If you are a poor newbie and have inspected some rich players, you might feel yourself naturally getting jealous at their Very High unique variants. Thanks to the people who helped me out on my previous Arsenal thread, I have come to this conclusion: if you know how to plan and assemble a good loadout, you will never ever need any UVs to boost your stats to a competitive level while taking advantage of good protection at the same time. This analysis is for PVE only, because I personally suck at Lockdown and am not going to bother making a stat guide for PVP.

To the experienced players: If I get any information wrong, please tell me so I can correct it!

Note: This is assuming that all your weapons are Level 10 already, so don’t tell me I got the CTR values wrong - you will obtain a free CTR medium bonus on every fully heated weapon.

Swordsmen

Tank Loadout: Vog Cub Cap, Vog Cub Coat, Barbarous Thorn Shield, Elite Slash Module, Elite Sword Focus Module; elemental defense and strong fire resistance; ASI very high, CTR very high, DMG very high.

Opinion: This is probably the best (and only) all-around set a swordsman can use. Elemental damage is rather common in the game, and you will have resistance to fire (the most deadly hazard in Firestorm Citadel, the first T3 boss stratum you will play). In addition, all of your offensive stats have a value of Very High. Swords already hit extremely hard if you know how to shield cancel and take advantage of charge attacks, and this is just icing on the cake.

Note: I won’t consider building an alternate Skolver set for two reasons: first off, piercing defense and freeze resist are inferior to elemental defense and fire resist; second, you can still obtain DMG very high without a single Skolver piece. If you try building a set with full Skolver armor and Barbarous Thorn Shield, you won’t be able to obtain ASI very high and CTR very high simultaneously unless you shop for UVs, which then defeats the point of this thread.

Bombers

Nuke Loadout: Mad Bomber Mask, Mad Bomber Suit, Elite Boom Module, Penta-Heart Pendant; elemental defense with risky status weaknesses, but 6 extra health points to make up for that danger; CTR maximum, DMG maximum.

Opinion: I personally titled this the Nuke Loadout because it provides massive stat buffs to your bombs, which will help on dps-oriented bombs like the Dark Retribution, Nitronome, Dark Briar Barrage, or Radiant Sun Shards. However, you might be taking a big risk wearing this armor because you have massive weaknesses to all four “theme” status effects: fire, freeze, poison, and shock. The extra health points from that Heart Pendant should help, but you should learn to use remedy capsules. For less experienced bombers who want to compete with “pro” bombers while getting better defense, I’ll build alternate sets which will have similar (but inferior) stats.

Safety Loadout #1: Volcanic Demo Helm, Volcanic Demo Suit, 2 Elite Boom Modules; elemental defense and strong fire resistance; CTR maximum, DMG very high.

Opinion: This is the best set in FSC for a less experienced bomber who inevitably tends to get set on fire a lot. You only lose out on a DMG medium when compared to the Nuke Loadout I described above, but you get better protection and resistance to fire.

Safety Loadout #2: Bombastic Demo Helm, Bombastic Demo Suit, 2 Elite Bomb Focus Modules; elemental defense and strong freeze resistance; CTR maximum, DMG very high.

Opinion: This is essentially the Volcanic Demo Set’s alter ego loadout. It’s pretty much the same thing except you get protection against freeze instead of fire. However, Bombastic is less preferred among bombers for two reasons: it doesn’t provide CTR by default and fire hurts much more than freeze.

Gunners

P2P Loadout: Perfect Mask of Seerus, Shadowsun Slicker, Swiftstrike Buckler, Elite Handgun Focus Module, Elite Trueshot Module; elemental and shadow defense (albeit weaker than a full set protecting against the same damage type) with fire, shock, and poison resistance but weakness to freeze; CTR maximum, ASI very high, DMG very high.

Opinion: This is a great set for any gunner. You’ll have protection against elemental and shadow attacks, and three status resistances; you shouldn’t get hit much if you use guns (ranged weapons) but extra defense is always a plus. The Swiftstrike Buckler is there because of the belief that gunners should know how to dodge; I won’t lie, it has terrible protection, but as a gunner you should be able to keep your distance from enemies at all times. Now onto the offensive stats: all your gun stats are Very High or above, so that shouldn’t be a problem. The Elite Handgun Focus Module in the first trinket slot here maxes out the CTR to make this slightly more of a set for charge-oriented guns like Autoguns and Alchemers, but you can trade out this particular trinket for anything else to be honest. It just depends on the guns you use.

Note: I titled this the P2P Loadout because of the Perfect Mask of Seerus; it’s a great gunner helmet but you can only obtain it cheap by paying real life money for the Operation Crimson Hammer expansion mission. Otherwise you have to trade a lot of SK currency (cr/CE) for the mission on Steam or the mask from the Auction House.

F2P Loadout: Nameless Hat, Shadowsun Slicker, Swiftstrike Buckler, Elite Handgun Focus Module, Elite Trueshot Module; elemental and shadow defense with freeze and poison resistance; CTR very high, ASI ultra, DMG very high.

Opinion: I created this as an alternate loadout for people who don’t own the Crimson Hammer mission. It’s still a great set all around, except you may find that you don’t have fire and shock resistance as compared to the set above. Unless you are really taking a lot of damage from these two status effects then you should be perfectly fine with this set. Again, every stat is Very High or above, but here ASI has a slightly higher value than the other two stats, so it should work slightly better with guns that rely more on the regular shots: Magnuses, Antiguas, Pulsars, etc.

F2P Shadow Loadout: Shadowsun Stetson, Shadowsun Slicker, Swiftstrike Buckler, Elite Handgun Focus Module, Elite Quick Draw Module; shadow defense and poison resist; CTR very high, ASI ultra, DMG very high.

Opinion: This alternate set is a great shadow defense loadout for a gunner who might find fiends (esp. Devilites and Greavers) annoying. Unlike the previous two loadouts, both armor pieces here protect against shadow damage, so fiends will find it considerably harder to faceroll you. Your only status resistance here is poison though, so you’ll have to be more careful to not walk into a status trap or Greaver cloud. For offense, you have the same stat buffs as the loadout above.

……

Conclusion

If you look at the loadouts I provided above, in all of them you will, at most, only need a Low or Medium unique variant to max out your preferred weapon stat - and since the natural stat buffs are high enough, you won’t need any unique variants at all. This analysis proves that Spiral Knights is not a Pay-To-Win game; you can be perfectly potent as an F2P player. Next time, don’t envy anyone’s Very High UV - instead, build up a good set. If you are F2P, then you should be proud that you can achieve all this without having to pay with real life money. If you are P2P, don’t blow your hard-earned money on crafting your first 5* loadout and rolling for crazy UVs; instead, use your energy on crafting as many weapons as you can. You’d be using your money in a much more productive manner.

Cheers!