You can bait the Skarrguard into the corner when he digs into the ground. This is somewhat known but a lot of people don't do it and there's no post of it anywhere that I can find, so just reposting here for visibility.
- 🔥14
Ant_02
Here's some stuff past me didn't figure out:
The opening I had in the previous post was a bit scuffed and awkward. Attachment 1 is a slightly faster and more consistent version of it. As long as your jump is after the second twig and last pogo is after the rightmost edge of the rightmost bush, it should hit the Skarrgard. Due to random inconsistency during pogo dashes, you may be much higher or lower than I was in attachment 1, but nearly anything works. All of the attachments use this opening, so this variation can be seen between them.
You can actually hit the Skarrgard an extra time during it's swing. This lets you kill it super fast if you get the perfect rng of 3 swings in a row (attachment 2).
The only reason for an upslash before a jump or burrow is to avoid the knockback of a regular slash - don't bother upslashing on burrows. If you find it hard to avoid getting hit by walking under jumps, you can just not slash before a jump and focus on the movement, or you can do a slightly tricky parry (attachment 3). It's really hard (but possible!) to actually hit the Skarrgard with the parry, so try to focus on perfecting the timing before that.
Other than all that's it's straightforward. If you're just trying to survive, try to work on perfecting your responses to attacks and then recognising them in the context of the fight. If you're trying to go as fast as possible, you can work on adding the harder strats
Some strats for the Skarrgard at the entrance to Hunter's March (assuming you have Silkspear and nothing else)
The Skarrgard has 150 hp, so it's optimal to start the fight with at least 5/9 silk, though more than 5 doesn't hurt, and up to 7 can help. You can get 6 silk really easily/nearly optimally from the enemies on the way to the Skarrgard from Bell Beast (including 1 from the Silk Heart)
The Skarrgard has 3 possible moves - a swing, a jump, and a burrow. You can tell that the Skarrgard is going to swing when it draws back it's weapon, and you can pogo the Skarrgard between the two individual swings to get in an attack. The timing is fairly tight but very consistent after some practice (see attachment 1). For the jump and burrow, the visual indicator is the same - a slight crouch. However, there is an audio indicator - if the Skarrgard growls before the attack, it will always be a jump. You should stay still if it is burrowing, and start moving towards the Skarrgard as soon as you see that it is jumping, to avoid getting hit. It's very easy to get hit if you don't react quite quickly. It's nice to get into the habit of upslashing just before either of those attacks, both because niche timings can make it so that a regular slash will only hit the Skarrgard if it burrows and not if it jumps, and because the knockback from a regular slash makes it easier to get hit on a jump. Very rarely, the timings make it so that you have to do a minihop before the upslash to hit the Skarrgard on either attack. Attachments 2 and 3 are examples of what a jump and burrow should each look like.