This is a change that would elevate the game. It is the sort of thing that would make people talk about Spiral Knights whenever they mentioned their favorite game of all time, not just the 20 people posting here, but the thousands of people that could like the game and do not. It would not be an easy change to make, but rather, a necessary one. I say that because right now, Spiral Knights just isn't up there and will very likely never be up there as a "great" game for the bulk of its players.
The Concept
When you go down into the clockworks, the best way to play is to process levels like a machine would. You iterate through all of the paths to get all of the ends which contain loot, and every run feels about the same with relatively repeatable results. This holds the game back by negating those random elements that it relies so heavily on for replay value- every clockwork tunnels feels the same and is basically the exact same level regardless of which parts it uses, especially whenever you bring the same items every time.
So I've been thinking a lot about this, and I think that the cause of this redundancy is that complete lack of real puzzle elements and relatively underwhelming nature of consumables and other temporary drops. Lets take for example the puzzle elements that occur during the Apocrean event- you find a key, you put it in a lock. You get an item that is... a material, most of the time. This isn't a real puzzle. Anyone can see that the key belongs in the lock, and it adds nothing to the game when that trigger is changed to a statue, a button, a spinning switch.......
These elements are fine, but they're rarely used in any interesting way and never used in a meaningful way. The puzzles in Spiral Knights are basically one of these, when a much better solution would be a puzzle like one of these, something tangible for you to work with that offers multiple solutions and multiple rewards.
This is where consumables come in. If we needed non-health related items for success and if they helped us out in actually interesting ways, there would be a much bigger drive to attain them and they would actually make the game interesting- however, since they wouldn't change the payout of levels they would offer mostly optional benefits that would really ramp up when the player has more gear options. If I find sword damage up as my setup, I might want to swap and use swords when I would usually not. In essence, consumables should define our runs as much as anything else would.
Proposed Changes to Consumables
The notion of what a vitapod should be extended to include a good many more effects than just buffing your HP. Because of this health in general would be made less of a requirement from vitapods by way of letting armor grant you more health per piece based on how defensive those pieces of armor are, and vitapods would be made to give less health in general. An additional pod slot would be added on to allow for multiple pod type pickups to be held at one point, and the ability to drop vitapods would be re-added to allow for players to swap out their boosts.
The new "vitapods" would be modules that allowed the knight to augment all aspects of their play- all existing buffs, and as many effects as possible would be added to these pods. Sword speed med, movement speed increased... these could be randomly generated for best effect, with balance built in using formulas. Some of them would contain tradeoffs- movement speed: max for negative damage very high? These kinds of things would make building your character actually interesting. Picking up a vitapod that does the same thing every time just doesn't benefit the game's design like it should. Of course, these wouldn't just drop all over the place any more, and would be spawned at a more constant rate, depending on the amount of effort put in to get them.
The idea of consumables like pills could also use improvement. The game focuses entirely on pills and health caps, with few exceptions. I wouldn't frown on this fact entirely however- why not add new health items and capitalize on it? Imagine a temporary health boost that filled your entire health bar with health pips that would disapear after a minute. Other options would be pills that gave you less health back, but healed your entire party, revival pills (revive one team mate for half health, anyone?), status immunity pills (only work prior to the status being applied) and temporary health regeneration pills (use and your health bar heals slowly over the course of a few minutes). These kinds of pill drops would all function like our current consumables, and would be found from monster drops like they currently are.
The other side to this would be the various vials and barriers that one can find. I would like to suggest turning these into active effects like sprite skills. Vials would regenerate over time, and would receive a small buff in their area of effect. Because of this recharge feature, they would become rarer to find, interchangeable with the vitapods mentioned above.
Proposed Changes to Levels (and Enemies)
The only necessary change would be a means of accommodating meaningful puzzle elements into the game. Most of the game would stay the same, but would need a bit of reformatting, and new sections would be added on as needed.
Every run should start with several development levels, should progress into several loot levels, and should end with a climax level. In other words, the first few levels would be aimed at building up your consumables and passive benefits, making you harder, better, faster and stronger, Daft Punk style. These levels would have average to mediocre loot. The second set of levels would appear more often the deeper you went. These would be more oriented around permanent loot, like rarities, materials, crowns.. they would be the meat of the run. At the end of the run, you would fight a boss, miniboss, arena, something big, and then you would be rewarded big with a level like the treasure vault or otherwise.
This general formula aims to find places for all of the odds and ends that have arisen in the game.
There is a huge difference between a pill and 3 fire crystals. Putting these things together forces players get both at once, and provides for the very shallow gameplay that I mentioned above. To control the buffs that consumables would provide, rooms containing a single one of these would be added. These rooms would require some sort of resource found on the level to access. Treasure boxes would never contain pills, consumables or vitapods.
This change would allow for a carefully planned balance of consumables and actual loot drops.
Shooting through walls should not be a bad thing any longer. This is big and this is hard, because it entails making levels and level sections safer by forcing the triggers to all work out... why bother? Because it allows for more interesting game play, it lets you produce items that open up new areas, that let you find secrets better. With things like this, even the player ghosting through the stage would be alright.
The first thing required would be a path to the exit. When you have that, a lot more is fair game. A new area is found? Imagine that you could perhaps fail the puzzle required to get through it. You find a set of 5 statue plates and 3 statues that slowly crumble. Can you find the pattern of plates that will let you access the loot? On the other side is a button that when pressed opens all of the gates permanently, so that your party cannot play tricks on you.
Similarly, puzzles could rely on your buffs that you have at the moment. Have one player kill 20 enemies in 5 seconds? Do you have bombs? Each party member gets one shot, and all are rewarded with loot or consumables, depending on how deep in you are. What about hitting a target in the distance? Got a range upgrade? Can you break this enormous mineral to pieces quickly enough? What about kill all of the grass? Maybe you could go back and get that consumable that gave your bombs massive range for less damage.
The classic branches with loot and fighting would stay as well, but these sorts of branching rooms are what puzzles should be like in general.
Enemies, and groups of enemies, should be given alternate abilities sometimes as well. This buff would make the game more challenging to compensate for the fact that your average knight is now arguably much stronger.
These enemies would become more prevalent the later in your run you went, and by the end you would be fighting significantly harder monsters. You would require these buffs to succeed.
Proposed Changes to Gameplay Mechanics Regarding the Level
All of the current gear would be able to stay roughly the same. However, more level altering weapons would be very appealing to use to the point that they might deserve their own mention. What if the knight could spawn puzzle elements like ghost blocks? Spawn a trail of concrete slabs, and then a ghost block, to access certain areas? This would disrupt the flow of the game, but if levels were made to accommodate it, it would play out AMAZINGLY well. What if the knight could light lamps on fire with combuster? Freeze water with glacius? Push blocks around with neutral damage weapons?
And finally, the big kicker- what if it made a difference? If I brought voltedge to shock the pillar with over combuster's fire, I could access a separate set of consumables that were typically stored by voltedge? For instance, an vitapod type item that adds shock damage to fire damage could be accessed only if someone had access to both. With enough of these, a strategic approach to gear layouts would be necessary.
I like it. Especially that last bit. This would finally give people to diversify their weps and equips from the usual Vog Cub + Acheron + Blitz sets. And it will also make the Clockworks feel more rewarding as opposed to simply mission grinding.
The one thing I am against is allowing shooting through walls. Not only will the safeguards make certain levels needlessly complicated, it also tips the favor too far into the players who own the Mixmaster. It'd be better if the Mixmaster was as regularly as obtainable as any other weapon, but even then I'd still be against wall piercing bullets.