A majority of the game's harder areas contain content that you cannot simply push into a corner and obliterate there. This includes things like lost souls (aka bubbles), poison/fire lichens that dash, Vanaduke, the entire fiend family, swarm turrets, enemies that shield in crowded areas and even wolvers that teleport.

Extra credits has an excellent episode on this- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w

If you watched the video you might have noticed that our pulsar is a FOO strategy. It gives a lot of power for a little bit of skill and so makes inexperienced knights feel powerful, but is ultimately limiting. Compare this to something like blitz needle- without skill, autoguns are going to just get you killed... but with skill, autoguns are godlike.

Pulsars are overrated, especially on the eyes of newbies. I hate them both on pvp and party pve... Kills party DPS, can cause an ally to get hit, screen clutter, ruins kiting, causes lag, cheap area-denial + status on pvp.

On a side note, does Nitronome knockback trojans? Or just the Irontech (Destroyer) and the Big Angry Bomb?

If my memory serves me right, I think yeah it does this but I don't have it anymore so I can't check.

Joke OP aside, there are incredibly good reasons to use a Pulsar gun over another gun line.

For one, the Pulsar line -- and specifically the Polaris -- is the only weapon line in the game that can consistently and reliably stagger most, if not all, possible clusters of Turrets, making it the prime weapon of choice against specific "bullet hell" scenarios the game likes to throw at you (*cough* Danger Rooms *cough* Arenas *cough*), if not against most general combat situations where any Turret of any sort is involved.

Furthermore, the gun line's signature Nitronome-like features (huge AOE + big knockback) on its expanded shots, alongside its Blaster-like fire rate, allow it to keep deadly foes like Lumbers and Mecha Knights/Almirian Crusaders (once they've used their shields) at safe range, while its Charge shot acts as an emergency blast in order to keep faster things like Scuttlebots and even Kats at bay.

Of course, having similar advantages to a Bomb also means it features similar problems, like the blinding explosions, misdirected knockback, and a somewhat-slower time-to-kill (in comparison to other gun lines), but most can be easily managed -- even in parties -- so long as the user knows what to expect from such a gun-bomb hybrid weapon.

That also being said, not every Pulsar gun was made equally. While the new Wildfire can be argued to be on equal terms with the Polaris (knockback consistency vs higher stagger chance), the Supernova's ability to hit Gremlins and Beasts for better damage is hardly worth sacrificing the Polaris' excellent matchups against Gun Puppies and Howlitzers (especially when the gun line is tied with the Catalyzer one for the slowest projectile speed of any gun line), and the Permafroster is not only among the list of most worthless guns to have (alongside the Hail Driver) but also tied (with the latter) for the worst Freezing weapon in the game.

Never mind you disregarding the fact that a lot of bombs -- especially ones like the Nitronome -- can be just as disruptive to a party if mishandled, you're disregarding the fact that I was talking about the Pulsar line as a Pure Gunner, rather than as a Hybrid Whatever.

Of course, as a Gun-Bomb Hybrid weapon, the Pulsar line isn't nearly as good as other Bombs in Crowd Control. Of course, a Brandish beats out a Pulsar most of the time, when the former's essentially a Gun-Sword Hybrid with literally all of the strengths and none of the weaknesses. Of course, a Blitz beats a Pulsar most of the time, when it can in the most ideal situation possible beat every other gun in the game besides the Grim Repeater against Giant Lichen Colonies. Of course, literally every weapon in the game is better than the others in a very specific situation or matchup if you could ever equip every single one of them all at once.

You're clearly forgetting that A) there is never such a thing as an ideal situation in SK, B) you can only equip two weapons by default and only two more at most, C) not everyone wants to be yet another Hybrid Black Kat clone and/or has the resources to even afford being one, and D) it's so much more cost-effective to maximize your effectiveness when you only need to worry about one weapon type.

It's a fact that Spiral Knights, by design, punishes over-generalization and over-specialization; people can only get away with them in-game because they have the money/teammates to afford them. Yet, with such a diverse set of obstacles like all the monster families and the threat level each member presents, the game also promotes weapon matchup versatility over raw power.

As such, it's why I'll always find the Polaris to be the Best Elemental Gun in the game IN SPITE of it being potentially harmful to teammates and IN SPITE of it having lower DPS than most other guns, when it has equal or better matchups than other guns like the Nova/Storm Driver, the Argent Peacemaker or even the Arcana, when pitted against all Elemental-weak enemies.

I just want to point out that besides pulsars, magnuses are also excellent at flinching turrets on their basic shots. With good switch-shooting, you can lock down up to 3 turrets at a time, and I personally find magnuses a lot more responsive due to the lightning-fast bullets. As someone who uses only two weapon slots and Chaos + Black Kat (full Chaos would work too, if cost is an issue) + Swiftstrike, one of my weapons is always Callahan/Iron Slug/Winter Grave.

For the most part, I agree with Traevelliath. Knockback is situationally very useful, but some weapons have way too much to usually work well in a party. It's fine if you're in a solo, you do you, but when you pair up with other players, everything gets hectic. My preferred amount of KB is around that of brandish swings and blaster shots, since I find those aren't too disruptive usually while still providing a good amount of safety and control over individual enemy positions.

My preference for elemental guns is Mixmaster/Orbitgun (not exactly accessible though) > Arcana >= Nova Driver > Argent Peacemaker > Storm Driver > Magma Driver = Hail Driver > Polaris > Wildfire. If I included normal guns too (still against elemental-weak enemies), I'd rank Iron Slug at the very top, Valiance after Nova Driver, and Supernova > Neutralizer at the very bottom.

Edit: Also, I disagree with Sgt-Brownie's claim that Permafroster is useless. I disagree with the claim for Hail Driver too, but that's less relevant because it's not a pulsar.

you very much lost your credibility for saying "by the time you get it to 5*, its user is highly likely to be able to communicate and therefore understand how he's using it wrong in a party if you were to tell him politely enough"

By "two shots", I assume you mean the second shot in the Magnus clip? Because I know from experience that the Magnus' second shot has a higher staggering/flinching potential, and that's not doing your Iron Slug any favors if you need to stand still for at least a whole second and then spend almost a whole other second reloading just to flinch one Turret.

You're also forgetting that projectile speed hardly means much in a matchup if the thing you're facing against doesn't move a lot; it's equal parts why the Polaris can vastly afford to have a slower projectile speed than an Iron Slug if it means it can flinch Turrets far more reliably, and also why the guy in your video was having difficulties in making the Permafroster work against the Menders (who incidentally seemed to be the only Gremlins in that mission that were actively trying to dodge the projectiles), making that video as a whole not very convincing to me -- unless you have something similar that shows me the gun's performance in a more trying place like OCH.

Finally, unless there was actually a ninja patch somewhere during these last 3 years that changed the Freeze status mechanics (in which case by all means post the link of it here, because I sure as hell can't find it), the Winter Grave remains as the only gun in the game that was actually given that Freeze buffer time, and the Hail Driver as the most useless gun in the game.

As for that final point, I guess I better chalk it up to hopeless optimism then, if even at 5* and at D&N people still don't know how to use a Polaris in a Party. That being said, I still stand by my point that a Polaris CAN be properly used in a Party AND without being at the cost of the latter, because I also dabbled into Bombs for long enough to tell you that a Blast Bomb can be used effectively in a Party -- and if a Nitronome can, so can a Polaris.

Again, you're gonna have to give me a link to the patch that says that a Freeze buffer time was given to all Freeze weapons then (or at the very least a video that shows it in action on the Hail Driver), because my anecdotal evidence is rock solid on the fact that the Hail Driver is utterly disappointing as a Freeze weapon and, by proxy, as a Driver AND a gun; I know because I gave it far too many chances to prove itself and it never did, despite me WANTING it to.

While I would argue that one or two sections of OCH are, at the very least, as hard as Grinchlin Assault, not only do I not have the experience to properly compare GA to OCH, but that wasn't even my point in my first place; my point is that OCH throws everything you hate from the Gremlin family at you: Double+ Menders, Respawning Thwackers, Mortafires and Stalkers by the clumps... Everything is there and in a myriad of situations and environments, which makes it the perfect testing ground for Shadow weapons -- almost all Jellies bar Polyps being a non-issue makes them not as worth considering as Gremlins -- including, in our case, Shadow guns.

Sure, you could predict the Gremlin's back dash and shoot the Permafroster there... But then you're forgetting that Gremlins have literally no cooldown on their back dash; what, then? Are you gonna predict that the Gremlin will back dash twice in a row? How about thrice in a row? How many back dashes are you willing to predict? What if the Gremlin decides NOT to back dash because of AI shenanigans? Face it; Gremlins are highly erratic and unpredictable -- a Mender, for reference, can just as easily not revive a fellow Mender nearby as he can just start spamming healing runes from behind its shield dome -- and you'll never be able to read them until it's too late, so unless you can find me a video of someone being able to fully adapt and beat the OCH Gremlins with a Permafroster and ONLY a Permafroster (no Grim Repeater or other weapon nonsense to make parts of it trivial), I'm not buying the weapon being actually effective against them.

But back to the subject at hand, you're quite honestly overestimating a Turret's reaction speed here, because if you were to shoot a Polaris shot by the time a Gun Puppy -- more specifically a T3 one -- started turning itself towards you, the range required for it to shoot all 5 pellets before the Polaris shot would get to it would be far enough away for you to easily lose aggro on them anyway (and by that range, the Polaris shot -- much less an Iron Slug's -- wouldn't even hit it anyway). When you're at mid-range, which is the usual range in which you get surrounded by 4+ Turrets, the Polaris' slower projectile speed hardly makes a difference -- especially if you can predict when they'll shoot, which, y'know, it's much simpler thanks to their rock solid AI -- and when you have the mobility, the clip size and the flinch consistency to affect more Turrets at once, the Iron Slug's faster projectile speed all seems very moot by comparison.

Also, not to rain on your parade, but single-switching weapons like the Iron Slug just for them to be on (almost-)similar terms with a Polaris in flinching Turrets -- if not just single-switching anything in general -- is quite honestly a hell of a lot more "disproportionately high" on the "effort-to-reward ratio", especially when it really isn't that hard to aim a Polaris at monsters your Party members aren't taking care of towards an empty corner your Party members aren't fighting on, all the while doing a solid chunk of damage that lets your Party members quickly finish them once they're done with the rest; Positioning 101, it's something that literally every Bomber and Gunner worth their salt knows and understands, and it's hardly rocket science.

...Alright then; I'll take your word for it and give those two guns a(nother) chance. I've actually been struggling to find a Shadow gun that has all-around solid matchups against the Slime and especially the Gremlin families, so maybe the Permafroster will actually surprise me on that front.

As for your other points, even if T3 Gun Puppies/Howlitzers were already facing you and getting prime to shoot, because of the way they work at that Tier, a mid-range Polaris shot would still deny anywhere between two and four bullets being shot out of five, and at longer ranges where all 5 bullets would be shot before the Polaris shot would connect, you'd be reaching a range that a normal Iron Slug shot wouldn't be able to reach anyway.

If you'd rather Blitzkrieg through them with an Iron Slug charge shot instead, then you'd fall under similar conundrums as using an Autogun charge (as in, can you realistically afford taking the time off of reacting to attacks with your shield to charge the shot and stand still for as long as it's needed for the gun to unleash its slew of DPS? If not, then that's not the right way of going about the matchup you're faced with), and that in itself is a whole other can of semantic worms, as Gunners by design don't need to play like Bombers in order to do damage, but they also aren't as restricted in their damaging AoE as Swordsmen are, allowing them to be a lot more flexible as fighters at the cost of more middling Utility and DPS.

That's, if anything at all, the core principle in why I'd rather use a Polaris over an Arcana or a Nova Driver; sure, both of those can deal more DPS -- never mind the fact that the Polaris has the same fire rate and damage/bullet as an Arcana, and is only worse in the DPS factor because of its slower projectile speed -- but knowing that I'll be generally doing sub-optimal DPS in comparison to Swords anyway, is the 100-or-more-or-whatever increase in DPS really worth sacrificing the sheer all-around versatility the Polaris brings against Undead and Construct matchups? Or, to put it in more general terms, can I get by not having this weapon and its matchup advantages over another, knowing that I have a very limited amount of weapon slots and not enough resources to have many weapons of the same damage type available?

It takes a bit of stepping back, outside-the-box thinking, and generally looking at every little thing in order to realize minute design details like these, but when the process of heating and crafting equipment is as resource-intensive as it is in Spiral Knights, it really pays off to take the time to do it and have a set course for the single best loadout you could have in almost every single situation.

Which brings me to my last point; while I'd still argue that single-switching isn't something that can come off nearly as naturally as simply being aware of your surroundings, it is true that some people are simply better at specific things than others, so all the more power to you if switch-shooting is as consistent for you to pull off as you say it is.

"Summing up, blasters are the best guns in the game, fight me."
Oh, I'll "fight" you on that one, alright.

The Riftlocker is the only worthwhile Blaster for a pure Gunner as it can handle the Arena horde of 12 Greavers excellently while still having decent matchups against all the other Fiends. That being said, the Gilded Griffin is simply without equal at applying pressure against the erratic Gorgos and especially against Devilites, and it can handle the Greaver horde just as well -- albeit with a bit more finesse required -- making it just as good or even better than a Riftlocker in the right hands.

The Arcana's only advantageous matchup is against Kats, but otherwise it provides absolutely nothing of value against the other Undead and the Construct family. By comparison, the Polaris has universally better matchups across both families and can still manage Kat encounters with some advanced kiting play -- hell, even the Hail Driver is a better pick now that its ricochets can't accidentally destroy the Freeze status you just applied to a target (I just tried its 3* version; the difference between then and now is as clear as night and day).

The Phantamos is absolutely and disappointingly bland in its inability to provide anything to the matchup table besides consistently middling DPS (if I were to compare it to a Shadow Sword), as its small knockback does jack-all at preventing Menders from reviving other Gremlins, and Gremlin Thwackers actually benefit from having more easy distance between you and them once their Low-HP AI kicks in and they just keep showing their back-shield to your face while they scramble to use a Health Kit. It's certainly not the worst Shadow gun in the game, but it definitely speaks for itself when even the Grim Repeater has some benefit in being able to shred through a Mender and its shield dome quicker than any other gun.

The Valiance is easily the only gun in the game that has a universally-solid matchup across all monster families, but I still wouldn't recommend using it outside of Hybrid play because A) a pure Gunner is better off having a gun for each specialized damage type that would have solid matchups against the families and the potential threats they'd be effective against, and B) a Normal gun is only a worthwhile addition for a pure Gunner if it brings some form of utility that couldn't be found with its other 3 guns -- like boss-killing potential, CC abilities, etc.

Again, they're quite far from being the worst guns in the game, but it'd easily be an overstatement in a Gunner's eyes to say that they're the best. Except for the Riftlocker; that one's the Best Piercing Gun in the game alongside the Gilded Griffin, and it practically boils down to personal preference on whether you pick one or the other.

"Riftlocker is my fallback in Heart of Ice, though I normally don't bring it because I feel like it trivializes the mission and it's ridiculously and (IMO) blandly effective in solos."

Y u no liek meh? This is the only time we hang out and you think our time together is bland?

@Zero-Chill

I personally prefer the Gilded Griffin because of the even faster projectile speed, the larger ammo clip before having to reload, and the faster reload speed (all in comparison to the Riftlocker), and considering how the most infuriating Fiends are coincidentally the ones with the lowest HP pools in the family (if not in the whole game), I am perfectly content taking a bit more time fighting the easier ones due to the lower DPS if it means I have all my chances stacked in my favor whenever I face those more bothersome ones.

But as I've said before, it's essentially personal preference on whether you wanna use the Riftlocker or the Gilded Griffin, since, from personal experience, you could practically do no wrong in taking either against Fiends and Beasts.

I wish I had a proper opinion on what I'd consider to be the best Shadow gun, but unfortunately I've yet to find a proper resolution for all the testing I did on OCH; all I know for a fact is that the Phantamos is meh at best, the Umbra Driver isn't much better, the Biohazard wasn't even worth trying and the Winter Grave is almost but not quite up to the task.

That being said, I played enough Lockdown to tell you that Alchemers and even Magnuses can be viable in it, albeit not really suited to the overused Striker class.

Honestly, up until Skepticraven posted I felt like we've been playing two completely different games, because my personal experiences don't seem to match up at all with most of yours.

Out of curiosity Sgt-Brownie, what sort of levels and party comps do you usually run with nowadays? Personally, I have a hard time convincing myself to keep playing this game unless I'm playing with friends, so I'm almost always in a party of 3 or 4, grinding things like FSC or arcade recipe runs. When I'm going full gun in a large party, I find a lot of guns like Pulsars, Blasters, and Antiguas inadequate for my DPS needs. Often I find myself risking carpal tunnel with the amount of clicking I have to do just to get one or two kills. Instead, I rely on the two big DPS guns that Skepticraven mention--Autoguns and Magnuses--to quickly eliminate threats instead of kiting and chipping. "Don't need to dodge if there is nothing alive to dodge," so to speak.

I still use my Blasters and Antiguas quite often, but they are never the focus of my full gun loadouts. They're usually clean-up or utility guns. Heck, they're always in my sword-focused loadouts because they are amazing at clean-up and utility. Admittedly, Pulsars used to fill that same spot as well, but I've since dropped them from my loadouts due to the aforementioned teamwork issues, especially now that I can use the softer/precise Blaster CC with any damage type I want.

Though as a sidenote, IMO, Autogun overkill only really applies in small parties or in point-blank range. Autoguns are one of the longer ranged weapons in the game, and because the volume of damage is so high, you don't necessarily need all the shots to hit to secure kills. So I sorta treat the spread like damage falloff, fighting at the minimum range necessary to get kills. For fragile Devilites, this is max Blitz range, while bulkier Slimes tend to be mid range Grim Repeater.

See this is what I mean by playing two different games. You've put a lot of self-worth on surviving solo, while I put a lot of worth on the MMO side of the game.

Circling back to the original topic, the reason why I absolutely loathe the Pulsar is because it is the perfect tool for someone who either does not care about their teammates, isn't thinking about their teammates, or has no teammates. If you have no teammates, it is a great weapon because it keeps the user perfectly safe while doing enough damage. Yet it wrecks HAVOC on everyone else on your team. It's the perfect weapon for the "screw yours, I got mine" people of the world. It's not the only way to use the weapon, but it's definitely the easiest way to use the weapon.

"...Also, if you're "risking carpal tunnel" from simply using Antiguas or even Blasters too much in general, then I'd urge you to reconsider your current PC setup, because I've played games that are much more demanding on the fingers and wrists than Spiral Knights, even when spamming Antiguas."

Have you ever tried to take on FSC with an antigua/blaster? In larger parties, in takes several clips to kill just one zombie. The Charred Court alone is close to 80 zombies, assuming you clear each room. Again, it seems like we're playing two different games here.

@Traevelliath

Well, maybe it is indeed that I don't quite get the "MMO" part of an "MMORPG" -- and all the bad guild experiences I had certainly didn't help the case -- but I still fondly remember the moments where my whole Party was amazed and even praised me for surviving and beating some of the hardest rooms in FSC with only a sliver of health left, way back when you could still revive Party members by giving them some of your own health and when FSC was generally considered to be one of the hardest parts in the game.

The thrill of sheer survival, of enduring past the worst possible odds and succeeding on the other end; it's what drived me to become a better gunner then, and it's what drives me still to this day, for it is the only endearing thing of the past I have left on this game.

And for the record, I once took on most of the Charred Court slag army with only normal Hail Driver shots while on a Party of four (before other Party members came in to finish the job), and I vividly remember enough for me to tell you for a fact that I never got any sort of hand cramps afterwards, and that if I were to do it all over again, I would without a problem.

I may have a much more different way of looking at this game than you do, but if there's anything these 7 whole years have taught me, it's that Spiral Knights is hardly hand-intensive even if you tried; hell, literally any fighting game with complex combo/movement inputs makes Spiral Knights look tame by comparison.

In all of my times where I used guns that could benefit from it, I only used switch-shooting a few times, and then I didn't look back at it again once I decided to stick with shield-cancelling for good.

That's not to say I didn't know or understand the power of switch-shooting in the right hands back then; I just wasn't willing to change my otherwise-comfy setup just so I could actually switch-shoot -- much less single-switch -- effectively.