I've actually soloed a few gremlins and if you strategize it right you can pull it off, but it helps to have a khorovod.

I do feel like the problem is not their strategy, but their frequency. Perhaps their numbers should depend on the party size, if that's doable?

Khorovod makes the game in general easier because it's second hit interrupts enemies attacks (makes the giant trees with the big hatchet arm super easy). And I agree that when fighting just 2 or 3 gremlins it's manageable. The problem though is when it gets any more than 3. When it gets more than 3 it just becomes beyond irritating and I usually end up dying and just going back to town like OP said. I think what they should do is either 1) Make it so shield gremlins aren't invulnerable from the back and instead take like 25% of the normal damage (so 100 damage would instead do 25); or 2) Sprinkle some of the plain vanilla gremlins in that don't have a shield or flamethrower or bomb or healing. Gremlin mobs are the hardest mob in the game. Well, that or gun puppy mobs. But at least gun puppies don't chase after you.

To some extent, I think that gremlins are a victim of too much balancing happening at once. They were always the "challenge monster"- but with the new changes to difficulty scaling, they get the following bonuses as you form larger parties to venture deeper:
- More HP
- Better defense
- Stronger attacks
- More healing abilities (shield gremlins below emberlight heal 450-488+ per pill)

Thus, the "almost impossible to defeat alone" monster remains a frustrating lethal force when fought in groups. Even more so, since groups have less HP and healing per person, while the gremlins are still able to kill a player in 2-3 hits. You need all those people alive and shooting to make the fight bearable, but at least some of your party will probably be dead at any given moment. So now, your one survivor has to fight an enemy that's several times stronger than normal, without enough HP to spare on reviving anyone, because a single hit is the difference between life and death.

As a result, my decently-equipped party 3 levels out of emberlight today needed on the order of a dozen massed shots from each of us to take out a single shield gremlin, using 2-3* guns of the damage type gremlins are weakest against.

And then, at the brink of death, it hid in an unreachable thorny corner until it healed for 488 HP. And came back.

And then, the other eight showed up. And we cried.

Mind you, this little nightmare was after we killed the healer. I'm all for challenging monsters, but gremlins are too much about patience and methodical technique. Having to zap repeatedly 12-24 times in a row- for each of half a dozen gremlins in the horde- is not fun. Especially when they start hunkering down in the corners, past thorns, completely and totally invincible through their massive shields. One thing that could help balance them is to make those shields breakable just as our are: I have a hypothesis that the Knights' shields are stolen technology from the gremlins, so it makes sense that their force fields can also be broken eventually.

PS- Don't get me wrong: we won, which is good. But I absolutely did not enjoy the tedious slog-a-thon that was required to do so. At very least, I'd like to see their more immutable advantages nerfed a bit more. Fights should be challenging, but not in a way that sucks the fun out.

PPS- Like I said- this has only really been a problem since the recent balancing. Overall, I love the design, variety, and potential backstory implied by the gremlins. The recent changes to the "energy dome" spell cast by healers have made that much more fun to fight, so I find comfort in the knowledge that they're a work in progress, with more changes yet to come.

@Kaybol

I like your idea of being able to break their back shield if you hit it enough.

I'd just like to see rewards commensurate with their difficulty.

And yes, please add some of the non-shielded gremlins into mobs. In fact do that with every monster type, variety is good.

Arenas are indeed impossible, but only because the gate out of the second room doesn't open :P

Given a big enough area, I think it's possible to solo even 4 or 5 of the Strongest Thwackers. With a mage is a lot tougher because you need to take him down first. With 2 mages, like in the 2nd Arena, is almost impossible. By the way I'm talking totally solo here.

Yea they're really, really annoying. What I mostly hate is that the normal and shield gremlins have a knock-back aswell on their weapon. It makes the fight a lot harder I believe. And it can make reaching those healers so nearly impossible.. you go near them - try to hit the healer - get smacked backwards and get major damage.

Different weapons on them would be a good nerf I believe.

If there's a Gremlin Darkfang Mage I can usually kill it pretty quick actually, given a decent gun (currently using Firotech Alchemer MKII). All I do is constantly run around the mob in circles, getting close enough to the Gremlin Darkfang Thwackers so that they charge up, and when they release I'm already long gone and am able to have a clear shot at the Mage. This usually only takes half a minute, and once the Mage is done it's usually another 30 seconds per Thwacker with the same gun, unless I'm one-on-one then my Vile Striker comes in handy. The only real trouble is when there's 2 Mages... not fun. When I was soloing the Arena I was caught in the second stage because of 2 of these Mages. It took a very long time, but eventually I was able to have them somewhat broken up and started them on fire, luckily, and one died. I then went on to stage 4 with a friend (I think it was Rage?) and it was pretty brutal, even without double Mages, but we managed to beat it. This is pre-balance patch though... I think.

I know this is not going to be popular, but I'm going to claim that they're (almost) fine.

First point to make - you can't solo the worst case Gremlin scenario "just below" Emberlight with gear that's somewhat appropriate for the level? That's how it should be. There's other, older threads in the forum about incentivizing party play, and my stance on that is - make stuff (challengingly!) doable in groups, but hard to solo. I'm pretty sure the guidelines given by Nick in his rebalancing post are refering to bigger parties than soloers. Now, if you do outgear the content, you could and can solo them. Pre-rebalancing, I've beaten an arena group of 4 healing + 1 shield gremlin on depth 24 or so. "Just" a matter of bunching them up and chaining accelerated Khorovod hits (with Drake gear). Granted, I doubt that I could pull that off even when using a res or two post-rebalancing, but you know - that's fine. And I'm not trying to claim to be a truly great player here - I'm sure there's many better ones out there.

Second - I don't think most of us make full use of our possibilities here (certainly including me!). When soloing now, I discovered the power of potions when facing gremlins. Got a group of three shield-wielders? Freeze/stun/sleep two. That's buying you enough time to lock up a third (again, with the indespensable Khorovod) and kill it. Rinse, repeat. Sure, I die every now and then trying that. But I'm getting better, and isn't that the point? Fire and shock potions both are also very helpful, and obviously poison. To say nothing of our little mechanical wind-up toys, even if they don't last long against them.

There's variations of that, of course. There's always "creative" use of the environment - using doors to split them up or even completely lock them, then shooting from safety. Or, when grouping, splitting those groups up. While the exact mechanics aren't clear to me, I'm pretty sure there's "threat" mechanics similar to many mmorpgs which allow you to some degree to control who they go for (notably, doing damage to them).

I'm not gonna claim that I'm all "wee, Gremlins, finally a challenge!" these days. But I think it's perfectly fine to have content that's balanced to be very challenging on the current end-game even for groups with decent gear. In addition to Vanaduke, that is.

All that said - the suggestion about either having their shields follow the same rules as players' or alternatively making them take reduced damage instead of none from the back, those I do like. Not necessarily to make them a lot easier, but to avoid somewhat frustrating issues when you got multiples, one is in "retreat mode" and blocking everything, so you have to get in between to get a hit in. And some restrictions on ressing would be welcome, too.

Today I soloed quite some gremlins. Basically charging the korov and kiting them, since the area was large. It was harder to do in smaller areas and with gremlins, but I succeeded anyways.

Now, what is overpowered is gun puppies mk2 in numbers.

My blaster has a fairly long range and I can hit gun puppies that I can't even see on my screen (but I know they're there because they're shooting at me or I've done the level before). If you just have some patience and don't charge the gun puppies with your sword they're not that hard. Gun puppies shoot with 2 patterns and you just have to stay between the shots. You don't want to try to aggro a bunch of them at once. Generally gun puppies don't shoot at you unless you're within a certain range of them or you hit them. You just have to take things one step at a time. In my experience anyways. Of course this is all ruined if one member charges ahead and aggros them all.

Swiftstrike buckler isn't really a powerful shield though, so it makes sense that they broke through that easily? But too many flamethrowers do make it a lot harder indeed. Especially on tighter areas, where they can nearly cut off a big part of the playing-room.

Shield gremlins are my major issue.. They have too much HP, too much defense, and on top of it they can self-heal. I can beat them yes, but it takes me too much time of "charging attack + dodging attacks - release charge - shield - redo". If I do it all well I can beat them without loosing any health, but honestly.. I am not enjoying myself if it takes me 5 minutes to kill 4-5 gremlins..

My idea: reduce either their Health or Def. Their damage dealing capabilities are okay, their survivability is not.

Towards the other types of gremlins: Bomb throwers and mages go down fairly quick I believe. Flamethrowers are somewhat harder but they're doable to circle around when they are doing their attacks so that helps a bunch too.

Devilites are just highly annoying because their objects still get thrown at you even if you interrupt their attack or knock them over.. you have about 0 chance to get a full combo hit off without getting hit yourself. I've bugged it before, since I think it's not quite right that they are still able to do that while their attack should be interrupted..

For Gremlins: Try a deconstruction level.. it's insane. You can survive it all, but you're stuck at repeating the same mindless killing-method far too long I think.

My firotech alchemer used to be dramatically more effective than my Khorovod before the rebalancing, so I would say Elemental is an avenue to explore - except that I haven't upgraded to Mk III, so I can't say for certain. The Mk II definitely wasn't viable below Emberlight, but it's only a three-star so that's really to be expected.

@Kaybol: I'm the opposite of you then. I don't mind fighting them in tighter spots. Running between them is very doable to me. In Deconstruction zone you have a lot more space yes, but also a lot more gremlins. The killing just takes forever for me, considering that 1 charge attack for me deals around 100-150 damage at +- depth 21 and that I don't really have a different option than doing just that if I'm facing a whole lot of Gremlins.

And yes Cien Toa, I find it very annoying too that their objects still get thrown at you even if you slap them around.. Even when knocked-down they can still hurt you if they had their object lifted up..

Mm I don't have that kind of graphical lag though :P I can evade them perfectly if there's some space in between me and the devilite. It's just when I knock them over or kill them, their object stays at the same spot where it was lifted above their head, and then comes flying at me. I think the whole lifting up/throwing is part of 1 attack, unlike the throwing of vials for us. That's not quite right though.. if we knock them over while they carry their object then the attack should be interrupted or even cause some self-damage?

Darkfang Gremlins in Deconstruction Zone.

They are RIDICULOUS. Granted, I was running around with a Firotech Alchemer MK II, but is it really necessary for a Gremlin to heal itself for 602HP?
TWICE?!
I'll admit that running in circles around a huge gaping hole with 25+ Gremlins chasing you is worthy of being filmed and put up on YouTube for giggles, but it's not fun when they heal themselves and move so erratically.
It's not that I can't beat the Gremlins in Emberlight with my 3-star weapon that I say they're overpowered... it's just that if I -do- manage to get the Gremlin down to its critical health, it heals itself and... and then I have to grind again. I... don't like to grind, and I don't think any player likes grinding when playing.

tl;dr

That was close!

http://wiki.spiralknights.com/File:Spiral_2010-12-05_18-35-52.jpg

If we killed 2 of them, was a lot.