I imagine you could buff and bombs a lot because they'd be inherently riskier to use. There'd also be less pulsar spam, for instance, because it would more directly hurt your teammates.
The obvious reason this wouldn't happen is because trolls are gonna troll. I do think it would give the game a more interesting pace, however.
Theres gonna be some person called Falco who sarcastically scolds you every time you hit him.
@Fruity
Yeah, exactly! Bombs would clean house in those tiny arenas with a big buff. Biggest problem is that with the fuse times and overall bomb design, you'd be forced to use a dash to get out of the radius.
I'm saying, friendly fire + small arena = upset friends
IMO, the most fun part about Spiral Knights is going through difficult levels with a party and pulling off combos on monsters with fellow knights (for example, a vortex bomb into a brandish/blitz needle charge). Vortex bombs would become 100% useless and detrimental to your party (well, bombs in general) as all it would do is suck you and your friends into an inescapable pow-wow with a bunch of monsters, and teamwork would be so much harder to the point that you'd have to coordinate your team meticulously. Let's be honest, the amount of people who would be able to do something like that would be slim and it would pretty much just kill the game. It may be somewhat interesting as a challenge event or something (complete an arcade run with friendly fire and limited sparks, get some sort of new equipment or maybe promo gear?) but it won't work as a normal game mechanic.
Even if they buff bombs to do stupid damage, think of all the tiny arenas in the game. Also mist bombs. And bombs with a long fuse time. It'd be a mess, really. Would probably work of there weren't bombs in the game, but they'd screw with this system.