Your 3 questions are just too large, considering the number of armors. And the whole topic is moot considering for the very reason you say (offensive game rather than defensive), those armors are not going to be considered. And even if it wasn't the case, most are just badly designed or simply not the best at any significant niche, thus not worth considering.

It's honestly pretty hard to evaluate armors without more concrete, quantitiative info about the game. There's several pluses and minsues we haven't measured, and several considerations that could weigh heavily either for or against some of these exotic options, depending on details that don't really know.

Ironmight and Volcanic Plate normal defense bars go past the visible range. Has anyone combined one with a non-normal armor and checked your overall defense to calculate how big those bars actually are? It's hard to judge how useful the extra defense is if you don't know how much you're getting, but my guess is that these two are actually very solid defensive armors, having considerably more total defense than other armors in exchange for a relatively minor penalty (that can be offset with trinkets, and doesn't even affect bombers). If you can tolerate the speed drop of using a sealed sword instead of a brandish, I think you can survive the reduced attack speed from these armors.

Of course, most players are just going to go straight for offense, because extra defense doesn't really matter once you have enough that you don't need to use energy revives. But if we allow that "defense-oriented builds" should exist AT ALL, then I suspect we'd have to consider these very viable options. I'm considering crafting one piece of Volcanic Plate for use in SFSC, where I imagine survival will be a serious concern (but this won't happen any time soon...)

We're missing a shadow equivalent. That suggests either that OOO doesn't consider this armor style important, or maybe just that their armor development is arbitary and disorganized; I'm not sure which.

For Ancient Plate, I measured the bar length myself. Unlike the others, it doesn't seem to offer more total defense than other armors, it just concentrates it all into normal (and gives some extra health, in exchange for reduced movement and attack speed). You pay a steeper penalty than you do for Ironmight et al, and I suspect you get less out of it (though it's hard to tell without knowing the actual bar length, and the health/defense trade-off depends on available healing).

Also, all of these armors run the risk of giving you more normal defense than you truly benefit from--latest data suggest defense is flat, and (anecdotally) that you can likely reduce the normal component of many tier 3 monsters' attacks to zero (or whatever the minimum is) with substantially less defense than a full Ancient Plate set would give you. All three of these armors (but especially Ancient Plate) would become a LOT more attractive if there were some armors that gave super-high NON-normal defense to mix with them.

For example, if there were piercing, elemental, and shadow equivalents of Ancient Plate, then you could get an Ancient Plate Helm plus a torso piece of each of the others and create a "full normal/special armor set" for each damage type by crafting only 4 total pieces of armor (instead of the six it currently takes), and they'd all probably have more utility for other niche builds than "normal" armors would (especially in PvP, where pure special damage is more common). That might be attractive enough to overcome players' reluctance to accept reduced speed. But currently, it's not really possible to get concentrated defenses against any type except normal, and I'm not sure there's any place that you actually want that (anyone with Ancient Plate clearly doesn't need it for tier 1; maybe for levels with lots of gremlin thwackers, except that gremlin-themed levels actually seem to spawn mostly constructs).

So for now, it seems Ancient Plate is a solution in search of a problem.

But notice that several of these conclusions are based on current theories (or outright guesses) about the way defense works and the quantity of defense and damage of various types in various scenarios. Much of this could still be completely wrong!

So...you're looking for people to make wild guesses based on how we imagine the designers might have screwed up the balance?

I mean, if you have actually personally USED several suits of armor over a long time period in a variety of circumstances, then your "gut feel" for which of them is better and why might carry some weight. But you didn't specifically ask for people who'd used these armors, and I'd guess that even a rich, long-time player has probably used less than a quarter of the armors in the game, so if you intend to comment on ALL of them, I'm forced to assume your comments are just based on their tooltips, which means details like "what exactly defense actually DOES" are literally the entire basis of your analysis.

If you don't know how much a piece of armor actually improves your survivability, you can't possibly know whether it's worth the drawbacks, unless your opinion is that NO amount of defense would be worth it, in which case you really aren't providing any information beyond "always go for offense", as you criticize others for doing.

"The type slayers all get an offensive bonus vs one type" - oooh I get it now. It that case you missed one: divine veil. Tricky because only the helmet in the set has the fiend bonus.

I didn't mean that you criticize others for going offense, but that you criticize others for failing to provide any deeper analysis than "always go for offense".

And I never suggested that all armors were balanced. But you're snapping off comments like "I'd probably up the typed defense on Ironmight and Volcanic, at least a little." That implies that there exists some amount of defense they COULD provide that would make them worth it, and that they're slightly below that threshold right now. But you don't know their current total defense! You have decided that their defense is too low without even bothering to check what their defense IS.

That's the kind of thing that happens when you just go with gut feel, especially when your gut feel is based just on a toolitp and no firsthand experience. It gives people the illusion of information, but it's actually just bluster; players trying to pick an armor are almost certainly better off NOT reading it.

Based on our defense tests, Ironmight/Volcanic Plate could plausibly save you a full pip of health on virtually every hit you take in tier 3, when compared to basically any armor with the same defense types. If you don't think that's noteworthy, it's hard to imagine that more than a couple of your armor reviews will have anything noteworthy to comment on.

On the other hand, they also could plausibly save you virtually nothing, depending on how how far that defense bar goes beyond the event horizon and precisely where the soft cap on normal defense is located. Which is why I say it's very hard to draw any firm conclusions without more data.

I do think it's worth noting that an unheated Ironmight provides at least 34px more normal defense than Azure Guardian (and equal piercing, and better status resistances), which means that if Ironmight is NOT good, there must be a VERY big balance problem with Azure Guardian, trinket balance (5* defense trinket = 28px), or both.

"I just think that if you're gearing up in tank gear, you probably expect to have superior defenses which allow you to take, say, 50% to 100% more hits at the expense of your offense."

IMO, suggesting that a 4% drop in attack speed should be compensated by a 100% increase in survivability is basically saying that you'd never even consider a tank build unless it were egregiously overpowered.

Sure, attack speed helps you dodge, but do you honestly believe one rank will let you survive 50% longer? How many speed ranks above a sealed sword would you say a brandish is, and what do you expect in compensation for using the sealed line?

I can't imagine any rational basis for this number--nor can I imagine how you've concluded that they are currently below this amount BUT that adding a few pixels of special defense will get there.

"But it's pretty clear that there IS a threshold for normal defense of some sort (otherwise Ancient Plate would be invincible)"

What? That doesn't make any sense at all.

Ancient Plate provides roughly the same total defense as other armors, just concentrated into one type. If there were NO threshold for normal defense, then Ancient Plate would be roughly as good as wearing some other random armor whose defense type matches the level theme--it would just have the advantage of being useful in a wider variety of levels (and you'd trade some speed for some health, not defense). The only place you'd expect it to be godly is when facing PURE normal damage--and my understanding is that it actually IS godly in those rare situations (though I don't have firsthand experience).

Ironmight and Volcanic Plate provide more total defense than Ancient Plate--or any other armor in the game--by a noticeable margin (we're not sure exactly how much). AND a substantial part of that defense is typed. So if you use them in a level where the piercing/elemental is actually useful, it is entirely plausible that they will provide substantially better protection than anything else in the game--even if Ancient Plate hits the threshold (Ironmight still might not) and even if Ancient Plate were unimpressive when it didn't hit the threshold (it has less TOTAL defense).

"In short, if Ironmight were overpowered, someone would be using it"

That's plausible, but there's also several reasons why that might not be true, including (1) most people blindly go for offense, (2) it's really hard to tell how good they actually are, and (3) however good Ironmight and Volcanic Plate are, they're vastly better than the 4* version and below, making them hard to discover.

And armor doesn't need to be overpowered to be viable. You need to be prepared to divide armor into more tiers than "the best in the game" and "NOT the best in the game" if you expect doing detailed reviews to be any help.

Vog Cub is the only armor in the game that provides ASI medium to swords, and one of only three that provide ASI medium to anything. If you don't gain enough defense by switching from a full set of Vog Cub to, say, Grey Feather to justify losing 4 ranks of sword speed, that indicates that Vog Cub is overpowered, not that Volcanic Plate is weak.

If you compare all armors to whatever you consider is the best armor in the game, and basically say "they're not as good", you really aren't telling us anything except that Vog Cub is your favorite. Nothing that you have said precludes Volcanic Plate from being WELL above-average, yet you gave it a negative review and said virtually nothing about its advantages. That means your standards are set too high to tell us anything.

Also, I'm sorry if this wasn't clear, but my "saves 1 bar per attack" comment was an estimate based on a mixed set with ONE piece of Ironmight/Volcanic Plate--hence the 1 rank of speed lost (compared to MOST armors).

//Do they need to be nerfed? Perhaps, but they work pretty well and nobody's going to be happy if they're weakened. So the alternative is to improve every other armor in the game to bring them in line with the top.//

No, no, no. You don't find a handful of clearly OP armour sets, then say that every other of the (iunno, 50?) armour sets need to be changed to suit THEM! You make the minority armour, the OP armour weaker, that's what a nerf is. No one likes nerfs, but it's all about balancing. Look at the discussions on gunner threads after all. Decent gunners all say that gunners are actually fine the way they are, they can get high damage and can avoid damage, but their problem is that they don't compare to swordies. Gunners who want their sets to be improved to medium only say so because swordies get medium bonuses and they get low bonuses, which is hardly fair. Swordies to get bonuses thrown at them with no negatives, so why should they be so OP as to make gunners feel redundant? (Yes, I'm aware that bombers get a lot of medium bonuses, but we do so at a very high cost, whereas swordies get medium bonuses on top of...well, just other juicy bonuses).

The clear answer to that conundrum is to nerf the swordy armour. That way the swordy armour is placed in line with the rest of every other armour set, stops gunners feeling redundant and introduces more balance to the scenario. Why should every single piece of armour be changed to suit a handful, when it's the handful that aren't right?

Don't be having an attitude like that when you're trying to be analytical, or this entire thing is just gunna finalise in "oh well, doesn't matter in the end, I'll just stick on my Snarby armour and call it a day."

I, for one, would be happy to see the 5* sword armors nerfed, even though I have several of them and use them regularly.

In fact, I'd actually like to see all weapon-dependent armor bonuses (whether for sword, gun, or bomb) completely expunged from the game.

The current design strongly encourages players to coordinate their weapons and armor, which locks them into using just one set all the time, which is monotonous and truly not conducive to the publisher's obvious goal of getting us to craft several different sets and switch off between them. I'm sure someone sometime THOUGHT it would get players to craft more armor, so they could have a sword set AND a gun set AND a bomb set, but it's actually used as a reason to craft FEWER sets, because a weapon bonus works in all levels, and in any case there are ways to diversify armors that would make the gameplay better instead of worse (if any devs are reading this and need ideas, PLEASE contact me). If you feel it's important to let players specialize in one weapon type, it's a far better idea to allow that specialization via trinkets (or any of several other methods) than via armors.

As for whether to buff or nerf, you should do the one that takes fewer development resources, so you have more leftover for improving the game in other ways--this will usually make everyone happier in the long run (even the people who complain about the nerf, even if they don't see the cause-and-effect relationship). That's not as simple as deciding which option requires you to change more armors, as either option could require cascading changes to weapons, monsters, and/or level design to keep everything balanced--and in any case, the number of things changed is often less significant than the complexity of the change (making all weapons 10% stronger is probably much easier than giving the Faust a 4-hit combo, for example).

But commentary isn't about choosing a balance point, it's about illuminating the current state of affairs, which usually makes average power a pretty darn good reference frame even if the average power isn't balanced. The point isn't that Volcanic Plate should be buffed or nerfed, it's that you didn't identify or explain its current strengths, you didn't evaluate its current power level in a way that is useful for comparing it with other armors, and then you shrugged your shoulders and said "um, give it bigger numbers." That isn't helpful.

Sorry. That was definitely not the goal.

Oh, I'm totally in favor of handing out LARGE bonuses, as long as they're balanced and make the game fun. But bonuses that lock you into a specific build and punish creativity are bad whether they are large or small. And even if they don't lock you in, trading off between raw offense and raw defense is a pretty shallow choice and very difficult to balance.

I made a list at one point of a bunch of interesting abilities that could be given to armor and shields that would supplement their core functions instead of just transferring power to a different aspect of your character. Posted them to Suggestions; got very little response. Of course, most of them require actual work both to implement and to balance--I don't think it's a huge amount of work, but Spiral Knights seems like a very frugal game in terms of development resources.

But even if you're barred from adding any nontrivial code to the game, I'd think you could do things like "this armor has super-high resistance to a bunch of different statuses, but lower defense" or "this armor resists all damage types, but has lower health". I don't think they've exhausted the interesting combinations of existing effects that are possible.

Let me see if I can be productive for a bit...

So, I measured the defense bars on all the 5* armors and entered a bunch of their information into a table to look for patterns. As you might imagine, there are several.

It looks like the BASELINE ARMOR gets:

• 126px of normal defense
• 110px in one other defense
• half a bar of resistance to one status effect
• an offensive ability (there are actually more armors that have some flavor of offensive ability than not)

Then I tried to decide what trade-offs you would hypothetically need to decide were "balanced" in order to permute this template to get the various armors that exist--what advantages the devs seem to have decided counter what disadvantages. There are several interesting patterns...though there are also several armors that appear to just be arbitrarily better or worse for no reason that I can see.

Looks like:

medium weapon ASI ~= medium damage vs. monster class ~= low weapon damage
I think most would agree that this isn't actually true in practice, though you can see how someone might come up with it: one damage rank boosts your DPS about twice as much as one speed rank, a weapon bonus applies to 1/3 of all weapons, a monster bonus applies to 1/6 of all monsters.

• But swords get medium damage instead of low. Maybe because they're (arguably) the most dangerous weapon to use, and get more fringe benefits from speed?
• And gunner armors all get screwed on resistances. Maybe because "you get to stand far away" is considered as good as a resistance?
• Only bombers get CTR armor, and it's medium on the helmet but low on the torso. I guess they wanted a "1.5 ranks" thing, but you'd think it would be obvious you should move some of the helmet's defenses to the torso piece to compensate..?

If you accept normal as your lower defense (110px), your special defense gets to be 135px instead of 126px, but you lose your ability.
Except for the Mercurial Mail, which gets move speed low. The others in this set all do get a second resistance, but in one case that extra resistance is to Sleep, and the others each also have a negative resistance. This seems arbitrary and harsh.

If you have no normal defense at all, then both of your special defenses are 126px.
Though these sets are kind of weird. Divine has an ability only on the helm, Dragon Scale has an ability only on the torso, and Radiant Silvermail doesn't even have a helmet. Also, Dragon Scale gets 1 resistance, Silvermail gets 2, and Divine gets 3, with no apparent compensation for this difference. I got nothing.

Then there's just some one-off stuff...

• The Fallen set gets a low universal ASI and an extra resistance (arguably balanced by a negative resistance, but the negative is Curse). But it has 110px for both defenses, and a medium penalty vs Fiends.
• The Chaos set gets a low universal damage bonus, but it has 110px for both defenses, and medium negative resist to all 7 statuses. Even if you think damage is twice as good as speed, I'd say that's pretty steep.
• The Mad Bomber set gets medium bomb CTR *and* damage, but has 110px for both defenses and medium negative resist to the main 4 statuses. Because low damage on all weapons is totally better than medium damage AND charge reduction for only bombs.
• Ironmight and Volcanic Plate get a substantial amount of extra normal defense (not sure exactly how much), but get low attack speed reduction instead of a positive ability. Volcanic also gets an extra resistance for some reason.
• Ancient Plate has 242px of normal defense, which is ever so slightly more total defense than most sets have, and it's all normal. It also gets +3 health, but instead of a positive ability it has -1 speed for both movement and attacks.
• Azure Guardian gives up its resistance AND its ability for...+9px of normal defense.
• Valkyrie Mail has 110px normal defense instead of 126px, for no apparent reason.

Also, most Shadow Lair armors get some small extra bonus

• Snarbolax gets an extra half a resistance
• Arcane Salamander gets its second defense boosted from 110px to 126px
• Mercurial Demo gets two abilities (!)
• Ice Queen gets its special defense boosted from 135px to 147px, plus an extra resistance

On the other hand, Almirian Crusader and Heavenly Iron seem, if anything, a little bit worse than their closest cousins. No idea why.

Some conspicuous gaps...

• There's a Fiend damage set, two Slime damage sets, and an Undead damage set (plus Silvermail), but only half a Beast damage set, and no armors that give damage vs Gremlins or Constructs.
• Radiant Silvermail has no matching helmet.
• Even if we consider Almirian Crusader to be the shadow equivalent of Azure Guardian, there's no elemental equivalent.
• There's no shadow equivalent of Ironmight/Volcanic Plate.
• All of the "super ability" armors (and I use the term loosely) are either elemental or shadow, no piercing.

Oh, looks like the bonus is listed on the page for that specific item, just not in the helmet table. Of course, there's still the issue that anyone specializing in fighting beasts will want piercing/normal defense instead of piercing/elemental.

I don't really count Arcane Salamander, though, because (1) it's a shadow lair armor, (2) it's got low vs. two monsters instead of medium vs. one, and (3) it has the wrong special defense type for fighting either of those monsters. Pretty much the only reason I could see taking it is because it basically has a little more elemental defense than standard armors (bit over a low UV's worth).

I'm not an expert bomber, but bombers tend to like movement speed increases (Mercurial) and to dislike movement speed decreases (Ironmight). I can't imagine why you'd choose Ironmight at all, but maybe I just lack imagination.

The bigger question is why you're choosing these armors, over armors that offer offensive bonuses to your bombs (or swords, if you use those for "melee"). It seems that most serious bombers use bomber armor, even though there are no piercing or shadow options. Or you could use Skolver or Justifier (and Barbarous Thorn Shield), to get piercing defense with offensive bonuses to your other weapons.

"I already have my bomber set maximized, I just want a solid, jelly defensive based set."

Why based on jelly? Or did you mean piercing?

"I really do not care about melee damage bonus, since I never finish my attacks anyway.
I tend to use the ghost attack of my cutter weapons A LOT ;p"

I don't know what it means, to not finish attacks. You mean that you don't finish the combo? That doesn't matter. Damage bonuses work on every stroke. If you use your Cutter a lot, then a sword damage bonus will help a lot.

Anyway, you're not interested in that advice, so I'll just reiterate that your getting Mercurial makes far more sense to me than Ironmight does.

He already has "maximized" bomber gear. For some reason, he really wants piercing protection, and he really doesn't want it to come with any sword or gun bonuses.