Did more testing 8/15/2026 in T3 this time using pretty good gear that is achievable for players at vanguard.
Chaos Set, Lv10 5* weapons (combuster, winter graves, arcana), Shivermist lv1

SPIKE FEEDBACK:
Overall, I still think the stat tuning could be tuned down more. Monsters at 1-2 spikes feel fine but when they get to 3-4 spikes, the hp is too much and attack speed is too much.

I do really like how spikes will spawn at the start of every encounter instead of over time. This encourages players to defeat enemies as fast as possible while still seeing the risk of monsters getting spiked.

Even with good gear, the health increase is too much and some monsters get way too crazy with spikes (mecha knights, thwackers, healing gremlin). Below I've got a video of the T3 arena I did, towards the end the healing gremlins got spikes and made it practically impossible to kill anything with how fast they were spamming their heals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4TgGD7mSWg

My suggestion would be to lower max hp and maybe the heal gained from spikes and also lower the atk speed given per spike too.

DISKGUN FEEDBACK
I really like the new model for the spike gun and was excited to try it out, however the crafting cost is too much to justify grinding it on preview server when our progress will be deleted. I think the cost to craft it is fine when it hits LIVE but most playtesters will not go for it simply due to not being worth the time atm.

Additionally I'm echoing what a few others have said (ex. spark, yatez, mergu) on the damage tuning for the 5* diskgun. The damage numbers are quite lower compared to orbit/mixers when they hit a neutral enemy. I believe it being a normal damage gun was good enough and the damage should be buffed.

Forgot to add to the last post, but...

Could you

- Make the arcade level highlighted when affected by spike weather?

My example concepts (Thanks abberdine for text description)

With this, people can acknowledge what to go or to be avoided. If they wish to engage or do not wish to engage with the event.
Since other danger content has a clear warning to the player about what they will be up against if the path chosen.

I vouch Ainogommon Aurora Effects Indication on the Gatemap on levels it is occurring. Great Idea... the method is up to devs decision, but is a good addition for clarity to new players not everyone knows what colors are what families... the heraldic method of Mapping is great but a bit obscure to new players

Just to add to the discussion of buffing the new Mandolin, did some extra testing on 9-2 Terminal Meltdown. Mandolin does:

126 damage base
148 w/ minor poison from a venom veiler
150 w/ poison quills from a maskeraith
153 w/ moderate poison from a dvs
157 w/ strong poison from a vial

168 damage charged
188 charged w/ veiler
190 charged w/ quills
193 charged w/ dvs
197 charged w/ vial

Then compare that to the damage from an orbitgun (the damage here is against slimes, a neutrally-resistant enemy):

156 base
176 w/ carbine poison
178 w/ quills
188 w/ vial

356 charged base
378 charged w/ quills
385 charged w/ vial

It takes strong poison from a vial to even make it to 1 damage point above the BASE orbitgun damage output against neutrally-resistant enemies.

I've been doing arcade runs with this new gun in parties of varying size and it feels weak against everything.

---

I also noticed the 4* and 5* icons are swapped for this line. The 5* icon is actually showing the 4* gun. That'll need a fix.

(I am going to split this review into two parts, since it's too long for the forums to handle atm)

After seeing a lot of opinions being voiced about the upcoming new event and seeing the changes made over time for it I became kind of intrigued enough to make a post on feedback forum. I want to make it clear, I really like the idea of this event and it still looks extremely promising. An event-exclusive Diskgun sounds like a great decision, it's essentially a god-send for those who always wanted to try Diskguns, but thanks to certain limitations they could not (much like me). Making an Arcade-focused event that adds new themes to levels is great. Pumping up the difficulty of certain enemies who might've not been threatening before to make them more threatening sounds really dope. More ways to obtain fire crystals is an amazing addition when paired with the Forging Update's changes.

Anyways to speed things up a little, I just want to say that I am very thankful Gray Heavens decided to return to Spiral Knights to drop more updates and fix some of the game's problems (64bit Java update, Forging Update) and I do want to see what they are capable of with the small help of the community. But as the "Feedback" title explains, there are some things that I believe still need changing for this event to shine, and remain relevant. So let me get started:

Spikes, as a mechanic
Constructs are generally treated to be a Monster Family where a lot of its enemies are known to be punching bags, so theming this event after them is quite an interesting option. Making other enemies able to pick spikes as well can also result in some really peculiar scenarios and combinations that are a lot more lethal which I always find entertaining. However after seeing just how brutal a total of four spikes can do for a single aggressive enemy such as a Mecha Knight... I think there needs to be more thought put into it still before it releases. The enemies with high spike count (3-4) already have a devastating impact on their own, they have incredibly large health bars, really high damage output (where one hit is guaranteed to put you to one pip of health, not even going to mention status effects if they have one) but most importantly, really high mobility which when combined with their increased attack speed, can spell your immediate doom before you even know what's happening. A huge contributor to the difficulty (as discussed by other players) is the combination of all these stats that make them simply unmatched. If you let an enemy pick up a spike they will start hoarding it with no control, and eventually you will be surrounded by spiked enemies before you even know it! And this is taking into consideration the player is equipped with the best weapons the game can provide (Combuster, Acheron, Blitz Needle), 5* Armor with high defenses, maxed out offensive stats (Damage Bonus, Charge Time Reduction, Attack Speed) and even high defense Shields, just imagine what Spiked enemies are capable of when put up against new, clueless Players in lower Tiers! They WILL be overwhelmed immediately!

So how do we get to the bottom of this problem? I'd say it's pretty simple, reduce their Movement Speed, Health, Damage increase from each Spike to half of what it currently is. Like that, Spiked enemies will not be able to chase you around in ridiculous speeds, instantly attack you the moment they get within attack range and on top of that deal ludicrous amounts of damage to you and to your poor shield, while not taking absurdly long to take down. The Attack Speed buff already makes the enemies more threatening as you need to adapt to the frame data of their Spiked counterparts, meaning you cannot commit the same way as you used to. Taking down a Spiked enemy should not be excessively difficult, especially when we get further down the list.

I know the damage being lowered was intentional, but the intent caters to whales. Even as a Mixmaster owner, I don't see the point of this change, because Mixmaster/Orbitgun will still be borderline best in slot for FSC and any other levels whose majority weakness is elemental. There should be no problem with Mandolin scaling being the same as Mixer/Orbit knowing this, but here we are.

If we are to grind this many spikes for making a weapon that, with this scaling, will do less damage than Mixer/Orbit against all monster families, would this be fair for those who don't have the financial luxury to acquire Mixer/Orbit? I'd say the answer is pretty obvious. Free-to-play players have been praying for a miracle like this for a long time and I think they deserve to be able to grind for a weapon that may not be as amazing as Mixer/Orbit for endgame levels, but would've still been amazing for arcade runs while not even being too strong.

We have to grind for a 1/50 spawn-rate mob that has a 1/200 or so chance of dropping the material necessary to acquire only 1/6 of the materials required for the single best piece of armor in the game, and that piece of armor presents one of the worst balance issues in the game. I don't think toning down the damage of a normal weapon is going to fix anything, rather it fixes the complaints of 0.01% of the playerbase that are complaining about how this could "destroy the value of their most precious trophy item". If the developers disagree with my sentiment, I can assure everyone that greed will destroy this game.

PS: The 4-star shoots for only 5 less damage per bullet and the charge is flat out stronger. Just revert the 5 star back and it'll make sense. Please do not nerf the previous line, that'd be even worse to double-down on.

I'm currently under the impression that this event is going to join the roster of major events (BK, torto, apocrea) instead of running on a monthly rotation with permanent in-game presence (casino).

I'd love for this to have permanent in-game presence that's divided into 2 stages similar to the casino:
- Each construct level does have a chance to have the aurora outside of the turn-in period (or random levels having the guarantee when new gates are generated).
- Current behavior present in the preview server during the turn-in period.

If at any point it was brought up and confirmed that this will be like the casino, my bad, I must've missed it.

I've been reading through feedback of others about Mandolin and the general functionality of the spikes after a few rounds of feedback:
- I do agree that Mandolin's damage should be almost par (at a minimum) with weapons that have a damage type + ailment on it.
- Spikes could use a shake-up to keep us on our toes. As much as being beaten into a pulp by enemies that took too many crystals might end up being funny, I'd rather see mechanical/behavioral twists added to keep us on our toes (destroying crystals by having enemies throw them at us is a step in that direction, but I don't think that'll come into play too often).

The buffs to Mandolin feel good, it seems balanced where it is.

However, I instantly noticed that weapon switching feels horrible on the preview server. I'm not sure if it's something to do with the delay increasing when using weapon hotkeys or what, but the game feels terrible to play. Please revert this change.

Ran a full playtest of Blighted Compound (Chittering Burrows) using the Gear volcanic demo set, Dark briar barrage, and Ash of agni. The HP and damage scaling on enemies feels right, but their movement speed is still a notch too high. Wisp and Shankle are still able to grab spike pickups, and it feels off given the invincibility they have while doing so. Small enemies shouldn't be able to pick up spikes at all, killing the one holding a spike doesn't help when another immediately grabs it.

Mandolin is in a really good spot gameplay feels smooth and damage output is tuned.

I agree with Yatez, this event should be a personal journey and the spikes and recipes should come bound. Spikes should be locked to pirate.

Also agree with Carbon, please don't add a delay to hotkey switching.

I usually like to take at least a couple days to play around and organize my thoughts to better formulate feedback but whatever change that was made to weapon switching is genuinely a problem.

I'm not even exaggerating when I say that patching out weapon switching will likely kill the game. Or at the very least, you can say goodbye to a very large portion of the active playerbase. I pray that this is an unintended side effect and not something deliberate.

additionally:

• fix Shankle and Wisp behavior. Nobody wants to see the event launch like this.
• get rid of the spike counter next to the hotbar, it serves no real purpose and its honestly an eyesore to look at.

I have more to write about but I'm going to wait a bit while I play around with the Slicer and its upgrades.

Mandolin:
I hear the Mandolin was buffed damage wise, but I was not able to test it pre-buff.
The testing I have done was mostly without weapon swapping because I wanted to use it as intended.

The new Mandolin feels very good damage wise, I like where the damage is and I have tried two builds, attack speed gunner and a black cat (max universal damage) build. As a normal damage weapon I do not feel like it underperforms like most other normal damage weapons, it is in a very good spot that fills the role of a normal attack based gun, a good counterpart to the Iron Slug favoring a more charge attack play style.
I like the idea of additional damage on returning shots, but the extra damage does not feel that rewarding to specifically go for returning shots. This led to me mostly just firing forward.

In terms of status, I have found the chance of stun to feel too rare to rely on as a mechanic, if the extra damage from returning shots is meant to be a low bonus, I would like to test an additional stun chance on returning shots (if this was the case, I did not notice it).
The charge shot feels generic but still fine, like the normal shot I would like to experiment with it having additional stun chance.
Because of the low chance of stun, I still opted to bring Stagger Storm for crowd control.

So overall, the gun feels great speed and damage wise but the stun status feels too rare. As a gimmick I kind of wish reverse shots were rewarded a bit more. It is an amazing option for a normal gun. I know it is not the focus of the test, but this makes me hope more normal weapons get a buff in damage.
(At the time of writing this, I was unaware of the weapon swapping nerf)

Bugs:
If you shoot the Slicer family shots into a wall with elevation, the projectiles can climb the wall for a few frames seemingly

Attack Speed:

ARMOR:
Justifier Hat
Nameless Poncho
Swift Strike Buckler

WEAPONS:
Mandolin
Gigawatt Pulsar
Strike Needle
Stagger Storm

TRINKETS:
Elite Bomb Focus Module X2

Universal Damage:

ARMOR:
Black Kat Cowl
Black Kat Cloak
Swift Strike Buckler

WEAPONS:
Mandolin
Divine Avenger/Gran Faust
Ash Of Agni
Stagger Storm

TRINKETS:
Elite Bomb Focus Module X2

I still need to spend more time trying out the new spike changes themselves before I write more about it. I have noticed that the damage buff seems less extreme.

Quick switching is emergent gameplay, please look up what that means. It is optional difficult tech people have spent years mastering, and it makes the extreme endgame of Spiral Knights more interactive and interesting. Removing it does nothing for newer players and only upsets the most skilled players.

The added delay hasn't been mentioned so the hope here is it is just accidental and won't get ported to the live game.

First of all, thank you so much for listening to the community's constructive feedback and suggestions! cheers!

Positive words

The issue with spikes is almost non-existent now; there are a few exceptions that will be addressed later.
After testing with a new player | appropriate loadout of average player for tier 2 (Elemental hood + Dusker coat + Sealed sword+ swift strike buckler, Fierotech Alchemer MkII) and tier 3 (Chaos hood, Vog cub coat, Gran Faust, Argent Pacemaker, chest of almire)
The run result was good. The stats given by the Spike now feel appropriate, with most gear able to counter or deal with spiked enemies without getting one-shot.

Mandolin changes were phenomenal! I really like the damage bonus on the return projectile mechanic. Which make the weapon feel engaging and fun.
Worth the effort needed to craft one. Thank you!

Suggestion

• Some mobs still have an unmatched speed, namely Scarabs. They are still able to zip and avoid bombs or mist effects from mist bombs
• The spike vendor could get some more love. More items that can be exchanged for spikes. Example: sword reskin, costumes, aura. It could come as a recipe which required Mysterious spike to craft. item themseleves should revolve around the spike itself.

Issue // Bug

• Mandolin is able to shoot through walls due to its projectile placement
• I noticed a delay on weapon switching after this patch, which caused my enjoyment of the game to drop because my game stopped being responsive. Could you investigate?

Overall, I think the update is almost ready. Just a few more tweaks. But so far it is more enjoyable than the previous patches. Thank you, GreyHavens For listening.

Ran down through Stratus 5/6 with a variety of 5* gear (damage bombs, haze bombs, flourish, brandishes, various guns. Just a kitchen sink of stuff, really, seeing what works, seeing how different playstyles play). Compiled thoughts below.

Positive:
Thanks for making Mandolin readily available for a single token on the test server.

The new option to disable screen shake is huge and greatly appreciated. Excellent change. Diskguns should actually be tolerable to use and have in your party now.

Mandolin changes are excellent across the board, good response to player feedback. Gun feels like it's generally usable and a worthwhile addition to a general-purpose combat loadout. The addition of Stun status is a nice little bit of flavor to keep it on-theme with other normal damage weapons. The extra glow on return bullets is also a nice touch, and helps communicate to players that return bullets have a specific benefit.

Neutral:
I disagree with earlier feedback regarding making spikes bound. If players want to save themselves some time by paying others for spikes, I say let them. Plainly speaking, I'm an adult. If I could swipe my card to buy/sell some energy, to buy some spikes and save myself some grind, that would be nice. I would only make spikes bound if alt-abuse for spike farming proves overly problematic.

As shankles/wisps are really intended as destructible environmental hazards, moreso than enemy mobs, I would disable their ability to path to and pickup spikes in general. It creates too many weird pathing behaviors, breaks numerous sections of various levels by making shankles/wisps too fast to really avoid, and can make retrieving spikes from them exceedingly tedious, as player has to wait for a shankle/wisp to become vulnerable before killing it.
It seems like golden shankles/wisps no longer pickup spikes? I wasn't able to get them to, at least. If so, that's good. However, their pathing still stutters and breaks when spikes spawn nearby.

Enemies with multiple spikes still feel too tanky. With one it's not too bad, but up at 4 it's just a chore. This has been a sticking point for the entire test period and it's the one thing I would aggressively tune down prior to live deployment. Fast enemies can be handled with aggressive status suppression (haze bombs), but tanky supersponge enemies are still just tedious to finish off.

Negative:

There seems to be some sort of new "buffer" on weapon switching in the preview server. This is a very dangerous and provocative change, and I would strongly caution against pushing it to the live server.

Hotkey switching is advanced tech, and while it might create some unintended weapon behaviors, it also raises the player skill ceiling and makes certain weapon classes actually usable (alchemers, etc). I would be extremely cautious about touching this AT ALL, as it will immediately inflame every veteran who's grown accustomed to using this tech as part of their combat routine, over thousands of hours, over the past decade. There are times when it's better to just leave a "bug" alone and this is almost certainly one of them. Be careful, this is a landmine.

This also makes fast-paced combat encounters, where you're quickly switching between different equipment (gun/sword/bomb/etc), needlessly clunky and stressful. Trying to quickly reach for your sidearm, or swap off your bomb to your sword, only to watch your character arbitrarily stall out for a half second, is... pretty awful, to be frank. Not a fun change. Regardless of the potential intentions behind this "buffer," I would not push this to live.

Overall, generally strong changes, some good responses to player feedback, with only a couple persistent sticking points, and one very dangerous (intended?) change I would not send to the live server.

I've been meaning to gather my thoughts in a meaningful capacity to properly provide feedback for the preview server. Problem is, I'm having way too much damn fun that I forgot about that until now!

First things first, let's get some complaints out of the way. I've been seeing a lot of reports that swapping weapon slots doesn't behave the way it used to, with some weird input buffering getting in the way. Maybe it's just because my mechanical skill isn't the greatest, but even I've been feeling something is up after getting several good runs in. I've been playing around with the Network Dejitter BETA option, and having it set to higher values seems to mitigate the issues that are causing weapon swapping to feel more sluggish. But that option also seems to favor users with lower ping to begin with, and given that my average ping hovers in the 30 ms range, I can't speak for everyone else's experiences. Having network dejitter set anywhere in the negative values feels like 9 out of 10 of my inputs are dropping, but having the network dejitter value too high in the positives makes my inputs feel like they take twice as long to register even if there's no dropped inputs. And I'm just... not sure what this option is intended to do? Perhaps the technical details are beyond my understanding, but I'd appreciate a simple breakdown in layman's terms. But anyway, back to the original issue.

Switching between weapons feels worse on preview servers than it does on live servers, unintentionally or otherwise. Is this an issue of the preview server? Is this an intentional change to nerf weapon switching? This can negatively impact the flow of combat. We should be fighting monsters, not our own equipment!

I think that Spiked enemies are in a great spot now compared to when the preview first launched. They're in the sweet spot of being intimidating enough if you let an enemy snowball from one spike to four, without being a one-hit knockout every time. It was funny being able to stack dozens of spikes onto a single enemy and make a pseudo raid boss out of some unassuming enemy like a Dust Bunny. But for heavier units like Lumbers? Good grief, they took forever to take out! I took 15 minutes to beat down a single one that had 40 spikes saved up! It was quite funny the first time, but jokes can get stale quickly. So having a cap for spikes was inevitable, even if I'll miss the visual of an enemy having too many spikes.

The spike counter added to the hotbar UI is confusing, as other players have remarked. I mean, sure, it's nice to keep track of how many spikes you've collected at a specific depth. But, like many others, I was under the impression this meant you had to get to the elevator to fully secure the spikes, much like how Mineral collection currently behaves. If spikes are immediately added to the inventory upon acquisition like other Materials, the UI has some strange ways of communicating that.

What I'm not too fond of is losing spikes if a single enemy bolts around and hoovers them all up like an overclocked roomba. The artillery strike is a fun idea, but destroying the spike instead of having it land for another enemy to attempt grabbing it just feels bad. Like, yeah, it incentivizes trying to defeat the enemies as efficiently as possible so that you can pick up the spikes without a problem, and we can totally keep the orbital barrage attack, but losing out on the material? It's already layering punishments on top of one another.

There are still some enemies worth looking into for their behavior going way too fast with even just 1 spike. Minis zoom all over the place like a blue hedgehog after downing a dozen cups of coffee. Gremlin Thwackers will jump you from offscreen the moment you step off the party button in a Deconstruction Zone. Wisp and Shankle enemies just kind of break their usual routine to try and pick up spikes. More often than not, they sit on top of the spike instead of picking it up, and just become stationary. Awkward! But otherwise I think we're headed in a good direction.

The switching issue, is due to reload... You have to finish the reload animation to switch, or at least that has been in my case... No complains here I wont cry for a 0.3% dps loss... The "I speak for oh! so many when I say at the very least, you can say goodbye to a very large portion of the active playerbase." gets old and boring regardless on who says it...

Again the shankle and wisp behaviour is great because as some players said "I'm tired of speed-running levels, give us a reason to stop" now we have an optional reason... shanklers and wisp makes You stop if You Wish to do so... and IF the behavioural change of a Shankler is a problem for Your gameplay... I'll quote Dawnleaf here "Tissues for skill issues all abound." Though I'm not sorry.

The log scalling on the monsters.
Now we are seeing the final stage of the buffs, before were to test when would it break?... at high amount, was the answer.
Now we have to test if the buff are good for starter players and for veteran alike without turning into sparkchug fest... again; Is there a Gate that would provide such landscape? and makes You wonder what would happen if levels and ranks will match or miss match for what players.

The spike counter feels new and makes me wonder if there will be other uses for it (looking forward to that).
The fact the spikes are tradeable I do think is good because is a nice way to trade (indirectly) forge crystals with friends. A complain some players had.

The weapon.
I love that instead of pure damage went an easy choice: stun... so there is no damage power-creep and remains an option... so far has felt good. I'm not a main gun type of player but felt nice to know that I can hit troyans by spinning around them and the stun even not very often gave some room to breathe. Overall a great experience.

Thanks!

Regarding the switching issue, I would disregard any feedback from anyone who does not use the tech.

If you're not affected by this issue, and all you do it swap with a mousewheel all day, stay on the sidelines, and keep your opinions to yourself. This doesn't involve you. Just being blunt.

I support the quick switching change, but if it was intentional, guns should be buffed to compensate.

Removing the mechanic is fine, but guns shouldn't be left balanced around a mechanic that no longer exists. Give them some buffs to make up for the lost DPS/uptime.

Thank you for hotfixing weapon switching!

the hotfix for weapon switching is great. i hope you make mandolin deal 'good chance' because i barely get any stun with 'slight chance'. also the weapon is still bugged it going through blocks and hitting the block next to it

Stun changes mob behaviour in a way that somtimes causes attacks to happen totally out of sync with the attack indicator/sound. For example, you can hear the Wolver attack sound and think it's over or it's from another Wolver you don't see, but then it's the stunned one next to you and it just starts attacking.
Also, the timing of the mob changes and not everyone in the party can get used to it right away, which causes accidents.

So IMO increasing the chance for Stun actually makes a weapon worse. But it's probably funny in PvP (which I don't play, but I understand if some ppl want it for that; Diskgun projectile speed and reach is sub-par in PvP tho).

Well, seems like the switching delay was fixed, thank you for that :)

I believe this is almost perfect for release as well, except the mandolin stun chance, which still doesnt make sense to me. Following other weapons logic (see my previous reply for the explanation) I believe Mandolin should be buffed to have at least a fair chance of applying moderate stun, instead of its current "slight chance".

(Again, orbitgun and mixmaster have good chance of applying moderate fire/shock)

Or, alternatively to keep things consistent, bring down the chance of status for orbit/mixmaster down to fair
Edit: It seems it might just be a case of the tooltip showing fake info for orbitgun and mixmaster, it doesn't seem they have a good chance of inflicting status, so yeah, false alarm. you might just want to fix the wording on that and call it a day

We're seriously getting closer to release with this one !

• The Slicer line is relevant now, and that Stun effect is a nice bonus ! I also love that bonus damage on the returning projectiles, makes it fun to try baiting the mobs into getting hit in the back ! Although I agree to some people saying it Madolin should have a better chance at Stun to make it fit with the other diskguns.
• Small issue on the Slicer projectiles though, they seems to go through walls and blocks in some cases, might have to look into it. 
• Spiked enemies are now manageable and balanced, no more Mecha Knights moving at light speed and making you burn through Sparks. Still, they're still a menace when spiked but a fairer one.
• The idea of Spikes being bound to the character is not neccessarely a bad one, given the case of Forge Boxes abuse you talked about a few weeks ago, and it also encourage players to interact with the event in itself. Although I advise upping the sell price of those for Crowns, spending them to buy Forge Crystals is cool ! But sometimes we just need more pocket money, and it makes the Arcade runes worthwhile in terms of rewards if you're not interested in the new gun !
• Lastly, someone mentionned the idea of having the Construct levels having energy stroms being highlighted in the Arcade menu. I think it's a good idea that could help lots of players, both new and veterans alike.

Finally, I'm happy to see this childhood game getting some love again after so many years, keep up the good work Spiral HQ !