With the Forge update adding some much-needed quality of life to what was arguably the most outdated and cumbersome system in Spiral Knights, I want to draw attention to another system in need of revision: Punch and rolling for Unique Variants. The system is built to work heavily against players from rolling solid UV's for gear -- mostly weapons -- by inflating the pool of desirable effects like Attack Speed Increase / Charge Time Reduction with Damage UV's against ONE enemy type when there exists gear with damage bonus' for entire weapons and even universal bonuses (Looking at you Black Kat and Chaos). Armor and Shields have generally desirable effects all around, so this is less pronounced with those types of equipment. As a statistic, this is a 25% for ASI or CTR, dropping to 14% if rolling for a second UV or if you're rolling for a bomb that ONLY has CTR. What's more are how these stacked odds are made worse by UV rarity -- You'll get Low affects three times more often than Medium ones, and while High or Very High UV's should absolutely be rarer the disparity between Low and Medium is too great when you're trying to roll for a solid UV. These issues are all compounded by the cost of rolling, and can result in players spending hundreds of thousands of crowns, even crowns into the millions to get the desired UV on their weapon, since those low percent chances at impactful UV's are made worse by the probability of Low to Normal. All of these problems get worse as players try getting a second UV or even a third on their gear.

Therefore, I'd like to make the following suggestion: players can use Moonstone and Valestone to influence their odds.

Since Moonstone and Valestone don't have an in-game use, what if they could be used as a form of currency at Punch's shop to improve their odds? A tab could be added in Punch's shop to deposit Valestone towards increasing the odds for a specific effect like ASI, while Moonstone could be deposited to Increase the Chance at a good UV Level. To prevent this from being too cheap these effects could require a large amount of Minerals, something like .1% for every Mineral Added, to a maximum of 25% at 250 Minerals which would be the cap. This wouldn't guarantee that the player gets their desired roll but would significantly improve their odds at success while maintaining the randomness of the current UV system.

This would be my foremost suggestion for maintaining Punch's function, but I'd absolutely appreciate if other players could comment below their suggestions for how to improve the QoL for rolling UVs.