• Mad Bomber isn't weak to curse like chaos is
• Iron Slug is completely functional as a weapon, just weak.
• The charge attacks getting stuck in walls is intentional to prevent people exploiting bugs.
• Perhaps those weapons aren't meant to be upgradeable? What use would an upgraded cautery sword have? How would it fit into the fluff? Ditto with Wrench Wand and others
• Heater shield is the only shield that protects against elemental and freeze at 5*. There are plenty of uses for it, just that people don't like crafting a 5* shield that protects against elemental and freeze when there's a shield that protects against fire and shock, two statuses that are more dangerous and more applicable to the more popular areas of the game
• Sleep Vials can inflict sleep. And besides, perhaps they removed sleep for balancing issues.
• Vanaduke's mask isn't that confusing, but the timer bug can be annoying when triggered.

A well known bug that does need fixing is the bugs associated with recon cloaks.

My speculation on the release schedule:

Apr: new UI, Dust Bunnies and other new addition to monsters.

Jun: Battle Sprites

Aug: some stuff that make use of new UI

Oct: Halloween + Kataclysm

Dec: Winterfest + GH fix or more furniture

@Eltia
I don't think they can release the new monsters before the Battle Sprites. All of the new monsters are being designed to be fought alongside the Battle Sprites. Giving us the monsters, but not the necessary tools to deal with them is just asking for a thousand dead Knights. They have to be released together.

Plus the new UI is being set up for use with the Battle Sprites and probably a few other new features. While they are probably going to release it before then to get feedback, it won't be in its final state until everything related to it is released as well. Basically it's further set-up for the arrival of the Sprites.

@Troupe
- Mad Bomber one non-weakness is no grounds for it to be put out of use. The Chaos set does everything that the Mad Bomber set does, except it applies to ALL weapons. Even Nick has said that he realizes that it's a problem and will be addressed.
- As a Gunner, Iron Slug is functional. Yes. But is it useful? No. It's (supposed) main feature of causing flinching/interruptions is horribly underpowered when compared to the Pulsar line which can cause more interruption in a single shot than a Iron Slug can with both of its stupid short range bullets. Plus you can move with the Pulsar, fire more shots from a greater distance, cause ludicrous knockback, inflict statuses, and drink tea while Iron Slug struggles to stay classified as a weapon. Plus its alternate 5*, Callahan, causes a status which further pushes the Iron Slug into uselessness. It needs work. Period.
- Charge attacks hitting walls behind you is most likely NOT intentional. The larger charge shots have an increased collision detection which is understandable, but it spawns in the Knight instead of in front of the Knight which is where the problem lies. If it spawned in front, it would still hit obstacles on the sides, but not from behind.
- Most of those weapons were intended to have upgrades as far as I know except for the Tier 1 weapons you mentioned. While I personally don't like that they do, that's the way it is. Why the Deconstructor, Cautery, etc. don't have full lines is probably due to the fact that there's no niche that they could fill without extra coding. Spur technically should have a 5*, but it's quite an odd sword to balance. It shouldn't take this long, however...
- Heater Shield could use a little buff or the prevalence of good Ice levels needs to be boosted, so it becomes more useful. Would still probably need some kind of balance though. But most equipment in this game does, so that's kind of a moot point...
- Sleep was a broken status that was removed from the game a LONG time ago due to balance reasons. Knights were using the Sleep's healing as a means for survival beyond what it was intended for, so most things that inflicted the status was removed. The only remnants are the vials and the (now useless) resistances on a few armors.
- Vanaduke's mask does get really annoying with that glitch. And plus it's a confirmed bug, so there probably is some work going on to get it fixed.

@Klip
I'm pretty sure with the Battle Sprites and new monsters coming that a lot of the equipment has been rebalanced as well. While it is always a good idea to talk about balance and such to keep it where OOO can see it, it's probably best to wait until the Battle Sprites come out before throwing a fit. They're probably working on it.
However, if there's no equipment balance once the update hits or they break the balance even more, I'd be glad to join in on raising hell for things to get fixed.

And I thought the new monsters are going to make Bombers feel important again. <_<

Fine, I'll put my bomber's gears back into the closet.

/no

/NO!

New content ftw. Something to keep me from going to LD when outa mist :) You silly people and your first world problems.

Many weapons' charge attacks get stuck in walls.
Keep in mind this is a balance. This is to prevent putting your back to the wall and spamming charges. However....Brandishes need this, because you CAN back yourself up against a wall and spam it.

"The charge attacks getting stuck in walls is intentional to prevent people exploiting bugs."
Really? What bugs? I hadn't heard of this. That sounds like a crude fix.
You should have played in the beta, where DA was the big thing...attacking through close gates, attacking FSC wheels head-on, attacking through shadow fire...the list goes on and on. While this could be fixed, it might cause more issues then you think. You aren't a programmer...as far as I know, anyway.

-Improved cutter-user safety
It's unsafe? This is news...I use it all the time. It's safer than a huge sword and doesn't require any ASI to work.

-Shard bombs... REMOVE INVINCITINKS (aka: hit-limit) I think they accidentally added this as a balance action for the OLD shards
This I totally agree with.

-Bomber shield? Even just bomb damage med?
I know a certain shard bomber and I'm getting into bombs myself. I support.

To all Chaos/Mad Bomber balances
Yes.

Iron Slug buffs
I remember some where a dev saying "Well, we're working on it, but what Nick wants to do is really hard, so we're still ironing out the kinks." Oh, and IRONING out the kinks. LOL PUNS!

Sleep
Would have to be changed altogether...which I'm happy with.

As for Glop Drops... Uhhhh DR?

No, Rocksalt.

Speaking of Heater Shield i just got a Poison max defender the other day heh. Would be nice if they buffed up the heater :o

@ Troupe - Completely agree about the heater shield. Not to mention the unique texture and skin on it :D But for the most part other shields are better.

I want Scarlet Shield lines. I don't want Krogmo trinkets. I don't want to do Vana 4 times a month. I want health bonuses just for the heck of not using trinkets.
:P But more importantly: More bosses. If you are working on a boss, leave Battle Sprites, GUI, and other crap for 2017. I want more bosses.

A message to OOO: if you're even thinking of devoting a major part of your team to the in-development horde monsters and Sprites, please think again. Devote whoever you can to fixing the UI. (Obviously not all the programmers would be needed for this, I would imagine it's mostly the art team and whoever comes up with ideas) As I said in the OP and in other posts, fixing what you have is more important than developing new content.

@GMs, if you read this and pass it on to devs: please actually convey this message and not just add it as some number in the "wants fixes" category.

Use Zopyros-ll's UI finish the battle sprite and new monsters then rest of the above. Seerusly this game needs balancing bombers are always holding a bomb over their head unable to block and have the lowest DPS what has the highest? The blitz needle a ranged weapon lol wut?

I have'nt been playing this game for a while and i wanted to know if they fixed the stun status?
I ask cause nobody is complaining about it :d

That is great news :) Thank you devs for fixing it. Cheers :D
I think ill upgrade my kamarin and rigadoon :D

Charge attacks getting stuck in walls is due to the weapons in question moving you backwards. The game assumes you are going to have room to move backwards, starts the charge attack where you will end up, and your attack is hitting a wall. Whether or not it could be fixed I do not know.

Sleep got removed because it was buggier than the new Scarab monsters. I do not remember the specifics on it, but it sounds like Zopyros has it down pretty well.

~Gwen

”You guys are starting to sound like Vavle's butthurt fanboys of not getting HL3. Give them time, they're either not taking requests not at this moment or they're taking a while to patch things up. Never considered things taking time, did ya? Also I never noticed charge attacks getting stuck in walls."

Have you been here for long? These bugs - not so much bugs as mechanical problems - have been around in most cases for over a year. In the meantime, they've continued to release small new content releases, reskins of existing armor as costumes, and small events with exclusive and/or limited time content. Example: Winterfest and the Black Kats. Winterfest had a new prestige mission, but it was buggy(devilites could shoot past barriers). That's understandable, since it was new, but the fact that an issue as serious as that made it into release raises questions about OOO's testing for things like that. Same thing with the new UI, they didn't test it long enough or get enough feedback to know all the problems with it and just released it with weird problems like the chat overlapping the LD team list and the weapon scroll wheel covering an important part of the screen.

The other problem with both Winterfest and the Black Kat mission is that they are both limited-time events. Time was taken out of development of the core game to create this content, that was only available for a few weeks. This doesn't make sense from even a design perspective, as you're spending time you could use to develop permanent content to make content only available to a limited playerbase for a limited time. That means you get less profit for your new content and it doesn't even stay in the game. Wasted time, unless you're really struggling for cash. And even then, it seems better to work it in permanently, more people get to experience and you get more chances to pump all the cash you can out of it, if you want to do it that way. All I'm saying is that they should take a little break from new content for a while, and focus on fixing the problems.

Valve/HL3's case is different. Valve has many times the employees and programmers that OOO has, so they could have been working on HL3 in the background for years and have virtually no drop in production. OOO, on the other hand, is a small company who are definitely foregoing polishing what they already have in favor of making new content. That also stays in line with what their recent development and business models seem to be, which goes something like “Forget the veterans, we don’t have to listen to them. There’ll always be new players willing to buy stuff.” Which, I can say for a fact, is a bad system. Eventually, word will spread that they don’t support you once you get to endgame so you might as well never start, and then there won’t be any more new players.

And if you never noticed charge attack getting stuck in walls, all that means is you’ve never used the charge of a Sealed line sword, an Antigua line gun, a Pulsar, or a Spur.

They make cash go 'round.
They make those who got event items feel speshul.
They make the nubs who recently joined feel excluded.
They bring us fun.
They make is cooperate in new ways.
They make us not farm Vana, resulting in somewhat cheaper CE prices.
They give nubs who aren't left out the chance to get rich in case they get lucky.

Most of all, they are a break from the everyday life on Cradle.

There are a large number of vets (among the vets who are actually still playing after the UI was bedazzled) who would love to have OOO take a break from making huge new game-altering updates (missions, guild halls, battle sprites) and just work on balancing what's there.

As an example, the vast majority of the armor in the game is boring and outclassed by the few top-tier sets. It's not just Mad Bomber.

Compare Heavenly Iron and Snarbolax. Sure, it's not -strictly- outclassed, but you can't honestly tell me that Heavenly Iron is ever actually worth wearing.

Compare Dread Skelly and Snarbolax. Again, not -strictly- outclassed, but if you think the rough equivalent of (Low Shadow + Low Poison + Low Freeze) is worth having utterly no offensive bonus AND a penalty to normal, then I'm not sure what game you're playing.

Compare Royal Jelly and Justifier. Why would anyone actually wear Royal Jelly (~ -Low Normal, +Low Piercing relative to Justifier, and then no offense)? And I mean practically, not "well there could theoretically be a knight who values their Piercing defense a lot".

And then every other piece of armor that doesn't give a bonus to swords, guns, bombs, or a global medium or high. All similarly underpowered, and their defensive advantages, if there even ARE any, are slight in comparison to the offensive disadvantages. Some sets are worse off than others.

What about shields? Heater gives only one status resist; the good shields provide two (Grey Owlite, Crest, Dread Skelly). Stun is so infrequent compared to other statuses that most shields' resisting it isn't really notable - and sleep resist? lol

Trinkets? People only equip status resist trinkets as a crutch to make up for lack of status resist on their armor and because they haven't crafted the better options yet. As far as I can tell, almost no one equips the pierce/ele/shadow trinkets. And you can usually manage to get the proper status resists on your armor given good loadout planning and a few UVs (I'm not talking about VH, I mean mediums, which aren't particularly expensive and provide just as much status as a trinket - or high/VH on resists nobody actually wants, like freeze and poison).

Level payouts? Well, there's a reason FSC is the holy grail of grinding - everything else pales in comparison. It's like most of the game is reduced in quality because running it gives the nagging feeling that you COULD actually be earning money but you aren't really. I get the feeling payouts are done by quantity of enemies and depth, so this might be a bit harder to implement, but is it worth doing? Well, are things other than FSC fun?

Weapons? Weapons are harder to balance, but some could be balanced easily simply by upping their damage output (or range, attack speed, etc). OOO refuses to balance weapons in any way other than changing the game mechanics on them - no simple numerical changes. And why? You can't tell me that Callahan's damage output is comparable to the damage output of drivers. Why not just make it so that it is?

And then there's Lockdown, wherein effectively everyone who plays it acknowledges that the balance is utterly horrible, but they play in spite of this because it's fun and if they have to use cookie-cutter sets because cookie-cutter is the only way to be competitive, then they do. PVP is more volatile in terms of opinions, but the general consensus that the balance is terrible seems to me indicative that some effort should be made to do something about it.

Other potential avenues for balancing? The four primary status effects vary dramatically in terms of how dangerous they are. The reason people value fire and shock resists much more than freeze and poison is because it's not usually as big a deal to be frozen or poisoned.

What about monster families - are wolvers and chromas really as dangerous as devilites and greavers?

Vials? Vials permeate every run, but they are pretty much worthless except in very rare scenarios. Why not give them a wider radius for spreading their status?

---

The long and short of it is that these things are core to Spiral Knights, and we don't really appear to have any short term prospects of seeing them changed. Some players will argue that these things aren't -supposed- to be balanced, but the truth is that having balance makes the gameplay more varied. More viable gear to equip? More variety in the kinds of challenges we face in the Clockworks? How could anyone say no?

And to all the people who just want as much new content as they can get as fast as they can get, ask yourself why. Do you want more gearing options? Tired of grinding FSC? Want a greater variety of challenges? Wouldn't balancing what's already there also be a great way of getting these things? All the while taking less development effort than actually writing a ton of new code for a big feature release.

And most importantly, the new players that OOO keeps seeking to lure in aren't burned out on what content actually is available. So why not offer them a richer, more balanced experienced so that maybe they'll stick around longer and shell out some more money?

It's really win/win for OOO to tackle balance (and ASAP). They just need to be convinced that it's important and worth doing over sinking dev effort toward putting out shiny new things with their own new balance issues, further straining the tenuous foundation the game already has.

+1