2 Gears + 10 Rocks instead of 15 Rocks for Winona Catapult

[Swanky Psammead]

Winona's catapults have utility similar to a Fling-o-Matic (they do aoe damage that is of similar value to a Fling-o's aoe freeze effect in combat) and while they are fairly expensive, I don't think they are nearly as expensive as they ought to be. Adding 2 gears means that you really have to commit to putting one down, because you'll only get one gear back from hammering it or letting an enemy kill it.

Note how it has immediately been put to use as a boss cheese technique, in a similar manner to how Fling-o's have been used with a perpetually-smoldering Dwarf Star.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFN2hosF5w&t=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f7dwPjp-7U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfZRytNWVMQ

 

[pedregales]

Don't think this is a good idea.

You need several catapults AND GEMerators to serve the same function as 4-6 fling-os and a flower field, and they have a much more expensive fuel source, plus this technique is exclusive to Winona; you could also use the regular generator instead of GEMerator, but they require a more intensive energy care with nitre. I also don't think being able to kill bosses fast (with proper preparation) should warrant a nerf. I mean, setting up all this takes hours (just the rocks cost alone is insane, being above 300, you also have to add the other crafting ingredient items, plus the time of placing it perfectly so it is properly affected by the generator while not being withing AoE range from the bosses) so you can defeat a 20-30 minutes boss 10 minutes faster.

[Swanky Psammead]

11 hours ago, pedregales said:

they have a much more expensive fuel source

Do they? Gems are pretty easy to renew from a varg pen, or even just from the dozens upon dozens you accumulate through normal hound waves. Nitre's a little harder but ultimately not that expensive either.

 

11 hours ago, pedregales said:

I mean, setting up all this takes hours (just the rocks cost alone is insane, being above 300, you also have to add the other crafting ingredient items

Again, I'd be happy to have the rocks cost reduced. My suggestion is currently to reduce it from 15 to 10, and I'd even go down to 2 gears/5 rocks over the current recipe. This is largely because at the end of the day rocks are not that difficult to accumulate in abundance either--lead Bearger through a petrified forest, play Maxwell, etc. The other crafting ingredients are 3 twigs, 3 cut grass, and 1 silk so I don't feel they add a lot of tedium to the recipe.

 

11 hours ago, pedregales said:

I also don't think being able to kill bosses fast (with proper preparation) should warrant a nerf.

I don't either, but that's not really my issue. My issue is more that this "preparation" lasts indefinitely once it is set up for a single fight, whereas in most other cases "proper preparation" consists of preparing items that will actually be consumed in the fight (armor, healing, weapons, weather pains/lazy explorers/nightmare amulets). Well-placed catapults will never need maintenance other than the 6-9 blue gems you drop into the gem-erators each time you want to kill Fuelweaver or w/e other boss you want. Any damage they take that doesn't outright destroy them will regenerate, and if they are well-placed they will be very difficult to outright destroy.

I don't mind the strategy existing--in fact, I kind of like it. I just don't think rocks/twigs/tape is an adequately expensive recipe for something that can so easily cheese the end-game bosses. The ability to completely automate the clearing of Fuelweaver's Woven Shadows is particularly strong.

[pedregales]

14 hours ago, Swanky Psammead said:

Do they? Gems are pretty easy to renew from a varg pen, or even just from the dozens upon dozens you accumulate through normal hound waves. Nitre's a little harder but ultimately not that expensive either.

Again, I'd be happy to have the rocks cost reduced. My suggestion is currently to reduce it from 15 to 10, and I'd even go down to 2 gears/5 rocks over the current recipe. This is largely because at the end of the day rocks are not that difficult to accumulate in abundance either--lead Bearger through a petrified forest, play Maxwell, etc. The other crafting ingredients are 3 twigs, 3 cut grass, and 1 silk so I don't feel they add a lot of tedium to the recipe.

I don't either, but that's not really my issue. My issue is more that this "preparation" lasts indefinitely once it is set up for a single fight, whereas in most other cases "proper preparation" consists of preparing items that will actually be consumed in the fight (armor, healing, weapons, weather pains/lazy explorers/nightmare amulets). Well-placed catapults will never need maintenance other than the 6-9 blue gems you drop into the gem-erators each time you want to kill Fuelweaver or w/e other boss you want. Any damage they take that doesn't outright destroy them will regenerate, and if they are well-placed they will be very difficult to outright destroy.

I don't mind the strategy existing--in fact, I kind of like it. I just don't think rocks/twigs/tape is an adequately expensive recipe for something that can so easily cheese the end-game bosses. The ability to completely automate the clearing of Fuelweaver's Woven Shadows is particularly strong.

Fling-os can be fueled with almost anything that you can use in campfires: logs, charcoal, twigs, even grass tufts, saplings, etc.; all of them are renewable. Plus, you can turn them off, meaning you can save whatever energy is left for the next fight. Even if gems are super common and farmable with varg farms, fling-os are still the cheaper option fuel-cost-wise; and cost-wise they are just slightly more expensive because of the 2 gears each require (and even then is not much difference).

If you want it's price greatly increased, increase the trusty tape quantity from 1 to 6, this way it costs 30 hunger from trusty tape alone for Winona to build it, meaning she will have to build all of that while hungry if the player wants to be efficient (while also having to deal with slow building animations). And then change the 3 twigs for 3 boards for 15 extra hunger and more time to build each.

The fling-o preparation also lasts indefinitely once it is set up. Wickerbottom's tentacles last for a good while before you need to replace them and they renew themselves.

[Swanky Psammead]

1 minute ago, pedregales said:

The fling-o preparation also lasts indefinitely once it is set up.

Yes it does. But it has an expensive recipe, so I do not mind.

2 minutes ago, pedregales said:

Wickerbottom's tentacles last for a good while before you need to replace them and they renew themselves.

Yes they do, and that bothers me much more than Winona's catapults do. : ) I have my fingers crossed for hard Wicker nerfs this year.

3 minutes ago, pedregales said:

If you want it's price greatly increased, increase the trusty tape quantity from 1 to 6, this way it costs 30 hunger from trusty tape alone for Winona to build it, meaning she will have to build all of that while hungry if the player wants to be efficient (while also having to deal with slow building animations). And then change the 3 twigs for 3 boards for 15 extra hunger and more time to build each.

I don't think that would make a difference. Food is just as plentiful as the other resources we've discussed here. It is no more difficult to maintain Winona's hunger while she crafts than it is to maintain Wolfgang's hunger while he fights, all it means is that she has to spend a second on an eating animation once every 12.5-15 crafts (but she saved 6.25-7.5 seconds by speedcrafting so it's a huge net win).

Gears are a resource that actually have a cap on how farmable they are. To get more you have to either reset the Ruins (which can only be done once every 20 days) or spend a long time chasing the 1% drop rate from tumbleweeds. But all the resources Winona uses for her machines are uncapped--gems, nitre, rocks, logs, silk, grass, food, etc., all of them can be farmed in arbitrarily large amounts that can go far over what players can actually spend.

16 minutes ago, pedregales said:

Fling-os can be fueled with almost anything that you can use in campfires: logs, charcoal, twigs, even grass tufts, saplings, etc.; all of them are renewable. Plus, you can turn them off, meaning you can save whatever energy is left for the next fight.

Logs/charcoal/twigs are usually generated faster than blue gems, but they have more applications and are consumed at a disproportionately faster rate. I would argue that makes them the more expensive fuel. The ability to turn fling-o's off, and the inability to turn generators off, don't sway me when all that's "wasted" by leaving them on are post-scarcity resources.

[pedregales]

6 hours ago, Swanky Psammead said:

Yes it does. But it has an expensive recipe, so I do not mind.

Yes they do, and that bothers me much more than Winona's catapults do. : ) I have my fingers crossed for hard Wicker nerfs this year.

I don't think that would make a difference. Food is just as plentiful as the other resources we've discussed here. It is no more difficult to maintain Winona's hunger while she crafts than it is to maintain Wolfgang's hunger while he fights, all it means is that she has to spend a second on an eating animation once every 12.5-15 crafts (but she saved 6.25-7.5 seconds by speedcrafting so it's a huge net win).

Gears are a resource that actually have a cap on how farmable they are. To get more you have to either reset the Ruins (which can only be done once every 20 days) or spend a long time chasing the 1% drop rate from tumbleweeds. But all the resources Winona uses for her machines are uncapped--gems, nitre, rocks, logs, silk, grass, food, etc., all of them can be farmed in arbitrarily large amounts that can go far over what players can actually spend.

Logs/charcoal/twigs are usually generated faster than blue gems, but they have more applications and are consumed at a disproportionately faster rate. I would argue that makes them the more expensive fuel. The ability to turn fling-o's off, and the inability to turn generators off, don't sway me when all that's "wasted" by leaving them on are post-scarcity resources.

The fling-o is not too expensive though... 2 electrical doodad (so 2 gold, 6 rocks), 2 gears, and 15 ice. Is not really much aside from the gears, since the ice is just a time-gated resource (only available in winter and a bit in spring).

I don't think they will remove on tentacles or how it works, but they might tweak the spawned tentacles to not drop loop. I honestly hope Wickerbottom is just nerfed in a nice way where she relies on books to do most stuff, but her books should be left almost untouched (their recipes could be tweaked a bit for example), making her a difficult character to master.

I was half serious there, I truly don't think the catapult recipe needs change (maybe the twigs for boards is not that bad of an idea though).

Yeah, gears have a "cap", but unless you have a WX eating every single gear on sight the cap is rather large, and with this you are only creating WiXona, another character fighting for gears. You would also make WX and Winona nearly incompatible in the same game (as they fight for the same resource), and also make ice boxes and fling-os harder to craft in games where any of this characters is present. Making Wino's catapult use gears would require for them to be more renewable (so Wino's playstyle doesn't conflict with WX), which would honestly defeat the purpose of this suggestion. Or, another option is removing WX ability to consume gears at all and give him all his stats (or a good chunk of it) from the get-go.

You can "argue" that twigs/logs/charcoal are more expensive fuel because they are used in more crafts all you want, doesn't take away that they are far more renewable than gems or nitre and you can farm them completely on demand.

[Swanky Psammead]

2 hours ago, pedregales said:

The fling-o is not too expensive though... 2 electrical doodad (so 2 gold, 6 rocks), 2 gears, and 15 ice. Is not really much aside from the gears, since the ice is just a time-gated resource (only available in winter and a bit in spring).

Yes but--"not really much aside from the gears", vs. catapults which are not really much aside from anything?

2 hours ago, pedregales said:

Yeah, gears have a "cap", but unless you have a WX eating every single gear on sight the cap is rather large, and with this you are only creating WiXona, another character fighting for gears. You would also make WX and Winona nearly incompatible in the same game (as they fight for the same resource), and also make ice boxes and fling-os harder to craft in games where any of this characters is present. Making Wino's catapult use gears would require for them to be more renewable (so Wino's playstyle doesn't conflict with WX), which would honestly defeat the purpose of this suggestion.

This is a good point. I would accept a similarly hard-to-farm mechanical-themed item as an alternative to gears for the sake of WX compatibility. Maybe frazzled wires.

2 hours ago, pedregales said:

You can "argue" that twigs/logs/charcoal are more expensive fuel because they are used in more crafts all you want, doesn't take away that they are far more renewable than gems or nitre and you can farm them completely on demand.

My point is that they can *all* be farmed completely on demand. Value is a function of supply and demand. If the supply of both logs and blue gems is higher than players can consume them (thus, equal supply), and the demand for logs is much much higher, that makes logs more valuable than blue gems.