Because poison can't pass through such iron. And to have some advantage over Volcanic Plate set on certain situations.
EDIT:
Title changed.
And, something more:
Metalic Plate Shield
Gray/Black instead of brown
Without the crown holograph.
Normal defense equal to Ironmight Plate Shield
Stun resistance equal to Ironmight Plate Shield
And poison resistance.
Brambles do piercing damage and cause poison.
And Volcanic has the elemental defense and fire resistance. Why not make Ironmight more viable, giving poison resistance?
@Dibs
On top of piercing defense protecting you from beasts (lowest common denominator) and slimes, neither of which cause stun which Ironmight is supposed to protect from, Volcanic Protects you from elemental + plus fire and stun(constructs, FSC, and gremlins beware who do actually cause stun).
Any status would make Ironmight more viable, even even freeze or poison. (ala Virulisk set)
I know large Lichen Colonies can cause stun, but 1 situational enemy in a population doesn't make stun resist alone a reason to get Ironmight at all.
"Volcanic Protects you from elemental + plus fire and stun(constructs, FSC, and gremlins beware who do actually cause stun)."
The shield doesn't have elemental resistance.
"neither of which cause stun"
Giant Lichen Colonies cause stun. Also, almost every level where Beasts/Slimes are present, Lumbers are also usually present.
+1 to giving the armour poison res, but -1 to the shield.
What about trading the piercing defense for the poison resistance on the shield? When you said about the piercing defense, I thought that you pointed the piercing defense of the whole set.
Dibs, Volanic shield regardless, the armor set provides a 1-up with fire & elemental resist on top of Ironmight's singular pierce resist. There are simply just better choices in pierce resist armor than it.
Just because piercing defense isn't something worth currently, it doens't mean that piercing defense won't be useful later, when things get fixed.
Just because there are better options of pierce resist now, it doens't mean that Ironmight won't have a place to him afterward, when armors get balanced.
EDIT: I think that is the motive to she disagree with giving poison resistance to the shield. And I agree with her, if this is her opinion.
"There are simply just better choices in pierce resist armor than it."
There's also better choices for Elemental resistant armour-- in fact almost every other Elemental armour resists fire. So what's your point.
The point being that even in it's own class of Plate Mail Armors, Ironmight has only one resist and Volcanic has two. They both have ASI decrease med, and they have comparable defenses in the respective fields.
Ironmight Armors should have at most one more natural status resist to be comparable or equal to Volcanic Armor's 2 natural resistances.
@Trats - If and when they choose to decide on maybe balancing armor sets. I'll keep my fingers crossed; The only "rebalancing" of armor I've seen in the past two years was Chaos Cloak getting the buff that made Mad Bomber a mute point. As it currently stands, there's no reason to wear Ironmight anywhere. Might as well wear Cobalt Armor.
"The point being that even in it's own class of Plate Mail Armors, Ironmight has only one resist and Volcanic has two. They both have ASI decrease med, and they have comparable defenses in the respective fields."
Again, VPS doesn't have elemental defense, hence why I +1'd adding resistance to Ironmight's armour and not the shield.
@Paintool
It's just my opinion. To me, OOO have a plan to the game, a list of things that they had planned to the game, like adding water-levels(a thing that Nick confirmed). How they aren't a big team, they work on more parts, make updates slowly, adding and changing things. Little things that will result in a big balance and in a great game, that will justify the importance of the all sets, all defense-types and status-types. But certainly you have a different vision of it. No problem with that.
@Dibsville
Why you not answered my question?
"Why you not answered my question?"
But then, wouldn't it be an extremely underpowered shield?
So the problem isn't the Ironmight shield have something more than the Volcanic shield?
The problem is it lose the piercing defense?
I don't see the problem with that, if the shield receives a poison resistance. Glacies prove that status is more important than defense type.
If you convice me... I'll change the shield part.
I somehow doubt that giving plate armor poison resistance is going to make anyone thrilled to pick it up, or fix the inherent design flaw that plagues armor under the new heating system. What is this you might wonder?
At level 10, you have your max potential pure defense, and can feel good about yourself for making it.
At level 1, you have all of your status resistances, as well as any other bonuses.
Compare say, vog and ironmight. Even under the proposed changes. Vog will have fire, some elemental and normal so you aren't just totally screwed over, and most importantly, sword attack speed. Is it functional? Yes. Ironmight will have stun and poison resistances, as well as some- but not as much as possible normal and piercing. Neither item will have the extra health from being maxed out in level, and because of this (as well as the basic fact that fire outweighs poison/stun resistance due to its ability to semi-restore sonic mode) ironmight cannot fulfill its duty as being a "defensive item" in the least.
And that's just the tip of the iceburg. Defense peters out slowly the more you have of it, and picks up quickly when you have next to none of it.* So if I have vog cub coat with a normal UV of max, thats worse than having a divine veil with the same UV... but it also means that if I have heavenly iron armor, that's not nearly as good as it would seem compared to having valkyrie armor. The same holds true for plate armor and just about everything else. And when you get down to it, attack speed decreased just isn't a good time at all.
Even if they gave it all of the status defenses, it would have a hard time finding use.
----------------------
Basically, you should go read this because I think its relevant. http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/80053
And to sum that post up, because its also quite wordy, we need to give ironmight something unique and cool that it can actually pull off on its own. Not just a puny little "Poison max ohhh look, the stats work out, woo.. everything is balanced now..." That ignores the problem entirely.
Something like "Slow Damage Increased: Medium", which would make it to where items receive a buff depending on how much they were slowed- bombs included and based on their fuse time. So using big angry bomb with the full set might double its damage.** Troikas would also get a sizeable buff from this, and of course using something like swiftstrike to negate the bonus would be pointless, because doing so would also nerf your weapons down to size. And that's just one way to do it.
*In PvE of course. PvP has the whole +100 defense for no reason :D thing.
**(BAB currently does 289 damage in T3. A single blitz charge does 4080 damage. For the suggested BAB to equal blitz, it would have to hit around 8 enemies. Against 8+ enemies, Bab SHOULD be better than blitz.)
@Dibsville
Won't you try to convice me?
@Fehzor
I know about the Plate class problem. But with my suggestion, I'm not intend to balance completely Ironmight. I just wanted to suggest something to it be bit better, to have more use than just monsters that deals just normal damage, Jelly and Beast family and statusless levels.
I already read your thread. It's a good one :D
It made me think about balancing some classes sometimes.
Bump, because I need feedback, mainly from Dibsville and Fehzor.
If you're not going to make it at least a somewhat viable choice, why bother to begin with? And thank you.
I wanted to suggest something to it be better, while the devs don't make something about classes and armors and because they have something planned to them. I hope.
And would be fun to sit down with a Ironmight set on some brambles and say: I'm feeling nothing.
EDIT: And, again, because of Volcanic Plate set.
Volcanic Plate Shield not having Elemental resistance still allows it to fit the Volcanic set. Ironmight just makes absolutely no sense without the Piercing resistance, and besides, if it had Poison instead of piercing, there'd be literally no reason to make it over Volcanic other than looks, since VPS has a better status over poison, and any place where there actually is poison, Dread Skelly, or moreso Savage Tortoise, would work much better anyway.
SO AGAIN, +1 to adding resistance to the armour, but -1 to adding it to the shield, especially if it's going to replace the piercing resistance.
Thanks for answering, Dibs. I'll add something to main topic to try to solve this problem.
I had a similar idea to Fehzor on plate having a damage bonus for slow weapons, even a damage bonus low would almost balance it - thy're not that different in percent increase/decrease, and to be honest a little bit more damage would compensate for the fact that you'd be getting hit a lot more.
The thing is, passive defence on this game is nearly non-existent in the grand scheme of things. In other games such as Path of Exile, I created my character to be a massively tanky character while my friends focused on ranged attacks. it worked well.
throughout this I found a few things:
The best kind of defence is passive regen. If you have a health regen then it instantly makes tanking viable. Without it, no matter how much you decrease the damage you take, the enemy will always pick your health down before you kill them because you didn't put your points into DPS.
Another things is aggro - if you don't have the aggro of monsters, you're effectively useless, because they're hitting your teammates and you have no DPS to stop it happening.
In path of exile shields are passive - they have a chance of blocking the next attack and provide more defensive points.
Defensive points in the form of a health bonus would really help on this game - if it gave you a damage penalty but more health, plate shields would actually be a much more interesting choice over standard defensive shields.
As spiral knights does not have passive regen or aggro-pulling mechanisms other than damage, it will always be impossible to create a viable 'tank' character. It's sad really, because tanky characters are my favorite sight in videogames. the thought of huge attacks just plinking off my carefully chosen gear is really something I'd love to do in this beautifully styled game.
[Actually on topic]
I had a thought that ironmight would suit shock or poison defence - then the tortodrone even happened, savage tortoise was a thing and I thought I was right. However we've already got a piercing/shock set.
If volcanic plate shield got elemental defence I think it would still be balanced. Let's be honest, plate shields do not see as much use as other shields even though they're meant to be massively protective. One of the main culprits is the fact that nothing inflicts normal damage except for tier 1 monsters and large things that have slow attacks (that you can dodge if you're using the more speedy/glass cannon gear anyway).
I've been typing for far too long.
In short: +1
Got +3. Just some more and I'll have a space on my own thread. ^^
As spiral knights does not have passive regen or aggro-pulling mechanisms other than damage,
You've clearly never used Haze Bombs or an Autogun line weapon. Spiral Knights has the same aggression mechanics as any other RPG. Proximity, infliction and hit procs, and DPS all contribute to how much threat you generate on a monster.
And he's never had a Trojan aggro instantly to him when he hits its shield with a full VPB charge?
But Ironmight has piercing defense...