Been playing around with it solo for a decent bit, seeing some perspectives of other players too.

The main thing, while a little bit of chaos is fun, I think some value increases with the spikes are probably severely overtuned, particularly in the damage and movement speed department.

• Some fast monster types (mecha knights or greavers particularly probably being the worst offenders) stacked up with 3+ spikes are able to stick to you like glue in a literal sense, since they are able to outrun you and pretty much almost always get a hit off on you.
• This in combination with the damage increase pretty much could result in you receiving an almost unavoidable* (depends on mob type) hit that would likely take you down to health gate (worse case, through entirety of your shield health alongside that), combine with a status effect like shock or fire and it pretty much results in an easy 1 hit KO. Yikes.
• Something I've noticed as well is the damage increase adds every other damage type alongside the existing ones(?) instead of adding more of the existing damage type. You'd expect to receive the usual normal/elemental damage against say like construct/gremlins, except now they also deal piercing and shadow alongside both normal and elemental, pretty much mixing every existing damage type there is. Whether intentional or not, it's possible it could contribute towards that damage problem, where having a specific gear set to mitigate some of that damage would make it completely irrelevant.
• The health increase could somewhat contribute to that sort of problem too, could be a worse offender in parties with multiple people.(?)
• Essentially, the points above combined can create some unfair/frustrating situations, especially against less experienced knights, where the enemies can become way too severely strong to the point a knight might have to pop a spark or two just to kill the mobs. Some mobs get so fast sometimes (the two i mentioned particularly!), you barely can even react to them when the come rushing to you offscreen. It gets particularly evil in areas like say deconstruction zone where enemies like to roam around while spikes end up spawning in, so they end up picking those up preemptively and then end up rushing you down.

The stats mentioned likely need some kind of diminishing returns/soft cap when having multiple spikes on a single mob, basically 3+ spiked enemies should not be straight up nightmare fuel, but still formidable.

• Damage needs to be either gutted with a hard cap or straight up removed entirely, it just gets to a point where its kind of ridiculous.
• Health needs a soft cap of sort (that scales with party size?) to prevent multiple spiked enemies from being way too spongy
• Probably increase the speed for the x1 spike but gradually tone down the rest by a significant amount, so mobs dont straight up teleport around when moving.
• A more complicated solution - make stats scale differently depending on a mob type, e.g slow mobs like trojans be speedy, fast mobs be still speedy but not to the point of teleporting/outrunning you

The animation speed increase scaling I'd say is in a fine place, I'd still like to see some kind of a cap to it so some attacks with high amounts of spikes wouldn't be straight up instant/undodgeable.

I'm not sure how to feel about boss/miniboss enemies like RT/collector being able to pick up spikes as well, since I don't think buffs like this really belong to them.

Visuals wise, they look pretty WIP. The spikes float around above mobs instead of being "embedded" like they should be, the spikes that appear in an area kind of just appear out of nowhere really without any visual indication/animation or anything. The item drops for spikes are quite tad bit large.

Would be cool to see some visual changes in those regards; spikes could perhaps be embedded around enemies or in the back like they are supposed to, some extra animations for the spikes spawning in areas.

It would particularly be nice to be able to tell at a glance how many spikes exactly a mob has as well, perhaps you could have multiple different tiers of an aura visual depending on how many spikes a mob has, as well as sound cues for transmitting into the next "aura tier", which would also help make them look and feel way more formidable too.

Reward-wise maybe spiked mobs could drop extra heat, depending on how many spikes one has? It'd fit in with the theme IMO and would also help players heat their gear much easier during the event. Don't really know if the item shop is a placeholder or not, but it definitely sounds nice to have a different source of fire crystals like this.