(Hey your not nick!) Well that's right, however, I felt this thread needed to be made. If nick wishes to close this and start his own for the sake of orginization that's fine. As for now I was already thinking about making a balance thread for discussion, questioning whether or not to because I'm semi-new to the game. (Side note: balance is very different to best armor thread imo, but once again if this is felt un-needed be sure to close it.)
nick's Guidelines:
Please read:
This thread is here to collect useful balance issues relating to armor. Posting balance issues requires a specific format outlined below. Posts detailing a balance issue not using the outlined format will be deleted. We want to keep this clean so that it's easy for us to parse.
Secondly, we want to get feedback from experienced players who believe they have an understanding of the item they are describing. Please do not post with knee-jerk reactions to using an item. Once you feel as though you have a grasp of the item and feel there is a balance issue, we welcome your feedback.
Please use the following format:
Armor Name
Summary: A one sentence summary of the balance issue.
Followed by a detailed description. Try to be as specific as possible.
(Also does anyone feel like there should be a shield balance issue thread? Or even have this be half and half because they need to be balanced together?)
Armor of Fallen/Crown of Fallen
Summary:
The Fallen Set is not as useful in comparison to the Valkyrie Set.
I believe that the Fallen Set's "Damage Penalty vs Fiends: Medium" is set too high. I can see how they added this in to balance for the "Increased Attack Speed: Low", but I feel that they over looked something. I can see how the developers said to themselves, "oh, we added attack speed to the Fallen Set, we have to take away something, lets make it the opposite of the Valkyrie and make it weak against fiends." Using the chart given on the wiki (http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Abilities), one would think that you would be getting 1 boost (low) in a useful ability (attack speed) and losing 2 boosts (medium) in a not as useful ability (damage vs fiends). But the thing is Valkyrie Set has "Increased Damage Bonus vs Fiends: Medium", which means that the Fallen Set would actually be losing 4 boosts (Very high). If you we're to be using the whole set, you would be losing 8 whole boosts, and using the numbers on the same wiki page, that equates to over 50% difference in damage between the Fallen Set and the Valkyrie Set (No, you can't only lose 6 since "that's the Max" ,you are actually going from +4 to -4). This makes it hard to get through the clockworks with soloing being even harder, where one would find great trouble going through infernal stages and arenas (Trojan), not the mention the fact that Silkwings are a common healer found in many stages. You could say that the damage penalty makes up for the huge gain in fire resistance, but the Fallen set also sees a huge loss in curse resistance. Developers probably saw curse as a very low tier resistance (due to the fact that only a Phantom's charge attack can curse you), and thought that this would even out. However, in terms of utility, this restricts the use of one of the best weapons in the game, the Faust and the Gran Faust. A Valkyrie would be able to use a Faust than a Fallen (which seems out of theme), with the Valkyrie experiencing a curse of one item and one weapon for 20 some seconds while the Fallen would experience a minute of all weapons and all items gone. Unless it was the developers intentions to take a one of the coolest archetypes of all time and make it difficult for them to fulfill their time honored tradition (fallen heroes always fight alone :D) and make them a poor asset to a team, I see some balancing issues here. To fix this i propose that at the least, the damage penalty be set to "low" so that the difference between the Valkyrie and the Fallen is "high" instead of "very high". Though it would be to my joy if they were to take out the penalty altogether or even get rid of some of the curse penalty, I feel that the developers want to make a point that the armor is cursed and makes you weak against evil.
As a summary:
Fallen Set=+2 attack speed
Valkyrie Set=+4 damage to fiends / Fallen Set=-4 damage to fiends
+2 attack speed comes with a damage penalty of -8?
A bit faster attack speed does not make up for an over 50% decrease in damage to a hefty amount of the monsters in game.
Solution, decrease the penalties on the Fallen Set.
(numbers from http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Abilities)
(This speel was brought to you by a guy who found writing this to be more fun than chemistry homework and one who has recently made himself a Fallen set and finds the inability to reliably use Faust and the difficulty of fiends to be troublesome.)