Spiral Knights - Special Abilities for Underpowered Armour Sets

Special Abilities for Underpowered Armour Sets

12 replies [Last post]

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 06:36

Kimahsonite

You know those armours sets where when you see someone equip them you either think that they’re rich, hipster or noob? Yep, I’m talking about everything except the wolver lines, kat lines, demo lines, gunslinger lines, chaos set and seerus mask. So here’s my thread to buff these underdog armour sets in unique ways to make them a viable armour choice and also to diversify gameplay. These ‘abilities’ will only applied to the 5* versions of armour sets and you MUST have equipped both pieces of the set to receive the unique bonuses.

This thread is also directly influenced by Fehzor's thread where she (?) mentions special abilities for underdog armour and weapons.

Chroma Lines (Arcane Salamander, Volcanic Salamander, Deadly Virulisk) -

Equipping the Volcanic Salamander armour set or Arcane Salamander armour set will give you ‘Cloak of Coals’ ability which:
A. Causes you to become invisible (similar to a recon shield without the goggles) after standing still for a second, which prevents monsters from focusing on you (as if you are dead)
B. The invisibility takes up shield health similar to recon shields in Lockdown meaning that higher health shield means more invisibility time
C. When a monster touches you it is inflicted with strong fire but it also breaks your invisibility cloak and causes your shield to lose all its health

Equipping the Deadly Virulisk armour set will give you ‘Concealing Miasma’ ability which:
A. Causes you to become invisible (similar to a recon shield without the goggles) after standing still for a second, which prevents monsters from focusing on you (as if you are dead)
B. The invisibility takes up shield health similar to recon shields in Lockdown meaning that higher health shield means more invisibility time
C. A small poison cloud (size of greaver mist cloud) surrounds you once you turn invisible; when monsters enter the cloud they are inflicted with strong poison but nothing happens if they touch you
D. Invisibility is disabled once you move, shield, attack, shield bash or dash
Volcanic Salamander should have its damage bonus VS slime medium changed to damage bonus VS construct medium and Arcane Salamander should have its damage bonus VS slime low and damage bonus VS beast low changed to damage bonus VS gremlin low and damage bonus VS construct low.

Spiral Plate Lines (Ironmight Plate, Volcanic Plate, Ancient Plate) –

Equipping an entire set from a plate armour line makes you almost completely immune to knockback from monsters. For example, the only thing which will be able to knock you back is anything equivalent to the knockback caused by a trojan overhead smash or anything greater. All plate armour sets will give you a special ability on the tooltip called ‘Combat Counter-Weight’.

Jelly and Quicksilver Lines (Mercurial, Royal Jelly, Ice Queen) –

Equipping an entire set from a jelly/quicksilver armour line… uh… can’t think of anything…

Drake Scale Lines (Dragon Scale and Radiant Silvermail) –

Equipping the Radiant Silvermail armour set (helmet coming out in 2015) will give you ‘Glaring Guard’ ability which:
A. Causes all monsters in range to target you
B. Causes monsters which collide with you to take light elemental damage and will cause them to be knock-backed
This ability only gets activated when you have 100% health.

Equipping Dragon Scale armour will give you ‘Beeline Blaze’ (or maybe Dragon’s Breath) ability which:
A. Causes a line of fire (identical to that spewed out by those machines in C42) to come straight from where you’re facing, but with only 3 tiles of range
B. The flame has a strong chance of causing minor fire
C. Fire cannot be stacked
This ability only gets activated when you have below 11% health.

Angelic Lines (Valkyrie, Heavenly Iron, Of the Fallen) –

Equipping the Heavenly Iron armour set will give you ‘Fiendish Fulmination’ ability which causes a slight chance (1/16) of causing strong shock to the fiend family using any weapon.

Equipping the Valkyrie armour set will give you ‘Valkyrie’s Strike’ ability which causes a slight chance (1/16) of doing double damage against fiends.

Equipping the ‘Of the Fallen’ armour set will give you ‘Berserker’s Strike’ ability which causes a slight chance (1/16) of doing triple damage against undead.

Skelly Lines (Dread Skelly) –

Equipping the Dread Skelly armour set will give you ‘Haunting Haze’ ability which causes you to have a purple poison aura following and surrounding you. This aura will have half as much radius as a greaver mist cloud (so monsters will pretty much have to be in direct contact with you to be effected) and will cause strong curse, however it will only ‘tick’ every 15 seconds. And no, I’m pretty sure this won’t be overpowered.

Cobalt Lines (Almirian Crusader and Azure Guardian) –

Equipping the Almirian Crusader armour set will give you ‘Rise of the Fallen’ ability which:
A. Summons an Almirian Crusader (found in Legion of Almire danger mission) to fight with you
B. There can only be one Almirian Crusader at a time
C. The Almirian Crusader doesn’t have a shield

Equipping the Azure Guardian armour set will give you ‘Summon Reinforcements’ ability which:
A. Summons a Cobalt Knight to fight with you
B. There can be two cobalt knights at a time
C. The cobalt knights act like summoned mecha knight kits except they don’t have any ‘Malfunction’ attack and they are equipped with Mighty Cobalt Helm, Mighty Cobalt Armour, Ascended Calibur and Mighty Defender.

Almirian Crusaders and Cobalt Knights are summoned through the Shield Bash move. Once the Almirian Crusader dies you can re-summon it using Shield Bash. Once both Cobalt Knights die you can re-summon them using Shield Bash.

Magic Lines (Grey Feather and Divine) –

Equipping the Grey Feather armour set will give you ‘Wizard’s Ward’ ability which:
A. Gives you a mender’s bubble shield coloured purple (blue and red combined \o/)
B. Monsters which touch the shield are either inflicted with strong shock or strong fire, monsters which are affected by fire are knocked back
C. The ability causes you to become stationary
This ability is activated once below 6% health.

Equipping the Divine armour set will give you… wait for it… ‘Divine Retribution’ (best name ever!) ability which:
A. If you die, gives you a fair chance (1/8?) of instantly destroying the monster which caused your death
B. This does not apply to bosses or swarm monsters and of course undefeatable environmental hazards

TL;DR: And that’s it, hope you read the whole thing and give me feedback/criticism of my ideas (spent a few hours on this). Oh, no TL;DR here, sorry.

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 06:46

Arkate

Who said anything about

Who said anything about skelly being underpowered?

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 07:19

Onekone

Arkate

Skelly is not underpowered, it's fine armor and stuff (not to mention that back then it used to be weak to fire), but existence of Snarby gear, which trades half of bar of poison and freeze (and never had fire weakness, I believe) and little bit of defences for DmgSword:+2, made it obsolete.

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 07:34

Juances

Then, remove some defense from snarby and give a little defense buff to skelly.

All of these suggestion fit better as a battle sprite ability.

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 08:11

Thunder-The-Bright

I beg to differ.

I'm perfectly fine with my volcanic salamander and my valkyrie mail. I don't think they are underpowered. I think other sets are overpowered.
then we should say that this game is more concentrated in offense then in defense (defense lines having debuffs).

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 15:34

Fropps

Dragons and firestorms.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, it promotes perfect imbalance and is a very good idea.
But I would rather change the dragon scale set's ability from "flame's breath" to "flame trail"
Flame trail would lay a trail behind you that would turn the ground you've walked on "red hot", red hot ground would be about the width of your characters feet and would inflict fire when stepped on by a monster, but it would disappear at the speed you move when it's reached a certain length so it cannot be abused. You can decide at what health it appears.

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 16:31

Zeddy

Virulisk sounds kinda boring. To use it, you stand still and do absolutely nothing?

Sat, 05/18/2013 - 19:27

Kimahsonite

@Zeddy- These are just ideas,

@Zeddy- These are just ideas, maybe you would be able to move but at like 10% normal speed. :)

@Juances- Yeah I sort of forgot about those things.

Also, anyone have any suggestions for abilities for the jelly/quicksilver lines?

Mon, 05/20/2013 - 05:51

Aveond

+1 I need to have some of my

+1
I need to have some of my armors buffed, it's too dangerous to run around with all of these snarbies as I'm the only one with salamander.

Tue, 05/21/2013 - 09:54

Canine-Vladmir

I like the invisibilty of the first one :)

Tue, 05/21/2013 - 15:11

#10

Fehzor

Hooray! Someone read my thread and made a thread about it!

@OP

It gets easy to get carried away, but most of these things sound fairly good. Some of this sounds a bit OP, but I firmly believe that things can be made balanced- namely the wizards ward bubble and the skelly ability of a poison. I also don't like "set bonuses". If you have say, full heavenly iron it should give you a 1/8th chance of shocking fiendish things if that is what it is to do. You should also be able to mix together more abilities- like having small amounts of invisibillity from one piece of chroma armor and then having a smaller version of the bubble from the wizard's ward.

Reading over it some more-

Divine Retribution- sounds like something I wouldn't want to use, as it requires me dying and doesn't always proc. I'd change it to something like "reflects 1/5 damage inflicted onto your knight back onto enemies per piece of armor" or something like that. The major balancing factor there is that your knight has to get hit for it to do anything, and would be much better off in just skolver 'n vog otherwise. Think about how good that would be in lockdown too... as good as having chroma armor that lets you go invisible as a striker, stealth capping points? Perhaps so.

The plate line also needs more of a buff in my opinion... though the counterweight thing does sound like a good attribute.. perhaps that and something else on plate armor? I don't know.

@Juances

I wrote a whole thread on why that wouldn't work... and-

Snarby's defense = vog/skolver's defenses, but with shadow. These armors are balanced to one another.

Snarby's defense = Dread skelly's defenses, but with normal and shadow switched, with about a low to med uv on each. And snarby only gets high poison/ice, of course. The low-med's on each piece apparently make up for the offensive buff, making it "balanced" in a sense. But people still don't use it?

Heavenly iron armor's defense = snarby's defense, but with curse resistance and negative shock. Here is where we start to see problems.

Valkyrie armor's defense = heavenly iron armor's defense, but with about a high-max less of normal, negative shock instead of fire, and max poison. It also gets +2 fiend. These 2 armors are balanced toghether.

Valkyrie armor has:
-A worse offensive buff than does snarbolax
-Less status resistance than does snarbolax
-Less defense than does snarbolax

I'd like for you to tell me how to balance these in such a way that what I wrote works out-

"The goal of any piece of equipment, is to gain money for OOO and provide an amount of happiness for players. That is, to be crafted. However, all armors, weapons, shields, even trinkets, are substitutes for one another in some way. I can craft a sudaruska, or I can craft a triglav. Or, I can craft a gun to do the job for me. Balance comes from the fact that after I craft a skolver set there is still incentive for me to craft a vog set. If a piece of equipment is crafted without destroying that player's wants for another piece of armor, then it is successful in it's design as well as in it's balance."

Unless of course you disagree with that statement. I'm very interested in what you make of all this.

Tue, 05/21/2013 - 17:09

#11

Qwao

@OP

No special abilities, please. Weapon/family type damage bonuses etc. are technically enough for the most part.

Oh, and invisibility is just a client render sort of thing. Monsters WILL still target you even when cloaked. Try this with the slush puppy in Avenue. Nonetheless I think you can still have coding applied to it, but as with my first point, no.

@Fehzor Valkyrie armor has: A worse offensive buff than does snarbolax Depending on how you look at it, snarbolax only gives that bonus to swords. Bombs and Guns get benefit from valkyrie against fiends. But overall Snarbolax gives sword a boost anywhere, so does Shadowsun for guns and Bombastic/Mad Bomber for bombs. (Not to mention that OP purple cloak set) So it depends on how you use it... still unless you grind fiend levels (And as long as it is not fire...) Valkyrie has not much use otherwise. Although it looks pretty.

But that statement is kinda well thought. To put that in my view of items:

-I craft a Crest of Almire, but I still want a Dread Skelly shield, because it covers the resistances the former does not defend against.
-All 3 wolver sets have their own uses in terms of defense against damage types. Same for gunslinger, but deadshot is too specific imo.
-I would go for Volcanic Demo because it has ctr and fire resist. I would also go for bombastic as it gives damage and freeze resist. But if I wanted to pure bomb and only require one damage trinket to reach maximum boost for bombs, I would go for Mad Bomber.

In a negative example, I would not go for Azure Guardian however, as Skolver can protect against piercing with about half a pip less damage while giving me a sword damage boost, or Justifier as it gives asi med for guns, not to mention the resistances.

I like the way it helps identify unbalanced items.

Tue, 05/21/2013 - 20:59

#12

Fehzor

@Owaoforum

Fiend med is "worse" in that most players are on some kind of budget and would rather not craft that alongside deadshot or armor of the fallen. Which is the other part of the point I was trying to make with my statement thing that I quoted- that statistical balance doesn't matter as much as plausibility and drive to craft.

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Special Abilities for Underpowered Armour Sets