Spiral Knights - Sword fix suggestion (dual damage for all)

Sword fix suggestion (dual damage for all)

4 replies [Last post]

Sat, 09/05/2026 - 19:18

Holy-Nightmare

Swords have a lot of winners and losers and when you go through them you start to notice a pattern...

Almost all of the "meta" swords are dual damage, and for those who don't know, this is because two damage bars means that these weapons get a stronger buff from damage boost effects.

While trying to fix the base damage of monotype weapons is one approach I have another idea that might be a bit crazy sounding.

Just add 4 new damage types.... hidden ones that you don't get to see..... Normal2, Pierce2, Elemental2, and Shadow2. Then just add it to the weapon who has the matching damage type... Suddenly your Leviathan Blade goes from Normal to Normal/Normal2

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What exactly does this mean though?

Well look at it this way... the Brandish and Calibur both share the same damage table with the combo attack doing the same in every stratum.

But with this new buff now the Leviathan Blade and the Acheron share the same neutral damage table, in fact every monotype sword will end up getting stronger as a result.

If you want a number to look at... the current Leviathan Blade charge hit deals 386 for 3 hits in a row for 1158 damage.... but after this buff it matches the Acheron's charge slash..... for 600 damage... 3 hits in a row..... for 1800.

Yeah that whole line about "hitting like a Tidal wave" is going to start carrying some weight.

Sun, 09/06/2026 - 14:46

Grandish

Hello, my name is Grandish and I approve of this message.

Sun, 09/06/2026 - 18:50

Mephisto-Philus

DVS would never need to be shadow damage!

Just give Normal2 to Dread Venom Striker and we'll solve the issue with it being weak!

+1 +1 +1

Mon, 09/07/2026 - 07:22

Holy-Nightmare

I will say as one point of

I will say as one point of realization I had later is that the Flourish and WRH will end up much much stronger for monsters they're effective against due to the effect of additional multipliers... and same for any potential future Shadow monotype weapons.

As such these particular ones may have to be tested or the "Super Effective" Multiplier for type damage may have to be adjusted for the Shadow2, Pierce2, and Elemental2

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We don't really have any of the code and the examples of weapons we have are monotype or half-normal. In all of these cases the effective damage to neutral damage is about a 40% boost.

It is clear that half-normal weapons suffer less of a debuff when attacking resisted enemies so it stands to reason that weapons with two of the same damage type would put out more damage when effective than half-normal weapons when effective.

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Part of the question here is.... whether this is ok?

Flourish line is only really useful against 1 major boss in the game with the monster families it's effective against being dodgy and it suffers a huge amount of competition for pierce damage from the Blitz Needle (who is allowed to be overpowered)

The Warmaster's Rocket Hammer is also only useful against 1 major boss in the game, and even though with a stronger effective damage boost it becomes a serious nuke of a weapon, it is also a DLC weapon, much harder to use against crowds, and is severely weak against the Gremlins that spawn alongside the Constructs that it beats

And as for the non-existent Shadow monotype you have a similar story as the Flourish where it is good against 1 boss but also has strong competition from the Winter Grave, Grim Repeater, and the ever reliable Acheron

Mon, 09/07/2026 - 19:23

Osmosi

I think it's a good idea to have a refresher on how damage works

The wording on your last post @Holy-Nightmare makes me suspect you don't have a very clear idea on how the damage formula works, so I thought it would be educative to have a little refresher.
The basic formula for damage is:

FinalDamage = IncomingRawDamage * BuffMultipliers - TargetDefense

The main parameter that causes differences in the damage monster receive is their defense, not any kind of "weakness/resistance" multiplier you seemed to mention. A monster that's weak to a damage type simply has a defense lower compared to damage types it's not weak against.
The main caveat that needs to be stated out loud is that if the total incoming damage (that is the IncomingRawDamage * BuffMultipliers term) is less than 2 * TargetDefense the damage formula switches to something else that's not as of yet really well understood (there's some speculation it may involve some logarithms of some sums and differeces but nothing concrete). In this hyper-resistant regime damage gets decreased a lot the further you are from that threshold even though it never really goes to zero. It's also worth noting that near the threshold the decrease is present but it's not too strong, and in fact you can get in this regime with some weapons even if the enemy is formally "neutral" to its damage type.

Lost souls and howlitzers heads (when they go kamikaze) are enemies which allow you to know the term right before the target damage, since their defense is 0.
This model is backed up by a lot of existing research and I've had the opportunity to use it in the actual game and be very consistent when gathering some damage numbers for Antiguas and Blasters.

For split damage types the whole damage formula gets simply applied twice indipendently. If the total incoming damage for both damage types you can then have:

totalIncomingDamageA - defenseA + totalIncomingDamageB - defenseB
incomingRawDamageA * BuffMultipliers + incomingRawDamageB * BuffMultipliers - defenseA - defenseB
(incomingRawDamageA + incomingRawDamageB) * BuffMultipliers - defenseA - defenseB

Which actually is similar to the one for a single "monotype" damage. In fact having split damage is really nothing special compared to having only one; the effects you and a lot of other people rightly observe and point out to stem from the values of these terms not really the fact that damage is split.
Here are some examples:
incomingRawDamage = 1000 ;
defense = 300 ;
buffMultiplier = 1.24 ;
outputDamage = 1000 * 1.24 - 300 = 940 (vs unboosted 1000 - 300 = 700, an overall boost of 1.342857143 or 34%, larger than the "expected" 24%)

incomingRawDamageA = 500 ;
incomingRawDamageB = 500 ;
defenseA = 100 ;
defenseB = 200 ;
buffMultiplier = 1.24 ;
outputDamage = (500 + 500) * 1.24 - 100 - 200 = 940 (vs unboosted 500 - 100 + 500 - 100 = 700, funnily enough the same exact result as before)

Hopefully this post of mine is going to help you with your buffing/balancing proposals with a stronger notion for the details.

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Sword fix suggestion (dual damage for all)