Many people wonder about the questionable balance and weapon design in the game. It would be very interesting to know why these weren't changed.

If you compare to a game like Overwatch, where they go through great lengths to ensure all the characters are viable but balanced (Taking a look at how they overhauled symettra and bastion, giving them much more defined roles in a team) It seems rather odd that so much in spiral knights remains unchanged despite clearly being an issue.

I hope that going forwards Grey Havens will address these issues that Three Rings did not, and perhaps shed some light on why they have gone unchanged for so long.

Of course, it's much more likely that they will remain silent and leave the game as it is, which is fine too.

too hard, pay them six figures.

Man, I wish SL gear was actually useful. Buffing those would even give players an incentive to buy energy.

Edit: Wow, did I just contradic myself? No, really, I wish the game could be harder AND SL sets better.

There's no need to balance armor as much as it's needed for weapons. The only OP armor in the game is Black Kat, because it still has a +4 status resist on top of its insane stats. That doesn't mean it needs to lose that freeze resist. In fact, I don't think it would be wise to change any base stats on armor sets that touch the Defense types or Status resistances. Doing so can completely ruin someones UVs on a piece of gear, that they spent a lot of crowns on to get. The only things that could be considered changing is the extra stat boosts that armors give, but it's not really necessary.

What they need to do instead, is making levels that are fair to each armor set. Chaos and BK both have drawbacks with low defense and status resistance penalties. The problem is, the hardest levels in the game get their difficulty from multiple enemy (=damage types), while status is very limited. Grinchlin assault has all damage types spread across the mission. Why would you pick a snarbolax set with 2 Shadow Max UVs to be very strong against shadow damage, when shadow is only 1 of the 3 damage types you'll encouter on that mission? Might as well pick a Black Kat set which has much lower defense than shadow max Snarbolax, but better offense. Same thing goes for Status resistance... There's no reason not to pick Chaos/Black Kat when there is barely any status in the mission (e.g. DaN).

Give us missions that focus on 1 damage type, so we can actually specialise. For example: I'd benefit from using my Skolver set with 2 Piercing Max UVs on a mission that has only slimes and beasts in it. Then give it a status theme that at least isn't freeze for once (so Black Kat isn't the dominant armor again), and make sure that at least 1 status type is highly prevalent throughout the mission. There can be 2 status types as well. Also throw in some minor/moderate status (currently it's almost exclusively strong status). C42 is a great example of how powerful status is to balance out the armor sets. Chaos is clearly inferior on C42 (and so is Black Kat, but I'm sure people still use it, more on that later), it's a lot better to go for fire+poison resist. And because the fire+poison from the oiler slimes is not Strong (but a special kind of moderate), you can actually be immune to a large part of the status in that mission (but you need +10 resist I think). That makes armors like a Snarbolax set with Fire Max UVs, Dragon Scale set, etc... great picks for this mission and chaos/Black Kat not so great.

So like I said, I believe Black Kat is probably still used by experienced players on C42, even though getting double immunity should be possible for them. The reason is OP weapons like Acheron. With a CTR VH on it, combined with Black Kat, you'll do so much damage and knockback that nothing else really matters. If Grey Havens decide to balance anything, it should be toning down OP weapons. Think about it, if endgame missions are more like C42 in terms of status, and focus on 1 specific damage type (e.g. just piercing), then armors with more defense will become more popular, while chaos/BK fall out of favor. This also means achieving max damage bonus will become much harder. If a mission has only 1-2 monster families, while max damage bonus is harder to reach... Then UVs that give damage bonus to a monster family will have more of a use. Same goes for Wild Hunting Blade's wolver bonus and the armor sets that provide damage bonus against a monster family (Arcane salamander could use a different damage bonus though).

tl;dr Design better missions (more status, less damage types/monster families) that allow (force?) Knights to specialise their gear, so defensive armors and speicialist armors (wolver, gunslinger, demo, etc) become preferred and BK/Chaos fall out of favor. Make sure to nerf some of the really OP weapons like Acheron to prevent Black Kat set still being dominant in missions that counter it, through sheer overpoweredness. No BK/Chaos means no max damage bonus on everything. No Max damage bonus on everything, while only 1-2 monster families per mission means damage boosts against specific monster families becomes more useful.

End result: a lot more variety in viable armor sets and UV combinations (improving the UV market, making it better for everyone). More variety in viable weapons and their UVs (monster damage UVs). Without requiring to change any core stats on items(only a nerf in numbers to weapons that have power to spare, but never changing damage types/defense types/status resistances etc) and therefore not upsetting anyone who has already crafted and rolled UVs on current items.

Thing about CIV is that it's a normal damage weapon. Normal damage weapons should be good VS anything, but if they're specialized they should be a bit less than a specialized damage sword to what it's good against and much better to what the specialized sword is bad against. CIV is bad since it's not good VS undead, and it's not good VS gremlins. Give it a high flinch rate, like the WHB, and you have a sword that's safe in a different way than leviathan blade.

Basically, we shouldn't make normal damage weapons with family bonuses better than specialized weapons since that's what you trade for effectiveness everywhere in the game. The problem is the damage for where it's supposed to be good isn't good either, so either making such weapons specialized damage or increasing their damage bonus would work pretty well.

Some weapons are armor deem just ridiculously OP. Almost to the point where there's, why in the world would I run that? To, why in the world would I not run that? It really is time for some balance changes, should be a priority for the team.

Drischa used Overwatch to compare to Spiral Knights. In Overwatch at a casual level (PvE in SK), every hero is usable and has their strengths/weaknesses. You are talking about the pro competitive scene of overwatch, something SK doesn't even have. In competitive overwatch for normal players that do not earn money by playing the game, a lot more heroes are being used than just 7 or 8. In quickplay/arcade overwatch (= PvE in SK) all of the heroes are usable. Some are better than others, but you can use all of them and have fun in those modes. Drischa is pointing out that even in PvE in SK, a lot of the weapons/gear are just plain worse than others, for example cobalt armor vs skolver armor, or acheron vs amputator.

I used overwatch as an example of a development team actively trying to provide more utility or strength to items (heroes) that they saw as being underutilized. I do not play or follow overwatch competitively so I cannot say how balanced it is at high level play, but at the casual level that I play I often see a variety of heroes being used.

Perhaps if I give the following examples it would make more sense:

In older Overwatch versions, Mccree's 'fan the hammer' ability allows him to put out massive amounts of damage very quickly, coupled with his flashbang made him very difficult to fight. So in turn, blizzard decreased the damage output, but increased the speed of the attack to keep it good.

In Spiral Knights, acheron is able to put out huge amounts of damage compared to other swords (heavy sword damage with lighter sword speed).
This has been an issue for years now, but is never addressed.

In Overwatch, Symettra was fairly underused as her defences were easily countered. To fix this, they heavily reworked her shield ability to give her a barrier that allowed her to better protect her team from immediate threats.

In Spiral Knights, cobalt and plate armours are supposed to offer defencive benefits to the user, but they have very very little advantage over more offensive armour and their disadvantages are quite great. However, this has also never been addressed.
If this was approached in a similar manner to Symettra, I would guess that plate armour could be given an extra ability (shield strength boosts?) to make it useful.