Spiral Knights - My JK/FSC Loadouts~ Suggestions/Opinions?

My JK/FSC Loadouts~ Suggestions/Opinions?

14 replies [Last post]

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 01:27

Darkbrady

(Note: I have no idea how to use the formatting on these forums, so this all looks a bit wall-of-texty atm, so unless anyone wants to explain to me how to use bold/italics etc, this is gunna be a bit of an eyesore to read!)

Well not all, but still! Looking for thoughts, opinions on these loadouts, suggestions if you have any. It's always good to hear different takes on the same strategy that I haven't thought of.
Saying that, I'm not looking for different strategies straight out; that is, I'm not interested in guns at all, and only swords to a limited degree, so suggesting to use a heavy guns loadout defeats the point; I'm looking for different takes and tactics on my current plans.
We basically farm JK for quick, easy money which tends to get funnelled into grinding FSC, to lvl up the weapons we'll be using to make our Vana attempts.

I should note that some of this info isn't entirely accurate yet. The setups are based on what it will be finished; i.e, some of the gear isn't +10 yet, and my VV isn't 5* yet, still being levelled, so the CTR rates etc aren't currently as high as they will be in the listed loadout.

JK Loadout:
Swordbomber:

Full Deadly Virulisk
Barbarous Thorn Shield (via Nicoya's suggestion)
Fang of Vog (ASi:Med)
Venom Veiler
Graviton
Ash of Agni
2x Elite Bomb Focus Modules

In total, this gives all of my weapons Slime:VH damage (which more or less sums up as VH damage for the entirety of RJP) and the FoV is elemental type to deal with any hasslesome lumbers or puppies.
Normal and Piercing Defence are both fairly high, and the shield has solid piercing defence.
The FoV has Medium ASi.
All of the bombs have max charge time, and slime:VH.

Plan is as simple as using AoA, VV and Gravi during RJP; silkwings are rendered useless, mobs damage is reduced and fire spreads like a beast, all while they get sucked into their wee black hole and 'sploded against the walls. FoV helps speed up damage if/when I need it, or run into puppies. Lumbers are easily taken care of with the Vortexes.
JK is a matter of dropping AoA and/or VV, or vials, and unleashing the FoV charge attack. Couple of them and he's dead.

Thoughts:
Better shield than Dragonscale? The piercing defence is high, and the main defence that needs worrying about in RJP, but with no normal defence it breaks easily against anything other than slimes. Short of that, it survives well on slimes, and looks cool as anythin' with my FoV.
Volcanic Salamander? I've been tossing between that. The fire res. would allow me to use the charge attack on FoV more freely, and it would be less of a danger in JK himself (although I make sure I have vials for him, in case I do catch fire), although the fire tends not to be a huge concern on T2 (although I would like to be able to use it more often without concern of immediate death), and the volc.salamander set would sacrifice all of my piercing defence for a defence type that's useless in RJP.

FSC Loadout:
Bomber in the face:

Mad Bomber Suit + Volcanic Demo Helm (fire res:low)
Gray Owlite Shield
Radiant Sun Shards
Shivermist Buster
Dark Briar Barrage
Electron Vortex/Glacius/Fang of Vog
2x Elite Boom Modules

Max Bomb CTR and Max Damage, with minimal fire res (about 1.5 squares).
I think this is the typical FSC Bomber loadout tbh, so I'm not sure if this merits much/any changing, but I don't see ...well, any bombers in game to have any direct comparison. I usually use full mad bomber and only one Boom Trinket, allowing a spare trinket slot (usually that gets designated to Elite Slash, for my sword of choice), but tried FSC with half mad bomber and no useful hat and the fire from that negative res. hurt badly; having full mad bomber there would be a total burn. (/pun) Although I have considered using full mad bomber and a sword trinket, but i'm not sure if that would be worth the extra fire damage overall.

Thoughts:
My 4th weapon choice is a bit hazy for me. I like having a utility sword with me in case anything comes up, but in FSC I do rarely actually use a sword.
Haven't tried my FoV in FSC yet, so couldn't say how well that will go, but a few guildies have said it runs nicely, killing anything fairly quickly, although idk if I can afford to be setting myself on fire down there with such low fire res.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 02:20

Nicoya-Kitty

BTS would be a good

BTS would be a good substitute for Dragon Scale in your RJP loadout. It has enough health and normal protection to tank a lumber hit and a few puppy bullets. The sword damage bonus will also stack you to max vs slime on that side of things.

For your FSC load... From my experience anything other than a full bar of fire protection hurts. A lot. I'd eagerly pass up 4 points of damage and go with just the volcanic demo helm and one CTR and one Boom module. Volcanic Plate Mail is nice if you have a tendency to tank trolljan/mace/debris/guard hits, Grey Feather if you have more trouble with getting shocked by the trolljan farts, or the FSC-standard Vog to give your occasional sword use a buff - ASI should mix nicely with the rather slow FoV swings.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 02:30

Darkbrady

Christ, I have a BTS as well;

Christ, I have a BTS as well; that literally never even occured to me! That's definitely going in the JK loadout :)

Yeah, having the negative from one part mad bomber seriously hurt; about 9/10 seconds and 3 bars per tick? Single fire just aboutk illed me every time. With the Volc. helm I have enough res that it goes away relatively quickly, even though it still burns, although with bombing using RSS and the new slow-mo zombies it's at least pretty easy to keep from getting hurt. Honestly, most of the fire damage I take outside vana is literlaly me just stupiding into fire tiles!
Although my trinkets are both just E-Boom Mods; with max bombs, and the bonus from each armour piece the bombs have Max! CTR already, so the E-Booms and the mad bomber suit keeps damage at Max too.

I wanted to use my Gray Feather, but the CTR bonus just winds up too important to me to have anything other than maxed. I tend not to get hit by trojans too much anyways unless they're in an awkward position. DBB circling just keeps them spinning in circles until they die.

Was contemplating a vog part, but with a mix of not using my sword enough and my bad habit of premature bombdropping on non-max CTR bombs I just gave up on the idea.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 03:30

Fradow

Let's start with your JK

Let's start with your JK loadout :
- Deadly Virulisk is ok, but your bombs don't benefit from damage (status bomb only benefit from damage for the tiny initial blast, and graviton is not a real damage bomb either). It is good because of piercing resistance for RJP, but you could use half Volcanic Demo, to be able to change a trinket for something else.
- Dragon Scale is horrible because of no normal defense. In T2, everything do at least half normal, and many things to full normal (mini-jellies, blast cubes). You should take a normal/piercing shield instead. Either BTS to benefit your sword(s) or Ironmight for more defense.
- Fang is bad, even more because you don't have fire resistance on your armor (so you can't use the charge that much, which is the only good part of this sword). You should take either a brandish if you like 3 swing swords, or a sealed sword if you prefer heavy sword (Fang normal attacks are as slow as heavy sword, and hit as much as fast sword .... not a good deal).

For your FSC loadout :
- armor is good. If you die because of fire, consider switching to full Volcanic Demo or get fire UV, but it's perfectly doable with that armor.
- your bombs are ok, but beware, DBB don't knockdown zombies down there, making it a little harder to use than usual.
- Fang of Vog is a big no here too. The fire property become useless, and it's worst than other available elemental sword. Its only use is to OS slags with charge in P5, and i doubt you need that.

More generally, a crucial bomb is missing from your arsenal : Voltaic Tempest. You may not know about it, but if there are more than 3 enemies clustered together, Voltaic Tempest outdamage Ash of Agni in RJP (I did the calculation with data available on wiki, assuming both have the same tick timer). It's a VERY good damage bomb for RJP, and is also good for FSC. I usually run RJP with Ash and Voltaic, and everything die VERY quickly (i use swords on JK tho). It also pairs very well with Graviton due to shock AoE property.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 04:01

Darkbrady

Deadly Viru: I use it both

Deadly Viru:
I use it both for the piercing defence amount and the slime bonuses. It helps keep the sword damage upped nicely and lets my Graviton bomb stay high; it generally is more a control bomb than anything, but I do use my vortexes very offensively and the damage stacks up well; so a max! damage boost counts for a lot for me to do that.
I could use a half Volc.Demo helm to get my fire res up for the sword and keep my CTR, but then the damage on both my Graviton and sword would drop; I wouldn't know what to use the extra trinket slot for, whether it be an elite slash or boom; one of the two will suffer. Would probably wind up using the slash I suppose. It's definitely an option I'll consider, especially since my helm has fire res.

Shield:
Agreed; already switched it out to BTS as per Nicoya's suggestion.

FoV:
I use it moderately in RJP itself; it helps me keep decent damage on the lumbers and puppies being elemental, and whenever i do hit a slime my damage will be high because of the set. I could use another sword, but I quite enjoy the fire effect happening randomly. The sword is slow, but with a ASi:med on it, it's swinging nearly as fast as regular brandishes, which I'm happy enough with. I'm using it primarily for the charge effect on JK himself, who gets trolled to the ground faster than any sword or bomb I've ever used against him.

FSC Armour:
I think my bomber soul would die if I lost all the stats from mad bomber suit QQ
I have fire:low on my hat, and when I can afford to UV spam I'll be aiming for fire/shock res on both parts, certainly. As things are I can tank the fire to a liveable degree (mainly only because I don't get caught on fire that often, to be fair; I'd never survive if I got hit more than I do!) so I think things will only get better as I start getting better fire UVs.

FSC Bombs:
I have the DBB purely for trojans; DBB spinning them lets me kill them without them ever taking a swing, and for the single room that wolvers appear. For zombies I don't even consider DBB, I just use RSS and that shreds them to pieces, and is especially easy since the latest patch.

FSC FoV:
I've not tried it myself yet, so this is all speculation. I have heard people who love using it down there, but I guess since they're usually swordies (and thusly I imagine using Vog Cub) it's more reasonable to do so.

VT/AoA:
Not tried it yet tbh; I've been incredibly unlucky finding any recipes for the VT bombs so don't even have mine 4*d yet (never been in a mad rush for the shock bomb, since I use mainly damage bombs coupled with shivermist or vortexes, one of which causes shock for me anyway) so never known to try it out. Can always give that a try instead of the VV, see how well that flows. Might be nice to double up the damage. Will give it a shot once I get it to 4* :)

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 07:26

Bopp

just skimmed

I admit that I've just skimmed most of this thread, but...

RJP: FoV regular attacks stink (except for setting things on fire). And you don't have any shadow weapon, which is the obvious choice for killing a bunch of slimes. So you're going to be killing all of those slimes using Ash of Agni? Most of the damage comes from the fire status, which isn't affected by your armor damage bonus. FoV charges are good against the big enemies in RJP. But you have no fire protection, right? So you're toast? And you have a vortex bomb, but what are you going to charge into it? In short, your loadout is interesting and will work, just because RJP is so easy. But it would be better if you replaced one of the bombs with an Acheron or Gran Faust. And Barbarous Thorn Shield is a no-brainer.

FSC: I've seen people use FoV to great effect against trojans. I'm a little worried about what you will do when you're surrounded by zombies, without time to charge a bomb. You'll have to cut your way out with FoV, which has terrible regular attacks, especially since the fire doesn't work in FSC. I don't know how good DBB is against Vanaduke. You say that you're bringing it for trojans. If that's so, then definitely bring Glacius instead of FoV.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 07:50

Darkbrady

@Bopp: The FoV works well

@Bopp:

The FoV works well against the slimes just because it essentially has max damage. It hits slow, but with the damage (and the fire effect at that) the slimes all die before my combo ends, no question. (1~2man party; not tried 3~4 yet; don't quote me for full parties!) Sure, that would be more than possible with an Acheron and slime:max, but acheron against JK himself just sin't as juicy. And I don't use swords in RJP much regardless.
The AoA helps just to keep things on fire and burning, but it's just a DoT for me; the main damage does actually come from Vortex, much to apparently everyones surprise. I'm not sure how many others use it, but I use it very offensively and watch entire groups die pretty fast with it, and in a much safer circumstance than when I ever tried using swords.
The FoV over my acheron is primarily for JK himself, who drops in like 30 seconds with it. I don't even use bombs in there. the lack of fire protection is a bit of a problem, but since i mainly use bombs in RJP I always remedies for JK, and even at that, being T2 the fire doesn't hurt badly enough to not be worth using at all. I can self-fire a couple of times with no remedy/pot and survive through it.
BTS is a no-brainer in need. I honestly have no idea why it didn't occur to me.

For FsC, never tried DBB against Vana...really should; using RSS against him is a total hassle, I usually just let others do the dpsing for him. Glacius is what I've been using until now and it's been working nicely, as has Electron.
As for being surrounded by zombies...honestly it hasn't really come up. Shield-bumping is usually a solid last resort, but even so, RSS charges up pretty quickly and with a short fuse it tends to 'splode everythin' nearby. If they're close enough that it's a life-or-death situation, then they're close enough to get totally minced by the bomb.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 08:54

Darkbrady

I think my main question now

I think my main question now is really about the set for JK.

Is making a Volc.Salamander set worth it, to keep the slime bonus and a brilliant fire defence, at the cost of the entirety of my piercing defence? As things are, slimes can still knock a hard punch when they get in groups, so throwing away all of that should be upping my damage intake from them by presumeably 50%, which is pretty harsh..but it would open up the door to spam the FoV charge more often.
But then again, they die quickly either from my gravi or a couple FoV swings so..is even worrying about using the charge actually worth the effort?

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 09:44

Bopp

forum destroyed my post

The forum software destroyed my post somehow, so I'm retyping this...

"The FoV works well against the slimes just because it essentially has max damage."

I don't understand what the phrase "max damage" means in this sentence. Does your FoV have a Damage Bonus versus Slimes: Maximum! that I've missed? Or do you mean that the damage bar in the item display is maxed out? Those are notoriously inaccurate. Or do you mean that FoV does as much damage against slimes, as any other weapon does? That is not even remotely true.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 09:48

Bopp

AoA, vortex

Darkbrady, I fully agree with you on using AoA in RJP. It's extremely effective. Although Fradow argues that Voltaic Tempest can deliver even higher damage.

Most people use vortex bombs by releasing sword charges into the vortex. This prevents the bomb itself from doing much damage, but lets the party do insane damage as a whole. But if the vortex works for you as a damage bomb in RJP, then don't let me stop you. In the end, RJP is so easy for a player of your caliber that the equipment doesn't matter much, really.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 10:05

#10

Darkbrady

FoV: Yeah, because of my

FoV:
Yeah, because of my Deadly Virulisk meets Snarby shield, my FoV has Slimes:Max! which means that it hits them for pretty high damage, enough to kill most any slime in a single combo in my usual 1~2 man parties. It works well with me, allowing fast, easy kills if I ever need to use my sword, as well as letting me spread fire without needing to use AoA.

AoA/VT:
Was curious about using VT as well, I will have to try it at some point, but for the time being, Basil does not feel like selling me the 4/5* recipes, so I'm at a brick wall just now as far as a fair comparison goes.

Vortex:
Yeah, in big parties I don't use it quite the same, because people will always attack into the crowds (and yeah, it does work out well, not complaining), but when I'm either solo, or with my gf (with which we've got each others tactics put together in a co-efficient fashion), I use them very heavily and allow the bombs themselves to deal their full damage, which seriously stacks up fast while denying monsters (except lumbers QQ) any real chance to ever fight back. my gf launching her acheron charges into the mix generally guarantees eveyrthing dies fast.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 10:19

#11

Scottish-Archer

my JK: deadly set,

my JK: deadly set, DA/triglav/voltedge, acheron, BTB, shiver/VT, whatever shield im feeling like.
my FSC: vog, DA, btb, shiver, voltedge, volc plate shield

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 10:42

#12

Bopp

just to finish this

I think that there's not much more that needs to be said in this thread, but just to finish off one detail:

You have Maximum! damage bonus against slimes, which is great. But it's not down to the virtues of FoV; it comes from your armor, and would apply just as well to any other sword. A shadow sword, or even an elemental Brandish or DA, would do even more damage against these slimes than your FoV. Your FoV is "good enough" against these slimes, simply because RJP doesn't require very good equipment.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 11:25

#13

Darkbrady

Oh yeah, certainly; damage

Oh yeah, certainly; damage with my acheron is absolutely beastly against them, kills far faster than FoV.
However, the main reason I'm choosing FoV is actually the JK himself; being a bomb-heavy loadout I don't actually use swords much during RJP, so the only time sword really matters is at JK, where FoV far exceeds Acheron.

Hoowever, because of that decision Ii've been trying to make best use of it during the RJP levels, and letting the easy ability to start fires mix with my vortex spams, and letting me knock heavy sword damage into vortex mobs without KBing them out of the explosion range and saving the need to switch to AoA.
Overall, it's working better than Acheron, because after this stage the damage is actually redundant; when something dies in one-combo there's no need for it to die in a swing faster, especially when you're losing out on settin' the place on fire :D
The elemental bonus also helps keep on up lumbers/puppies, where acheron lacks. Ik that my Glacius would do that too, but then being weaker on slimes than the acheron and having no great ability against JK would make it the worst choice of the three regardless.

Sayin' that, you're right. Had a lot of very useful and constructive ideas from you all, and a couple of them will need to be seriously considered and tested, so thank-you all for input :)
Any more thoughts are, ofc, welcome.

Thu, 01/12/2012 - 23:09

#14

Stavrosg

FSC

In FSC, I allways have my VT on. In most rooms there the zombies are packed together, it does a ridiculous amount of damage with the shock spasms being close to 1-2/sec. I also had problems with fire, so I have vog coat (fire med), volc.demo helm and 1 elite bomb focus to get my ctr to max.

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My JK/FSC Loadouts~ Suggestions/Opinions?