Phantoms are already tough, they can status walk some haze bombs, they deal that powerful and rare curse, are pretty dodgy when fought with swords, and are immune to long range gunfire.

Their only real weakness is having to deal with bombers, bombs keep them a bay but still deal damage plus Phantoms can't sidestep bombs like gunfire or sword combos.

One possible buff is to give them a Curse dealing retrode style beam and a spin attack that leaves a weak curse haze (like greavers).

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Number 3 is interesting but can cause a full team graveyard run to come apart faster than a game of Jenga between 3 year olds; it also has no effect on graveyard soloers.

7 phantoms against 1 player is already too much, you want up to 20 phantoms at once?

Cut their damage a lot and remove their curse status and we can talk; we want this game to be easy and fun for new players and there are some early missions that require the player to go into graveyards, we don't want graveyards to become the new compound.

A fair amount of players in T3 are knights around the 4star mark and most of these don't have or even plan on using Chaos Cloak or BK sets. Brandishes get ruined by gravestones, bombs have no good elemental choice, and bullets get lost in the masses of zombies.

This may be a fun idea for people with maxed sets but the general SK populace wouldn't like a massive difficulty spike especially in a place with at most 6-7 free boxes (on a good run)

Still not fully sold, I like the limiting idea but rather to elite T3 why not put it in certain missions? This way it becomes a one time problem for people playing through missions and a challenge for those (like you) who want to have fun. This way it isn't something that empties your party when you get there (lots of people ditch on compounds because it's too hard) because people are expecting this.

Well it's more that due to power creep and us learning how to deal with everything present on the level, graveyards just aren't as much of a threat any more and the original intent behind them was to be a hard, bad level that penalized the player for taking their time with phantoms.

"Where monsters fear to tread"

It's not the monsters fault they are easier to deal with... it is all the damage boosting armors, and new OP weapons

There used to not be so many elemental weapons (back when CIV was good) now we have hammers, brandishes, etc.

@Holy-Nightmare

Yes, that was what I said. And CIV was never considered good at any point, excluding perhaps some brief spell prior to the launch of the actual game.

Then why don't very many people use cold iron vanquisher for that?

IDK, I see most people using warmaster rocket hammer, brandish normal hits or blitz needle for the deadnauts. Warmaster rocket hammer does 1466 according to the wiki, if the full combo hits. Brandish does 966, which isn't bad if you're using it for crowd control anyway.

And what about leviathan blade? If I can get to +6 damage with it, wouldn't that be better?

What about the stun from celestial sabre? It's charge does 1104, and stuns around 25% of the time if I recall correctly. If you were able to take advantage of the stun and get in a full combo, it would deal 1768 every time it stuns. If you swapped that out for a quick warmaster rocket hammer combo, you'd get upwards of 2570 damage from that one stun chance. On average, using the warmaster rocket hammer with it would net you a total damage of 1470, much higher than you would expect to reach with cold iron vanquisher.

I'd also consider that crusaders have a soft spot for the stun status, and are not considered undead- making this weapon highly versatile in many situations that appear alongside deadnauts. Similarly, phantoms are not immune to stun, so the weapon would beat out cold iron vanquisher in almost every situation.

I mean, if you're going this far out of your way to craft a specialty weapon for this small subset of enemies, you're probably invested quite heavily in Spiral Knights and should want to find time to purchase a sabre. You can argue that it's too hard to get, but really we both know that people saying that are just jealous.

Well that's for the stun. Cold iron vanquisher doesn't have the stun.

Well I guess that solves it. Cold iron vanquisher is better than the brandishes and warmaster rocket hammer.

Well yeah, but deadnauts are basically the hardest undead enemies in the game, and howlitzers aren't too far behind them, showing up whenever they do. Why should I craft a brandish or bother heating warmaster rocket hammer when I'm set for life with cold iron vanquisher? The game isn't going to get harder than either of them. From now on, I'm recommending cold iron vanquisher over elemental damage.