Merciless Knight Combat Knife Only - Professional/No Damage

This is something I forgot to do in my previous run. Having done this means I've finally covered all three strong threat enemies knife only. But this is by far the worst one. Which all the more frustrating because it's not even difficult in principle. The Armaduras are just a naturally frustrating enemy, but the golden knight variation is utterly abhorrent for knife only.

The room starts off simple, though it's so easy to screw up if either you fail parries or the knights move in annoying ways. The idea is to kill the normal Armaduras before taking on the golden one. Knife durability is a huge concern, but you are fine to use the knife execution on both of the normal knights. The way I go about the room does yield some amount of consistency, but every now and then the knights will move in frustrating ways. Most of the time I failed was either due to failing parries or underestimating the BS nature of the golden knight. If things get uncomfortable, you can return to the elevator. This will cause the knights to leash. The golden knight will end up taking a long and slow path to the back up the room, which can give you plenty of time to deal with the other knights.

The golden knight itself has such infuriating behaviors. First of all, it has absurd reach. It can lunge at you from halfway across the room with its stab attack. If it raises its sword and walks after you, it can do a double strike which can easily catch you if you aren't careful. A lot of its attacks can just hit you through the pillars too which is so garbage. You don't want to parry this enemy unlike the other two. Parrying the golden knight doesn't set up melee or a knife prompt (Turns out this isn't entirely true; Aether has mentioned in the comments that you actually can get the melee prompt if you parry it three times and possibly less with more stun damage) It just causes it to recoil and it shaves way too much durability off your knife. I ended up parrying it in this attempt, and thankfully I had just enough durability leftover to win by the skin of my teeth.

The big problem with the golden knight is the location of the weakspot. It is not easy or consistent at all to hit it with the knife. Half of this video is me awkwardly fumbling behind it desperately trying to hit the weakspot. Most of the time you'll hit the armor, and yes, that does reduce your knife durability. You really can't afford to miss too many times. It gets worse when you do manage to make the plagas come out, because while it's standing you can't effectively reach the plaga from behind. My solution to this is to keep my distance and bait out the attack where he holds the sword above his head. I bait both swings before going in to punish. I do this twice just to be safe, though it is technically possible to kill him after just one cycle of this.

This proved to be so much more frustrating than I anticipated. I couldn't really figure out any better strategy. Using the stairs to gain elevation against the golden knight proved to be awkward, clumsy and unreliable. The space is just too limited and he is constantly moving in awkward ways. If anyone has a better strategy then feel free to share it. Not that anyone in their right mind should be interested in doing this room knife only. I'm glad to have this one behind me.