those two.

And yes, sometimes killing fast is going to be the most efficient solution. If you're surrounded by 6 guys, you can be damned sure that taking them all out in a couple of GF combos is going to net you more damage over time than whittling down each one in advance. (Unless, perhaps, bombs will work better? I dunno, man! Crazier things have happened!)

It's a pointer. If you're looking to increase your damage, keeping this theory in mind can help you work out a method for whittling enemy HP down and setting them up for overkill (since you are now aware that it is a factor, whereas previously most people responding here weren't). Whether that starts when they have 1, 50 or 300 HP left is entirely left to your own skill and imagination.

@Terrty

http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/90606

You should not get Chaos with piercing max. There are more useful things to throw your money away at.

Zee-cores, for instance.

1) I'm sure if you asked Feller, he would tell you he could pull this off 100% of the time using Auto-Target because Auto-Target lets you win everything.

2) Here's the kicker. You don't have to hit with the Nova bullet. Your opponent will die after 3 FF + GF with the bullet or without it, but the Nova shot will add to your damage. Open the fight with the Nova bullet, maybe it'll hit, maybe it won't.

Like you said, your opponent is probable to retaliate as well. While your opponent is doing that, I assume you want to be outside of the range of their sword hit, and you could fire off the Nova at that point, maybe? There are a lot of ways to pull this particular combo off, and, more importantly, it doesn't have to be this particular combo. That one just hit really close to 1 hit points so in terms of damage per kill it paid off pretty well. You could go lower risk with something akin to 2 x Gran Faust + Polaris + a third Gran Faust or 2 x Flourish + Gran Faust Combo.

Your example with DVS isn't extreme at all, it's just inefficient. Against which opponent and at what level of damage bonus will DVS take your opponent down to 24 HP or less? (You need less for the poison to pay off.) Why are you using a Triglav charge when Divine Avenger's charge is easier to land and hits harder? Why are you poisoning your opponent when you could get a teammate to deathmark them?

There, that's an extreme example.

3) Honestly, though? I have no idea. Any given member posting on this subforum will have orders of magnitude more experience damage-farming and being a striker than I do, including you. I've been hoping for someone to provide feedback on the practical aspect of it.

I can run numbers, however. Wanna run numbers?

Let's say you kill all of your opponents using 3x Gran Faust. (Is this what you guys usually do?): 3 x 413 = 1239 per kill

In a seperate match, you kill all of them using 3 x Flourish + Nova + Gran Faust. 3 x 290 + 204 + 413 = 1487 per kill

In the first match, you get 14 868 damage. That's 12 opponents. A Lockdown match lasts for about 7 minutes, so that's a kill every 35 seconds.

In order to match that score, you will need 10 kills in the second match. Assuming a 7 minute match, that's a kill every 42 seconds. In other words, the second method must not add more than 7 seconds to your fights in order to be efficient.

We'll up the ante. You're aiming for 40k damage.

That's 33 kills (40887) with the first method and 27 kills (40149) with the second.

We're looking at 12.7 seconds between kills for the first instance and 15.5 seconds for the second. In this instance, the second method is not allowed to take more than 2.8 seconds longer than the first one.

Does it? I'm sure you or someone else will let me know if it does. Admittedly, 2.8 seconds is not a lot of time to squeeze in 3 flourish hits and a gunshot in place of 2 heavy sword hits. And ideally you want it to be even faster than that for this method to actually be the superiour method to use. It does look grim for this method at higher levels of damage farming.

One thing to keep in mind is that in matches with ridiculously high damage numbers around the range of 40k, the farmer is very likely to be facing a team full of really inept opponents and would probably not have any problems at all pulling the combo off.