Gauntlets/Knuckles are terrible

[Devarian]

I've enjoyed most weapons and they all normally have a balance. Hammers have high impact and decent damage but are incredibly slow, bows have range but have ammo, all 1h weapons are decent damage and impact mixture but have access to offhand items. Everything has a pretty decent balance.

The gauntlets have:
- Terrible frame data, when you do a sprinting attack with a spear you can dodge roll before an enemy swings, making it very useful for poking blockers. With Gauntlets you do a jump punch that does ridiculously low impact and you cannot move, attack, or dodge for about a second. That's absolutely horrid for a close up melee build, if you can't react after a dash attack unlike EVERY OTHER MELEE, then these have no point.

- Abysmal range. Of course they have the shortest range, but they make up for it with... uhh. I guess you can stack statuses really fast? Your impact is low, your damage is equal to a sword ONLY if you land both punches, and if you knock someone down from impact, you can't actually punch them since they will fall out of your attack range.

- Bad animations. LMB with gauntlets locks you into a one-two-punch combo. That's cool! I like that, aside from the fact that it does less damage and knockback than most weapons, is as fast or slower than swords, you have to hit both attacks in order to evenly trade, and if you click an extra time on accident you're locked into 4 attacks. But aside from all that, it looks cool..

This opinion may change over time, but as of now I've used Cloth, Iron, and Brutal Knuckles on Chersonese, Hallowed Marsh, and Antique Plateau enemies and they've all been underwhelming in comparison to pre-DLC weapons or new DLC spells.

Really hope they get tweeked a bit, I find them horribly weak.

[Buldor]

Originally posted by yuvhaim:

5? i havent tested it yet but rage and discipline are also boons and benefit from the hermit's passive skill. 7 strike might be possible though you cant have them all the time like the other boons wo potions

Elemental boons is what is listed. So Discipline and Rage won't count

[Conzo]

Weak? Huh?
I just tried the Porcelain Fists, just for fun, in the last Soroborean mission, and they wrecked everything. And Prismatic Flurry hits like a truck (i have 4 boons).
All the high-level monster im usually afraid of, got stunlocked to death fast.

Atleast for me they seem quite OP.

(EDIT) Just saw OP's later comment: Yeah, i've only tried porcelain so far, so can't say about weaker models.

[Tovias]

People keep talking about end game equipment when people spend a lot of time using ♥♥♥♥ like gold lich and brutal weapons.

[Devarian]

Originally posted by Conzolax:

Weak? Huh?
I just tried the Porcelain Fists, just for fun, in the last Soroborean mission, and they wrecked everything. And Prismatic Flurry hits like a truck (i have 4 boons).
All the high-level monster im usually afraid of, got stunlocked to death fast.

Atleast for me they seem quite OP.

(EDIT) Just saw OP's later comment: Yeah, i've only tried porcelain so far, so can't say about weaker models.

Porcelain Knuckles are the best ones hands down, so going from not using any to using the best is a very skewed point of view. I discussed earlier that Prismatic Flurry is only good if you have 3-5 buffs because 5 hits at the same time can never be a bad thing. What is bad is the terrible animations, ending lag (time until you can react) on dash attack, and most fists before Porcelain are terrible.

Every end game item is OP on non-endgame enemies. My main concern is that Knuckles are garbage against groups, and most Hidden Arena bosses are all 2-4 creatures.

[Black Captain]

See Kerillian, I'm not 100% sure porcelian is best. Here's what I have to say.

Here are 2 things necessary for the porcelian fists to top dps.

1. Enemy can't be knocked back or knocked down (or won't easily be knocked down).
2. Enemy doesn't have poison or lightning weakest (if either, the horror and gold knucks win versus those specific enemies. Note, this is w/o elemental buffs, do you can always apply an elemental buff to top damage, but I don't know if buffs add more elemental damage than what is native to specific weapons. I say that because you can always apply an elemental buff on an elemental weapon to get even more damage out of it. It stands to reason, then, if a fire buffed, gold knuck still does lightning damage, a lightning buffed porcelian fist won't do as much damage. But I don't know this for sure.)
3. You can attack w/o having to stop.

In the the dlc landes, you fight golems, horrors, and some humans. Only humans are weak to poison (still works on horrors but not well at all). Golems lose to lightning damage, and everything seems to lose against spectral damage. I found the horror fists usually not the best choice for more than half of the mobs here. Gold fists did well on golems, but their poor damage to anything not weak against lightning made them not a good choice as a secondary outside of mechanized enemies.

All that said, porcelian fist have a 1.1 attack speed, which can only really be taken advantage of if you can't knock the enemy back or down. The problem lies in the 2nd hit not connecting due to the knockback. There are also times I've missed a hit or 2 attacking an enemy that was knocked down. Porcelian's raw damage isn't higher than the Tsar, and if you are only connecting a half your hits, you are better suited with something with more raw damage or dmg vs elemental weakness. To that end, porcelian fists are best used as a debuffing tool or if you want to solo with it, you use elemental buffs.

I've done is hotkey 2 or 3 of my knucks. Porcelian won't outdamage the horror fists on human or animal enemies (anything that can be hit with extreme poison). Extreme poison literally melts enemies and is your best defense against multiple targets. I've hit 3 kazite enemies with the horror fists 1~2 times. They were all poisoned. I died to something else. When I returned, they were all dead. Better example. I tested horror fists dps versus porcelian on Wolfgang enemies. We know that enemies will always block a string of attacks before sliding in with one of their own. You probably can get 2 hits in before they start blocking. The 2 hits from the horror fists causes extreme poison and you know how this story ended. They were dying while blocking while the porcelain fists has to wait for an opening or create one in the same sitatuion the horror fists can. However, those enemies will cast healing sooner when fighting with extreme poison, and the poison alone will kill them if they get to that point (I've killed over 7 enemies with the poison doing most of the work).

I haven't used the tsar fist. I don't know if it has a status effect on it, but I believe it hits harder than porcelain while being slower. It's probably a better choice, but I don't know how much dps you gain against a weakened enemy from the porcelain attacks.

My point, it seems they designed the upper tier fist weapons to work in a rock/paper/scissors format. Porcelain can be an all-arounder, but it won't be the best in every scenario. In fact, if you took it to non-dlc maps, it wouldn't outperform the horror fists against most mobs.

But they look really cool (they suck... but they look better than most other options).

[Nomnom Victory]

Honestly I'd rather put any basic enchantment on virgin knuckles instead of using unenchanted brutal knuckles. Brutal weapons do get substantially better with the Crumbling Anger enchant but that's a lot harder to obtain than a basic virgin enchant.

Once the Unsuspected Strength enchantment gets fixed I'll have to try iron knuckles, even iron weapons tend to be decent when you multiply their damage by 2.5x.

[Devarian]

Originally posted by DuWryght:

See Kerillian, I'm not 100% sure porcelian is best. Here's what I have to say.

Here are 2 things necessary for the porcelian fists to top dps.

1. Enemy can't be knocked back or knocked down (or won't easily be knocked down).
2. Enemy doesn't have poison or lightning weakest (if either, the horror and gold knucks win versus those specific enemies. Note, this is w/o elemental buffs, do you can always apply an elemental buff to top damage, but I don't know if buffs add more elemental damage than what is native to specific weapons. I say that because you can always apply an elemental buff on an elemental weapon to get even more damage out of it. It stands to reason, then, if a fire buffed, gold knuck still does lightning damage, a lightning buffed porcelian fist won't do as much damage. But I don't know this for sure.)
3. You can attack w/o having to stop.

In the the dlc landes, you fight golems, horrors, and some humans. Only humans are weak to poison (still works on horrors but not well at all). Golems lose to lightning damage, and everything seems to lose against spectral damage. I found the horror fists usually not the best choice for more than half of the mobs here. Gold fists did well on golems, but their poor damage to anything not weak against lightning made them not a good choice as a secondary outside of mechanized enemies.

All that said, porcelian fist have a 1.1 attack speed, which can only really be taken advantage of if you can't knock the enemy back or down. The problem lies in the 2nd hit not connecting due to the knockback. There are also times I've missed a hit or 2 attacking an enemy that was knocked down. Porcelian's raw damage isn't higher than the Tsar, and if you are only connecting a half your hits, you are better suited with something with more raw damage or dmg vs elemental weakness. To that end, porcelian fists are best used as a debuffing tool or if you want to solo with it, you use elemental buffs.

I've done is hotkey 2 or 3 of my knucks. Porcelian won't outdamage the horror fists on human or animal enemies (anything that can be hit with extreme poison). Extreme poison literally melts enemies and is your best defense against multiple targets. I've hit 3 kazite enemies with the horror fists 1~2 times. They were all poisoned. I died to something else. When I returned, they were all dead. Better example. I tested horror fists dps versus porcelian on Wolfgang enemies. We know that enemies will always block a string of attacks before sliding in with one of their own. You probably can get 2 hits in before they start blocking. The 2 hits from the horror fists causes extreme poison and you know how this story ended. They were dying while blocking while the porcelain fists has to wait for an opening or create one in the same sitatuion the horror fists can. However, those enemies will cast healing sooner when fighting with extreme poison, and the poison alone will kill them if they get to that point (I've killed over 7 enemies with the poison doing most of the work).

I haven't used the tsar fist. I don't know if it has a status effect on it, but I believe it hits harder than porcelain while being slower. It's probably a better choice, but I don't know how much dps you gain against a weakened enemy from the porcelain attacks.

My point, it seems they designed the upper tier fist weapons to work in a rock/paper/scissors format. Porcelain can be an all-arounder, but it won't be the best in every scenario. In fact, if you took it to non-dlc maps, it wouldn't outperform the horror fists against most mobs.

But they look really cool (they suck... but they look better than most other options).

First, golems take more damage from Ethereal damage while Scourge take more damage from Lightning, just to clarify.

Second, Porcelain fists inflict Sapped and Weakened, they have no elemental damage so I have no clue where this is coming from. Hot swapping from Porcelain to Horror or to Tsar is also what I do in the case of fighting specific enemies as well. However, the fact that doing some combinations with Porcelain reduces the enemy damage by 40% physical AND elemental is bar-none. Tsar has the damage and impact but thats it. Horror and Gold have statuses buy lower stats so they're situational. Marble are just worse Porcelain in my opinion since unless you want a knockdown build and enchant them with 'Weightless', they are slower than Porcelain with the SAME stats.

Third, Tsar swings at 0.8 speed while Porcelain swing at 1.1. That difference in speed is extremely significant, if you're running a knockdown build with Wild Ranger or Speedster, Tsar is extremely useful. Getting Alert level 3 for confusion and using Alert 4's flip punch impact ability makes Tsar fists insanely good. However, raw dps doesnt make them the best. Porcelain does 17 less damage than Tsar, but has 0.3 more attack speed. Meaning that if you attack one on Porcelain and then attack again, you can get through 2/3rds of the animation of attack #2 before Tsar finishes its first one. On top of that you reduce the damage the enemy deals by 40%. That's enormous. If someone were to deal 80 damage to you, they would deal 58 instead.

Damage reduction and consistently high dps > Raw highest damage but lower attack speed.

[Devarian]

Originally posted by Nomnom Victory:

Honestly I'd rather put any basic enchantment on virgin knuckles instead of using unenchanted brutal knuckles. Brutal weapons do get substantially better with the Crumbling Anger enchant but that's a lot harder to obtain than a basic virgin enchant.

Once the Unsuspected Strength enchantment gets fixed I'll have to try iron knuckles, even iron weapons tend to be decent when you multiply their damage by 2.5x.

All those are well and good, but the end game knuckles are obviously going to be better. Porcelain Knuckles you gain from a dungeon boss, Tsar from a secret, and Marble from luck or money. I'll always recommend Marble + Weightless if you can't manage to get Porcelain. Or just get Vampiric Knuckles or Horror Knuckles. Statuses are scary and so is lifesteal