When I first started playing Spiral Knights, I was accidentally swapping weapons because I expected that pressing a direction key plus space would make me dash in that direction, avoiding enemy attacks in the process. I don't know why I expected that... Possibly because I've seen it in a lot of other games and found it very useful every time, so I kind of grew accustomed to it. So I figure... Why not suggest it? Here's what I mean:
I'm talking about a short-ranged "slide" of sorts, where your knight slides a couple of squares in the direction of the movement buttons. A lot of enemies already do slides like this. Foxes (wolvers) can dash in and run up behind you, slimes can dash into you for an attack and raccoons (gremlins) can dash back and away from you. Such a move would be good for both closing the distance to an enemy and attacking, as well as for dodging large-scale attacks. Let's face it - our knights run pretty slowly. If I'm standing in front of one of those giant tree things when it rises its club, there's no chance in hell I'm going to run away from its effective area. I'm taking that hit, and hoping my shield survives the impact. If I have a dash move, however, I can dash out of range or to the side.
This also gives the opportunity for dashing attacks. I can already envision both a dashing sword attack (depending on the sword), and even a dashing shield-bump attack, where if you dash and block, you bump what you collide with. That would make for a good way to get out of being mobbed in a corner.
I realise that a lot of the situations I'm describing are of the "Just don't get into those situations!" variety, but I also prefer to give people the tools to deal with everything and let the player hold the responsibility of knowing what to do and the presence of mind to actually do it.
Clearly, such a mechanic would need to be time-gated so you don't see people short-dashing to cover distance over long hallways. I'd give it a cooldown timer such that it's slightly slower to constantly dash than it is to walk.
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Incidentally, some kind of "sprint" function would be nice for covering said long distances, but that's another story for another time.
