Spiral Knights - Royal Jelly strategy

Tier two has a boss fight that not only is a prime source of heat and crowns, but the only way to gain Jelly Tokens. I am of course talking about Royal Jelly, often times called the Jelly King.

The fight is often approached by those that do not fully understand what is required of them, even after 2+ different fights, so I wanted to write up a small strategy guide for those wanting to know what is happening during the fight.

First of all, the Jelly King fight is not hard per se. The King still does the graphical animation before it does special moves, still attacks fairly slow, ect. It's more or less a normal mob, just far bigger. The difference between the Jelly King and most normal mobs is that the Jelly King is almost always self healing himself. this is an important bit of information to keep in mind when heading down to fight him.

So your group has just started it's decent down towards the King, nothing to do but push onward right? Wrong. First there are some very important vials you and your group needs to remember to sit on and keep as many as possible for the JK fight. there are of course some always important ones like health vials, so those should be common sense by this point in your Spiral Knights career

• First and foremost, poison vials. These vials, when applied to the Jelly King will actually cause the Jelly King to hurt himself while trying to self-heal. Free damage is always good.
• Second are Fire and Shock Vials. more forms of passive damage, that, once applied, is fire and forget. 
• Third, and the rarest of vials to find on your trips, is curse vials. With this vial active on the king, in junction with him trying to self-heal, your have effectively made him take double damage. Curse will also activate anytime you find the Jelly King performing his spin across the room.

The next important thing about fighting the Jelly King is your arsenal of weapons. Even as a gunslinger, you should have some form of sword on you, as shooting against the Jelly King is almost completely ineffective. It isn't that shots don't get through and can hurt him, but there are a ton of extra mobs that can get in the way. Because of this you want to be up close and personal with the boss in order to land strike and get those important vials on him ASAP. Any UVs that enhance damage versus jellies, or cause fire/poison, is a plus as well.

Ok, so you got through the various levels of the Jelly Citadel, and now facing off against the King. First thing to note here is the fact there are a ton of adds in the room with you. I will be completely honest, they suck, and most likely will be the cause of you death many times over. No matter what though, remember what your ultimate goal is: Kill the Jelly King. Have to focus fire that King if you want to beat the stage, and for every second you spend wasting attacks against the adds, is another second an important vials isn't being used, or sword damage isn't being caused. the adds will despawn as soon as the King dies.

The Jelly King isn't horrible hard to fight, and would be a cake walk if it was a solo mob. It has a few attack moves, all of which shows the charging animation before the King performs the attack.

• The first move you will common see the Jelly King perform is a spin attack, in which he'll attack anyone next to him but the Kink himself will remain in place. Best to back off if possible, but in the least try and get your shield at the ready.
• The final attack move, and the one that tends to throw the battle field into chaos; the Jelly King begins spin around the arena, destroying walls, and  hitting everything in its path. It is best just to avoid this if possible, as it isn't a particularly fast attack. Beware the adds during this time though, as they will still try to attack you. This move begins showing up once the king starts getting low on health.
• The Jelly King's biggest pain of a move however, and one I have mentioned before is it's healing ability. the Jelly King will constantly be absorbing the smaller jellies back into it for health. If you every see the Jelly King not healing, that means it is at full health, which is never a good sign if you have been beating on it for a while.

That is more or less all there is to the fight, it will still be hard, but it is very easy to understand once you actually can look for patterns in the chaos. Even with the best strats though, sometime lag is just high enough where you can't bring up your shield in time and you find yourself dead. Eventually you'll get it down, and when you do, make sure you let other people know what to do as well, or you will end up grinding with people wasting those important vials and going into the fight with no melee weapons.