Sorry for derailing a bit with my tirade, I just feel like it all goes together. Glop drops are especially miserable, after three spikes they can stick to you like tar if you have MSI+2. If you're focused on literally anything else or get unlucky with two of them picking up that much at the same time, you are taking at least one hit - one hit that is DISPROPORTIONATELY damaging because it's a hit from a buffed enemy.

Spiked enemies being able to claim advantage so consistently just turns every room into either a tedious slog of dividing-and-conquering that slows down gameplay or turns it into a damage race that you're doomed to lose just by the numbers alone. It gets out of hand way too quickly, just like you said - because if it's not the spiked enemies causing the trouble directly, it's the fact that they're concentrating spikes inside groups of enemies and basically getting the chance to pass them to another low-threat enemy you're NOT focusing on. Like, sometimes it feels like you're *effectively* fighting twice as many spiked enemies because each time you deal with one, another moves in to swipe the spikes LONG before you're even ABLE to, becoming a spiked enemy in itself.

I'm facing having to spark in rooms I have never, ever had trouble like this with in the past in MOMENTS. It's DULL. It just simmers down to this boring acceptance that there's just a lot of the experience that has to be ignored or avoided to be consistently manageable.

Edit: I didn't see Bopp's post before I replied. @ Bopp - Thank you. I feel like I'm going nuts; I'm usually pretty consistent solo and I try to be positive on the forums but I haven't struggled like this with an event in a long goddamn time.

Pdtopgun, that's my main response to this event, too. The tactics are so different that it's like a whole new game.

But some of the specific circumstances are out of balance, though. This is why, in the last Spike Storm, Grey Havens disabled spikes on the last wave of the last room of an arena. It was just too crazily hard.

Maybe Cristals spikes should be breakable whit bombs from the player, and interrupting an enemy could break one already adhered to said enemy (Like the third attack of the balanced new cutters).

Idk, there are big needs for tweaks and balancing has well of other details.

A part of me wishes the spike spawns were telegraphed better. Like have it rain similarly to a mortar. If you get hit by it, you collect it. So now it becomes a game of trying to take control over changing areas instead of it feeling like some snowball effect.

As you all mentioned above, it just spawns randomly and more times than not, is super inconveniently placed over an enemy.
While bomber is my main, I've seen my friends complain about it being too punishing for players without CC or playing without a team member who has CC.

I feel like people were running the event on Normal last time because Elite was so miserable in the first place. No balance changes were made but now to get the same (genuinely wild??) number of spikes in a reasonable timeframe, because lesser difficulties *reduced* the amount of earned spikes, (rather than harder difficulties raising the amount) the game seemingly incentivises play on a difficulty that play patterns directly indicated as being unrewarding the first time around. People were playing on NORMAL! And we STILL had an alting problem because the count was so high - the way that this has been addressed this time around really feels ill-considered...

[Edit: I should actually clarify before the rest of the post - I still maintain "people played on normal because the experience was miserable," but to that end I am mostly talking about the "genuinely wild grind" that a mandolin demanded. 7200 spikes is nuts and people rightly switched to normal to speed the process up, NOT to mitigate the difficulty - but the latter point is the body of this post.]

It will perhaps surprise you to learn that I actually started the last event playing on Elite consistently, and went *down* to Normal when told it was pointless in the later days of it. The spike throwing mechanic is the difference-maker for me, and after doing yet more solo testing I can confidently say that I think it tips the balance of control WAY too far towards enemies when I'm playing solo.

I also find myself wanting to agree with Holy after counting rooms that spike enemies before players, but with some very important nuance - I don't actually think it's biased to do that in code, so much as I think the way a player enters a room gives them access to only part of it (as a function of their movement speed), and just as a matter of statistics, the part you aren't in, or can't get to before spikes spawn, happens to be a "larger area" representing "more spikes spawning near enemies." This bias does seem happen, but most likely as an emergent property of a system I have to assume is designed to be "fair" (in exclusively a mathematical sense), just because i don't want to make an argument in bad faith.

Relevant to both the above paragraphs is the reason why I think I object to this iteration of the storm: there was a huge amount of enjoyable risk-versus-reward in rushing into a crowd of enemies to grab spikes before they did in the previous iteration of the spike storm, controlling the threat before it became significant. There was interesting gameplay in taking the risk of dashing into a crowd, leaving yourself out of position and on dash cooldown (thereby leaving yourself exposed to a threat nonetheless, but a lesser one than had you done nothing). You had to choose what enemy would become the biggest threat, and that split-second decisionmaking wasn't hampered by a layer of interaction design that directly prevents it.

Now, that brief delay makes threat management not just "harder," it is at best tedious and at worst unrealistic to impossible. The fact that attacking is prioritised over interaction also means you can't stop your combo without actively hesitating to open a window to grab a spike. More testing would have revealed this, but as the opportunity to exhaust this gameplay problem never existed we're now left with the decisions that have been made, as Fangel already pointed out.

I helped enough people craft mandolins last time by donating spikes to have strong memories of prioritising running towards spikes that a mecha knight was beelining for to get the spike before it did - that opportunity isn't "not present" now, but so much less consistent that saying "the opportunity still exists" is largely academic. I'm reluctant to discard my testimony here on the basis of it being anecdotal or opinion based because, by and large, all testing feedback is, but the summary is "I can't do the fun thing any more that lets me preserve my fighting chance in combat." It's an ESPECIALLY tangible difference in arenas, which I never struggled with NEARLY this much in previously.

Responses in the form of "yes, but you DID switch to normal" are probably still relevant because that represents less practice overall, but I want to emphasise ahead of time that I legitimately believe the event's gameplay is less enjoyable now because of the changes made to it restricting my ability to respond to the buffs the spikes impart - not just because of the fact I have to play on a different difficulty to obtain the same reward. I acknowledge I am not a good player - but I am a bad player trying to exhaust all my options, and I had something kind of working before. That experience is gone now - and that's why I think "Spike event just isn't fun" any more.

Was that true in the previous version of this event? Is it true now? I hadn't even considered that possibility...

Hi, Bopp. Good to see you again (in the forums).
I hadn't played Normal in ages. I just tried it and it was surprsingly easy but also disappointlingly sparse in spikes. I got about 20-30 large spikes per level. I'll try advanced next and compare.