Everytime I run arcade, be it with friends or with randoms, we always wait for the stage to cycle. The only time I play compounds, is when the team is full of new players who dont know any better.

Not a single veteran I know loves compounds.

Reason? It always boils down to the minis. On T3, they tank too much, almost as much as regular enemies despite being miniature versions. When you have so many of them on the field, its just not fun at all.

Imho, minis should be killed in one hit no matter the tier. They should serve as a nuisance at most.

I would not miss compounds at all, in fact I'd be happy if they got removed.

i'm fine as long as it isn't scarabs
their attack makes them hard to kill quickly unlike drops and bunnies, compounds have a guaranteed amount of boxes, so i know what i'm getting
compounds have their own tileset, so it's nice playing something different sometimes if other maps are repetitive
one of my main weapons is a ctr vh torpor, so it's easy to collect and kill the minis

Compounds just feel like alternative Clockwork Tunnels to me. A regular generic stage that shows up several times per gate. It's been years since I've paid any attention to Compounds while looking at gate maps.

They generally have better and more interesting rooms than Clockwork Tunnels (They do lack Danger Rooms however). I think Compounds are some of the better regular stages, certainly more interesting than the likes of Wolver Dens or Deconstruction Zones. I enjoy them.

I also like minis. I found them difficult at first too, but once you start using the right bombs or other crowd control weapons they become very manageable. I would hate to see them get nerfed into shadows of their former selves like some other enemies (rip wolvers, retrodes and zombies).

Adding a few more treasure boxes couldn't hurt though. A lot of people find Compounds difficult and they should probably have a slightly higher payout.

I always avoid them, they're the main reason I avoid a gate. If I need to do them I usually just rush through them. They aren't really fun nor do they even give you good rewards that would encourage you to do them. Spiral Knights really isn't a game where dealing with a million small-but-fragile enemies is fun

I like them generally, though the ending section could use a lot more variety especially with how often compunds appear in the arcade.

Bullet sponges. All they do is move forward and deal damage on contact, and the level spams them, with the final arena respawning them infinitely. It's just not fun. Same issue for the treasure vaults.

They become very annoying in the higher levels because now they deal a lot of damage, as spiral knights armors don't scale well into higher levels.

They arent worth doing and severely impact profitability of the run, usually costing multiple sparks for extremely mediocre rewards. If they rewarded dozens of radiants or unique items it might be worth it.

Compounds have unusually high enemy variety and a number of slow rooms laden with spikes meant to be slogs keeping you under pressure from respawning minis that have no drops and exist only to harass you. Their rewards were not commensurate to the time and effort it takes to clear them on release and they remain that way even after the patch that added a couple of boxes to them.

I agree that minis were likely designed to encourage the use of bombs. However, this mostly ends up being blast bombs and the rest is standard AoE fare as with Brandish and other popular weapons that work well against minis. Additionally, working well against them doesn't solve the issue of them being uninteresting and tiresome to deal with, which causes them to be frictional anyway, though I personally have a soft spot for scarabs since they have actual movement patterns and it's satisfying to bunch them up against walls.

It's annoying that dust bunnies have tracking and better effective range than actual wolvers (who used to have tracking and lost it) and glopdrops are just jelly minis but with badly telegraphed, smoothly chasing contact damage, which A) sucks and B) is unprecedented across almost all non-hazard enemies in the game. To me, the fact they feel bad with the game's serverside hit detection serves as an example as to why most enemy attacks in SK have such long telegraphs and stiff movement.

Without factoring in autotarget, heavy swords can catch Gremlin Knockers more easily than standard swords, but the difference is negligible because they have tiny range, no tracking, and no real presence in combat outside of bodyblocking movement and shots. I typically ignore them unless I'm doing something that requires me to be completely stationary for more than a second for some reason.

It seems the main problem people have with Compounds is the lack of loot compared to their difficulty, especially from minis. According to monster cages 3 minis are equivalent to 1 regular enemy, and yet 3 minis don't drop nearly as much loot, sometimes not dropping anything at all.

The easiest change would be to make minis drop more loot. A swarm of minis needs to drop comparable loot to a room of regular enemies, if not slightly more. This should apply everywhere, not just in Compounds. It would also be nice if the amount of treasure boxes before the final room were to be increased. If I recall correctly there's randomly 2-8 boxes before the final room, it would be much better if there were 8 boxes every time.

As things are, players rushing ahead and doing the keys on their own is ironically the safest way to handle the final rooms since it's easier to spawnkill the enemies with actual drops while split and it's a lot easier to control the behavior of minis when they're only going after one person at a time. If they're doing that and it's getting someone else killed, then that's on the key/button-hunting player for being too slow, not the strategy in a void... Making the fixed spawns a requirement to clear the room won't stop rushing players from spawning them all as quickly as possible. You might see them bothering to clear them as they go instead, though.

Just giving the fixed spawns drops instead of being waste-of-time obstacles would be enough to do a lot for compounds, imo. A huge number of enemies in compounds have danger mission / danger room drop behavior for some reason where everything's backloaded to the clear rewards.

It's the candlestick keep levels that I hate.

Hang in there. Like everything in the game, you just have to learn the rules and the monster AI, and then it becomes manageable. In Candlestick Keep, by maneuvering correctly, you can lead a grimalkin around, as if it is on a leash.

Candlestick Keep is a microcosm of the bigger lesson about Spiral Knights: It's fundamentally a dodging game. That's why experienced players can get away with glass cannon armor. They rarely get hit.

I do a lot of solo runs, mostly to practice my positioning and battle-test my builds in situations where I don't have backup or allies with solid builds (I like to run parties where anyone can show up) and I've found that compounds are definitely *challenging*, but ultimately pretty manageable if your build is good. This, unfortunately, doesn't give them a free pass in my mind; close friends to me that run gear in-line with their play preferences rather than "most effective build" often find themselves at a disadvantage especially in the final room, and this isn't fun for them. I don't think profitability should be a key metric in this even though it is valuable; what matters is that everyone's having at least a half-decent time.

The fact that I like Compounds because they force me to lock in and focus on my dodging and positioning doesn't make them good, because not everybody wants that overly challenging experience (at least compared to their rewards). From the perspective of risk versus reward, they're absolutely last in the running for me too *despite* enjoying them, right next to that utterly miserable stretch of scarlet citadel rooms where you have to carry a statue through a gun puppy hall - they're not unmanageable, but the play and decisionmaking you have to engage with slows the experience down.

For what it's worth, glop drops are INFINITELY more unpleasant than dust bunnies for me, because they deal contact damage, unlike basically everything else and don't *seem* to take as much knockback. I would probably feel better if I was better rewarded for doing my run through a compound but I don't think I'd be too mad to see the difficulty lowered, even after putting this much time into learning them. For bringing in new players, that extra reward alone might be enough.

Compromise position might be that mini spawners can deplete, but I don't think a full party should be in the final room for that long anyway. If I could only make one change, it would be that glop drops *spawn* in their harmless state, *then* become dangerous after a brief delay. A little lenience for players caught off guard.

As long as you have a bomb, they're not that big a deal. They don't bother me, it's whatever. Very rarely will I skip a specific biome.

EDIT: I forgot how to remove the Subject?

I will go as far out of my way as necessary to avoid running Compound levels, including avoiding entire gate tiers and sitting around waiting for 10 minutes for a better level to show up. Even if I can usually manage my way through them I find dealing with the mini enemies to be incredibly tedious and unfun, especially in those infinitely-respawning final rooms. Drops are up there with T3 Greavers as my most hated enemies in the game (even moreso when they're in Treasure Vaults...ugh).

I largely don't care about compounds, but minis spawning anywhere makes me groan since on Elite they tend to be mildly annoying enemies spawned in ridiculous numbers. If minis consistently died in 1 or 2 hits I would not mind them anywhere near as much.

It really slows down the paste of the adventure, we always try to avoid them, and most people have no problem on waiting for the floor to change, there is just no reason to be there, and is mostly a party killer, it feels more like a punishment rather than something you want to explore, the fewer the better, i rather see more scarlet fortress wich are more rare to find.

@Tany-Killer
> I think compounds have no interesting environmental things to encounter.

They have rare scenario rooms about the gremlin civil war thing, for example.

So, having done an arcade run every day or so for the past couple weeks, I arrive at the conclusion that compounds are just poorly implemented.

In Tier 3, minis are not appreciably weaker than other monsters, they spawn in massive numbers, and they are in fact individually more threatening than normal monsters. Dust bunnies have good tracking even if you can bump them away, compared to wolvers which are basically just punching bags; glop drops speedily pursue you with an active hitbox, compared to cubes and lichens that mostly have to wiggle for a solid half-second before they can lunge for an attack; and scarabs not only wander around a lot more than zombies do but also fly much, much further when attacking.

This isn't about bombs. Bombs are an effective way to deal with the 12 greaver wave in Fiendish Fray arenas, but people don't say "oh you should just use a bomb" because arenas are not actively hostile to other weapon types. I don't care about "the meta", there never should be a case where the solution is to bring a specific weapon because options are what make games fun.

Minis are just overtuned. In general, minis could stand to overall be weaker since the point of them is to be a threat in numbers, not an individually strong monster that gets a million copies. They aren't guaranteed to flinch when struck either, looking again to the 12 greaver wave where the solution is to just hit them, and means that fast weapons which might ordinarily seem effective against large groups actually suck because they just get you hit. Spamming bombs just happens to be a safe way of dealing with them and it's also quite boring.

Not to mention, the final room of many compounds spawn large waves of minis on top of the infinitely spawning ones, so you have to clean out minis a bunch to be sure you got all the non-respawning ones, or accept a lot of damage if you want to go fast. And I don't recall these waves dropping anything either (though it's hard to tell, but mini waves in earlier parts of the level do have drops), so they're more monsters to kill with no reward attached.

As for them being a "buff to normal damage", I don't really think that's much of an argument. While a combination like beasts and constructs does mean one resists the other's weakness, beasts especially are no stranger to having things that resist piercing damage mixed into their spawn pools. Not to mention, you have at least two weapon slots, so it's not hard to bring a weapon effective against each of the two family types. That said, I take normal with me everywhere anyway because that's the flavour that Turbillion and Leviathan Blade come in.

Rewards are the other pain point for compounds. Lichenous lairs tend to consistently pay at least three and often somewhere more like five to ten boxes per segment, despite being far less challenging as levels. (There's a reason people farm Sewer Stash.) So it would certainly help a lot if compounds reliably had a payout more proportionate to the time and effort they require.

This also neglects to mention that, unlike other arenas that infinitely respawn enemies, minis do not telegraph their spawns. One moment, there's nothing, and the next, a mini appears on the spawner tile. Compare the visible enemy generators in Royal Jelly Palace or Operation Crimson Hammer.

And finally, event rooms are a general problem. I would argue that almost every level type could stand to have them appear. Being procedurally made, Compounds certainly should be easier to add event rooms to, sure. But I would really rather that events rewarded me for playing the game instead of abusing gates to loop a specific level type over and over.

Compounds do have some neat scenario rooms but they tend to be pretty rare. The fact that they're actively unpleasant doesn't help.

tl;dr minis are more threatening than normal monsters, compounds pay way less than easier levels like lichenous lairs, and things like event rooms could stand to appear in most normal levels.

Just coming back into the thread to nod along; having dabbled a little more in Tier 3 Compounds and discussing them outside of the game it's becoming clearer by the second that there is something amiss and I think @Nethorse nailed exactly what that something is.

I didn't see it mentioned, so i'll bring up: there are a couple of compound-exclusive spike setups with switches where i have taken significantly more damage from the rest of the party than any other stage. While the one of two long strips of spikes that you need to walk along (with the two slime turrets) is fine, the spike square with the four gates around it has progressed to "I refuse to step onto the square unless everyone else is past the obstacle" due to how easy it is to get a gate shut in your face by someone inattentive.

While this wouldn't be an issue in a team with good communication it is a huge problem in public teams and part of why i dread compounds, on top of the mini spam. Any issues with communication or different playstyle are just massively exacerbated by the way compounds are made.