Spiral Knights: Now with ALL THE DANGER

[Smashy]

A huge update happened a couple of days ago that greatly increased the playability for those without elevator passes, so I'm going to poke around for interest on this game.

For those that haven't played before: Spiral Knights is a top-down action MMO that is comparable to the older Legend of Zelda games.  Using swords, guns, or bombs, you fight your way through the ever-changing Clockworks, crafting new gear and facing increasingly powerful monsters as you advance.  For instance, a basic sword can be upgraded to launch fire/electric/freezing waves and armor can be crafted into different variants (such as the bomber armor being upgradable into a fire-resisting variant or a "glass cannon" variant with poor status resistances or a variant that increases movement speed), while enemies gain new behaviors (wolves, for instance, will eventually learn to dash around ranged attacks and then burrow underground as a form of teleportation) as you advance through each tier.  The game is mostly PvE, but a couple of PvP modes exist: "Blast Network" (Bomberman, basically), and Lockdown (point-capturing mode with actual combat).

There is also a non-zero chance of death by stapler, so be warned.

For those that have played before but quit, a bit of a timeline (excluding most balance changes) so people are slightly less "omg what does this do where did this go":

• Nov 16, 2011: At the beginning of most levels, there is now an Arsenal Station that you can use to change and (as of Battle Sprites) level gear (more on that second one in a bit)
• Dec 12, 2011: EU servers added (same account works on EU and NA, it's just a switch in the options), Scenario Rooms were added
• Dec 19, 2011: Drones added: Obstacle mobs that move in a set pattern and can only be damaged at specific times.  Usually only drop hearts and are sometimes immortal.
• Feb 22, 2012: Missions!  Until later updates, these were mostly storyline quests. Also contains the Hall of Heroes, where all non-boss/PvP recipes can be found. Also changed the Antigua upgrades to single damage type guns
• Feb 29, 2012: Operation Crimson Hammer added, the first (and currently only) Expansion Mission.  Note that OCH is controversial because it contains three equips only obtainable from that mission.  You can trade Energy for it via Steam.
• April 18, 2012: A bunch of knight customization stuff: Previously you could change your personal color, now you can change your height and eyes, with some options being buyable with crowns and some being found in Mirrored Lockboxes from the Prize Wheel.
• May 9, 2012: Only exception to the balance change thing: They buffed all bomb damage by 15% and gun damage by 10% uncharged, 20% charged.
• June 19, 2012: Party Finder added, letting you see parties in progress around your rank
• June 28, 2012: The first Danger Mission, Legion of Almire, added.  Danger Missions are two-floor Prestige Missions that are very difficult but contain a reward level afterwards with a ton of red treasure blocks.  LoA is undead-based.
• July 25, 2012: The next Danger Mission, Compound 42 added.  This mission is Poison/Fire-based, with Gremlins and Oilers as the main enemy groups.  Is also total hell without Dragon Scale set. Danger Missions now go through a cycle each day.
• Aug 1, 2012: Heart of Ice, the third Danger Mission added.  Freeze/Fiend based.
• Aug 8, 2012: Shard Bombs changed entirely.  General consensus is that they were nerfed to oblivion, as not only are they much harder to use effectively they also have a buggy hit limit.  There IS a bomb for every damage type, making it the only viable Shadow damage bomb outside of OCH
• Sept 12, 2012: Ghosts in the Machine, the 4th and currently last of the Danger Missions. Shock/Undead/Construct theme.
• Nov 14, 2012: Guild Hall update added.  It is now customizable, and can have functionality added to it like vendors, storage, and an auction house.
• Jan 30, 2013-Feb 13, 2013: Kataclysmic Confrontation event, although it's closed for now.  Added a new boss and some new helmets.
• April 3, 2013: UI Overhaul
• April 10, 2013: Compound levels added, with new "mini monsters" added that are weak individually but spawn in huge numbers.
• May 1, 2013: A new fiend mob, the Gorgos, added.  Greavers moved to "Elite mob" status (aka ohgod fiend/undead arenas)
• May 22, 2013: Two new knight techniques added: a Dash that gives you a quick burst of movement on a 10s cooldown, and the Shield Bash that charges forward stunning and knocking back all enemies hit at the cost of half your shield

And that leads us to two days ago:

• Battle Sprites were added.  After doing a few low-level missions, you will obtain your choice of three battle sprites.  These sprites can assist you through their abilities and through Perks that add passive bonuses (such as increased health or damage vs specific families).  Sprites are fed materials to level up, and will change in appearance as they are levelled.
• Mist Energy has been completely nuked.
• The energy cost for elevators is gone completely.  You can play as long as you'd like now!
• The energy cost for crafting has been replaced by Orbs of Alchemy.  It takes three of the specific tier of an orb to craft an item, and orbs can be found in treasure blocks or purchased at the Supply Depot.
• Revives were completely overhauled: The first death of a level will result in an Emergency Revive, restoring up to 30 pips of health.  After that, the only way to revive is to spend a Spark of Life (or pay a flat 50 energy fee if you're caught without any) or get an ally to use a Spark on you.  Sparks are found in treasure blocks or can be bought in 10-packs from the Depot. The Spark revive does come with a massive attack buff for 10 seconds. HP-share revives are completely axed.
• Gear levelups were revamped too.  You level an item to a full heat bar as usual, but after that you must head to town or an arsenal station to use the Forge. Here, you spend tier-specific Fire Crystals (they drop in packs of 3 from treasure blocks or can be gotten from the Depot) to level up the item.  Spending more crystals can grant bonus perks such as accelerated heating for the next level, skipping a level entirely, or getting a prize box with a bunch of items.
• Difficulty levels have been added, and as you can guess upping the difficulty improves drops.
• All loot is now instanced.  This means no more pill hogging, but it also means that any loot that drops must be manually collected.

Spiral Knights is available on Steam for free, or directly from the site at www.spiralknights.com in a browser version or downloadable here.

IGN is Volkani if you want to poke me.

[hyorinryu]

Is crafting items still a pain in the butt? Like, if I wanted to make a Divine Avenger, I'd still need to pay copious amounts of energy for it. Not that I didn't read your post, but I didn't understand it very well.

[Smashy]

Yeah I had to go do something or I would have slapped a tl;dr in the post, but there is no longer an energy fee to crafting.  You now use three tier-specific Orbs of Alchemy as a crafting mat instead.  For those that want to rush out gear the orbs can be bought in 3-packs for the old crafting cost, but you can now find them in the clockworks as well.  There's also a Hall of Heroes that lets you purchase most recipes without having to deal with Basil.  The general rule here is if the gear you're making is upgraded from a boss token equip, be prepared to pay some visits to the auction house or Basil.

The new bottleneck is that it takes much longer to heat items, due to one heat level per clockwork level.  This has sorta killed FSC for heating: It's a great source of Radiant Fire Crystals on Elite due to the amount of boxes, but you can no longer level items in the middle of a boss strata.  You also get lots of orbs from missions: For instance, the two rank 5-2 missions leading up to the Royal Jelly both give enough Advanced Orbs to craft a piece of gear.

Speaking of: Gear is now gated by missions, instead of missions/clockwork depth being gated by gear.  You need to reach rank 3 (which is conveniently now after the Battle Sprite missions) to equip two-star gear, rank 5 (after the elemental/piercing monster tutorial) to equip three-star, rank 6 (post-RJP) to equip four-star, and finally rank 8 (after going through the tier 3 elemental/piercing monster intro) to equip five-star gear.

(Sadly, by losing Mist Energy you now have to pay for slot unlocks at full price, but this update did cause a dip in energy prices for now)

[hyorinryu]

Oh, thanks, I understood some of that, though when I stopped when a bit after Lockdown came out. Grinding in Arenas took a long time. I never got to the third series of dungeons as a result. If there's a decent amount of people interested in Spiral Knights though, I'll gladly give it another look, since that's pretty much how I decide what I play.

[Third Eye Lem]

If I wasn't hooked on MapleStory right now, I'd consider playing this. It looks like a good time to jump in.

[hyorinryu]

I played it again for the moment. It's fun, but not something I'd do a lot.

[NegaZero]

Suddenly this game got 100% more playable for me. I got stuck in progress after tier 2 dungeons (I think) because I refused to pay for the crystal energy I needed to make tier 3+ equipment.

I'll have to start playing this again after reading the changes. It's too bad Dragon's Crown comes out in two days, though, because that's going to be taking up most of my free time.

[Smashy]

Last night, I attempted some speedruns.  Online Games Done Quickly 2014, clearly.

As for the results?  Was winning the first speedrun, right up until Snarbolax.  Snarby RNG promptly kicked in and he took so long to actually attack that we lost.  To be honest I think Snarby's the third worst boss to speedrun, only ahead of the Roarmulus Twins that can decide to take forever if the first head you put into phase 2 never moves to the center.  Snarb's just buggy in general and evidently has some RNG with deciding to bite you.

And then RJP 100% kills happened.  The sad thing is that while I had a couple of bad timewasters that were entirely my fault, I don't know what I could have done about that Lumber on the first floor.  If he had stuck around in the room that alone's sub-17 minutes.  Followed up by 25 seconds of big delays later and only being at Ultra mattering a lot more than I expected and yeah :V  Now I just have to figure out mist bomb only RJP.

Also I just added 30 Valestone to the Sapphire Falcon's strata 2 to turn it into freeze as well along with everything else.  Come at me  :justasplanned:

[Bio]

So is Divine + Skolver still the goto armor set?

e: with this lag the battle sprites are bugged out as hell

[Smashy]

With Arsenal Stations, generalized loadouts like that one are much less common (I'd run that setup in a fiend level, but that's about it).  Nowadays the best way to go about it is to take a combination of whatever will best boost your loadout for the level and the relevant status resist with the shield blocking the correct damage type and hopefully the correct status, unless you have something like the Chaos set (and yes it did get buffed) in which case you take that and go ham.

I do recommend making an Owlite and Skelly Shield, and if you can get to it a Heater Shield isn't a bad idea either.  There's a surge in Freeze levels with green and blue minerals having a surplus due to not being sprite food, making Skelly the ideal shield for Undead/Fiend levels and some form of Elemental shield required to not die to an instant Lumber guard crush (which they will do if they're not the basic type and get double status proc)

EDIT: Bugfix patch today, mostly dealing with maxed-out sprites.  I'm guessing there'll be at least one more (for perks in LD, being able to overlap Healthy Boost and another perk, and the strange mat drops like wood from jelly cubes) and then maybe OOO will work on something else.

[hyorinryu]

Is there a way to rank up quickly, I'm annoying that I can't use my Volt Driver.

[Smashy]

Missions, pretty much.

Also, after a few bugfixes/annoying hit effects having an option to disable them, there is now a login event lasting until the 14th, giving out sprite food, sparks of life, and a chance for rarities.  Also sales for all rarities and a few rare accessories

(Energy prices have actually risen to 8.5k, too.  I guess unlimited levels>two big energy sinks being cut down, along with the accessory sale)

[Kingault]

I was going to install this game when the energy removal update occurred, but I kinda forgot about it.
Well, time to try it.

[Smashy]

Probable next thing on the list: These things

Current Energy prices are still floating at 8450 because someone put a 4.5k wall on that, although it's been cut to 2600 now.  Dunno where they'll go now because the promo came so fast after the change but it certainly isn't going up.

[Smashy]

http://puu.sh/47rGk.jpg

It's baaaaaaaacwait I was only barely here for this and I don't think anyone was here for this at all so yeah explainstuffs while I hear Mewkats mew in the background constantly.

1) http://puu.sh/47rGk.jpg

This guy sells the base hoods (at 3*) and a material that is used in further upgrading these things.  There's a swordie hood with ASI Low, a Gunner Hood with ASI Low, and a bomber hood with CTR Low.  They are Shadow/Normal with a high Freeze resist but negative Shock and Curse resists.

2) http://puu.sh/47sH3.jpg

The alchemy machine for upgrading the hoods.  At 5*, all three hoods gain a gear-relevant Damage Bonus Low.

Now you need Ancient Pages to make these (buying the hood and getting the materials required to upgrade).  How do you get them? Beating up Kats.  But not just any Kat...

(While we wait for pics, MOBA characters discuss arenas) Welp needed a Keep but A Black Kat that can curse and summon curse zombies.  There's also a prestige mission for them.  In general, you want to look for Undead arenas (T1 and T2 Onyx Lion for instance), Candlestick Keeps (they're the pawn levels), Dark Cities, or a Scarlet Fortress for a high concentration of Kats. The black kats can also drop a book, but when that happens the event will be streamed because

Spoiler:

you take it to the Conjuring Mewkat

Spoiler:

to spawn a boss

.

[Bio]

Grinding for rare drops the video game.

[Third Eye Lem]

Grinding for rare drops the video game.

I thought that was MapleStory...Except it's for skillbooks or familiar cards.  :derp: Still, how "bad" is the grind for loot?

[Smashy]

Discounting the Black Kat event, there is some grind for getting equipment from boss tokens.  If you're starting, I highly recommend getting the shield and bomb from the tokens that Snarby drops, which is 6-7 runs.  Getting rarities is also a thing, but knowing what levels to avoid and what tier of rarity drops where helps a lot there.  It used to be just grinding a bunch of crowns from Firestorm Citadel to buy the 700+ CE needed to make 5* (and maybe a few other levels to get materials) but the big update gives you a bunch more options (although FSC still wins in the crown grind department).

And then there's PvP which is a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE GRIND if you want any of the Krogmo gear ._. Sadly this includes a bunch of really nice trinkets and some nice weapons ( Electron Vortex :* )

[Kingault]

I thought that was MapleStory...Except it's for skillbooks or familiar cards.  :derp: Still, how "bad" is the grind for loot?

LotRO is the LotR themed version of the game, now.
But anyway, I find the grind in SK to be somewhat more tolerable than certain others.
At least the token system makes you more likely to progress in getting gear than a flat 1/x chance for certain items...

[Smashy]

Black Kats is over, but now we have a Danger Mission event: All 4 are available to run each day until October 6.  Also, OCH is now buyable for 3200 CE, although the energy purchase isn't working with Steam at the moment.