The split damage types fit perfectly into the game, except for the bit where they had odd interactions;

As a complete over-simplification:
Super effective = +65 damage
Normal effective = Normal effective
Not very effective = Significantly less than 65 damage

So...

Super + normal = +65 (x2 from damage up!) = Really really effective; like brandishes.
Super + not very = Pretty Ineffective
Normal + not very = REALLY not very effective

If we really wanted to make them, we should put them on par with the other ones, and just create new damage types that use existing values. These would then be placed onto rarer weapons.

For instance-

Piercing + Shadow = Jaded damage
Elemental + piercing = Holy damage
Shadow + elemental = Chemical damage

This would allow us more options and would expand gameplay by a bit. Enemies could potentially deal them, though perhaps they would have to team up with one another some which way? And then they would just deal split damage as one would expect.

Retro Sun Shards or bust.

You got your Piercing/Elemental wrong

What it should be:

-Strong ve Fiends and Undead
-Neutral vs Beasts and Constucts
-Weak vs Slimes and Gremlins

Perhaps there will be introduction of new dual armors?

"Ideally, it really should simply change the enemy families affected by the combination."

Let me explain this to you again.

How the game is coded: (an example with made up numbers for the sake of being an example of why it isn't simple)

Enemy Slime Cube:

Normal defense = 100
Piercing defense = 300
Shadow defense = 35
Elemental defense = 100

Damage taken = based on the above values, via a semi-complicated formula that boils down to basically (damage - defense) with some extra bells and whistles to prevent negative damage and too much damage and what have you.

How the game isn't coded:

Enemy Slime Cube:

Normal defense = use neutral formula
Piercing defense = use resisted formula
Shadow defense = use weak formula
Elemental = use neutral formula

Damage taken = based on which formula was followed.

You cannot receive consistent results with this

Because you cannot just say-
Piercing + Elemental = Neutral. Done! Not hard at all, right devs? = Consistent with normal damage

Instead you have to say-
Piercing + Elmental = Good + Bad = Bad overall. SOMETHING HAS GONE TERRIBLY WRONG! = inconsistent with say, normal damage.

What I wanted was for the devs to just make new damage types that represent the various split damages. They could have the bars lie to us and show them as being "split damage" and then just have the resistances set up accordingly, but I'd rather the game tell players what's what instead of misleading them. So instead of "it does split damage", it should be "it does holy damage, which behaves like split damage might."

This would make your idea play out exactly as you want it, rather than just having it be a mess.

Nope, not percentages.. just straight up subtraction, but I believe it is more complicated than that when you have high/low damage.

Another thing is that you have the weird mobs like Vanaduke and the tortodrone that don't fit into a family per resistances. What damage would a tortodrone take from elemental + shadow? Does anyone know? I know that he resists elemental but not shadow, but he doesn't have the standard amount of either defense.

To make this, OOO would HAVE to find a way to fix this. They could potentially add in the other offense type, invisibly.

So like, argent might do:
120 Piercing
120 Elemental
40 Shadow (hidden)

This *might* work out if they tweaked it enough, but I wouldn't know. But even if it did, the weapon would become far too incredible for lockdown and people would then go complain about how OOO needs to change that too.

They could redo the way that all of damage works to a newer, better system. But then that changes the balance on every single piece of gear, and despite what we are inclined to believe, the gear in Spiral Knights is relatively balanced. I see people choosing to use all kinds of things outside of brandishes and alchemers. Sure there are some weapons that are redundant and strange, but there are far more that are actually viable. Making a new damage formula would likely take a while, and isn't really necessary.

What they *could* do is to add a layer onto the damage formula and change dual-damage. That would probably be their best move if any, actually. So like, instead of storing how much piercing defense, it would store that it is weak... then when the special cases came up, it would be able to jump to them and say ah, this is like normal damage. Of course.

The weapons in Spiral Knights are not nearly as unbalanced as people would make them out to believe.

Swords that are great options:
Brandishes
Divine Avenger/Gran Faust
Flourish/Barb thorn blade/Rigadoon
Fang Of Vog

Even Sudaruska, Triglav and leviathan blade are fairly useful as sidearms for gunners and bombers. The only thing that's really missing here are flamberg, the cutters, and that's about it. The few things that are truly poor need reworking, but these are relatively the few. Armor on the other hand is more of a mess, but weapoons are relatively fine. They could certainly be more fine. I would very much like for them to be more fine. But they aren't the biggest issue.

So it's just weapons you say... even so, when you say "fairly balanced" means that they're unbalanced to some point and makes the term quite ambiguous, or at least thats how i feel it.

and i would remove rigadoon from your list of things that are "fairly balanced", it's just like a flameberge but with stun... sure you can argue that fire is just damage and stun is different as it cripples monsters and makes them easier to control, but the chance is really low, and it's randomness makes it very unreliable as a status inflicting weapon, much like DvS's poison (maskeraith also made DvS redundant as in inflicting poison), there are just way better means of dealing status, so even when you do land stun/poison on some enemies i'ts just going to be useless, it's 1/16 chance as the wiki says it is,the pure damage counterparts are almost always a better choice. And yes, i did have a Fearless Rigadoon once, but once i saw how underpowered it was compared to the Final flourish i sold it... to vatel... because it was just so worthless.

Same applies to sudaruska and triglav, they deal very similar damage compared to DA and GF, but the problem is that they're Horribly slower than them, and lets not forget that special damage > normal damage, even when fighting resistant monsters a DA would be a MUCH better weapon than a Troika sword, just because it's charge and normal swings are safer, specially on the charge, a troika charge leaves you open for quite a good time, where as DA can safely knock back enemies without risking the user so much... if at all. and thats another factor of why brandishes are so popular, they're safe and they deal high damage, plus their charge attack can inflict lots of statuses, troika line swords are both poor on safety, damage and charge... actually the only charge that's worse than a troika is the GF (well not really, that would be the cutters charge but we're talking on heavy swords here) charge wich takes insanely long time to charge, while moving at a slow speed leaving you vulnerable for enemies to easily hit you,to get a chance of cursing enemies, and get cursed yourself... and even then you have to endanger yourself AGAIN by letting enemies attack you to actually make the status work... lawl.

After that add add Pepperbox ,Callahan, Iron slug, irontech destroyer and big angry bomb to the useless weapon list and we're done.

Thus, this is the balance that Fehzor is talking about. Just about every weapon fits into a niche.

Ok this is what i still don't get about that, why would you have a "specialized weapon" that requires lot of skill or UV's to be useful only in certain little situations while other weapons can just do better pretty much everywhere and with little effort? that i cannot consider true balance... it isn't balance.

And i have no idea why you're mentioning triglav's knockback when i said in my previous post that a DA can knock enemies back aswell and even better, in a much safer way, also it's funny that you mention the triglav, that one sword that can freeze enemies right in front of you and let them throw a projectile while your knight is about to rise it's sword back afther the strike, moreso if it is a devilite, besides, unlike sealed sword line swords, the troika only knocks back enemies that are left inside of the explosion radius, that happens to be about a grid ahead of the knight, so anything that is left on your sides or close in front of you (wich is fairly common thing to happen with that kind of sword since the first hit of the charge has no knockback whatsoever), will most likely hit you, making it's knockback redundant compared to sealed sword line.

I respect your point of view, but i cannot agree with it still.

Now don't get the wrong idea that i have never used such weapons, i find DvS very useful for certain things like playing around vana on it's first stage while comboing like a maniac cause the sword lets me move around him to avoid his hammer while constantly striking on him, or using maskeraith damage bonus cloak to get insane damage on the mask, luckily, the spiral gods blessed me with a CTR VH cutter (or cursed me, it's very hard to tell) same applies to gunpuppies but you have to be careful not to get in front of the bullets way, heck i even got to chain-freeze a trojan to death with my triglav's charge (you could say he had a taste of his own medicine), but that's just when i get bored or something, when i am playing seriously i'd never touch those weapons because i know they are simply not worth trying.

Well thats about enough derailing for now... i kind of have a thing for derailing threads... i need to stop. XD

This is so off topic, but I can't help it. Sorry, OP. I tried my hardest. On the bright side, your thread is getting a good number of free bumps.

Think of the brandishes as the training wheels of weapons. They're good and useful in a lot of places, but they aren't nearly as strong as people make them out to be. Have you ever seen people using combuster against vanaduke? Of course not. The player should have things like the brandishes because they feel good, and they're effective... which is what you need when you're mediocre at the game- weapons that make you feel good and function well under most circumstances.

Then think of warmaster rocket hammer. New players aren't likely to get this because it comes from DLC and that requires more serious investment. Warmaster rocket hammer can out damage the brandishes by a bit if used correctly, but it requires much more finesse and even then, cuts out the crowd control aspect of the sword... but do people use it? They want that extra damage, so of course they do! And then you have things like turrets and deadnaughts that really benefit from using the rocket hammer over the brandishes.

Final flourish and fearless rigadoon also have a peculiar balance to them. Final flourish is always better for damage, especially against a single target. But what if there are greivers respawning, or you don't need to kill them? Like during the tortodrone fight, you might want a flourish to help you swat away the devilites and nothing more. You could use the extra damage, but stunning the devilite would take it out of the game for like 5 seconds, allowing you your opening. If your main source of damage isn't your sword (gasp!) then you might want to have a rigadoon instead of a final flourish. That devilite would die regardless to your endless supernova spam, so the extra damage would have been meaningless. Likewise, the grievers are weak to stun. Using your sword on them for the stun could allow team mates to kill them, put them off of you, whatever you need.

Sudaruska/Triglav are good weapons when used correctly. You don't usually want them as your main thing, but they have a pretty swell charge that can save you as a gunner on things like compounds and even arena levels. The normal damage plays relatively well on them. They could stand for a buff on their damage, but then all heavy swords could.

The problem with the cutters is that by the time you get to the point of using them, they're overkill. They ramp up with damage faster, allowing you to kill priority targets of ANY TYPE extremely well. Except this isn't really that useful, because if you know what type the target won't be, then brandishes can out damage it and provide crowd control. The problem with flamberg is that it deals fire damage, and that most beasts and fiends and even gremlins are resistant to it. Its exactly the same problem that ionized salt bomb had before becoming a worse version of dark retribution and voltaic tempest.

I would agree that there are problems with a number of weapons, especially bombs. But even so, there is a certain balance between them that does work, and we shouldn't act like literally nothing in the game is balanced, because that's ridiculous.

Bombs are far less balanced than swords are, but even so- dark retribution, nitronome, the haze bombs, and the vortex bombs (minus graviton) are all balanced. This leaves the shard bombs, graviton vortex, irontech and bab. These are mostly just failures of other lines, and irontech/bab have even been buffed unsuccessfully-- they are still obnoxious, not very damaging, and generally counterproductive. They aren't entirely un-useful either though. The shard bombs are... probably the biggest issue with weapon balance right now. Its only one failed line, but its one that OOO won't touch for whatever reason, and its one really just needs to be redone in some way. Not necessarily redone entirely, just with damage values and mechanics. It comes close to being useful, but then falls short.

As for guns.. well, they're being changed as we speak. Though most of them work out too. Even blitz needle and pepperbox... pepperbox because it's normal shot is actually viable, as you can use it to light things on fire.. and blitz because it makes you hold still and that's a huge balancing factor.

the damage was porbably the same, so you just have to subtract the defense. remember to subtract quite a bit for resistant.