So apparently, damage that's either good or bad against a monster group is NOT multiplicative it's ADDITIVE. This makes no sense at all! Instead of doing, say, double, damage, you do a fixed amount of bonus damage (based on tier and monster type, I guess)
I've never played another game that does this. It makes strong weapons almost pointless to specialize damage, and weak weapons almost require it!
And don't even get me started on the wonky "defense" system monsters use...
We can tell this bothers you due to how much you noticed it before I told you.
Well excuse me for not being clairvoyant. I can't exactly be bothered by something I don't know about.
Battlegrinder, the point is that damage should increase linearly, not by a fixed number. I should get a proportional bonus no matter what weapon I use, I shouldn't be penalized for using strong weapons.
The system isn't set up to penalize people with stronger weapons, it was set up to keep weapons with lower base damage balanced and make specialized damage useful.
Also, this still isn't a suggestion. Move it to general discussion.
You're saying a blitz shot gets the same amount of damage added to it as a BTB swing against beast enemies?
1. Move this to a appropriate sub-forum
2. Stop complaining and accept how it is
That's right. Excep Blitz Shot gets it added 15 times because 15 shots.
The current system makes high-damage weapons all-around good and low-damage weapons exceptionally good against their intended targets but less general purpose. At least in theory. I think it adds some variety.
If the defence system worked with percentages, what would distinguish a fast sword from a slow sword? You'd just figure out which one is best and stick to it.
"If the defence system worked with percentages, what would distinguish a fast sword from a slow sword?"
How it feels to use it?
Dat terrible, terrible post.
What would distinguish them practically? Let's say you have two guns. They're identical except for two things. One does 25 damage four times per second while the other does 100 damage once per second. Seems balanced, right? In SK's current defence system, the heavy gun is just better, but in a percentage-based defence system, the fast gun is going to always be better because you get more opportunies to use it and you can move out of danger more quickly. In terms of DPS, they're the same but fast gun is safer so fast gun is better.
But then you could just make heavy gun stronger right? Give it 140 DPS. That'll balance them? Except now fast gun is the worse choice. It's more defensive but us SK players dont' really care about defence. If you don't use heavy gun then lrn2play, scrub.
I'm sure you could work it out by balancing out the weapons in some manner or other, but it'll have to be balanced according to the defence system used. In Spiral Knights, all the weapons, armour and sprite abilities in the game have been balanced with a subtractive defence system in mind. Changing it around wouldn't just mean changing the defence formula around, everything would have to be re-balanced with the new system in mind because it's all going to get thrown out of whack. ASI is going to be better than damage bonuses by far because 4% damage bonuses are only better than 4% speed bonuses in a subtractive system. You'll have to buff damage bonuses. Or maybe you nerf ASI? What do you do about CTR? Monster health? How much defence should things have in Lockdown? And invinciframes in Lockdown are going to shaft fast weapons even more than they previously did with a percentage-based system. Oh man, Blitz Needle will be a mess. Right now defence reduces Blitz Needle much harder per charge attack than it does for Sudaruska, but with a percentage-based system either Suda is getting nerfed hard or Blitz is getting the uber-buff to end all buffs.
Why were we doing this again? Because Larry is kind of bothered by the system now that he knows about it? Even though everything was working fine in practice? People are clearly happy using specialized weapons, it's working for them, so it's not like special damage is pointless or anything.
"In Spiral Knights, all the weapons, armour and sprite abilities in the game have been balanced with a subtractive defence system in mind."
Implying the game has been actually balanced.
Most people use different weapons based on how they feel, like comparing AP to Polaris, unless there's a massive disadvantage in DPS to using one or the other, like what exists for a whole heck of a lot of weapons.
The game is dominated by fast weapons and charge ups, because balancing around around normal damage and then getting additive damage on striking weak targets, which is how the game functions in reality, favors faster weapons and tons of hits.
kham, explain why DVS is not the most used weapon in game. unless you use flourish on constructs, which are pretty much always found in almost every stage.
in fact, most used weapons are brandish and sealed lines, that are respectivly medium and kinda-slow speed. practically, because they can dish out so much damage that they can OHKO weak targets, while leaving stronger ones dead in 2-6 hits.
also, most used gear in the game is not the asi gear, but chaos and skolver, which give damage.
for charges, yes, chaos gives CTR max. but it's not that, it's the charge that's unbalanced. you see what charges are used? brandish and sealed lines? they carry on damage. so much damage that they can kill everything.
Don't forget the Blitz Needle. One charge of that thing with a Chaos Set can kill a Trojan in an Stratum 6 full Advanced party, and on Elite it can also do it with a 3 player party. (But I think that if you have the Chaos Set and throw in an Elite True Shot Module, you can one charge kill a S6 Trojan with a full Elite party).
I guess what Zeddy was implying is that Blitz Needle is actually hit hard by the reductive damage? If it had a damage nerf, it would do no damage whatsoever to enemies with high piercing defense. Except for the fact that defense drops off at a certain point... then it would probably do the same damage to regular enemies than it would to resistant enemies...
@Khamsin
"Implying the game has been actually balanced."
Which it has. The game has received a large amount of balancing patching. If you don't believe me, simply go through the announcement forum and search for words such as "balance", "balancing" and "adjust". You will find that the dev team has made a lot of effort in this direction.
Are they done balancing? Is the game balanced? Hell no. But to say that the game hasn't been balanced is crude and misleading. Wild Hunting Blade used to be the most overpowered sword you could find anywhere, did you know that? The damage was a lot higher than its previous state, and every single hit with the charge attack was so powerful they could even interrupt Lumbers. Freeze used to inflict damage upon enemies when you broke them free, making shivermist buster most likely the highest-DPS support weapon you could possibly find. And then there's the other end of the scale. Skelly suit would have negative fire resistance. Final Flourish used to have the range of a Troika. Autoguns used to be suicide buttons as the damage was low, the charge times were longer, the attacks were slower, you moved slower during charges and could not move at all while reloading them.
Sure, some of the buffs and nerfs they've done were a bit heavy-handed, but there were efforts towards creating balance nonetheless.
@Hexzyle
Blitz Needle isn't hit nearly as hard by the resistance system as, say, Volcanic Pepperbox and Plague Nedle. Each charged bullet from Blitz overshoots the damage of most other guns and is comparable to swords. The thing could definitely take a nerf without any problems. I'd say reducing base damage of the charged bullets by 9% would be plenty.
That number isn't pulled out of thin air, by the way. Prisma Driver has 15% more base damage than Magma Driver. Same with Rigadoon vs Flourish. Meanwhile, Blitz has 25% more damage than Plague. Prisma vs Magma (or Storm as it were) is one of the few examples were people can't quite point to one and claim its better than the other without caveats, so they seem to be balanced examples we should strive to follow.
"Why does SK have such a stupid weakness/resistance system?"
^^^
Piercing:
Skolver - Freeze
Deadly Virulisk - Poison
Mercurial - Shock
Dragon Scale - Fire (But no normal)
And so on...
No resistance = about 10+ more seconds of resistance.
A) You do understand what a suggestion is, right? If you want to complain, go over to general discussion.
B) Having the current system give weaker weapons a competitive advantage against strong ones is a bad thing....why, exactly?