[Skullcatrons]

[headline=2]Introduction[/headline]

Shine Knights. You know them. You've seem then get summoned once by a friend who was extremely excited, only to have their hope utterly crushed, and shattered because of how terribad they are.

Shine knights aren't so terrible at first sight, especially since it sort of neat to have the +1 stat increases to all, until you realizes that most of their stats does nothing of value, nor even helps. They do not inflict Fire damage, and they do not even have any abilities that cost, or requires FP. Which begs the question, 'Why?'

We'll discuss their current abilities, and what they have or provides for the players right now.

[headline=2]Abilities[/headline]

Shine Knight have at most, 3 abilities. Including the Passive.

Blinding Aura - Said to blind enemies, and reduces their HIT chance. Which, I rarely see the player enemies getting blinded by the Shine Knight. Especially though all that effort to go, and summon them into the battle. This Blinding aura is made further impractical if facing off against Kaelensians.

Charisma Aura - This is decent, and okayish overall. Though it is not even worth the effort to bring the Shine Knight into plays, as you would finish the fight on second round, implying that it would take too much effort to even bother summoning just to get +2 Stats increases to all from two Shine Knights.

Protect - Useless. Simple as that. Unless you have Total Control turned on, and you're making sure that Knights are alway sticking to priest like glue, don't even try bothering utilizing this. It's never really effective, and just usually poor uses to make Knight actively the priest.

Overall, the abilities are not that great.

[headline=2]Equipment[/headline]

They have basic weapon, until they get updated with Alondite. Which is sort of a spear, with Light slash damage instead of default. This weapon is very interesting, and nice to have on your Shine Knight, but most of time, it's only what make them effective against one type of enemies, until they starts fighting Barghests, or any undeads with extremely low Light weaknesses. Then it can get quite tedious.

I am not very personal fan, nor do I care much about Shine Knight's weapon. So in this area, they're fine with what they have.

[headline=2]Stat distribution[/headline]

Though it's not the weapon I'm concerned with. It's the distribution of stats.

You'll notice that Shine Knights' strength is 61, which is useless. Sure, they may have heavy equipments, but that's just weird considering they deal no fire atk damage at ALL! Even worse, they have 51 Wil, and they don't even have any skills that cost FP either!

What is reason why that Shine Knight needs absurdly high numbers of two stats that it can't even utilize, because it doesn't use these two stats in either cases! What's the deal? There's no reason for Shine knight that doesn't utilize this, considering the invocation time!

[headline=2]invocation[/headline]

Unfortunately, it is the most underwhelming, and most impractical spell in entire magic field, even Darkness, to even bother utilizing. Nearly every strong spells are ranked D [Takes 1 round pause], compared to Shine Knights, is ranked C. [Takes 2 Round pauses]

The player can easily get interrupted by an outside source, right before he can even pull a Shine Knight summon, unlike other invocation where they have immunity period, and were able to cast the invocation within that immunity period. The Shine Knight will never get pulled off, as long as priest in question is constantly getting interrupted.

So, despite it being useless, and impractical. Even overshadowed by Grand Summoner's Youkai Summon Storm. It's even more pointless to invest the precious SP into a summon that can't do anything.

[headline=2]Fixing it.[/headline]

So we're down to only path we could. Here's list of solutions I could give.

Solution 1.

Convert the Summon Shine Knight's invocation from C to D, allowing player to summon it after the initial invocation. Thus, player will be able to summon shine knights within Round 1, and have shine knights available for fighting. Although they'll still be useless in most cases, but at least we will see them getting summoned a slightly more often. Doubt this is real long-term solution.

Solution 2.

Change the Shine Knights' stat-values, and change the Shine Knight's abilities, to something better to make them more fearsome opponents in the battle-field, rather than making them have Protect, or Blinding Aura which rarely does anything useful, and effective. Provide them ability to summon Holy arrow attacks from the distance, and dealing decent damage as more fearsome opponents.

Solution 3.

Remove Shine Knights entirely. Replace the Shine Knight summon with something else. For the best, or for the worse.