This might sound farfetched and someone might have already suggested this, but how about we are able to fuse two weapons together? One weapon will be the style of what you want and the other is the heat level, attack power, if it does shadow, piercing, or elemental damage and modifiers. And you can only fuse together weapons of the same star level. Same thing with armor, maybe...
Combinding weapons
Er... I guess so... but I just got another idea. Like combining a caliber with a striker and the weapon would like a mix of both of them. only sword names I know.
For every weapon in the game that is not a reskin, it takes countless testing and boring programing code for them to have a balance structure in the game of spiral knights. Now for us the players to be able to combine these weapons, the developers would have to create the end results of each combination and test each new weapon end result combination to make sure it is balanced. If we were to do this without these test, these new weapons would either be to overpowered or too underpowered. So your idea is a good idea, in my opinion. But it would just take a while depending on time the developers have to start this project.
I have played a game like transistor where we can modify our attacks and passive abilities by using the existing attacks that we can use. That game had a really interesting concept to how unique a player could get with their character and that model could have easily been used for an online game. But sadly, it became a console game. Anyway, again, good idea, but it would take a while to do and you know our devs are always having theor hands full on a new reskin (can't blame em too much sense there not the ones in charge).
Would end up with numerous OP weapon combos
Dark Retribution with powers like a Shocking Salt Bomb
Acheron with flourish speed and attack style
Autogun and Iron Slug or Alchemer to deal tons of penetration or bounce damage
Would certainly be interesting but would end up with numerous unbalanced combos
Okay, Holy Nightmare (nice name), how about this: not all weapons can be combined with each other and/or not all attributes carry over.
A better suggestion would be fixing the arsenal we have now, not expand it and make other weapons inferior due to power creep with this needlessly complex idea of combining already-existing weapons together.
Troikas are inferior to Sealed Swords, because Sealed Swords are better for damage, and they're faster.
Cutters are laughably buggy. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to fix.
Acheron's basic swings are too good. The charge is fine compared to the other Brandishes, but the swings...
Bombers lack a viable elemental offensive bomb
Bombers lack any defense type that isn't elemental (or a shadow set locked behind a wall of crappy RNG)
Catalyzers are even worse off now than they were before. How hard would it be to revert them to their old mechanics?
ahahaha shard bombs
Maybe once they are done fixing the arsenal, they could think about this suggestion... maybe...
Oh, come on! This is a good idea! Or maybe I'm just playing another game that uses this idea too much...