lol, it's as powerfull as any other sprite. And you're basing all of this on a single enemy, not in the game as a whole.
Of course a fire sprite won't be optimal on a fire lair :P

My maskeraith can't poison toxigels. Invisibility breaks in 1 hit, while your flame barrier can take more punishment.

draycos, I'm not entierly sure of juances' gender.
besides, drakon needs a buff, yes, but the other sprites do too. up to now it's balaced with the other sprites, but overall sprites are not balanced.

http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/86002

It doesn't need a buff. It's great.

Plus we can choose another Sprite eventually. When more come out.

drakon's damage rely on his fire. which, erm, is useless in fire levels. maskeraith and its poison don't have this problem. drakon does.

except you can't use firestorm while you are near a wall, and firestorm can't even touch undestroyable objects.

Oh no, I linked to my topic that has lots of discussion, observation, and comparison to show Drakon is the worst Sprite, I'm a terrible person. I don't need to link to someone else's topic in order to give relevant, proven information. You'll find that other people have made "buff Drakon" threads, too.

That topic you linked doesn't prove anything.

@Juances Firestorm fizzles if aimed at any barrier, or if you use it with a wall behind you. I don't think Sprites should be balanced around bugs, either.

@The-Mighty-Potato: The OP of the topic you linked doesn't have much merits. Fire does not do 103 damage per tick except against zombies, because zombies are weak against the fire status (except Slag Walkers and Carnavons). I have a T3 Drakon, and its fire (EDIT for clarity: FIRE STATUS) only does around 40 in T3 against basically everything. Unless Drakon users are meant to be zombie slayers or something. The Flame Barrier usage listed there is limited to a certain weapon, which not every Drakon user may have. The last point about it having less cooldown than other sprites does have some merits, but imo, that's only useful if you literally want and need to spam Drakon's skills everytime the cooldown hits 0, which obviously isn't the case since the player themselves can do stuff, since they really need to rely on their sprite at every moment. It does come to use when the counter hits 0 when you conveniently need it though. If you really want to prove it's good, you should list some of your own points instead of just linking that.
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Another thing to note is that just because a single sprite is the only one that's not bugged, it doesn't really make up for balance issues, since when bugfixes come in, that becomes completely moot. Bugs are things that were not meant to happen anyways.
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Now my opinion on this... One of my issues is that its advertisement is a bit off. It's stated that Drakon is an offensive pet that relies on power, as all the pet food implies ("power , for sprites that focuses on raw power") and as it was stated in game and out that it was an offensive pet. The fact is, it DOES NOT focus on raw power to deal damage. It relies on a status effect called Fire to deal good damage. Remove that status effect from it and you'll find its power pretty lacking. Is it an offensive battle sprite? Let's take a look at it's skills (ignoring ultimates right now).
Fire Bolt: It's a projectile attack that can inflict damage, and can deal fire. Also useful for hitting switches seperated by gaps when you don't have a gun.
Flame Barrier: Raises your defense (which to be honest, the defense it gives minimal), and creating orbiting fireballs around you that can deal damage and set things on fire.
Firestorm: You create a field that can set things on fire.
Since the fire status IS in fact an offensive oriented status effect, and the fact that two of the attacks can deal you can say it is indeed made for offense. Is its offense good? In fire stratums, it's basically useless, but that's because it's a fire offensive pet (not a power one as the game is trying to advertise it to be). Also, if you have a weapon that can inflict fire, Drakon will not be very useful for you. I'll ignore what the game is trying advertise it as and pretend it was stated to rely on fire to deal good damage. So it's all good for now. Time to compare it to other sprites in terms of offense (ignoring all their ultimates, because sprites shouldn't absolute need ultimate to be able to do whatever they're meant to do).

Comparing Drakon's projectile attack to each other sprites' projectiles.
Firebolt vs Ray of Light - In terms of damage, Ray of Light wins if you get in all the hits. Ray of Light can outdamage Firebolt whether or not Firebolt burned its target by T3 (unless Firebolt burns a zombie). Ray of Light wins defensive as it can be used defensively in certain ways and can push enemies back, but that doesn't really matter since we're comparing offensive uses. Firebolt wins in terms of range/distance and cooldown (IIRC, might actually be wrong about this). This means Firebolt has a situationally better if you happen to not have a gun and can't cross a gap too far for Ray of Light to hit, but that's situational, so Ray of Light wins offensively (to me anyways).
Firebolt vs Caustic Quills: Caustic Quills does not inflict damage itself, but if you detonate all quills, then it can outdamage Firebolt regardless of the fire status infliction. Caustic Quills can also inflict poison, which although can be used offensively, I'll consider it a debilitation class status instead of offensive. Firebolt is more accurate, has more range (IIRC), can break blocks focus its all damage on more enemies at once (well two at most anyways) and less cooldown (don't know if this is actually true though). Firebolt wins this one.

Comparing Drakon's second skill to the other sprite's second skills offensively.
Flame Barrier vs Heart Attack - Since I'm only comparing them offensively, Flame Barrier wins by default, since Heart Attack doesn't do anything offensively. It's more useful support wise vs the defense buff since the defense buff barely does much.
Flame Barrier vs Shadow Cloak - I don't know if you can use shield charge during cloak (aka use shield to cut off the first attack of the weapon without disrupting cloak). If you can, Shadow Cloak wins, and if you can't then Flame Barrier wins offensively. Shadow Cloak is more useful utility-wise (since it's a repositioning skill that can give you a good advantage provided you use it right), but let's not care about that at all.

Comparing their last skills.
Firestorm vs Angelic Aura - Unconcluded. I don't know enough details about Angelic Aura to do a comparison offensively (Angelic Aura sounds more useful usage-wise though).
Firestorm vs Hexing Haze - Hexing Haze wins this one. The fire status effect itself can't outdamage Hexing Haze, and even if Firestorm has a smaller cooldown, I highly doubt whatever enemy/enemies you're fighting should still be alive by the time either of these skills are done with the cooldown, unless you're playing extremely defensively, can't seem to kill them for whatever reason or it's a boss of some sort.

So what does this mean? It's arguable that Firebolt is a bit lacking in damage. Flame Barrier wins in terms of damage in comparison to the other second skills (in my opinion though, it's not very useful if at all, since the defense it gives is barely noticeable to me and the fact that you have to literally stick to the enemy to deal good damage, which is hard since a single hit from sword that's not a striker-line weapon can knock them out of range, and some enemies are hard to stick to, but I'll assume I'm not using it properly for now). Firestorm... Don't know, but in terms of usefulness to me, it's practically useless.

My largest problem with Drakon myself is that Firestorm without its ultimate is almost useless in comparison to the other two skills that Drakon has. All it does is burn, while the other two skills can do the exact same thing, and with less cooldown. Sure, it has a decent wide range, but the fact is you wanted to, you can walk around with Flame Barrier around a certain crowd of enemies along with inflict damage to them and Firebolt does damage, can go over gaps and is much more spammable than Firestorm.

Is Drakon actually balanced in comparison to the other sprites? I won't know. I have a character with a Maskeraith, but that'll be quite a while before I raise its level high enough to compare (The info I got about the other sprite's skills is from other sources, but I saw firsthand that Ray of Light is stronger than Firebolt). You guys can all prove me wrong about the skill comparisons and whether Drakon is good or not or whatever. My main two issues I'm most concerned about for now is the fact that it's not really a "power" offense battle sprite as advertised and stated, and that Firestorm is basically next to useless. Drakon focuses on burning enemies, not raw power, but the info on it states otherwise. Firestorm needs revamping.

First off, I couldn't care less when it comes to how many people say something as long as it's still valid. Also keep in mind that General Discussion is a more popular board than Suggestions, and people have more to post about concerning flawed feedback/suggestions compared to more refined topics. I don't care how many people think Drakon works fine. I know Drakon needs buffs, because I've run all sorts of stupid tests.

Alright, let me tell you why it proves nothing. These are the only two points in the thread that I can see:

1. Firebolt deals decent damage (220 + 300 from fire [on most enemies, when using the right damage type])
2. Flame Barrier can potentially deal a lot of damage, and is great for swords that you need to stick to enemies with

And here's my responses.

1. Copypasted from my thread: "I feel as if the Meteoric Firebolt upgrade makes it a decent skill to use, but it still feels very weak. The most damage I've been able to get out of it is using an Electron Vortex... and ironically, i'd deal about the same amount of damage if I kept spamming my Vortex instead of stopping to cast it, or twice as much if I used a single hammer-dash. I still think it needs a boost in power." Additionally, 5* sword swings deal more damage than a Firebolt would, even if you mixed the Firebolt in between your attacks; you literally do more by ignoring it. This is ignoring charged attacks, where Meteoric Firebolt loses out again- yes, my vortexes were outdamaging my Firebolts, unless I was getting extremely lucky with fire procs.

2. More copypasting: "Flame Barrier isn't effective where it counts: enemies that can actually fight you and have reasonably smart AI, like Jellies, Gremlins Thwackers, Mecha Knights, Almirian Crusaders, and anything else that'll mess you up if you stay close to them for too long. This restricts you to using it on stationary or massive enemies, like turrets or lichen colonies. A boost in damage reduction would allow you to take some hits in return for dishing out some big damage. Ramping the % up to somewhere around 50% sounds bad on paper, but look at 20% and see how it doesn't actually help you. In T3, it's unlikely that 20% will let you make even a single extra mistake. Think of it like a Fang of Vog charge attack- you trade some of your health dealing massive damage to prevent you from taking any more damage."

Later: "Flame Barrier is extremely risky to use on the enemies that are reasonably difficult, with a 20% damage resistance that ends up being negligible (but might be a lot better with overshield mechanics). However, he gains utility that nothing else does in the form of massive MSI bursts with the Backfire Barrier ultimate." In other words, in reasonably difficult levels, the only things this is good for is for being a kamikaze (which is stupid) or for getting boosts of speed (which is pretty underwhelming).

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"It's not bad at all."
Prove those raw-number tests in that thread of mine wrong, if you think I am.

"Angelic Aura doesn't last long enough."
It's also bugged and STILL works better than Firestorm, especially with the CTR ultimate (Valkyrian Aura?). Did you know that Disintegration Ray is more powerful than Firebolt, especially with the same vortex approaches?

"Shadow Cloak wears off if you attack."
Yeah, it also removes any aggro enemies have on you. Deadly Cloak gives you ~medium MSI and a massive attack boost that stacks past the typical Low/High/Max system. A friend of mine did over 6k with a Blitz Needle and appropriate gear.

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I don't need multiple people to say the same thing I am for me to make sense or to have valid points. But, just throwing this out there- a lot of the stuff in my thread, mainly the comparisons between sprites, was thanks to some of my friends (Quotefanboy/Qwote, Heimdallr).

I have a level 100 Drakon and here is what I think: Note I will be talking about MY ultimates only:

Concussive Firebolt: WHEN it stuns it is great as I can easily finish off the stunned enemy, fire+stun is also very nice.

Scorching Barrier: Honestly Backfires MSI increase is so short it is pretty situational, and when using Scorching with Cutters or Brandish normal attacks this just decimates the enemy. In Stratum 6 it gets 120+ (effective) damage AND fire damage, not to mention the defense boost--even though it's slight it is still something.

Explosive Firestorm: 50 damage per effective explosion is not weak by any means. This annihilates stationary/slow enemies, and in compounds it's just flat out amazing.

All in all, I just have one thing to say: Battle Sprites are made for SUPPORT, not to be your only weapon against enemies.

Double Post

Here's the deal.

For the sake of balance, Maskeraith's damage abilities have to be stronger than Drakon's damage abilities.