Spiral Knights - Sprite Ability Use and Crown balancing

Sprite Ability Use and Crown balancing

5 replies [Last post]

Thu, 04/27/2017 - 15:58

Shadow-Turtle

Hi there Spiral Knights dev team and all you players out there,

I was thinking two simple ways to help improve spiral knights gameplay.
1. First suggestion dealing with Sprite abilities.
A fully powered sprite is marginally useful in some niche instances. To me, it seems to hamper their abilities a bit for all of the cooldowns to be tied together. I think it would be a great improvement to Sprites if the cooldowns were separated. I mean, wouldn't it be awesome to pop out of stealth blasting a single enemy with poison quills far more effectively assassinating them? I mean, the ability to combo your sprite powers would be a huge strength increase to sprites. they're not wildly strong as it is, but i'd definitely use my sprite a lot more, and it would add a little more depth to the game allowing players to build combos with their sprites rather than being so limited to single abilities all the time.

2. Second suggestion dealing with Crown farming
Currently, prices for cosmetic items and such seem quite outrageous, and even trying to get UVs for items is pretty difficult unless you buy a lot of energy or become a merchant. To be honest, I'm not very good at merchanting, and I'd rather play the game and earn the ability to get my UVs and make my gear better.
I was thinking, using the current system of crown drops, the devs could simply multiply the crown drop meaning based on tier level the crowns are dropped in.
1 single bronze coin in T1 is 1 crown,
1 silver crown with bronze boarder is like 5
etc...
Well, I think it would be a great improvement to crown farming if we allowed that in T1, multiply crown values by 1; in T2, multiply them by 2, and in T3, multiply them by 3.
This wouldn't overpower the money currently in the game but would allow people a better time trying to farm for crowns instead of merchant for crowns.

Thanks,
feedback to suggestions would be ok, and especially on the sprite cooldowns. I think the game would be infinitely more fun if i could combo rek the face of a T3 healing gremlin with my sprite. And, from a coding standpoint, i doubt the changes to these timers would be all that difficult. might take a few days or so but nothing too elaborate.

Sat, 04/29/2017 - 13:30

Fangel

ehhh

The crown balance as it stands is fine. The only thing I believe should be altered is that odd strata should have similar crown levels to even strata, just with a slowly increasing crown amount per strata.

Besides, making 27k from a single elite firestorm citadel run (which is tier 3) would be insane, and inflate prices of pretty much everything to amounts so that players in the early game who can only earn about 3k are now needing to pay upwards of 25k for 100 energy. That's not good.

As for sprite cooldowns, I don't think having separate cooldowns would be a bad thing. However, if that were the case, actual sprite cooldowns may need to be increased for balance. Universal cooldowns could still be applicable for the duration of the skill animation, but being able to drop a heart attack while under an angelic aura would allow for some pretty clutch situations, and would encourage players to use their sprite more often.

Do keep in mind that this would turn sprites into more of a weapon than the utility that they currently are. While that might sound great, it also may not be the best thing for the game. I'd like to see how it would play out with the playerbase before saying it would be a good or bad thing, though.

Fri, 04/28/2017 - 21:15

Shadow-Turtle

sooo...

Unfortunately Fangel, I actually can't disagree with your first comment on the crown balancing as far as inflation goes. Players would just inflate the prices of things in AH and thus for energy buying/selling and everything. sigh..... My whole point to this idea is to give a player a way to play the game for the crowns that they can use to get UV rolls to make their gear better instead of basically forcing them to use AH and trading as the primary means of making actually decent amounts of money in the game.

As far as the sprites go, yeah actually that'd be pretty cool to me, if they were more like weapons. But that's my opinon. I do agree and thanks for the feedback on the idea. I think they would have to increase each individual cooldown for balancing purposes but it would be neat to have.

Sat, 04/29/2017 - 13:36

Fangel

yeah

Alternative ways of earning UV tickets would be a better outcome. Keep in mind that UVs should be considered end-game, and not a staple for the average player, thus the current cost for UVs is built with that in mind. Weapons are not balanced around unique variants after all, meaning a player with unique variants should be an outlier rather than the norm.

To be fair, the forge prize boxes already provide a roll with unique variants. Expanding ways to obtain those would be good (such as exchanging x amount of primal/forge/grim sparks at Brinks).

Sat, 04/29/2017 - 19:01

Niezumiko

Sprite Improvements

I agree with your idea about sprite improvements but it would be nice if sprites could buff up our knights even more. At the moment we can only equip one buff option that buffs our knights however the 3 slots below it are useless. They could add a option to pay energy to unlock those slots and equip more buffs like we have for trinket slots and extra weapons slots. Each slot could cost 200 energy or so and unlock for 30 days like the others for trinkets and weapons. If someone equipped 4 buffs for more attack, speed, faster charging time, and more health for example then it would make our knights much stronger.

Also I don't exactly like how if you equip one sprite harness it effects all the sprites you have so some minor changes to the harness feature would be nice as well.

Wed, 05/10/2017 - 17:03

Shadow-Turtle

hmm

Fangel,
I actually agree with that sentiment.
Instead of playing with Crowns we should probably just play with ways to get UVs on equipment. They're really helpful. the players I know that have them usually have really good ones on most of their equipment. Though most of them are also pretty old players, so they're all at end-game. They somehow got them, but I just peeve about it because getting 2 or 3 good rolls must have been really expensive. even with the current system of being able to get tickets from Forge boxes. They seem to be fairly rare. Having different, less "crown" particular methods of getting the 2 and 3 tickets would resolve my complaints there.

Niezumiko,
I like that idea to put those extra couple of slots to use. But like Fangel suggested, I think adding more functionality to sprites would require more balancing to keep them from basically single-handedly making your Knight into Hercules. And if they don't balance it because there is a slight paywall, the ones that get enough crowns, mostly the end-game players, would definitely be really strong in PvE. So some amount of new content that's more difficult to adjust to these new possible buffs might be wanted at that point. I think after hearing Fangel's input, some caution in buffing or changing sprites would be necessary because doing too much with them could be pretty game changing, requiring buffs/nerfs or new content, or whatever to adjust to the new power of the sprites.

I do think though the sprite harnesses could definitely use work. It's convenient to default the harness to the strongest normal type harness a player has, but perhaps they shouldn't let changing one harness affect all other possible sprites in your inventory.

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Sprite Ability Use and Crown balancing