Skill expression is a defining factor in the strength of guns in spiral knights. Magnus charges depend on knockback manipulation. Tortogun charges depend on knockback and usage of the invisible projectile, and alchemers depend on angles. Autoguns benefit from close range and flinch timing, and pulsars depend upon where its used and how frequently. Two guns lack any major way to tell apart a good player and a not so good player: mixers and catalyzers. A way in which skill can be expressed when using these guns can attract more people to practicing more engaging and expansive playstyles.

Mixers do too much for not enough skill. Before the shadow lair buff, me and a friend who doesnt play the game went tandem with one of us controlling movement on a keyboard and the other one shooting and aiming with an xbox controller in a shadow lair vana run. We did it deathless easily. Simply pointing and clicking to 2 shot enemies is not engaging.

Skill expression in relation to mixers has been a popular topic ever since they were seen as a god tier gun. Among all the suggestions, my favourites are:

The damage the bullets have once fired should be lowered, comparable to the damage of a small pulsar shot. Once reaching their apogee, however, they gain damage, like a large pulsar shot.

If the bullets hit nothing and manage to return all the way to the user, they either deal damage to or shock the user. Adding some sort of risk that can be played around with decent skill would make the weapon much more skill expressive.

Catalyzers have some forms of skill expression already. These being controlling knockback direction by timing when the charge is fired in relation to the orbitals positions, hitting more than one enemy's orbitals at once by brushing the charge inbetween them, or shield bumping enemies close to an "orbitaled" enemy for aoe damage. These are great forms of skill expression, but they nearly always are accidental, have no benefit, or far too tedious to be even be considered as useful.

Here are a few ideas I have regarding skill expression with catalyzers

Orbitals last for 20 seconds (im not actually sure, just assume they do). During the last 5 seconds of an orbital's lifespan, it changes in colour and becomes unstable. Detonating unstable orbitals create stupid high damage, aoe and knockback as a result. For example, you can load up a scary enemy with a few tags and continue the fight. By the time you know 15 seconds is about to be up, you can get in position to detonate the charge. Waiting 15 seconds to deal damage is trash, so the damage should just be astronomically high, in the multi thousands. As a recon in ld this could be interesting as well.

This one is just a dumb idea but it seemed cool in my head. Each enemy has a maximum of five tags they can have orbiting them at a time. The catch is, the order in which these tags are aquired changes the effect the explosion has. For example, neut>neut>bio>neut>neut could be a sleep and poison explosion wheras bio>bio>neut>bio>bio could be a poison and shock explosion. This is just a rough, off the top of my head idea, but memorizing combos that suit different situations better seems like a fun idea. Not to mention the absolute chaos that would happen in a 4 man party.

Each tag gains the ability to bounce once off a wall, but unlike alch, is predictable in its second angle. A bounced tag gains much more damage. This is an easy way to reward more calculated catalyzer play, but I'm concerned that it takes too much inspiration for alchemers.

The one thing I don't want when changing a weapon to make it better or worse is damage numbers. I'd rather skill expression be changed so that either big brain play or teamwork is what turns a good weapon great. If anyone has any ideas for skill expression regarding these guns or other weapons I'm kinda interested in what other things could be changed to make loadouts more equal, engaging, and fun!