It inflicts freeze. It breaks its own freeze. Save for charge spamming on Lockdown, why go with Glacius over Voltedge or Combuster?
Why pick Glacius?
That sounds more like a flaw with freeze to begin with. Other 5 star brandishes have 6 chances to inflict their status. One from the initial hit, and five from the bursts.
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't brandish charges treated like bullets by enemies dodging mechanics? There are more reliable means of crowd control after all.
Because strong freeze is powerful and awesome.
PROTIP: freeze an enemy, then walk away and deal with other mobs. Let the freeze damage actually take effect. Don't just freeze it and attack it again.
The Glacius freeze is a pretty reliable freeze.
Glacius is also a lot safer than the other Brandishes. As Batabii said, you throw a charge, and you can walk away. You can use it like a Shivermist that does damage.
After the ice chip breaks, the enemies take damage from being frozen.
Yes, Glacius freezes really often. You can often keep an enemy in perpetual freeze until it dies. Yes, enemies take thawing damage if you let them thaw. Yes, Glacius is kind of fun.
Yes, you can Glacius enemies while your partner Blitzes them. But keep in mind that you can Combuster enemies while your partner Blitzes them, for less safety but higher damage. Which you prefer depends on how experienced you are, perhaps.
Combuster's charge, in addition to doing more damage, also produces predictable knockback. This is a minor safety win for Combuster.
Freeze is not an unambiguous win. Freeze hinders knockback, kiting, and shield-bumping. Depending on how many people are in your party, how experienced they are, and how crowded the room is, freeze can be a blessing or a curse.
It's hard to believe we're having another thread on the elemental brandishes, but we are.
A PRO tip from batabii....thats funny XD
And glacius freeze is useful for people who need to not go as fast in levels. It slows down enemies, so it gives people time.
If you dont need time to breathe and attack, go for a non pansy weapon like FoV. DPS for days
That reminds me, I don't really care about Combuster because Fang of Vog is really similar, but arguably cheaper. It may not have the range, speed, or aoe of combuster, but it burns enemies even if you don't charge, and the charge attack, while somewhat risky, is one of the most powerful in the entire game.
Well, I think that FSC also being a prime location to run regularly being on fire all day, every day as well as Voltedge being only available either via huge markup or suffering through having to play PvP are probably a few reasons why Glacius is popular as an elemental sword alternative to a DA.
The Combuster-in-FSC argument comes up in every one of these threads, but let's repeat it again: Combuster is extremely effective in FSC. Most of the monsters are immune to fire, so they do not get ignited by Combuster's charge attack. That doesn't matter. The charge attack does enormous damage, often one-shot-killing the monsters. As someone who has used both Glacius and Combuster in FSC many times, I greatly prefer Combuster there.
Why? Combuster's status is completely useless against 90% of the enemies there. Sure if all you have is combuster it's not "bad" per se, but if you have glacius, why bother taking combuster?
Let me put it this way:
Acheron is a great sword against gremlins and slimes, right? It has an awesome charge attack, and its regular attacks also deliver huge damage per second.
Combuster against fire-resistant undead and constructs is exactly as good as Acheron against gremlins and slimes. Neither inflicts a status. Both kill their targets with big raw damage. Both have completely reliable knockback.
Glacius is not a clear win over Combuster, because freeze is not a clear win over no status at all. In general, freeze is sometimes helpful and sometimes a hindrance, as I've explained. In the case of brandish charges, freeze has a big drawback, in that it prevents monsters from riding the entire charge attack. Compared to Combuster, Glacius does less damage, fewer one-shot kills, and less predictable knockback.
Becuase Glacius stops enemies from taking the damage of all the explosions while Combuster doesn't.
The main reason I like Glacius the most is because it's not silly overpowered as its knockback is limited as it has been explained earlier.
This is like grey feather vs chaos on a lesser scale.
Glacius is safe and clean to chain other attacks. But you could just rush and throw everything at once with a combuster and a blitz disregarding your safety.
That can't be true. Why would combuster and acheron have the exact same damage against weak targets when combuster has strong fire ON TOP OF the direct damage? That would make combuster GROSSLY overpowered anywhere that isn't fire-themed.
Guess what, it is grossly overpowered. All Brandishes have same base power. As a user of both Acheron and Combuster, I only bring Acheron if I need deal huge amounts of damage to shadow-weak enemies quickly (Acheron have CTR:High from lucky craft), otherwise I bring Combuster because Combuster burns every freaking thing in it's patch
Zeddy I'm not talking about something like valiance vs supernova. These are two weapons from the same crafting tree that have the same attacks. There's no reason one should be so much more powerful than the other, and if it is, OOO needs to fix it.
If acheron has no status, there's no reason it should be the same damage as combuster.
Big Angry Bomb is stronger than Nitronome, but that's because it has a much slower charge time and walk speed to balance it out.
And doesn't Umbra Driver have a higher base damage than Magma Driver?
Umbra Driver has the same base damage as the Nova Driver if I'm not mistaken.
Brandishes dont have a Nova Driver equivalent.
See also:
Callahan vs Iron Slug (Same damage, but Calla has strong status)
Deadshot vs Almirian Crusader (Same shadow defence, deadshot has twice as much curse resistance, no fire weakness, ASI for handguns, medium damage bonus for undead, Almirian has slightly more normal defence)
Chaos vs Mad Bomber (discussed to death)
Final Flourish vs Furious Flamberge (Flamberge's fire is so infrequent compared to the reduced damage that it wouldn't even outdamage Flourish against zombies. The damage penalty is the same as Magma Driver vs Nova Driver, but Magma Driver has Good chance where Flamberge has Slight.)
Blitz Needle vs Plague Needle/Pepperbox (Plague has slight chance of strong status and pepper has fair chance of moderate status. Blitz has 25% more damage than those two, compared to Nova Driver having only 15% more damage than the status variants.
Furious Flamberge vs Warmaster Rocket Hammer. (The dash in WRH hits three times, does the exact damage of Flamberge's first hit but inflicted in an instant.)
Triglav vs Sudaruska (Triglav inflicts status on second stroke, Suda does not.)
Snarbolax vs Skolver (Snarbolax gives +3 resistance to two statuses while Skolver gives +4 to one, otherwise numerically identical)
Divine Hood vs Divine Mantle (one gives +2 fiend bonus, the other does not)
Useful for soloing, because no one can break the freeze right after you inflict it.
So this is a major issue that needs to be addressed by the devs then.
1. That thread is from april, and it's locked.
2. They still haven't fixed it.
3. I can no longer see the questions, so I have no idea if there was a way to specifically indicate that many weapons weren't adequately balanced against their statuses.
1. So? It was still made by representatives of OOO.
2. That doesn't mean they are unaware.
3. Let me quote Njth- I mean uh, Eury here.
We’d like to get a snapshot of what the wider Spiral Knights community thinks about how armor and weapons are balanced in the game right now. If you’ve got opinions on Spiral Knights gear, would you kindly do us the favor of filling out this survey?
See it yet?
We’d like to get a snapshot of what the wider Spiral Knights community thinks about how armor and weapons are balanced in the game right now. If you’ve got opinions on Spiral Knights gear, would you kindly do us the favor of filling out this survey?
1. so it's no longer relevant.
2. It means they haven't done anything about it. After almost 6 months.
3. That doesn't tell me anything specific.
Freeze -> Throw a GF combo
Freeze -> Charge again -> another freeze -> repeat and pro players will call you a virgin or something.
That's another thing, if you MUST attack a (glacius) frozen enemy, at LEAST use the charge attack while it's stuck. I can't stand people who waste my freeze on piddly little Sentenza shots etc.
What I hate is when people freeze enemies right in front of me. So instead of being knocked back, they stay there and hurt me. I've had that happen on more than one occasion.
And yeah, Combustor in particular is probably OP. Its charge attack does more damage vs slimes than Acheron's does, due to fire. It's kinda ridiculous. It's not unusual for me to use Combustor's charge on slimes, then switch to Acheron to finish them off with regular attacks when needed.
How often does that happen? Why would you blindly swing right in front of someone you know has a full glacius charge?
It's not like blindly swinging a sword is a problem as the combo is most often fast enough to interrupt the enemy no matter what unless you're 3-4 people on Elite.
That too. And they're only taking knockback for such a brief period of time that I don't see how they could freeze something WHILE it's getting knocked back AFTER the hit in a way so the hit DOESNT break the ice...
Inability to shield bump frozen targets = annoyed by glacius users. I generally use volt edge and combuster. And yes, combuster does do far superior damage in FSC because it does more hits, however at the same time you might not want the target to slide around so much. I personally use my volt edge when doing solo elite FSC runs because usually I farm FSC sort of in a half-asleep daze and don't want to bother running the target down constantly, but still want to shield bump every so often.
@ people suggesting that Combuster is better against Slime than Acheron - lolno. Fire is nice, but it generally only does what, 400-500 damage over its whole duration, not stacking with itself? The damage boost you get from using shadow is much more than that. The combuster can really only be considered superior when you use it against ice jelly to take off their spikes.
Fire doesn't stack with itself, but it can be re-applied, at which point it deals an instant fire tick. On depth 24, the difference between dealing elemental damage and shadow damage versus a slime is about 65.4 damage. A strong fire tick vs a slime deals 95 damage at that depth. The chance for a Combuster to set stuff on fire is like basically 50% per explosion, so that's an average of 47.5 extra damage per hit if you chargespam, only 17.9 damage below Acheron. This isn't even considering the extra 380 damage following that if you just let it burn out.
Acheron is nice for gremlins, though. Those are pretty fire-resistant.
Edit: Never mind. Forgot that defense is subtractive, not multiplicative, so with more damage the gap should stay the same.
Still, I guess the point about the first hit of acheron being larger than the first hit combuster of jelly remains though.
(since everything else has been said...)
Post #9 should have been #1.
And
Stationary, frozen, and sometimes shocked and large enemies cannot be moved by shield bumping. But, only from observation can I agree to the situation-specific damage output between the brandish variants. Glacius seems best suited for crowd control when the freeze status is applied. In exchange, if the final blast does not freeze the enemy then the full extent of damage does impose on the enemy's life.
Using a Glacius's charge is like practicing Hotoku Shin Ken, well sorta. Not everyone has time to wait five seconds for death to befall their opponent.
The attack that breaks Freeze gets the same chance of re-inflicting Freeze that the first had of inflicting Freeze. So really, if two attacks hit, you had one chance to inflict Freeze the whole time.
And if Freeze ISN'T inflicted, the enemy will ride the chain of derpbillion explosions until it is. This leads to people decrying Glacius with "LOWER DAMAGE! IS BAD WEAPON!!!" But it's really much higher damage if used correctly- like, say, in tandem with your buddy's Blitz Needle on a spastic swarm of Devilites or an obnoxious Deadnaught.