[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.

[Sarinpa1]

Making them much more stronger will simply motivate people to not go outside without a Silence to interupt the casts. Priests are already terrible to fight againts, and them having the option to suddenly pull out two very strong allies would make them incredibly hard to deal with. (See : Summoners, except summoner is almost exclusively around the summoning. Priest without shine knights is still a very formidable and useful class.)
So the solution 2 would be very problematic.

I'd be willing to test the first solution, because there's pretty much an identical spell in a different class. Summon storm.

[MegaBlues]

blinding aura doesnt inflict blind, it just straight-up reduces hit. and it stacks

charisma is a holdover from days long past and is pretty mediocre but not bad

protect is amazing, it's just broken right now

alondite is a sword and is ~okay~ i guess

in short this post reeks of misinformation, but i think that reducing the value of blinding aura and turning shine knights into a rank d invocation will fix them. they're not really for attacking, they're just two big boy meat shields to pump your aoe healing into that make you so much harder to kill

[Skullcatrons]

The Blinding aura only have range up to three, and it doesn't specifically mentions how it reduces hit. All it stated, is that it reduces hit equates to level, and there's nothing that stated the level. Does it scale off from the player's summoning? Does it scale off from Shine Knight's level? What does it scale off of? The description is not descriptive with the scaling at all.

Charisma is pretty weak, in my own opinion, and doesn't seem to be worth effort, and looks like to be influenced by the Scaling. It wouldn't be even worth it for Shining knight to be hoarding as passive.

Protect is useless, and will alway remain useless in my eyes. I rather not be toggling Total control every time I feel like summoning Shine Knight.

[Autumn]

Shine Knights are amazing, Alondite is such a good weapon, and shine knights do good damage with them, Charisma is out dated and needs to be updated somewhat, blinding aura itself is pretty nice, the fact it summons 2 shine knights at max rank is pretty gud.

Shine Knight's only problem is being a rank C invocation, if it was Rank D it'd be grossly overtuned.


The downsides of shine knights include mostly the following:

Movement speed issues
Long summon time
Protect is bugged to hell and back
Blinding Aura really only helps dodgy builds.

[Snake]

The downsides should be looked at, then. Let's go people, one by one, using what Spoops said above, and my opinions about each of them and how to solve their problem. Shine Knights are ""fine"", but there are some things that keep them from being worth of their time taken to invoke.

- The movement speed can be buffed by the Priest's curate spells, but that also means they need yet another round to prepare their Knights. Momentum-wise, making the Priest in question take over three rounds and a half to finish setting up knights that won't do the trick for them at all.

This can be solved by either giving them automatically 'Quickness' once they're summoned. (If the Priest has it equipped.), or increasing the Knights's move.

- The long summon time is pretty needless. Maybe back before GR, where people could safely invoke on round 1 and round 2, because the enemy needed to buff up, the damage was not that almighty, and spawning locations were not fixed. Now it's impossible without getting immediately interrupted.

Maybe Devocation could also give you a FAI chance to receive a temporary silence immunity when invoking Mercalan enchantations with a rank higher than D. (Removed when the invocation breaks, so you can't abuse this for silence immunity on other spells.)

- Protect doesn't work because the Shine Knights, like in http://www.neus-projects.net/viewtopic.p...982#p25913 this situation with Metalaegis, don't spawn with a shield on. They have nothing but their Alondite, equipment wise. They need a shield, so Protect works. (Still can't get how Monsters can do it, but they don't need shields to protect other monsters. But at least for players, this might be it.)

If I may suggest a shield for them, it would be Bulwark, the one that reflects Darkness Damage. Like how I suggested Metalaegis's shield being 'Magnetic Shield'. They're already existing items in game, shouldn't be hard to implement them on those spawned mobs.

- Blinding Aura is supposed to help dodgy builds, yes. But not everybody is dodgy, they should be more broad. Charisma should definitely be removed, and traded away for more worthy buffs.

Maybe they should also come with Aegis and Woki at max rank? (Or rank 5, which may increase DEF/RES by 5 of surrounding allies on top of it. And Woki would increase STR/WIL of allies by 5.) Knights of Light are supposed to be brimming with positive, warding energy. It makes sense, no?

[Skullcatrons]

I like this thread going.

[Raigen.Convict]

Ahem. As someone who used to (abuse) use shine knights often I can say vs anything with good defense they were fairly tedius BUT they do serve as nice tanking tools. I do suggest a light based physical skill for them as well as having a sheild for protect and lastly they receive an aura of protection that grants nearby allies extra defense and resistance based on rank. This will help their lacking points greatly while fitting their asthetic nicely.