It's been 9 months man atleast tell us something or actually do it bruh.

But for me that something isn't urgent, although I would appreciate more loot since at the moment arranging runs is too difficult between the price, difficulty and payout.
Especially for a noob wanting to do his first run.
But at the same time I assume Grey Havens are already working on this as the current situation makes no sense.
That said though, it's been quite some time and it'd be nice to at least see the payout increased even if you're planning to make a different reward in the form of new equipment or whatever you're planning on doing.
At this point reverting the Shadow Lairs would feel weird and I'd rather the payout is just massively increased since waiving or reducing the value of Shadow Keys will make those who have one get annoyed. Although that would also be a nice change.

I believe the reasoning behind the change was to make SLs scarier?
There are many ways to make them scarier and buffing health/damage wasn't really a good one.
First one or two runs feel scary because you don't want to get close to enemies, but after that they get tedious and punish for mistakes too much, which, in turn, makes players use many more sparks of life. Rabid Snarbolax pretty much requires using sparks because of how healthy silkwings are, otherwise any and all damage will be reverted after a few seconds and the bosses can't be poisoned to prevent the healing.

T4 could be possible if the overall knight strength matched the SL difficulty. Currently, using even best available methods is not enough to reliably complete a shadow lair. Using more enjoyable weapons is not even an option anymore, it's just too tedious. Old shadow lairs were more fun.

Agreed! The old shadow lairs were much more fun and they were an actually viable rad farm for late game, and at the moment we are very starved of those.

The t4 SL changes have ruined the only truly good and interesting rad farm in the game imo.

The buffed lairs are most of what keeps me engaged with the game at this point. I go on them every other day and love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEdUTzf8NkM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMtJS7khwjQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghHdbXgyLJ4

I filmed these during my last week or so of playing. I think if anything the enemies could use a slight nerf to their attack and that vitapods should be sold at basil (+21 vitapods that is), but that their defenses and health are reasonable. Status effects could also use a buff in tier 4 and everywhere for that matter.

Honestly, my only issue with Shadow Lairs as it currently stands is the ridiculous Tier 4 damage, that even with the right resistance half of ones health is gone. If Shadow Lairs flat out returned to normal they'll barely be a challenge anymore in my opinion. Everyone will just go back to pure damage weaponry and ditch all crowd-control, which Shadow Lairs encourage in the first place for the latter.

Ice Queen in a 3-man after the change was the most fun i had in the game in like forever, even though i burned at least 2 sparks doing so. Completely made me play the game differently on a defensive front, and abusing game mechanics such as flinching enemies at the right moment, instead of going for pure damage, and keeping more dangerous enemies like Lumbers on me and away from the team.

Keep the Tier 4 health, remove the Tier 4 damage, or at the least restrict said damage it to the Unknown Passage. Standard Tier 3 health enemies simply go down far too quickly in a well coordinated and experienced group, Tier 4 health allow enemies to still be a threat and encourage coordination or crowd control if necessary.
I personally don't think they overstay their welcome with it, it's too cheap to simply one shot tougher enemies like Trojans in one go from a single charge attack like Blitz Needle, they are elite enemies for a reason. Overpowered weaponry robs them of that, even for stuff neutral to it like Deadnaughts.
If Tier 4 health is seriously that concerning for all of you, then make it so it doesn't apply to certain spawns, such as the Silkwing in the Rabid Snarbolxes fight.

Those silkwings are just... painful...

Ok. Instead of harassing me on discord for expressing an opinion lets think about this for 12 seconds and come up with something like-

Step 1: Split SL materials into elite/normal/advanced variants.

Step 2: Revert the normal mode dungeon to D30, make advanced D33 or something and keep elite D40!

Step 3: Make a few SL themed variants of weapons and shields to fill in the new gaps in the future or just move some of the existing gear around to fill in.

These kinds of common sense balancing changes are what the game needs

I could go on but I don't think anyone cares about me or my opinions here.

The current state of lairs are not friendly to less experienced players. It may be argued that the previous ones were not either, but the difference between them is that before, the player wouldn't have to spend over 40 sparks to get through the lair. Difficulty before was determined by clever level design, not overcharging the enemies with 3x hp and 2x damage on top of the already difficult level design.

The current HP scaling only increases the length of the lairs for no good reason, and while this may be fun to players who are already well versed in the layouts of the lairs, this hurts the experience of many others.
The damage scaling so punishing that building defensive gear gets invalidated, and the player is forced to build as much offense as they can.

I'll reiterate my previous post, there was no reason to touch the the Shadow Lairs, they were made by level designers who knew what they were doing, so lairs were fairly balanced, and they were a solid piece of endgame, but now the incentive to run them is gone, and are too punishing for many to find enjoyable, all the while taking 2-3x the amount of time.

I mean at first people DID ask to keep it, to be fair. We're now realizing how stupid of a decision it was for us to support the change when it first happened.

I'm not implying at all either SK needs to be a "tryhard" game, that's taking it way too far on what i actually said. Then saying it's not for the challenge? Shadow Lairs were made in the first place to offer challenge, all the way back when they first came out, even with end-game gear.

There's of course been power creep, to the point even these end-game areas were reduced to a pile of rubble that everyone just runs pure damage with no crowd control, that kills the points of Shadow Lairs and what they encourage. There's just no variety in playstyle needed, Tier 4 health forced one to do that and approach cautiously, plus abuse the games mechanics to ones advantage.

None of this is barely done in lower Tier's from all of my experience playing, everyone just goes pure damage even if it means not interrupting a devastating attack, drawing a dangerous enemy away, immediately focus on more dangerous targets, and other stuff that isn't all about damage. Enemies die way too quickly for this to all matter, i feel like the only one that fully takes advantage of these mechanics in terms of enemy aggro and flinching.
None of this is out of brag, just to note. These mechanics are incredibly under utilized even for end-gamers, because they are not explained enough. This should be fixed and Shadow Lairs should encourage them. Because damage simply outdoes all even if one dies in the process, like blitzing a hoard of Devilites who easily kill them in return with chairs/pitchforks to the face.

While i agree elite enemies should retain Tier 4 HP, the rest are still going to remain relatively weak by Tier 3 standards. At the least, perhaps give them double/triple stats sans damage? That wouldn't be as ridiculous and at least give them a chance to retaliate while still surviving devastating blows. Instantly killing something on the spot in a end-game area without proper coordination from the entire team just doesn't feel right, it just kinda becomes no different to soloing by that point.

Sorry if i came off passive aggressive, being called a minority ticked me off quite a bit and had to re-write this a few times. Please accept my apologies.

i may agree that Shadow lair at their previous state were too easy, but hold that thought for a second.
In general there are ways to make something more engaging/difficult instead of playing the Numbers game like many others have previously, which led to huge shitstorms and complaints about the game Design.

Take Payday 2 or The Division (1) as an example.

Those both games just increased the damage and Health Values and left enemies as dumb as they were with all the Stupid AI Paths, it was just mostly a race between player and NPC to race eachothers health down.
This was at a point where certain game machanics completely lost to others since the difficulty was not accounting other factors; For Example Grenades in The Division dealth about 34k damage to enemies that had a value mostly above 1M HP for the weakest member of them.

And Payday 2 used to have 3 Viable classes while Death Sentence and One Down removed the chance to play Armorer completly.

What does this have to do with all of this?

Simple. The entire problem was just to increase values and having to abuse certain Game Mechanics to kill enemies, this was realized by Ubisoft themselves and made enemies easy to kill while difficulty just increased their aim, tactics and Boldness to make something more difficult in their second part of the game (And made weapons like Granades to lure out enemies also deal damage if the intended result would not occur, so the incentive is there to use grenades more often.

And the modding community of Payday 2 also saw how they failed on their promise to "Heist Smater, not harder" and instead they released a version where enemies coordinate, get more dangerous tactics, more support and stick together and introduced another Mechanic to engage someone ib a battle.

Enough about other games tho.

How can Spiral Knights learn from this?

This is not as easy to talk about but either you give the players more reason to play something (By increasing Loot and chance of Item drops even)
Making enemies more difficult by letting them react faster and recover from Status effects (Or give them Temporary Immunity like a Diminishing Returns effect)
Or the more interesting approach that makes the game more difficult but needs some balancing and development of giving Shadowlair enemies their own types (Which look diffrent, have even more attacks and can only appear there)
And those Elite Mobs empower other enemies around them meaning you have to focus your attacks on those first.

I think you have the best response Death-Key, Shadow Lairs before were either easy or reasonably challenging depending on your skill level, this is true.

The best change would have been actual mechanical changes, 3x hp, 1.5x defense and 2x attack damage on enemies was not the way to make the lairs harder, enemies have ~4.5x effective hp than before, while also boasting double the damage, so you are forced to not make many mistakes, when everything takes so much longer to kill. This is not properly balanced.

If enemies just had increased damage, so the mistakes you did make were more punishing, this would be fine.

The only enemies that are better from a game design standpoint are the larger enemies like Dreadnaughts and Trojans, as they're supposed to be beastly enemies, but currently get defeated in a few seconds without much effort in Tier 3, common enemies shouldn't have as much health as the larger enemies.

But the main thing that I believe many people fail to recognise currently is that GH are small, so large scale changes are unfeasible, that's why I believe a revert is healthier than what we have now.

I think originally the shadow lair difficulty change was half and half, it was nice to have a difficult challenge but at the same time it ruins it for the less hardcore players. At this point in the game shadow lairs are at the lowest popularity they've ever been though I believe, they are more trouble than they are worth. If the "tier 4" difficulty is sought after at this stage I think it should have its own optional difficulty with the standard normal, advanced, and elite followed by a "nightmare" difficulty to be in place of the tier 4 difficulty. Shadow lairs before were still challenging and enjoyable, they are needlessly difficult now with no increased gains, personally I won't do anymore unless they are changed in some way. I always appreciate your efforts Grey Havens, the community appreciates you all the more when you take time to respond to us.