I recently have been working on a plate set, im on boosted soon to craft heavy today an possibly volcanic tomorrow or in a few more days. Though after crafting a few 3* sets and 3-5* weapons, it feels like im setting myself up to be under-powered.
This isnt a PVP point of view, this is purely a PVE. I havent tested plate out in PVP but im sure its beyond bad.
I decided on Volcanic plate because the levels leading to Vana and Vana himself have tons of fire based damage attacks, apparently Vana is the best way to make money over jelly king soo this would be worth the investment. I knew i could get seals for Ancient Plate (which i love the look of) which is why i decided not to make a regular plate set.
After long comparisons between armor sets, i can already tell i might have made some painful choices. See im a very defensive player, i am also a Heavy Weapons Knight >:O
When looking at the other choices, theyre just flat out better because the lack of debuffs.
Plate lowers your attack speed : medium, in addition it lowers your movement speed : low. Feel free to correct me on those if theyre wrong. This feels terribly punishing when the other sets all have bonus speed/damage UV's and nearly as much defensive capabilities.
As a Heavy Weapons user, the whole point is to be defensive (Keeping distance). But when youre moving and attacking slower it kind of hinders that ability to play defensively (especially when youre attacking slower, 2 combo heavy attacks are meant to knock back farther than initial hits and interrupt targets). Theres a big gap i noticed where in between attacks i often get hit while using heavy weapons while in plate due to monsters letting off hits faster than i can.
Maybe other sets are just over-tuned and need to be reduced down though.
Are there any plans for OOO to re-balance the plate items? From what i can tell they could really use some love.
You are mostly correct.
I don't have Volcanic Plate yet, decided to go for Ironmight first as piercing is a concern in Lockdown and that's where I wanted to try it out. In FSC I'm happy with my Volcanic Demo (or just Ironmight, really). It lowers attack speed: low, not medium. Only Ancient Plate lowers movement speed, the other lines should not do this. I think it's actually a pretty well-balanced set. Each piece gives more normal defence than the tooltip is actually capable of showing. (Try equipping proto armour or something and observe how far beyond the midway point your total normal defence is shown to be.) If plate armours didn't have that debuff, Ironmight would outclass Jelly armour pretty hard while Volcanic Demo would outclass Grey Feather against anything but shock. Those sets have a little more specialised defence and the second stat they protect against, however normal defence is worth a whole lot more than anything else since it works on all families and jelly's second defence is sleep, which is useful nowhere.
So Ironmight is well-balanced against Royal Jelly. Then where's the problem? The problem is that Royal Jelly is woefully underpowered against Skolver, Justifier and, hell, even Deadly Virulisk. For just a bit less specialised defence, all of those armours have more normal defence (which, I remind you, is inherently more useful) and an offensive buff instead of Ironmight's offensive debuff. This is where our problem starts to shine. Which is more defensive? Being able to kill things faster, shooting your gun a lot faster and reloading for a shorter time, or attacking slower but being able to take maybe a hit or two more from close-range enemies? The answer is: certainly not plate armour, and not really Royal Jelly, either.
Spiral Knight's just isn't a game where you're meant to be taking hits. In higher tiers, it takes very few hits to drain you from full to zero health, so even though there's a dedicated "glass cannon" set, the truth is every knight are glass cannons. Every knight except the ones going out in Ironmight or Royal Jelly. Those are just glass.
You can still make it work, if you're interested! I've been using Triglav and Ironmight for about a couple of months now, and here are my tips for you:
-Timing is key! If you're getting hit between your attacks, you did not time them well enough. The idea is to time it so that your second strike will hit enemies just before they attack you. This will cancel their attacks and leave them exposed for at least as long as you are. I'm assuming you're using a Troika or some other 2-hit sword here, by the way. I actually find this kind of timing to be easier in plate armour.
-Bring a support bomb! If you use stagger storm, enemies will move even slower than you do, and you can smash them without fear. If you bring Venom Veiler, the extra defence from your armour becomes incredibly noticable and you'll really be able to tank hits. Any CTR UV on these bombs, even if it's just a low, will make a big difference in the charge time.
-There's an exploit known as "midstepping", similar to shield-cancels and gun-switching. Hold your attack button when doing the first strike, and then release it a bit later. If performed correctly, the unleashed attack will be the second attack of your combo. Between the attacks, you are able to move or simply delay your second attack for adjusted timing. It's a crucial technique for heavy swords.
-Friend me! I'll be happy to go on a plate armour run with you!