They all sound so awesome, although I think that RSS should elemental, to make it the only elemental pure DPS bomb that we needed so much. The rest are really pwnage!!!!!!!

Antigua lines w/ no piercing sound kinda odd and cool, but that would make them one of the most used guns after this modification:
- They are easy guns to use, a faster and cooler version of blaster that can hit wolvers
- Fast dmg rate
- Biggest gun clip
- They can hit wolvers and other pesky dodgers

Besides over usage, there is no downside for me basically. Boss rewards are supposed to be better than the regular recipe weapons anyway, so YAY. :)

AP/Sentenza: Yes. Forever... except...
It'll depend a lot on how much attack power you actually give them; Could end up being ridiculously powerful... Or just plain useless against things it's not effective against. Perhaps an attack boost to the elemental/shadow attack powers, while leaving piercing intact, could work better? Dunno.

SS/RSS: Not so sure about this one; Would be great for fiends, but I'm sure lots of bombers enjoyed it for undead mobs too. Considering fiends are pretty fast, too, I don't think bombers would really enjoy a pure piercing bomb. At least not of the shard kind.

While on this subject, may I ask: Have you guys considered an upgrade for Radiant Sun Shards, then? Sort of sad such a fun bomb ended up being just 4*.

Additionally, do you have any other plans for balancing other weapons or armor?
I still feel so bad for the poor Chaos set. :(

Please do not make RSS pure piercing. It will ruin them.

As they are now, they do at least neutral damage to everything except Slimes and Gremlins. Gremlins dodge anyway, but it is a problem against Slimes. They do have trouble hitting Beasts, especially Wolvers, and Devilites, but otherwise they're quite versatile.

If you're going to make a change to them, please make them pure elemental. This way they would crit against Undead and Constructs, making a very useful tool for bombers to combat Gun Puppies and Howlitzers, and still be able to do neutral damage to Polyps.

If you make them pure piercing, it will ruin them. They will do only neutral damage to one turret type and have a very hard time hitting Wolvers and Devilites. They will be vastly overshadowed by Dark Briar Barrage in all situations I can think of except against Trojans, in which case they will be vastly overshadowed by Blitz Needle, even if RSS has max damage and Blitz Needle has no damage bonus.

This is totally awesome Nick. I would really enjoy if you made these changes, I could pull out my Silversix!
I will be very sad if you don't put these through, though thanks for the thought.
If you do, yeah!

totally cool. think that this would be really nice

Why not just make the Silversix/Argent and Blackhawk/Sentenza fire only the Giant Bullet/Eagle from the charge attack? For pure elemental/shadow damage- of course for reduced damage. It'll be nice having their charge attacks being useful in other areas, not just firestorm.

Agreed, that would be a great change.

I would love to see the antligua changes, and maybe the introduction of a pure piercing line of antiguas.

If I could cover all three damage lines like that, I'd never touch a sword again.

I like this change a lot, but be careful with the damage. It already has the best clip size, range, one of the best fire rates, bullet speed and mobility. Giving it around less than half the damage of a status alchemer's shot would be good, since it gets a built-in bonus vs certain enemies.

I also agree with the charge changes, but if you were to make it just the bird, it would definitely overpower the other gun charges by far.

Glad yall are taking this under consideration! I thought they were purposely created as niche weapons only good for one or two particular purposes.

It was mentioned above, but still worth saying again. Here's my thoughts on the bomb:

RSS should be pure Elemental and consider an Undead bonus a la the new AP. We already have DBB, fiends/beasts dodge, we already have ISB's normal/piercing, RSS would be even better for pure bombers to snipe turrets and give us an alternate bomb for FSC.

Not on your list, but, Ionized Salt Bomb. Maybe that should be pure piercing, and bring the charge time in line with RSS, and change the bonus to Fiend or Beast instead of Slime. Alternatively, if you really want it to retain the Slime bonus make it pure Shadow.

And make a 5* versions of both :D

I've made almost all the (useful) weapons in the game, could we get another Arsenal Expansion soon? :S

(Just a sidenote regarding all those Damage vs Type bonuses... I don't have HP tables, but if most creature can die in 3-5 hits from a weapon and a medium damage bonus increases the damage by 10-14% then would that even change the number of hits to kill something? I think status proc is a much more useful attribute than damage, e.g. DVS vs WHB.)

Currently RSS and SS don't really need to be changed. there pretty decent as they are, and makng them pure piercing would ruin the style of game lay that comes with them. Instead Id rather have a pure elemental Shards bomb for fighting the undead where there more useful. But if possible id like to see it stay the same

DONT.TOUCH.MY.SUN-SHARDS.

Thank you.

Switching the antigua lines to pure elemental/shadow would do wonders for their usefulness in PvE, ntm making Sentenza even more annoying in PvP (who stacks shadow?)
However, switching the Sun shard line to pure piercing would really mess with the damage type balance (I use this term loosely) of bombs and make bombers like me sad.
Currently, there are 3 pure damage-type bombs: Blast line, Snarby line, and Crystal line.
Blast is pure normal, Snarby is pure piercing, and Crystal turns into piercing/elemental and normal/piercing.
Most of the other bombs are more status or effect centered, with damage as more of a side bonus to the main purpose of the bomb (note that this is arguable, and I'm not speaking for everyone)
This means that for pure DPS purposes we've got normal and piercing covered pretty well, while elemental is somewhat neglected (RSS helps, plus many people swear by their VTs and Electrons, so it's not that bad), and shadow is pretty much non-existant (We've got a total of ONE shadow bomb line)
This means that if you were to switch RSS to pure piercing with a fiend bonus, the main usefulness of it, its good or neutral damage vs. 2/3 of the monster families, dwindles down to a mere good vs. 1/3 or 'em. Also, this would really mess with one of the main uses of it: interrupting turrets since it wouldn't be very effective versus any of them.
Like mentioned above, if you're going to change SS and RSS to a pure damage type, please make it elemental, otherwise just don't change it at all.

P.S. @ Grievos
That post is a prime example of why people dislike you; if you're gonna make a lil' petty remark, make it on a more trivial or less game-altering thread, not an important one.

The changes to the guns sound good, though leaving the Antigua as piercing in that case would seem a bit odd.

Echoing what others have said, I don't want the (R)SS to go pure piercing. We already have the DBB line for pure piercing bombs (and I do love it to death), and it would make it useless for turret sniping. I think going pure elemental would make a lot more sense.

While you're fixing things, the rock/ionized salt bomb line makes no sense whatsoever, doing piercing damage with a slime bonus. I don't think anyone would complain if you switched it to pure shadow, and fixed the charge time on the ionized.

Granted, that leaves the same oddball situation as the antigua where the crystal bomb is piercing but none of its upgrades are. Probably the best plan would just be to add another line to both weapons that does pure piercing.

this might be a dumb question, but why not a mix of normal damage and a specialized damage? maybe that wouldnt be super beneficial, but it would give you more of a baseline damage against the other types.

I just remembered something, the range of the Blackhawk is bugged. Will this be fixed as well?
It is proven that Silversix has longer range then Blackhawk in this thread.
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/30676
If you could, this would be nice as well if you end up doing the things you said you might.

Cheers,

~W

I'm very excited to see the gun changes, especially Sentenza/Argent Peacemaker, but I do wonder if this will make them too powerful. Fast bullets, large clip size, push back charge? This all makes the AP very, very good against undead and construct, decent at slimes and fiends, and I don't really use guns against beasts or gremlins due to dodge anyways. I like how these changes would make Sentenza a good, viable shadow gun though, which is greatly needed since we've only got two choices (Bio and Umbra) at this point. Still, doing this would make these guns at least useable and not be extremely specialized, which is great.

I don't like the changes to the RSS, because we've already got a piercing damage bomb. Unless you're going to make some shadow or elemental bombs come out at the same time, making RSS piercing is too limiting for the pure bombers. Not to mention, for pure bombers, RSS is the only viable way of killing far-away gun puppies. Making them piercing completely destroys any option of doing so with a bomb.

I'm all for the gun changes. Love 'em.
As for Sun Shards, I'd rather it be elemental, we already have a piercing damaging bomb, yet there are no shadow or elemental bombs dedicated purely to damage.

Pure shadow damage is a huge buff, especially with all the Skolver running around. Not sure what you're talking about.

The WHB is downright rare because the Cutter line can go 2 directions: DVS which can Poison (and does Normal damage), or WHB which gets an approx +19.5% damage bonus vs Beasts (and does Normal damage also). DVS is normally picked because it is the ONLY sword that can Poison. Also the damage bonus is not enough to make the WHB more appealing then FF/BTB, which kills Beasts (and Fiends also) much faster and easily due to them dealing Piercing. CIV has the same issue, Normal damage + damage bonus does not make it better then the various Elemental swords. Especially, as you pointed out, since most people stack damage buffs. So FF/Elemental swords would get max damage bonus and the enemy weakness bonus.

Comparison against Undead:
CIV does 177, 177, 223 at D19
A comparable Elemental sword, Glacius, does 270, 270, 356 at D19

What Nick is talking about is giving a Shadow gun a damage bonus vs Gremlins (which are weak to gun's damage type to begin with), and an Elemental gun damage bonus vs Undead (which again are weak to the gun itself). At the moment I can count on one hand the number of Sentenza's I've seen because with the exception of Lockdown the gun SUCKS.

As for Lockdown, Shadow resist is rather rare. Most people go either Vog or Skolver, with the occasional random Dread Skelly and Snarby thrown in. If anything turning it pure Shadow will help you in Lockdown as you'll be able to do more damage to Skolver Strikers.

~Gwen

I have used all of those weapons and think the changes mostly sound awful.
- Making silversix elemental would make the alchemer line even more useless. There'd be just no place left for them between the slow "turretslashing" polaris and the fast antigua. Also: Split damage is what makes this gun a sorta valuable but not overpowered "swordie multi purpose gun". It's a good newbie gun, too, and that's fine. Making 2 "best guns" in addition to the 2 "best swords" (that you also get from JK) doesn't really sound like a valuable addition to the game... more like reducing diversity even more.
- Blackhawk: Not as bad, but still: Umbra driver would have less uses. Yes, it's hard to make this gun as valuable as silversix, but I'm not sure making it pure shadow is the right solution. Maybe it just should stay in its small niche - lots of other weapons are off worse (iron slug? irontech destroyer? big angry bomb? neutralizer? )
- crystal bomb: A line that already is not too useful and making it pure piercing would ruin it. What could safe those bombs would be a small dmg boost, fixing the salt charge time (or is it supposed to be longer than sun shards?)... an elemental or normal dmg version would be more appreciated (also 5*!). The biggest flaws of those bombs are lack of protection (no knockback, often fails to interrupt the mobs /turrets you aim at in lvls after basil) and low damage in most situations (especially against multiple turrets - at least with my ping I can't hold out long enough in the "right spot" to hit multiple ones at once). Maybe making both bombs "normal + x" would be fine, but not sure.

And in general:
Builtin damage bonus against certain mobs has so far never been something you'd want in a weapon. It's something you "tolerate" (or try to stay away from). Look at how many people are using wild hunting blade, cold iron carver, heavy deconstructor, ionized salt bomb... if anything, I think this should be removed from the game, not more of it added. As far as I know, noone wants to sacrifice overall dmg for a specific bonus (that might even be capped away when wearing the right equipment for the weapon type).

but the changes you proposed seem to REMOVE most of their reason for existence. For example, Sentenza was (supposed to be) good against Beast and Gremlin, but you want to make it good against Gremlin and Slime. I don't really think the damage bonus makes up for that. And one of the RSS's major uses was interrupting gun puppies while staying at a distance, but now it won't be any use against them at all, not to mention the Royal Jelly which was one of its best uses. In addition to that, it loses its usefulness on undead, especially Zombies.

Why not give the bonus against the OTHER type? Make Sentenza shadow w/beast bonus and RSS piercing w/undead bonus, at the very least. To be honest, I'd rather RSS was elemental, since the Ionized Salt Bomb (despite being generally useless) is already Piercing.

Making guns pure damage? I'm all for it. You could also make the flourish deal half normal damage if we're making this division between guns and swords(/bombs).

Sentenza sounds great, but I'm not too sure about Argent going pure elemental. We have enough elemental guns (4 alchemers, 1 polaris), but only 2 other shadow (biohazard, umbra) and 3 other pierce (blitz/poison needle, callahan). Not to mention the fast bullet speed is what I associate with pierce. I guess it does match its image as an undead killer, though.
.
Making RSS pure pierce is interesting, but why not also fix Ionized Salt Bomb? Make the charge time for it not ridiculously low, and give it effective damage. People wouldn't be complaining about RSS going pierce if the Ionized Salt Bomb did pure elemental or shadow. Not to mention, considering how there's only 1 shadow bomb, another would be nice. If the two shard bombs did different pure special damages, everyone could be happy.

Blaze-breaker: They can dodge normal projectiles, but not extremely fast ones, like the callahan. The antigua lines will hit them on the first shot, but their 6-shot nature does make them deal less damage than other fast guns.

Batabii: What? Why would Sentenza need to be useful against beasts and gremlins at the same time? Also, damage bonuses are extremely minor.

Antigua line surely needs a boost; the pure elemental/shadow thing could be the solution, but be careful not to make them too overpowered compared to other elemental/shadow guns.

Damage dealt should probably be lower than the sum of the two current types.

Or, you could simply replace piercing with normal damage (Antigua could deal pure normal as well)