I made a topic a few days ago titled "Would you use it if...", in which players responded with whether not not they would use an item given its introduction, or change. The intentions of the topic were not given, and it was presented as a forum game of sorts. The actual content of the thread asking questions is as follows:

1...Royal jelly/armor shield had twice as much piercing defense and half as much normal defense, with a touch more health?
2...Dread skelly/armor shield had twice as much shadow defense and half as much normal defense, with a touch more health?
3...Plate armor had no negative attributes to weapons/movement?
4...Sudaruska/Triglav did equivalent damage on neutral targets when compared to to gran faust/divine avenger, and swung just as fast?
5...Barbarous thorn shield was stripped of its piercing resistance?
6...Divine avenger's charge attack did not stick to walls?
7...Gran faust's charge attack did not stick to walls+took the same amount of time to charge as faust?
8...Big Angry Bomb had a larger radius, and a chance to deal stun?
9...If the stun that stagger storm dealt was "fixed" to not make things attack twice?
10...There was a haze bomb that dealt sleep?
11...There was a point damage bomb similar in charge and detonation to radiant sun shards with a very small radius that dealt about 500ish normal damage?
12...There was a curse haze bomb that only cursed things for 1/2 a second, so that they had to be in the radius to be cursed?
13...Cautery sword had life steal?
14...There was an upgrade to swiftstrike buckler that halved its health and defenses for one more level of ASI?
15...Dark Briar Barrage did not flinch beasts as easily?

I'm not wanting all of these things implemented into the game by any means, but rather, an evaluation of how players perceive bonuses. I will go over each one, and in a few sentences, describe why they are significant and what players saw them.

1...Royal jelly/armor shield had twice as much piercing defense and half as much normal defense, with a touch more health?
2...Dread skelly/armor shield had twice as much shadow defense and half as much normal defense, with a touch more health?

Both of these sets are rarely seen as anything but costume, and are often undervalued due to their lack of weapon buffs. The obvious effect of doubling the defenses is to make them more specialized. I separated them due to toothpics in lockdown, but no one seemed to go for the 'buff', in many cases due to the value placed on normal defense and in many cases due to the lack of weapon buffs.

If skolver offers 1 normal and .85 piercing defense, then the current royal jelly armor offers about .9 normal 1.2 piercing (I am of course eyeballing the bars on the wiki, although this should be somewhat accurate per "one armors worth of defense".) The new Royal jelly would have .45 normal and 2.4 piercing. As a chart:

Skolver, full set: 2 normal; 1.7 piercing; +4 stages of weapon attack bonus
Current Royal Jelly, full set: 1.8 normal; 2.4 piercing
New Royal Jelly, full set: .9 normal; 4.8 piercing
Mixed Skolver and Old Royal jelly, combined: 1.9 normal; 2.05 piercing; +2 stages of weapon bonus
Mixed Skolver and New Royal jelly, combined: 1.45 normal, 3.25 piercing; +2 stages of weapon attack bonus

Consider that when balancing armors, it is important to consider how much defensive boost is equal to an offensive boost. The difference between using full skolver and a piece of skolver and a piece of royal jelly is very small defensively, and you sacrifice some of your normal defense to use royal jelly as it is.

Players value normal defense alongside more specialized defenses due to the way that hits are calculated- one of the main reasons for players not wanting to use the changed armors was in that they would lose out on some of their normal defenses. In some cases, they remarked that they would use it if not for the lessened normal defense. But the point is that because of damage calculations, there is very little difference defensively between full skolver and royal jelly armor currently. And even if there were to be a huge difference, people would still choose skolver in most situations.

3...Plate armor had no negative attributes to weapons/movement?

This builds on the last questions- currently, you can trade a weapon buff for even more defense. These armors are in the "Never used" tier of armors, and are quite blatantly ignored most of the time. But what if they didn't even trade their debuff for the defense? What if they were just incredible defensively at no cost?

The result, was that no one would go for it. If any rebalancing is to come up for these armors, this should definitely be considered.

4...Sudaruska/Triglav did equivalent damage on neutral targets when compared to to gran faust/divine avenger, and swung just as fast?

There are quite a few people wanting this specific buff, and I don't blame them. I myself find sudaruska a bit underwhelming on its normal hits, although its charge makes up for that by far in my opinion. But even so, players value specialized damage far more than normal damage, and this does not seem to be an adequate fix for them. The few that do use it would welcome the change, although it didn't seem to win any majority of players over.

5...Barbarous thorn shield was stripped of its piercing resistance?

Barbarous thorn shield is a good example of how good a buff is. It is exactly as strong as the royal jelly shield, but has an awesome sword bonus. It is favored by many sword users, and most of the people replying to the thread would still use it even if it had absolutely no piercing defense- putting it on par with swiftstrike to an extent.

6...Divine avenger's charge attack did not stick to walls?
7...Gran faust's charge attack did not stick to walls+took the same amount of time to charge as faust?

The wall glitch is considered a bug by many, although since it hasn't been fixed, I see it as intentional to prevent the wallhacking DA charges used everywhere. The Gran Faust's charge is significantly longer than the Fausts, to the point of Faust being better than Gran Faust. When this occured for the Barbarous Thorn Blade and its 4*, a nerf was delivered to the 4* sword.

However, if we fixed them, would players want to use them more? The answer was yes. In many cases, they are used (as people said), but it would change the way people use them, and as others said, it would not change their existing strategies enough to warrant creating one. All in all, fixing the issues here would be a nice touch to the game.

8...Big Angry Bomb had a larger radius, and a chance to deal stun?

This is quite literally taken from the testing server, although I did not suggest that it would happen any more than I suggested that royal jelly would become incredibly resilient to piercing damage while less so to normal damage. But what if it would happen? Some people said they liked it, although many still did not go for it.

9...If the stun that stagger storm dealt was "fixed" to not make things attack twice?

Another 'bug' that has been here for a long time, although the lore behind it suggests that it is in fact, a bug. Most of the players to respond considered this to be a good fix to the stagger storm, and favored using it.

10...There was a haze bomb that dealt sleep?

This was generally considered to be game breaking, and most of the participants favored using it.

11...There was a point damage bomb similar in charge and detonation to radiant sun shards with a very small radius that dealt about 500ish normal damage?

We have this- its called Radiant Sun Shards, and does about that damage to slimes given the same circumstances. Now, a lot of players here said that they would favor using a sword to such a bomb- while the only interested parties seemed to be a few select bombers whom liked the idea of being able to deal lots of damage to a single target.

The idea of a point damage bomb comes from me looking at players going through parties and seeing swordies and gunners kill things while bombers were often 2nd best, and stuck as a third wheel in the support department. It seems like some bombers favored it due to it giving them the ability to help the team out a bit, but that many people did not value such a thing due to it not fitting their use of bombs for area control.

12...There was a curse haze bomb that only cursed things for 1/2 a second, so that they had to be in the radius to be cursed?

Mostly, people were on the fense on this one. Obviously, this one was about the suggestion for such a thing itself- what if the decision to use it was presented as a "balanced" use of it that did not imply causing STRONG curse every second? Most players thought it would be OP, while some said not to it, and almost all thought it would break lockdown, even when I posted the implications of using it in lockdown in the opening post.

13...Cautery sword had life steal?

While some players were all right with this, most found it to be over powered due to the obvious ability to farm via healers/resurection. When that was removed through the idea of it forcing heart drops alongside other things and only when things had drops, it became much more balanced, and many players chose to forgo it for damaging weapons that dealt larger amounts of damage.

14...There was an upgrade to swiftstrike buckler that halved its health and defenses for one more level of ASI?

Another issue with the radiant sun shards is the pricing- it is a perfectly usable 4* item, which makes it half as costly as every 5* item. However, even given increased pricing, many players chose to use a weaker version of the swiftstrike for but one level of attack speed increase. The real benefit is of course that 4 stages of ASI fits with other items that boost ASI by 2 stages- namely trinkets and armors. This also goes to show that players value such a small bonus more than half of the shield's defenses, although the already low defense of the item is not such a loss.

15...Dark Briar Barrage did not flinch beasts as easily?

I have observed that beasts are laughable with this item. Many players use the bomb for gremlins as well, and this nerf did not seem to hinder their ability to use it on gremlins, or for that matter, their opinion of the item. This goes to show two things- players undervalue the "flinch" statistic of the item, and that this item could probably use such a nerf- it already makes beast stratums a joke, and the level of safety it provides is not even needed for those levels.

Selection Bias

I not only understand that there is a good deal of selection bias in the results, but I wanted for it as well. Imagine the views on item balance from the eyes of the programmer- she can sit and create items on a whim to test them. Similarly, when I write things my perspective is skewed towards owning all of the weapons and many of the armors, but this isn't realistic. Most players must make a decision on what weapon or armor to craft, and they don't want to farm to create every item before choosing one to perfect using the UV system. If I wanted to get rid of selection bias, I could have easily gone on runs from depth 1-29 and quizzed every player from the system I encountered, or found my information by going on random missions chosen from a random number generator. But I wanted the bias of players who are knowledgeable about the infrastructure of the game. They have formed opinions, and they are the ones to answer questions. They're more likely to have read the wiki (considering that they're on the forums posting in an arsenal thread that they didn't make) and they've probably read/participated in discussions on balance. They are the ones in game to give advice most frequently, and they are typically more successful in their skill level than others. But they are also somewhat random in that they are limited to their class that they put themselves into, and not always "have it made". Some are "bombers" and others "gunners", and that alters their views in many situations. In essence, I wanted a variety of mostly established players.

The thread: http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/61589