Armor Knight is a Spirit effect introduced in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It occupies two slots and boosts its user’s attack power by 1.15x and their defense by 1.8x (at the cost of 0.7x movement speed). It is part of the “big five” Spirit effects commonly banned from tournaments along with Autoheal, Great Autoheal, Super Armor, and Slow Super Armor.
General Information
Armor Knight’s extreme power boost is nearly unrivaled by any other Spirit effect in the game. Its attack buff is about on par with other bonuses, but its defense buff is absolutely absurd — 1.8x. Whereas the Super Armor bonus works best with heavyweights, Armor Knight is incredibly versatile and works well with almost any fighter. It also only occupies two slots, so you can run something like Move Speed ↑ or Trade-Off Ability ↑ to offset the speed drop. On lighter characters, it’s recommended that you run Move Speed ↑ instead of Trade-Off Ability ↑ (which starts its user at 30% each stock, a definite risk for lightweights).
Before its ban from competitive tournaments in 2019, almost every top-tier Figure Player used Armor Knight in some way, shape, or form. In the early metagame, fighters with strong off-stage options (Lucas, Piranha Plant, and King K. Rool, among others) became dominant. Furthermore, Armor Knight was almost always run alongside a maximized Defense stat. This made matches last much longer, especially in tournament sets which are best two out of three. Although every FP can use Armor Knight and achieve a degree of success, it was banned because of its over-centralization and staling effect on the metagame.
If Armor Knight were to be reallowed, almost every optimal FP would undoubtedly run it. If you are entering a tournament that does not follow our ban list, using Armor Knight alongside a speed-boosting bonus is a great way to earn a top placement.
Acquisition
It took amiibo trainers a few days to find out about Armor Knight — Figure Players can only inherit it from the Halberd Support Spirit. This specific Spirit can only be found in Funky Kong’s shop, which can be accessed via World of Light. Unfortunately, its presence there is completely random and rather rare at that. World of Light shops may prioritize Spirits that you do not own, so if you have any existing Halberd Support Spirits you may want to use them before trying to farm for another one. You can also abuse cloud saves on Nintendo Switch Online to keep any Spirit effect you feed to a Figure Player; that being said, any Spirits you had fed to the FP will be unusable for at least 24 hours after the cloud save is restored.
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