SK - Shadow Lair Patch

October 18th
UPDATED: October 20th (Patch released, content ventured, speculation removed.)

Today, this was announced: http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/29844
http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Shadow_Lair_Overview

New end game content. Finally. Everyone will be happy. What could go wrong?

Three Rings could, of course.

This Shadow Lairs patch will add four "new" areas to the game, and all four with have their own lift located in the Tier 3 Terminal. (You need higher clearance to access higher Shadow Tiers, in other words, beat them in order.) These "new" levels are not exactly new, though. They are reskins of original boss stratums, and so are the bosses themselves. It sounds dull when put like that, but I will say that the difficulty is honestly an exciting change of pace, especially considering that Darkfire Vanaduke won't be the hardest part of Ultimate Firestorm Citadel. More on that soon.

Adding to that, new Boss Armors will be added, some of which look fantastic, but are mostly basic reskins, and very minor model editing. Unfortunately, all they are is looks. Mercurial Demo seems to be the only "good" set of armor, and even that's being generous. These armors don't take recipes, but use a special Alchemy Station, and you have to level gear and know what mats you'll need beforehand using the wiki if you want to make an honest effort at obtaining Boss Armor.

Shadow Alchemy Stations are past the one original level of the Shadow Lairs, the Unknown Passage, which is actually beyond the Lair's boss. They work much like Krogmo Alchemy Stations, and require Shadow Materials only past the Unknown Passage, and in The Sanctuary. It's important to note, though, that if ANYONE grabs the Shadow Material sitting on the pedestal before EVERYONE has loaded and is active, the person that hasn't loaded will NOT get a Shadow Material.

Alone, that all doesn't seem so bad. Hell, I should know, as my first run was so much fun, as a distant friend had asked me to join him on his run because of my reputation. I didn't have to worry about the conditions just to gain access. But let me tell you about these conditions, and how it almost ruined my fun.

To access Shadow Lairs, one player needs a Shadow Key. Now, say you can buy Shadow Keys from Boost for 1k ce. That sounds like something someone can really rage about, right? Well, in reality, it's much worse. Shadow Keys are not sold by Boost for 1k ce. To get a Shadow Key, you have to buy a Silver Key for 750 ce, and then open a Lockbox in an attempt to get a Shadow Key. But instead, you get stuck with a Drab Barrel Belly. So you have to buy another Silver Key, and another Lockbox. And another pair... And another... And at some point, you realize you've gotten ten Drab accessories and have just breezed through 7.5k ce. And if you haven't read yet, most accessories sell for far less than 750 ce, the amount that was paid just to get the ugly thing.

There's no way right now to know whether Shadow Keys are common from Lockboxes, or just as rare as Volcanic and Divine styles. But even then, you're still paying three dollars worth of energy to have a CHANCE at getting access to the new endgame content. And people are going to WANT to play the endgame content, which brings us to possibly the worst part of this new content.

Endgame players have been around for a long time now. We've wanted new content to play for ages. I've wanted new content to play for ages. And there's a lot of us. A lot of people will buy Silver Keys. They'll trade in their crowns for ce off the market, over and over, trying to get a Shadow Key from a Lockbox. Much like unbinding, this removes ce completely from the market, making ce rarer and slowly go up in price with each key bought. Before the Lockbox Patch, ce prices gravitated just over 5k cr. As of this writing, ce now costs 6.3k cr. If this is directly related to the original Lockbox Patch, or everyone is grabbing ce to buy keys while they're cheap to try and get Shadow Keys, isn't determinable, but either way, the fact is that more and more keys will be bought, meaning ce will be more and more expensive.

If you're thinking most people will just buy Shadow Keys from other players instead of just getting them from Lockboxes themselves, let me just stop you right there. A Shadow Key is an extremely desirable item to get your hands on. Last night, I saw not one, but two Shadow Keys both sell at 500k cr. So, with this ton of money these sellers have just gotten, they take more ce off the market and buy more Silver Keys, and keep opening Lockboxes in an attempt to get more huge Shadow Key sales. Even if they're not successful in maintaining a luck-driven business, they're already hurting the ce market.

You may or may not care about this if you pay for ce with actual dosh, or already have all of your gear and don't intend to run Shadow Lairs, but if not for yourself, consider new players, who are essentially going to up and quit when they learn how much it takes just to get a little energy to even make new gear, or even people about to just getting up to four and five stars when they see it'll take 2.4k ce just to get from three star to five star gear when it costs 7k cr (or more) just to buy 100 ce.

TL;DR: Real endgame content released, access to it requires paying INTENSE amounts of energy or crowns to get a CHANCE for a key that allows access only ONE TIME for the whole party, may take several times of paying large amounts of energy for multiple chances just to get enough for rewards for even completing a Shadow Lair, this in turn will harshly raise ce prices and affect all players in some way.

But without Shadow Keys, it is genuinely fun.

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January 8th: I realize this is a bit late, but I spread this information in game, rather than on here.  When weighed against the rewards, the cost of the Shadow Keys was not absurd. If you sell all your rewards, too, you can get a decent amount of profit as well.

And yes, I did go on Shadow Lair runs to test this. I wouldn't protest against something without knowing full details of it.