With hopium and whilst crafting new armors i was thinking about defence. Currently in the game is a killed or be killed situation and everyone playing in elite hence people are going chaos or bk to dish out dmg. Would you guys be ok if they made tanky armors tanky (e.g heavy plate set) on their own or would you like to be tanky plus have so extra bonus?
i would also like to see similar to how weps gain ctr maybe shields can have recharge time increase, dash distance or stronger stun bash?
How would you guys change defense?
Thu, 06/18/2026 - 11:56
Fri, 06/19/2026 - 02:24
#2
Like Draycos says, armor needs to do more. Sure, we could just make Iron Plate defend you for tons and tons of damage, but it might end up both being boring and also not good enough. With ASI - 1 you're going to get hit while swinging your sword and that's going to interrupt you. It needs poise. It needs to turn your shield into a lockdown guardian shield so that you're a valued and noticable member of the team. It needs to make your hits build up a layer of temporary health.
My favorite RPG armor system remains Remnant: From The Ashes, which has a bunch of bonuses on each armor set that scales equally well with mixing-and-matching as it does going with a full set and specializing in one very cool thing. Do anything, do lots of it, be creative and interesting. We can't have eighty armors and hardly ten stats that are actually five stats wearing different wigs.
Fri, 06/19/2026 - 04:23
#3
"It needs to make your hits build up a layer of temporary health."
Always wished something like this was given to Drakon's Barrier, since it's not good at doing damage reliably or effectively but has a cool defense multiplier that's not strong enough to warrant eating hits. I remember a long time ago I threw the idea around for it to give you some personal Sera-shield-esque effect wholesale. Slow charge attacks, slow swords, bashes - they all would benefit from some buffer like that, and Seraphynx's shield is proof, made even more potent of an example by how its bugs and tuning made it a selfish ability instead of a support ability due to friendly fire damaging the shield and the sharing range being only a couple of tiles wide.
Fri, 06/19/2026 - 12:58
#4
An issue with a vector of bulk
The ancient plate helm may be a meme, giving ASD and MSD in exchange just for raw health, but part of the issue is that spiral knights is oddly hostile to large health pools.
This is rarely ever properly relevant; you'll need a max level health vitapod to start seeing silver bars, let alone gold bars. And when you're still on red health, it seems fairly reasonable; you can carry a decent amount of portable health in pickups and hearts heal for a reasonable amount, assuming you're good at not taking too many hits in the first place. It's not unreasonable to stay alive if you're careful, and even if you aren't, dying multiple times is reserved for particularly difficult missions.
If you start stacking health, though, since none of that scales, you'll find yourself just unable to use that health effectively. basically ever. Not only do hearts and capsules heal a smaller percentage of your maximum, but revives also only restore red health, meaning that you can't even use the extra health as a buffer to prevent death chains. It makes it so that going into silver health and beyond is almost entirely worthless.
It's already not useful at all to spec into health - after all, the ASD and MSD are absolute killers and this is a game about not getting hit in the first place - but there is a difference between "not useful" and "the game systems are actively hostile to the idea".
Temporary health is I think a genuinely good way to make tanky armors actually feel tanky without letting a knight facetank their way through challenges; since it is easy to rebuild without having to rely on the game's typical health-restoring mechanics, there isn't that feeling of hostility. I will also say that, in regards to the shield; I have never played lockdown, so I don't have a proper idea of how the shield works there, but the ancient plate mail I think should massively boost shield durability. I'm talking at minimum triple shield health. make the shield stun last longer while you're at it. ancient plate can be the shield set, and volcanic plate can be the temporary health set.
since shield durability regenerates it would give a similar feel, with ancient being much better at stage hazards and the like where you have nothing to hit to gain health against, while the volcanic plate would be better at mobbing due to tying "gaining bulk" to the process of attacking, which you already want to be doing.
Would this make APM good? probably not, but its a defensive set. These things shouldn't be meta especially in SK. I'm aiming for "has a functional niche that someone would theoretically want" as a baseline.
(as a final aside: the drakon barrier is useful to pop preemptively if you know you're going to take hits. I used it against the grim harvester in apocrea. I understand why that's functionally event exclusive but if there were more things like that, that effectively let you use the barrier in "response" to it, the defense boost would be more useful.)
Fri, 06/19/2026 - 14:48
#5
I agree that max health is a placebo in PvE.
It used to matter when we could share health to revive each other.
The nice thing about SK's armor system is that it's so barebones that you could do almost anything with it, including the easy route of adding new statistical passives like you mentioned. Permanent super armor, extended iframes; and beyond that there's no shortage of space for new mechanics like beneficial reactions to statuses... Endless directions to go. That goes for SK as a whole - beyond its first couple years, it lacked any real direction for its game design, where there are still malfunctioning Sprite abilities to this day. The tricky part is that SK will almost always be a game about offense, and it was even before the ugly stat bloat that Elite difficulty introduced or the universal power of Black Kat and Chaos, since there are precious few situations where the objective is anything more than "defeat nearby enemies." In order to be compelling, let alone compete with offensive gear, armor boosts that don't directly boost how hard you hit or how quickly you attack have to be so good at whatever else they do that you can position yourself attack more often and/or take what would've been untenable risks. Status resistances are the only thing that pose a big question here, which themselves can usually be tacked onto offensive armor with UVs and trinkets more effectively than defensive armor can recoup its offensive opportunity costs.
Because of last-pip death protection and how insanely scaled endgame content is (such as modern SLs after GH messed with them), purely defensive armor would need massive numbers to keep up. My pipe dream is that they fully revert SL scaling and do away with Elite difficulty affecting stats and only have it influence enemy placement / AI, then add new kinds of effects rather than just changing a bunch of stat values, like Quicksilver and its variations giving you a boost while shocked, let you and your teammates inflict shock on you - and likewise with Ice Queen and Freeze. Things that change how we play, not just how efficiently we play, would prove more robust in a game that already has utterly monstrous best-in-slot equipment and the UV system.
Odds are more likely that they do just change a bunch of numbers around though, looking at how Turbillion was released as a speed/dmg bump over Winmillion with nothing done for its janky hitboxes or charge attack. Even in the scenario of a boring patch like that, it could still be executed thoughtfully, like giving Cobalt generalized defenses and status resists, and similarly having Mad Bomber confer more of a bonus to bombs than Chaos' universal bonuses that currently eclipse it. Giving armors that lack any special effect at all (save for the occasional status resistances) at least throwaway passives, such as Almirian Crusader being a candidate for one of the worst armor sets in the game despite being locked behind its hardest content, is free real estate as well.
Zeddy made a good writeup on how balancing within the game's preexisting design space could work: https://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/125264#comment-1077117