Spike Event:
I think the HP scaling with spikes needs to be better tuned for T2. They feel more tuned towards bringing T3 weapons into T2 which I feel is too much. Its fine for us end game players, but when you use 2 and 3 star gear the time to kill feels way too blown up.

I think good a solution may be that spikes can be knocked off enemies after a certain flat number of hp had been depleted.

The event concept feels very fun to play, I like it a lot more than how the Black Cat event is designed.
I know it isn't the focus at the moment, but I would like to see a similar design philosophy applied to older events to encourage arcade play through consistency.

Slicer:
The Slicer projectiles do have weird interactions with Mecha Knights and Develites. Mecha Knights not detect Slicer projectiles to enter a blocking state unlike other guns, and Develites do not seem to dive out of the way. Unaware if the Mixer and Orbit guns did the same, but it feels like a bug.

The Slicer shots seem to originate from the player world position instead of the barrel of the gun.

I am not sure how to feel about returning Slicer shots activating switches. I kind of prefer if the projectiles moving backwards can no longer hit switches for consistency sake. Though, I think I could get used to it after using them for longer, but I found it a bit of a peeve as is.

The charge shot for the slicer feels a bit generic. A part of me wishes it pierced through enemies, but not to the overpowered degree of the Iron Slug.
Maybe it could be a weak charge shot that is used more to move enemies towards where it was fired, like a reverse brandish wave to combo into melee attacks.

The Slicer overall, is a fun weapon. I think its almost there.
I assume like the pulsar, it will branch into a fire, shock, and normal version for its T3 versions?

Most used loadout for testing T2 arcade floors:

ARMOR:
Dusker Cap
Dusker Coat
Swift Strike Buckler

WEAPONS:
Slicer
Kamarin (Sometimes a brandish line weapon is used, but I just prefer 2 swing swords)
Fiery Vaporizer Mk II (Mist bombs may be swapped if the floor resists)
Toxic Vaporizer Mk II

I am very glad to see the test server be used again, it really gives me hope that development is resuming.

I didn't see any noticable changes. I'll just copy-paste current issues

- Broken delay machanics, spikes appear if i step away from it's spawn area. For example i killed 2 mobs immediately, but got no spikes, spikes appear when i'm leaving room. It works terrible for arenas, opposite corner is enough distance for that behavior. I killed mobs in one corner, I think that collected all spikes, but most of them can appear when i far away (opposite corner), so the next wave will get some extra spikes.

- Rockets count as mobs, 1 rocket = 1 new spike.

- Too high buff, 3-4 spikes is hard to deal with full 5* equipment. I have no reason to test spikes with 1-3* gear atm.

- Over 4 spikes still give buff and heal mobs. There is limit for spikes per mob, but their stats not lmited (it's noticable, more heal from spike, more dmg and HP).

- Speed buff is still too high, mobs run faster than me, 1 fast mecha will collect most of spikes.

- Bots (wisps and etc) are affected by spikes, change route, collect spikes

- Reusing spikes is another problem, especially for arenas. Usually there are some spikes from the first wave at the last wave. I can't move close to mob with 4 spikes (buff is even more due previous issue), 1-2 hits = death. So after killing strong mob, his spikes are few tiles away, that can be picked up by the next wave of mobs.

Please, disable Tier 3 buff option for preview server.

It's feeling much better to play. The cap of 4 is a welcome change, and incentivizes smart play to avoid losing spikes. The health gain at 3/4 spikes is still a bit much, and the attack speed buff does not incentivize particularly fun gameplay (literally just running around in a circle avoiding monsters). I'm not quite sure how to tune that beyond a complete overhaul of how the spikes affect enemy attacks, which I imagine is outside the realm of possibility for now.

The Slicer (presumably the 5* version) is a great reward, and is a great way to implement a craftable diskgun. I am looking forward to playing with the 5* version, and whatever other new weapons you make (maybe bring back the old shard bomb mechanics in a bomb tied to the event?).

Also +1 to Jayzio's feedback about screen shake. It has bugged me for years and it's great to see people talking about it. I get motion sickness from the screenshake when someone else uses a diskgun (though not when I do). An option to disable screen shake from player weapons would be much appreciated.

+ Rockets were fixed

Some mobs are still too fast with spikes, alpha wolvers, greavers, mini gremlins. If it's not so hard, the fastest mobs should get speed limit. It's ok if slow lumber gets speed buff, but 4 spiked wolver is another level, it's fast enough to collect all spikes before player and any other mobs

HP buff is still too high, 4 spikes mob requires 3-4 times more damage. In my opinon it should be scaled something like 1 spike = +1 virtual player in the party, 3 spikes in solo = hp equals to full party.

Spikes seem a bit shy. It looks like there is restricted area around player, i had never seen that spike grows close to me, but it can appear immediately 5 tiles away. Also it causes weird behavior, some spikes appear when i'm leaving area.

I repeat: DO NOT TOUCH the Mixmaster and Orbitgun. And, if you make the new Slicer like them at 5 star, just with normal damage, that would be greatly appreciated.

Mixmaster, Orbitgun and hopefully the new weapon, are considered so good BECAUSE of monsters often reacting differently to them, NOT DESPITE !!!
Yes, nobody will miss the screen shake and it would be nice, if they hit switches more consistently, BUT NOT if you sacrifice their PRIMARY MERIT that they deal with monsters like Devilites and Mecha Knights slightly better than other weapons!

If you "fix" those weapons despite this warning, the result will be: Mixmaster, Orbitgun and Slicer being not desirable any more. They will become a useless collectors item, like Tortoguns and Catalyzers. Just a good looking thing nobody actually uses. As a consequence people will also not be willing to pay much for them any more at featured auctions or by buying Equinox Boxes, which means, GH will additionally lose IRL money and will have LESS MONEY FOR DEVELOPMENT. So just don't change them and leave this system working, as it currently is. There is no need to touch them, just some noobs being confused by their unique mechanics. They will enjoy it, once they craft their own and got used to it. No problemo.

Instead, please just make the Slicer as cool as them at 5 star, so everyone gets to enjoy these cool mechanics, that are a reward for all the effort you put in to get them.

@Tailslanga: Because energy knights on a clockwork planet makes so much sense, right.

They are not even dodging it. They just react to it. Sometimes that makes them jump right into an attack. There are already multiple other weapons and situations they don't react to, for example, if a Slug or Callahan uncharged shot hits a devilite, it won't jump.

Or do you want that "fixed" too? Do you want a game where all weapons are useless, so you can go back to farming vana 24/7, because Slags don't react anyways?

Changing this on guns that are beloved for exactly that since 10 years would devalue them A LOT for sure. It would not make them completely worthless, but their worth would drop to by like 80% or 90%. They would be on par with Celestial Vortex. Same box, same chance, similar to an item in game, but with different status.

The thing that makes no sense is you.

Zosu: I only see an Orbit/Mixer owner getting mad because they are fixing his broken weapon who has paid absurds amounts of money for it... I don't want to start drama here so leave this subject here.

As for the spikes, they’re really fun now; the health bonus and some monsters speed buff just needs a little more tweaking, and for me, they’ll be ready for launch.

It might also be useful to check the armor defense formula—taking spikes buffs into account—to prevent monsters from wiping out your health bar in a single hit, or to limit damage based on the tier.

the spikes buff many things about enemies and perhaps by too much. the pace of the combat becomes very cautious and even a little boring.

i don't think it's fun to get one shot by an enemy who moves and attacks too fast to react to.
it's at least interesting needing to prioritize picking up spikes before things get out of hand? i just think the buff is too strong anyhow.

discguns originally not triggering enemy reactions is one of the more interesting things about them, given their other shortcomings i would rather use a blaster most of the time if they're gonna lose that trait. they don't outdamage brandish or blitz, and they aren't useful as a sidearm for hitting switches and boxes.

the general playerbase finally having access to a much much less interesting version of something previously considered strong(maybe overtuned) and prestigious, which also coincides with potentially bringing the premium alternative down with it.... i don't think it leaves anyone feeling very satisfied.
all things considered if it's too strong then i think it'd be more worth trying to bring other kiting guns to it's level of performance, rather than sucking excitement out of what would otherwise be an extremely hype addition to the game

using elemental hood/robes, swiftstrike buckler, slicer, brandish, needlegun, and sealed sword

@Grandish i'm curious where you're coming from with wanting discguns in particular to trigger reaction ai. because you just brought up some really good examples of guns that are made very awkward to use because of said reaction ai (Neutralizer, Tortofist), and would perhaps be made a lot more usable if they didn't trigger it.

speak more on this? I agree that firestorm probably shouldn't trigger it either.

@Grandish: I agree, instead of making mobs go into defensive mode for more things, it would be better if they ddin't for more things. Drakon Firestorm is a good example. It has a lot of cooldown and it hurts when it's sometimes completely voided by this, sometimes just in part tho.

@Zosu while i'm glad to see someone agree with the sentiment that defensive reaction AI should have counters besides exclusively melee, i can't agree with the opinion that this means discguns will be underpowered.
there aren't exactly a lot of weapons that can compete with blitz and brandish when it comes to raw damage output, and discguns are Basically at that bar(and while sharing the trait of lacking knockback with blitz to boot).

it's easy to tell they will keep their place in the meta because the meta is FSC(which lacks enemies with reaction ai), and it's not rare at all to see people bring discguns there if they have them.

personally, i think that if the devs have decided to nerf discguns in the patch that makes them accessible to more players, instead of "fixing" the reaction ai quirk, i would rather see them become more in line with the convention that effective range should inform damage output.
therefore safely maintaining close proximity to enemies continues to feel rewarding and engaging, creating more satisfying risk/reward decisions in the short-term gameplay loop.

you could accomplish that a few different ways, but the simplest ones would be lowering the damage output or range of the weapon type. i don't think people would like that happening either though.

a couple other people in this thread have mentioned something along the lines of wanting the projectiles to be more powerful when coming back so that the gimmick feels stronger, and i like this mindset! it would emphasize the gimmick of the weapon as it's identity and would also make it an interesting cousin to pulsars(where a similar change happens, but one emphasizing long range combat instead.)

But I think for sake on convenience. Can you provide tester an arcade gate with only construct levels? From depth 1 to 28
This would greatly helped with testing items , spike gathering, and find suitable play style and possibility of how to deal with it with different equipment.
Current arcade gates provide little to non for all spike type.

Thank you.

Expecting the real feedback after a proper test though

GH seems to be already heading in the direction of nerfing the normal damage f2p diskgun so the pay-to-win elemental variants stay ahead.

I would suggest not half-committing to these changes. Either stop with the pay-to-win advantages completely, or just fully embrace being greedy, otherwise you'll end up angering both groups of players. I get you are trying to get some goodwill with the community by giving us an inferior diskgun, but the community is not dumb, we can see you sitting on the fence trying to please everyone.

Let normal damage diskguns beat out their elemental counterparts on 4/6 monster families.
OR
Release the static and fiery diskguns (the free-to-play elemental variants that just sit there as unused assets)

I think the upcoming changes are great and refreshing.

I'm just not exactly understanding the direction GH is taking regarding the Diskgun line.

I really appreciate the slicer line making it through, but I frankly don't understand why it would deal less neutral damage than other Diskguns against neutral enemies, especially if we're still lacking free to play elemental diskguns.
We should get diskguns for all damage types like blasters, especially when mobile mobs react to them now. It's nonsense to keep the elemental diskguns behind their massive paywalls.

Equinox and confection don't need to rerun anymore if you still want to keep the rarity of Orbitgun/Mixmaster, they can still be cool reskins and overall I think this is a much more healthy direction. I'm fine with having rare cosmetics but locking a weapon behind such a huge paywall is boring

"We should get diskguns for all damage types like blasters"

no! im tired of guns trying to have everything. every gun exists in every damage type and there are 1 million padded armors that make the game worse by existing. not every attack type needs to exist in every damage type! guns already have by far the most diversity in attack types, mostly by virtue of way too many reskins that lead to everyone just crafting every blaster and a blitz needle anyway. (it's hard to imagine a piercing orbitgun making any thematic sense anyway. maybe if you redid the model to shoot buzzsaws or something? blasters didn't bother though, valiance painted yellow counts as a piercing weapon now for some reason.)

elemental is already the damage type with the least gun types currently, at "only" 5 plus mixmaster (meanwhile swords with exactly 1 piercing weapon). make the elemental diskguns craftable, but it's fine for elemental to get to keep diskguns as an exclusive attack type, with only normal + elemental fire + elemental shock

Now that the 3, 4 and 5 stars recipes are available, I got some feedback to say on this :

• First of all, maybe it's because I only tested T1 and T2 in the previous preview builds, but this time, Spiked monsters hit like trucks on T3. The Attack, Speed, and Health boosts are simply too much once again. I did a T3 run on the Amber Knight Gate, and I must have burned through 20 sparks on it, 6 of them alone because of a room with a Giant Lichen Colony with 4 spikes.
• Also, on a personal note, I don't think the critters in Compound levels should be able to pick up spikes. Critters in these levels usually swarm you with their numbers, and this alone makes them a nuisance. Giving them boosts through spikes only makes them even more of a headache to deal with. But that's maybe a skill issue on my end. I get the feeling that you're not meant to kill all the enemies in Compound levels, and instead, you need to speed right through them.
• The total amount of spikes needed to go from the base Slicer to the Mandolin is 600 small, 700 medium, 3,500 large, and 1,000 huge. Those numbers seems a bit absurd, especially for the Large Spikes given we get at best 50 spikes per floor. I advise than either you reduce the number of spikes needed, or run the event for a considerably larger ammount of time than the usual 2 weeks we are used to, to give players more time to earn their weapons.
  

Imagine Combuster and Voltedge are in gambling boxes and not obtainable otherwise, and then GH tells you "Next event you can craft an amputator (without the slime bonus)".

This is literally what is happening now with the diskguns. It is 100% a lame trash move.

Also I must add, why nerf the Slicer line's overall damage ?
You can stick them to deal Normal damage, but why make the stats weaker than its Prizebox counterparts ? I dont understand this move.

There are occurences in where the monsters are able to carry more than 4 spikes too.

Some of you seem to be under the impression some monsters not always reacting to diskguns is a benefit solely for the gunner using it. THIS IS NOT THE CASE! It certainly doesn't hurt the gunner, but ACTUALLY THIS IS MOSTLY BENEFICIAL FOR THE SWORDSPEOPLE IN THE PARTY !!! (And slightly less for bombers ,too.)

I can lean back and keep kiting and firing with my Argent or Arcana, no matter if the Mecha Knight has its shield up or not. But my party member trying to hit it with a sword at that moment, when it raises its shield FOR MY SHOT, is in for a surprise when their swing has no effect and the mob then drops the shield and stabs the party member in the face like Mecha Knights tend to do.
The same is true for Devilites and Wolvers btw.. The gunner knwos he's about to fire and the Devilite/Wolver will jump away. But the teammate with the bomb/sword cannot know the gunners intention. The bomber/swordsperson will suddenly face a random office chair to the back of the head from a totally different direction than the mob used to be when they went in to hit it.

Fun fact: I've had to rewrite parts of this post twice now because changes keep getting implemented before I get enough time to playtest and provide feedback. (Luckily the only change this time was upgrades to the slicer)

The stat scaling is still way to damn high. Just about any monster with 2 or more spikes become an absolute menace to deal with, often moving just as fast, of not, faster than the player. In some situations, bombing is borderline impossible. Monsters will zip straight to you and attack instantly before you even have the opportunity to charge a weapon. This isn't fun. Most monsters with 2-3 spikes will throw out attacks faster than their animation plays out. please lower or cap the attack speed scaling.

The damage bonus granted from the spike buff is unreasonably high. For the sake of testing purposes, I've decided to assemble a few super tanky armor sets. I have elemental + normal high UVs on a few sets that already boast high defense. I've got a mountain of elemental and normal defense (both stat bars are more than maxed out in the inspect menu), and it's actually made a substantial difference against non-spiked monsters contrary to defense deniers. However, the spike damage bonus is so absurd that monsters in stratum 3 (not even the difficult part of T2) with two or more spikes are still bringing me down to 1 pip with a single attack. I'm not even halfway down the gate and monsters are nearly 1-shotting me with a fully decked out 5-star armor set. This is just about as much elemental defense as you can get, anything else is going to result in more damage being taken. This isn't fun.

I'm not even sure if this part is intentional, (not sure how it wouldn't be but still) When entering Stratum 6, the level scaling jumps significantly to something reminiscent to Shadow Lair scaling. On its own, sure, this is a pretty neat change. but it conflicts with what's already going on with the spike event. (increasing monster stats to add a challenge) Its also probably the single laziest form of artificial difficulty I've seen in a while. making an event which is already overtuned as hell (people have been saying that the scaling is too much for weeks now) and making it more difficult, just for the sake of difficulty.

For the Stratum 6 scaling, revert it. it serves no purpose than to make things harder and as a lazy way to amp up the difficulty. If the goal is to boost radiant drops, adjust the actual droprate of the rarity instead of just adding +1 to the current stratum. (or just reward the player with more radiants from Barbus) And as for the spikes, tune down the scaling. its too much and its just not fun.

Side note to all the playtesters out there: If you're finding yourself spending numerous sparks on every spiked floor, something is wrong here. Ive seen a handful of people completely brush this off due to having infinite revives on the preview server, but stop and think for a second about how this event will play out on the main server. Taking cheap deaths and having to revive multiple times to take down a couple of 4-spiked monsters isn't fun.

Please find a solution to shankle and wisp behavior instead of slapping the "its working as intended" label on it. It's incredibly lazy. They're not supposed to act like this.

An extremely annoying phenomenon that occurs in just about every area is that, enemies that are already buffed will instantly beeline straight to the nearest spike, further stacking the buff and often deleting any extra spikes (due to the 4 spike limit). This has actually been the case since the first wave of testing, where spikes will often be funneled into the last couple of monsters. Except now, instead of having to deal with a single monster with 10+ spikes, they only drop 4 of them. In retrospect the 4 spike cap, although a welcome change, didn't really fix any of what was wrong previously.

Another occurrence that comes off as tedious/annoying is that spikes will often continue spawning after a room has been cleared. Making me have to backtrack to previous rooms just to collect all the spikes. There was already an update that reduced this, but I found it still happening frequently in clockwork tunnels and compounds.

The Slicer is really neat, thanks for giving us an actual item to go after. A few things that bother me:

• We're being given a recipe to learn and craft from the standard Alchemy machine, rather than it being part of the Mysterious Alchemy machine. The machine which holds the recipes for all other craftable event-related items.
• The 5-star gun currently takes several hours of grinding to obtain. This is actually fine in my opinion, except for the fact that this is on the preview server. Players are less willing to pour hours of time on a test server where all our progress will inevitably be wiped. For testing purposes, lower the material cost or just put it on Depot or something.
• From what I'm reading, the 5-star slicer apparently has lower base damage than the existing diskguns?? It's a non-status variant, it should follow the design of all other non-status weapons (Acheron, Nova Driver, Final Flourish, ect...) and deal more damage against neutral targets.

Through typing up this post, I've realized that the entire premise of this event completely deconstructs what makes Spiral Knights enjoyable to play in the first place. The game simply isn't built for monsters to be this fast, hit this hard and for players to be this helpless against them. If you want to do an event that revolves around enemies accumulating buffs, the way to go would be to give them special attributes and effects rather than just raising stats to unreasonable amounts. (Kinda like when they fire the crystals like a mortafire. that change was really cool)

I do have a question for the team, will this event be focused solely on constructs? Or will we see the monster families shift in subsequent events? (I'd like to see Spikes appear in more level types than just construct levels)

a couple things I'm jotting down now because I forgot to write about it previously: The visuals of this event, particularly the skybox, look really good. Big props to the artists. All the slicer models also look great, keep it up. Cronus mentioned something about saying what tiers/equipment we're testing with. The answer is just about all of them. I've done numerous arcade runs in every tier (not so much T1 than the others) and I've ran with a wide assortment of gear. Even downgrading to lower stars in T1 and 2

P.S. Ignore literally everything @zosu has said. The change to mixers was good. keep it (If its not already in the works, can we fix the charge attack hitting though walls?)

In this patch, the slicer line attack damage was reduced to be lower than the scaling seen previously. This means it is now (marginally) weaker than Mixmaster/Orbitgun vs. their respective neutral enemy groups. (124 basic attack (Mandolin) vs. 150 basic attack (Orbit/Mixer) against tier 3 enemies)

I'm a little concerned about this for a few reasons:

- Every single other weapon family in the game, think (valiance vs. arcana/riftlocker/phantamos, blitz needle vs pepperbox/plague needle, etc). the normal damage variant is equal in neutral damage or stronger than its status inflicting counterparts. This change with the Mandolin's damage compared to the Mixmaster and Orbitgun directly goes against established weapon/game balancing systems.

- This also worries me for the future of diskguns: I would (hopefully) assume the intention in the future would be to release the craftable variants of the elemental diskguns (static, fiery), in order to combat the "paywall" that exists for that caliber of weapon. This change worries me, because if we nerf the f2p versions before they are even released, was anything really solved?

I understand you have to cater towards people who currently own the Mixmaster/Orbitgun, but as far as I've seen, plenty of owners are okay, if not happy that this type of weapon is releasing. I just hope the general playerbase gets the full experience rather than a watered down sample.

I do not have enough time to grind up what is needed to test all of the upgrades.
For the next test session I would like to try out the damage numbers and upgrades if the weapons are more accessible.

From what others have said, I do not agree with the Slicer being a watered down version of the Mixer and Orbit guns. If you wish to rebalance the game as mentioned before, I feel that dependencies through lootboxes and premium purchases should not be a factor.
A non-status weapon dealing less damage than weapons that do deal status effects breaks the previous design philosophy of such a tradeoff.

If this is a general nerf to Mixer and Orbit damage as well, please do clarify. As of now the damage numbers on those two guns have not changed and it may be giving us the wrong idea.

When the first diskgun test came out I was so excited and expectant that we get to try a more accessible variant of this type of guns.

Then the newest patch came out and I can't help but feel absolutely baffled. I cannot speak for everyone as considering the previous posts someone DID do the grind, but how many players have actually been able to test the newest 5* diskgun? At the very least 2 or 3 players? What about everyone else?

It is mind-boggling to me that you expect us to bash our heads against a wall to even test something that should have been readily available to us from the beginning. We are TESTERS, we should not have to grind hours upon hours just to be able to test something.

Just thinking about how much time I would have to put just to even reach the 5* diskgun is already exhausting. Any time spent having to grind for the new diskguns when it could have been used to test the guns is meaningless.

I get that you want us to keep testing the spikes to further tweak them into a more stable gameplay for future launch, but if this the way you would go about it, then this is not it.

Agree with the sentiment that mandolin will be a dissapointment if you release it in this nerfed state, 124 vs 212/150 damage per pellet is disgusting.
Again, it needs to deal more damage than orbitgun/mixmaster or all monster families except constructs/undead.
Or if there are plans of releasing fiery/static diskguns equal in gameplay to orbit/mix, just let us know.