I've been thinking a lot about the difficulty settings too for a while now. From my experience, very few people use advanced mode. Players either want to just get through their content, making things as easy as they can on themselves with normal mode, or they want to maximize rewards at all cost. I think that this is mostly fine, as it acts as a practice mode of sorts for newer players so that they can learn the ropes before being expected to really perform on elite mode to earn things.

The Dark Souls analogy is interesting. The problem with using our mechanics as a difficulty setting is that it effects all four people in the party, and not just one guy on (s)hard mode. Spiral Knights also rewards players externally quite a bit- if I can earn my winterfest scarf faster by playing on normal mode in tier 1 as a tier 3 player, then I WILL earn my winterfest scarf faster in that manner, because I don't care so much about that feeling of accomplishment... rather, I'm just there for the reward because in Spiral Knights time is your most important resource and doing the whole thing on hard mode wastes time. Bragging rights and "for fun" will always be motives, but as a newer player choosing to take longer makes very little sense. In these ways, it becomes impossible to truly adjust the difficulty in the same manner as the Souls series.

Originally, the difficulty system in Spiral Knights relied on tiers. Lets say I suck at video games and take a month or two to get past tier one. That whole time I'm playing on "easy mode", and because of the experience I've been spoon fed for that month, I'll be better prepared for tier two than would be a newer player that flew past tier one. In this way, players found their own difficulty through progression, and were driven to become better at the game because of it. The difficulty settings bar is worrisome to me because it breaks this. If I'm playing T1 on elite mode then chances are I can survive T2 on normal mode........ so where should I play? I could go in order and work my way up in T2, which would be fine, but that's the same as what was already happening.

Another issue I have with the difficulty settings is in finding parties. The Jelly King is my favorite boss because it lets me see new faces in the game, so that I can observe how they use weapons when there is no right way to play and loads of novel arenas (required fights) to fight in and strategize around. Unfortunately, I want to do this on Elite mode only because doing so earns me tons of free 4* orbs to use crafting new bits of gear and newer players often prefer normal mode. Because of this I find it hard to just press the big "go" button at times, and have to start parties, wait around.. the same goes for missions like grinchlin assault and the danger missions, whereby players all want to go on normal mode for the easier victory. I don't like it.

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I think the developers should have gone with a "practice" and "normal" mode system. In practice mode, you'd magically not take a good 50-70% of the damage, but would miss out on huge portions of rewards.. you also wouldn't be able to get credit for missions, shadow lair materials.. you know. Playing this mode would make the game unbearably grindy, but it would offer players a way of improving their skills and adjusting to new tiers.

Normal mode would be the current "elite" mode.

" The Elites think they are unstoppable killing machines "

At least until the Apocrean Harvester starts looking at them like a Fat man looks at a burger.

I play on Advanced a lot because it's the comfiest difficulty.

People who just want to get it over with play on Normal, and people looking for loot or a challenge play on Elite.

When you open a public party on Advanced, you meet all the people taking a break from Vana runs or people wanting to semi-relax and do their favourite mission *cough*Arkus*cough*

i think the real problem here is players lack of imagination regarding raising artificially the difficulty.Sorry if i've insulted someone(s), but the game give you the tools, like in Darksoul, and, like minecraft, its your imagination/interpretation that decide their utility

You want the easy difficulty, play on normal with brandishes/other good 5* weapon
You want the "MLG of the MLG" difficulty, play on elite with the proto stuff(the stuff you get at the very beginning of the game), go for shadow lair, compound and bosses lairs without changing your stuff if you do arcade run(start at depth 0) and try to not die and no spark of life allowed

Exactly, the game gets harder but the monsters stay the same except for those minor changes to their attacks etcetera. Compare this to a game like Dark Souls- you go to the next area and find all new monsters. It would be like if they made all of T1 wolvers, all of T2 devilites, etc. There isn't anything innately wrong with the way they made things originally either, it was a design choice because tier represented difficulty.

As for Velcrocs, I believe my previous point still stands. Proto gear might be a bit of a stretch as Autofire said, but try bringing it on an average FSC run, and see what happens. Bringing the normal shard bomb has a similar effect. Difficulty clearly wasn't planned and so doesn't function very well in this way. It feels very clearly artificial.

Why do people say that elite players consider themselves unstoppable? It's not that we're unstoppable, it's that the vast majority of the levels in this game are rather easy. If I can kill the royal jelly in 6 shots with my mega tundrus (I think I also did it with the 3*?) I'm obviously going to play on elite.