If you have both a knife and shield in hand, you will use the shield and it's bonuses to parry, if you only have a knife, you will use that :D

Parry bonus is a multiplier to the block armor if you successfully parry, block force is how far back an enemy is pushed when you block (even without a parry, tower shields push enemies back fairly far, but cannot parry)


The more you block, the more you increase your block skill, each level of block skill add 0.5% to the block armor, so a block skill of 50, adds 25% block armor.

So a fully upgraded black metal round shield (90 block armor), with a block skill of 100 (50% bonus), has a block armor of 135, if you then parry (1.5% bonus) your effective block armor would be 202.5




A black metal knife has a block armor of 3, so with 100 block skill
4.5, with a x4 parry bonus, so you effective block armor would be 18.....



Or in other words...the knife is rarely worth trying to block with, it's better to just dodgeroll or run from the attack at that point ;D