Buffs to monster AI is the real difficulty that most of us actually want. On the other hand, you can easily make the argument that Spiral Knights is -supposed- to be easy, and runs are supposed to be a leisurely social experience rather than provide any significant gameplay challenge (OOO's track record of nerfing monsters indicates this perspective). But if they want the game to really be more difficult, only monster AI changes will manage that.

You mean you like the fact that only one line of gear (Wolver) is used 80% of the time while all other pieces are pushed to the sidewalk due to unbalanced metagame? Why did you even bother making this thread if you don't care about balance?

That's not even remotely what I said, how did you manage to make THAT conclusion? I was stating that while the current in-use gear can easily be seen as overpowered, I don't think the game is less fun because of it (which would warrant nerfs). The game is less fun because of a lack of option in choosing between one piece of overpowered gear and another due to the fact that most of the gear in the game isn't overpowered. Obviously, if you're going to be pedantic, in this scenario none of the gear would be overpowered anymore. But the working balance level can be anywhere, and I honestly think it's better higher than lower.

And therefore, issuing status resist nerfs would CAUSE gear to become different. Because tell me, what's the obvious difference between Skolver and Royal Jelly? Vog and Salamander? Snarbolax and Skelly? Apart from the fact that the latter looks like they suck? (they don't really, but they are definitely "less optimal")

Firstly, status resist nerfs wouldn't fix much of anything in terms of what gear people are actually using (especially when you suggest Snarbolax/Shadowsun's status weaknesses being stun or curse... seriously? If you give everything else a relevant status weakness and don't give one to the two premier sets, then that just makes things worse).

Gear needs to be shiny and offer interesting things that other gear doesn't have, and as it stands now that doesn't really happen. Adding status weaknesses just makes the current top tier of gear a little bit less shiny; it really doesn't offer any benefits to the remaining gear except by comparison, and that gear continues to come up short even after the status weakness. So then what, add more status weaknesses?

Since when? Remember shards, lockable UVs, and dark retribution? I think a balanced game is more important than pleasing the perpetually whiny minority.

Every long-term game balance decision OOO has made since I started playing (Oct 2011) has been a buff to something. Shard bombs were not a game balance decision, they were a game design decision. They are perfectly happy making dramatic game-altering changes to their core gameplay (and making people angry in the process), but never to gear for balance reasons. I'm just extrapolating from what OOO has done in the past and what it seems like they might be willing to do. Buffing things looks like it could happen, nerfs do not.

It's a bit misguided to state that offensive armor covers everything. At least in the absence of UVs. As a gunner, there's no way for me to cover the following damage-status combinations while wearing gun armor:

Piercing/fire, piercing/shock, piercing/poison, piercing/freeze, elemental/poison, shadow/fire, shadow/shock

5 out of 12 combinations are covered by gunslinger gear, 7 are not

A swordie has no way to cover:

Piercing/fire, piercing/shock, piercing/poison, elemental/shock, elemental/poison, elemental/freeze, shadow/fire, shadow/shock

4 out of 12 combinations are covered by sword gear, 8 are not

The reason that people wearing gunner/sword gear can handle any situation the game throws at them is due to the fact that the game is easy, not due to the fact that their gear completely covers every possible scenario the game might throw at them. If you want to use status as the countermeasure to easy game difficulty, then you'll want the actual effects of statuses themselves to be stronger at the no-resistance level and reduced more sharply as resistance increases. Adding arbitrary weaknesses to each of the available sets doesn't really achieve the same result.

In a game where the most defensively-geared player is still a glass cannon (slightly less fragile and significantly less cannon, but still very much a glass cannon), it's hard to use defensive weakness to offset anything unless you make that weakness so extreme that people can't take a hit at all.

That's exactly the reason why nerfing things to have negative status resists is not the answer to gear balance in Spiral Knights.

Yes, there is a huge disparity in armor quality, that's why I made this thread. But nerfing the top gear is only one approach, and buffing nearly everything else is the other. A status weakness wouldn't be enough of a nerf, and buffs make the game more interesting and are less objectionable anyway, while increasing variety in what gear actually does.