I didn’t think I’d learn so much myself when I started up Spiral Knights for Beginners, which is still in its infancy at 3 videos. But it takes several takes to show off any particular technique, as well as a lot of practice to make sure I can find the right mobs to demonstrate on. And with a particular idea in my head, I start to pay much more attention to it as I delve in the Clockworks.

And yesterday, the lessons of shield bouncing, shield canceling, and sword canceling all came in handy to surviving, on solo and with no revives, a surprisingly harsh upper Tier 2 with almost all only 2* equipment (and one 4*, but Khorovod doesn’t give you defense). We’re talking narrow hallways of things like this:

Oh yes, and five more flamethrower puppies appear in that narrow corridor as you progress down it. When I get to go down it again, I’ll make sure to take a screencast.

There was a room of interconnected rooms, all filled with monsters of different types that you couldn’t avoid. There’d be Wolvers in one, Slimes in another, Slags (fire-breathing zombies) in the third, Greavers in the next, etc. None of this was all that bad, except it helped me notice a few things about swords that deal elemental, shadow, piercing, and normal damage:

• A sword that deals out heavy normal damage (like Khorovod) makes exploring these kinds of surprise! rooms easier than special damage swords. The rooms were small enough that you didn’t have time to switch weapons before the Alpha Wolver broke your tiny little Plate Shield’s health.

• But the special damage swords can do far higher damage on their levels than the corresponding normal damage swords, given an enemy weak against the damage. We’re talking sometimes nearly twice that of a normal sword.

My conclusion from this is that it’s not just convenient, but also rather smart, to carry around weapons that can deal all four types of damage. (Hm, we have four slots available….) It is helpful if you can find a dual-damage-type weapon, but you have to take into account that such a weapon will only do its full damage against an enemy weak against both types, and will be doubly weak against an enemy strong against both types.

I think I wouldn’t have done well without Khorovod, because I neglected to take a Shadow damage sword along, and Khorovod’s excessive normal damage can almost always fit in the shoes of a special damage sword. And with shield canceling and sword canceling, charged attacks were far easier to pull off, even in confined spaces (and Khorovod’s charged attack is quite impressive, with the rocks that pop up behind me disrupting and even killing parts of the mob behind me).

Someone once told me that charged attacks were useless because they took too long and you were vulnerable during that time; but for a lot of this run, charged attacks saved me.

• They killed Pit Bosses fast enough to chain forced promotions up through a mob of IT shock Devilites such that they didn’t have a chance to hit me even once;

• they killed Slags if I hit them just right so that the Slag fell into the additional explosion of the Fireburst Brandish;

• they kept jelly mobs from immobilizing me, and killed several large lichen colonies I let form for increased heat;

• and of course, bombs are all charged attacks and quite deadly to the enemy.

Khorovod is now level 10. No thanks to my partial Tier 2 run, since upper Tier 2 hands out less heat than lower Tier 1 (which does mean that, once I can solo lower Tier 2, heat will pick up immensely). I think next I’ll level up my Nightblade (before the Silent Nightblade, which will take quite a bit of work to level) and then my Voltech Alchemer (before the Mk II version). Then I’ll have a nice set of 2*/3* swords, bombs, gun, armor, helm, and shield that are all leveled. I’ll work next on creating a new set of 3* armor/helm/shield to level up fully, so that a Tier 2 run is not quite… so death-defying. And then I’ll start to level up my 4* items.

This is going to be fun!