All of them except deadly splinter bomb.

There is a situation where each and every shard bomb can be useful. Be it damage weakness or status invulnerability. The problem is that sun shards deal stun and not much is immune to stun [Apocrean harvester is!].
Obviously they are not for DPS. You have to be a bit more creative with their uses, similar to antigua line guns/tortoguns.

The bombs have very predictable knockback - away from the most recent explosion.
They also have a long timer for damage being dealt.
Combine these two and you have a moving perpetual "safe" zone from melee monster attacks.

They also have moderate interrupt [no where near as strong as magnus guns], which is great against turrets if you have good timing.

The old Radiant Sun Shards coz they were really fun. Well the new ones are fun too but the old ones aint ever coming back. Wanna have what I can't have. :P

Does the Warmaster Rocket Hammer do more DPS on the first strike on strong compared to the Brandish lines?

Look at this:
Lancer Knightz (Guild)/Sword Damage (Depth 24)
Lancer Knightz (Guild)/Sword Combos Per Minute

There's data. There's no proper data on just 1st strikes, though. My estimate is that you can squeeze in about 3 WRH hits during 5 Brandish hits if all are shield cancelled and perfect switch attacks as necessary.

Looking at the Lancer Knightz data, we see that an unbuffed Combuster does 270 damage per hit while WRH does 307. There's a pretty clear winner here, but perhaps there's more to it. Let's start with the simplest calculations:

5 Brandish hits in x seconds gives us 270 * 5 = 1350 damage.
3 WRH hits in the same amount of time gives us 307 * 3 = 921 damage.

Suppose we can, however, hit two enemies consistently with WRH, and that damage doubles though.
921 * 2 = 1842
As an experienced swordsman, this is quite easy. In fact, very good players (such as myself :D) should be able to consistently hit three enemies with a heavy sword and two with a light sword. This is where things perhaps get the most interesting. Multiplying our simplest DPS calculations...
1350 * 2 = 2700
2763 * 3 = 2763

So in the end, WRH should be better in the hands of a good player but then again, these limits are silly. A brandish user should be using the combo for interruption and optimal amounts of multihits as well as the charge for huge crowd damage while a WRH user should primarily be using the dash to dish out damage.

Krakob's post #7 unequivocally won the second question, but I do not see him in the list of winners.

Even though it's obviously not the most powerful weapon, it is one of the most fun ones to use. There is nothing funnier than using it against a group of wolvers, devilites or gremlins, as they will just keep on dodging every time you attack. The only thing you should not use it against is mecha knights, since they will just block everything.

TL;DR

Herp Derp weapon, makes stupid enemies dodge so they won't attack you, just completely OP

IGN Jmoormann

Warmaster Rocket Hammer or Divine Avenger? Which is better?

It's a good question, and one not directly addressed in my sword guide. Both do good damage, although WRH does more damage in most situations. Both require some practice to master, which is satisfying, but WRH requires a bit more. WRH also has bizarre utility such as using the dash to move yourself around and even move other players around. WRH also has boring utility such as breaking blocks. So I'll have to give the win to WRH.

Aside: WRH, alchemers, and old Radiant Sun Shards are some of the best-designed weapons, because they are weak in the hands of a novice but strong in the hands of an expert.

Warmaster Rocket Hammer should outclass divine avenger most of the time because of its ability to deal large amounts of damage point blank using its first two hits.

Rocket Hammer's strong point

Consider these values from the wiki-

First 2 hits of warmaster rocket hammer vs undead/construct: 340 + 3 * 241 = 1063
Damage from 3rd hit: 403

This is a big deal because it can do that damage very quickly, for instance before a deadnaut turns around or a few times against vanaduke's mask or against a turret before that fires.

Compare this to Divine Avenger-
First/Last: 328/445
One combo = 773, which is about half the damage of a full combo from warmaster rocket hammer.

Divine Avenger's Strong Point

Divine Avenger's charge, is what sets it apart from other weapons and warmaster rocket hammer in particular. DA's charge pierces, and has 3 projectiles making it very good at dishing out crowd control.

Charge damage if you get 10 hits with the piercing projectiles: 682 + (188 * 10) = 2562

This blows rocket hammer out of the water when it comes to this aspect of the sword.

So why is Rocket Hammer stronger?

Because what it does is more spectacular than what divine avenger does. There are a LOT of swords, most of them actually, that deal some form of crowd control like that. These other swords tend not to get stuck on stuff, and tend to have more going for them or the same things going for them- the brandishes, sudaruska, even fang of vog all compete with divine avenger, and when it comes to picking one there really isn't a wrong answer.

Warmaster rocket hammer on the other hand competes with nothing, as there are no pure elemental swords that deal damage like it does. The only thing that comes close to it is dread venom striker, which requires tons of damage bonuses to actually win out- this contradicts warmaster rocket hammer, which requires very little damage or attack speed or anything to deal its damage, and is really not much competition to begin with. Because of this and the fact that most aspects of the sword are the same (both can deal the same 3 hit combos using sword techniques, both have knockback, etc.), warmaster rocket hammer is the more significant and therefore 'better' item.

--------------------------------------------Not part of reply to question----

You should probably leave the past questions in the OP or something so that the thread makes some kind of logical sense. Like, "starting at comment 35 is question 15- what is.." So that that way people reading the thread for information (if they do?) can see what all of the posts correlate to.

I didn't get my CR :C
Either way, the prizes are so small I don't really see why you bother.

@Jmmoormann

"[T]he WRH has its pure elemental damage which makes it so great"

Actually that's just wrong.

Having mixed elemental + normal on weapons detriments their damage, because now they are resisted more heavily than every other weapon.. but because of the way specialized weapons are balanced, the developers have given all split normal+specialized weapons considerably more attacking power. In the end, being split elemental is massively advantageous as all of damage boils down to underlying values. Consider-

Formula
Actual Attack*Damage Modifier - Defense = Damage Done

Defenses
Weak defense: 82
Normal defense: 164

Warmaster rocket hammer
First hit: 340 (wiki damage value) + 82 (resisted) = 422 actual attack
Dash: 241 (wiki) + 82 (defense) = 323 actual attack
Full Dash: 323 * 3 = 669 actual attack

Divine Avenger
First hit: 328 + (82 + 164) (resisted normal AND elemental defenses) = 574 actual attack
Second hit: 445 + (82 + 164) = 691 actual attack

Damage Modifiers
Attack orb: 1.3
Maskeraith: 1.3 (cloaked) or 1.4 (uncloaked)
Damage Increased MAX!: 1.24 (1.04 per stage * 6 stages)

Application

Whenever a split damage weapon hits, it gets the full resisted value buffed rather than the number you typically see when attacking. So if I attack with divine avenger, I will receive an additional (normal defense * damage modifier) - normal defense added on to my attack over what WRH would receive.

So if I use ___ with DA... I will receive an extra ___ over what I'd get w/ WRH. Values rounded.
Attack orb: 55
Damage max!: 44
Maskeraith uncloaked: 73
ALL THE MODIFIERS: 229

This property also applies to number of hits (as hitting twice resists defense twice), which is why dread venom striker receives an absolutely monstrous amount of bonuses from having everything applied to it, to the point of literally outdamaging combuster/acheron against their effective targets at similar bonuses.

In terms of our argument, rocket hammer's defense resisted is = elemental * 4 as it hits that many times with the first 2 parts of its combo, while divine avanger's resisted defense is normal * 2 + elemental * 2, as it hits twice with both of those being applied. The difference according to the wiki is 164, which means that my chart above applies to the full combo as well. I still prefer rocket hammer for the reasons mentioned in my post, but credit where credit is due.

See-
http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Defense

Wow, didn't know that. I actually expected special damage to be a lot more effective against their intended targets, found a (quite old, so it might be outdated) graph lately which showed how much damage a weapon with x damage would do against neutral, resistant, weak, splite neutral and weak, splite neutral and resistant, etc. would deal (can't find the graph now), and it showed that pure special damage was always better. But boosts were probably not calculated.

It also makes me wonder if this works for enemies who can be boosted. Wolvers, which can be boosted by Alphas, inflict split piercing and normal damage on normal/advanced difficulty, and pure piercing on elite. So does this mean that Wolvers get higher attack increase at normal/advanced than at elite?

Thanks for correcting me, I didn't expect this to be so illogical.

I do remember someone saying that player defense was a percentage and no set value. But that doesn't seem to apply to monsters...

Player defense works exactly the same way as monster defense does, except for in lockdown (and on normal/advanced difficulty, as SkepticRaven points out in a later post) where there is a minimum resistance- if you have under 100 of a defense, that defense is set to 100. This makes strikers a bit stronger, nullfies the bulk of mixmatched armor and negates all damage resisting UVs that aren't stacked onto matched armors; i.e. divine set w/ normal max on each piece is worthless in lockdown.

In the arcade, your defense values scale with where you are and resist the amounts specified under the defense page. Since the developers value defense a considerable amount more than most rational people would dream of, armors are balanced to heavily favor offense-- the difference between "glass cannon" and "reasonably high" is about 25 defense per set, saving you 5/8ths of a health pip per hit. That's nothing, compared to receiving 1.24 damage and 1.08 MSI from something like the black kat set. Status resistances on the other hand are actually fairly decent.

As for monster attack buffs having the same principle I mentioned above applied, yes I would expect them to do so but the implications are a bit different because of things like sonic mode (always stick at one health) and knights having about the same health overall. It would really only come into play if you REALLY resisted them and they buffed themselves. For instance, if you were wearing full ancient plate armor in T2 while fighting a trojan, the attack buff would help the trojan kill you a considerable amount.. but if you were wearing something like skolver while fighting beasts, you would take more damage than anticipated but not an incredible amount more than anticipated. I'm a bit hazy on this though and it's really just a prediction, so if someone could clarify (like Hexzyle, if she is still reading these..) that would be nice.

And lol-

Are there a lot of these kinds of strange inequities in Spiral Knights?
You wouldn't believe...
Which guild do you play for?
A major one.

Jmmoormann, might you have been looking at this classic study?

http://wiki.spiralknights.com/User:Exasperation

For this thread, the key thing to examine is the graph at the bottom. Look at the two green lines. They show a rather complicated relationship between "effective damage" (such as WRH against undead) and "half-effective damage" (such as Combuster against undead). But you see that the latter is not worse than the former.

While we're at it, it's also interesting to examine the second-to-last graph. The blue curve shows the "effective bonus" (such as elemental against undead). There is a weird bump at low damage values, which is the "threshold effect" discussed at the wiki page Defense that Fehzor linked. After the bump, the curve levels off at a particular constant, which is the constant extra damage that we mentioned. Later studies by Zeddy and others explained this constant in terms of armor on monsters.

Happy travels.

@Fehzor

Player defense works exactly the same way as monster defense does, except for in lockdown where there is a minimum resistance

That is true for elite difficulty. Players also get a minimum in PvE while not on elite difficulty. The LD minimum is likely because LD is considered non-elite PvE game mechanics wise.

Fehzor, the contest is telling us more about the person running it, than about the game's weapons. Happy travels.

I mean you don't have to do that and Bopp is kind of right, it is your contest and your crowns so if you think Holy won then that's fine.. I'm just curious as to how I could better persuade/inform you.

This question is rather open ended, and doesn't have a defined answer since it heavily invites personal preference over general effectiveness.

Going to keep this short since I'm pressed for time atm.

Personally, I prefer the Recon shield. Why? Drop cloak for a moment, then recloak, head off on a tangent, and watch the nearest enemy(s) come investigate. Also uncap points, and keep some enemy running around to recap everything, and out of the fight while I'm decoying and uncapping. Also, you can't kill what you can't see.

Generally, Striker shield. Sword damage and speed increase, as well as the boost. Close the distance, and whack them hard with a big sword. The health penalty is easily negated by trinkets. Basically, it allows you to preform high speed hit and run ambushes.

Snarby Set

It's the only set in the game that has a helmet, armor, shield, sword, and bomb

EDIT*
IGN: Anakletos

Allgood. Just wanted to clarify since I've seen different definitions of what is a set in SK, with the wiki sets being the most common definition.
And I knew about the no '2 win in a row' rule. Its the reason I didn't put up an answer.

For a favorite set (crap seerus mask doesn't have an armor)

I would say I like mercurial slime set
Shock resist and speed, easier to get than mercurial demo, although I have good UVs on it I'm guessing they don't count

If I win (not likely) my ign is Vohtarak

In my opinion, the preferred set is likely always either black kat or chaos, although since this is personal and I have the advantage of unique variants at my disposal, I'm going to go with black kat on this one.

My procedure for choosing armor is as follows:

1. If I require a status resistance for whisps or otherwise, choose that status resistance. E.G. Use dragon scale set for C42
2. If I require a utility statistic beyond trinkets etc. that isn't MSI, choose an armor for that. E.G. Use chaos for CTR
3. Use black kat for damage max vs everything.

This ends up with the bulk of my sets looking like this:

[Some weapons@CTR/ASI]
[Full Black Kat@Fire UV]
[A defensive shield, or swiftstrike if I'm going for a dodge-based loadout]
[Sprite perk for MSI if beneficial, otherwise a weapon stat or health, pending]

The only levels where this is not the preferred set are ones in which there is an absurd amount of a status that isn't ice (i.e. firestorm citadel, gitm, C42), and on levels in which I am using a loadout that makes MSI+damages is useless/ineffective to me (i.e. Using nothing but haze bombs (damage useless) or). Whenever these conditions that prevent the set from dominating every other armor are actually presented to me, I tend to try to mix and match with black kat.

In other words, black kat is akin to my default armor as its combination of global damage high and msi period tend to win the "stats game", where relevant stats are relevant stats period and you're trying to get the most relevant stats so that you can show the game who is the boss using your relevant stats without concern for being "unique", because there is no unique armor that rises above the stats game.

Armor is not special. It is not a beautiful or unique snowflake. It is the same boring stats as everything else.

If you won't give a prize then shut this down, if you mean you will give a prize at a later time please clarify

If you're not going to rip off winners and give prizes like you said you would, I'll say yes, people use the grey owlite shield a lot, usually in vana, ive also seen a fair amount use grey feather sets in ghosts in the machine and multiple stray levels in the arcade