What exactly does elite mode do?
jeu, 11/26/2015 - 10:57
Once, I wondered what elite mode and the whole system of difficulty actually did, so I checked the wiki page on difficulty. http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Difficulty
Here is the stuff I get:
"Difficulty simply influences the odds of getting the best of those possibilities(of a pool of drops)."
Okay, so it has a better chance of getting the best loot. It's a bit confusing at first, but understandable.
"Enemies will have more health with higher difficulty"
Well, duh.
"Certain status conditions will be more intense on higher difficulty."
No wonder mecha knights deal statuses lasting for 15 seconds.
Now here is the stuff I don't get:
"Traps deal a different split of damage depending on difficulty."
Wait, just changing the split damage? Is it just for traps, or also for enemies?
How exactly is the damage affected in elite mode?
-Pery
mar, 12/08/2015 - 09:53
#2
This is what I speculate to be the case, I don't have any solid proof but I did some monster damage tests a long time ago and found that the damage of what should be pure specialized damage was less on Ancient Plate Mail when in Strata 5, and it also seems far easier to wear the right equipment (even taking into account the inherit damage resistances on lower difficulties) on easier difficulties, most likely due to the prevalence of normal damage.
As you get deeper in the clockworks, the many attacks gradually shift from being pure normal damage, to pure specialized.
This ratio is further modified by the type of attack (I presume most melee attacks have something roughly around double the normal:specialized ratio than ranged attacks) and the difficulty also applies a hefty modifier.
Let's just say for example, we have three depths: 19, 20 and 21.
Say a retrode's beam attack, on those depths, deals 80:20, 82:18, and 84:16 specialized to normal damage, respectively, on Advanced.
On Elite, they might deal something like 90:10, 92:8, and 94:6 specialized to normal damage.
(similarly, the Retrode's melee attack might do something like 40:60, 41:59, and 42:58 on those depths on Advanced, and 45:55, 46:54, 47:53 on Elite)
You can see this occuring in Tier 1 on Elite, monsters start delivering specialized damage well before when they would on Advanced.
I have never seen a detailed test or documentation of this. But if you believe what players say on the forums, Elite mode causes a lot of normal damage to be replaced with non-normal damage. For example, a construct that deals a mixture of normal and elemental will instead deal more elemental.
If you could find more detail, then that would be interesting.