Is the Vortex Cloak supposed to be just used by Maxwell?

[oCrapaCreeper]

The Vortex Cloak on paper is really strong, but the sanity drain really discourages you from being able to use the backpack portion of the armor. -20 sanity per minute is insane. Seemingly there is no character in the game that could ever get enough practical out of it, except for one: Maxwell.

Maxwell's passive sanity gain in DS is +20 per minute, which exactly cancels out the Cloak's drain. So he can have a psuedo-godmode and an extra 8 inventory slots, while never losing sanity. Of course, the trade off is Maxwell effectively doesn't have his sanity buff anymore, but you can still easily manage his sanity with a Tam, and of course just take the cloak off for a few minutes to recover.

This item just has "Maxwell item" written all over it. His quote even says "It's like it was tailored just for me."

So is it a good idea to have an item that only benefits one character effectively? I mean it is pretty useful for going insane, but I don't know if that's really a good enough use for most character considering this is a boss drop from a pretty strong boss.

[Hx380]

Its also good at farming nightmare fuel 

 

Personally i use it for wormwood since im already insane all the time. A bit more won't make a difference

[Alexias]

Yeah kinda, no one can move it without suffering the -20 sanity drain.

if it broke while I am Maxwell, I just leave it in the ground, repairing it doesn't worth it, 20 nightmare fuel to fully repair is expensive, I could use that to make 4 night armors.

[SouthTom]

3 hours ago, oCrapaCreeper said:

So is it a good idea to have an item that only benefits one character effectively? I mean it is pretty useful for going insane, but I don't know if that's really a good enough use for most character considering this is a boss drop from a pretty strong boss.

I like the idea of a loot item that's good for one or a few of the characters, but I thought they would add unique loot drop for the others too. Not just Maxwell. If it's only really good to go insane for the others, holding a dark sword has the same sanity drain and is much easier to come by.

[Majestix]

On 15/05/2019 at 4:12 PM, SouthTom said:

I like the idea of a loot item that's good for one or a few of the characters, but I thought they would add unique loot drop for the others too.

Other characters have perks of a different nature. WX can overcharge easily, Wicker can easily farm nettles, etc. Maxwell's fast harvesting was not nearly as useful in Hamlet as in the other parts of the game, so they decided to buff him this way, which, I think, is a pretty cool idea.

What people don't seem to realise is that if every time Klei release a new feature, everybody starts demanding that they duplicate the effect across all DLCs, all characters, all seasons, etc., the only way for Klei to comply is to stop releasing new content.

[inferjus4]

6 minutes ago, Majestix said:

Other characters have perks of a different nature. WX can overcharge easily, Wicker can easily farm nettles, etc. Maxwell's fast harvesting was not nearly as useful in Hamlet as in the other parts of the game, so they decided to buff him this way, which, I think, is a pretty cool idea.

You have to beat Ancient Herald first, and if you manage to kill him then you probably do not need Vortex Cloak, because Herald is one of the end game bosses. It has the same problem Living Artifact has - you get it in end game and it remains useless because you have nothing more to do.

[Majestix]

6 hours ago, inferjus4 said:

You have to beat Ancient Herald first, and if you manage to kill him then you probably do not need Vortex Cloak, because Herald is one of the end game bosses.

It is a logical fallacy to think that an item is useless if it is harder to obtain than the things you would want to do with it. Killing the Ancient Herald is not that hard for Maxwell if he prepares well. You know in advance when he will come, you will be ready with no other plans, not stranded somewhere without proper equipment, you will have your night armours, and your weapons, and your healing foods ready, and you will beat him quite easily. However, Maxwell being such a glass cannon, it can easily happen that you are somewhere gathering materials and get surprised by a large bat wave just as you are running away from rabid beetles, and before you know it it's all over for you. To prevent that, you can always keep an amour in your chest slot, but nobody does that, because it is too limiting. The cloak solves that problem for Maxwell once and for all.

So sure, Ancient Herald is, with all the preparation being equal, possibly harder to beat than a bat wave (actually, I am not even sure of that). But even if that is true, the loot is anything but useless. Why would you think that once you have beaten the Ancient Herald there is nothing left to do? There is plenty left to do in the game beyond day 60.

[Caochu]

6 hours ago, inferjus4 said:

You have to beat Ancient Herald first, and if you manage to kill him then you probably do not need Vortex Cloak, because Herald is one of the end game bosses.

It is the same as saying "You have to beat the Dragonfly to craft the scalemail, but if you manage to kill the Dragonfly then you probably don't need the scalemail anyway." And I think we all agree that the scalemail is a good item to have 

Also, endgame or not, you can "cheese" the Ancient Herald like all the other Hamlet bosses by just using the blow darts from the ruins. Yeah sure, to kill him you have to do more than just throwing a coconade for a one hit KO, or hire some pigs, but it's still accessible by various ways 

 

Quote

It has the same problem Living Artifact has - you get it in end game and it remains useless because you have nothing more to do.

That's because you chose to get it in endgame. You could actually rush it in 10 days if you want, like people rush the slanty shanty, Ro-Bin or the key to the city day 2. That's what is really nice with Hamlet, as there is no engame because everything is doable at the beginning if you already know how to do it. Some like it, some hate. I like it personally as it gives a lot of replay value. With the teleportato in Hamlet, that aspect will shine I think.

[Faintly Macabre]

There is a very outspoken portion of the game's playerbase that thinks that being insane 100% of the time is the only way to play, and I think you can probably lay some blame on them for how this item works. I think 10 fuel for a full repair and maybe -8 sanity per minute would be enough to make me want to use it

[theJas0n]

On 15/05/2019 at 1:38 PM, Namelessgamer said:

Yeah kinda, no one can move it without suffering the -20 sanity drain.

if it broke while I am Maxwell, I just leave it in the ground, repairing it doesn't worth it, 20 nightmare fuel to fully repair is expensive, I could use that to make 4 night armors.

i see this argument a lot and its just kinda silly. doesn't really make a lot of sense if you think about it properly, it only holds if you think about it in a vacuum not in actual gameplay and you don't even take all the factors into account. nightmare fuel is insanely cheap and easy to farm. you can do it whenever and wherever. you cant make 4 night armours with just 20 fuel, you also need 48 reeds which is a lot more time consuming than passively killing shadows while doing other things so in terms of productivity, rarity of items needed and usefulness, vortex cloak wins on every front. plus it does make you insane and you need fuel to keep it running. if you're good at kiting its a good item even for other characters than max, he just has the ability to wear it without being insane all the time. its great fun to use for me personally and for others too so if you had used a more sound argument for example "vortex cloak doesn't fit my playstyle" i would agree, but even then its not a bad thing to have variation because then everyone can find a way to play that they enjoy.

[SouthTom]

On 5/18/2019 at 9:10 AM, theJas0n said:

i see this argument a lot and its just kinda silly. doesn't really make a lot of sense if you think about it properly, it only holds if you think about it in a vacuum not in actual gameplay and you don't even take all the factors into account. nightmare fuel is insanely cheap and easy to farm. you can do it whenever and wherever. you cant make 4 night armours with just 20 fuel, you also need 48 reeds which is a lot more time consuming than passively killing shadows while doing other things so in terms of productivity, rarity of items needed and usefulness, vortex cloak wins on every front. plus it does make you insane and you need fuel to keep it running. if you're good at kiting its a good item even for other characters than max, he just has the ability to wear it without being insane all the time. its great fun to use for me personally and for others too so if you had used a more sound argument for example "vortex cloak doesn't fit my playstyle" i would agree, but even then its not a bad thing to have variation because then everyone can find a way to play that they enjoy.

It's not usually impossible to get a stack of 40 reeds from a single trip to the swamp in RoG. You can even farm shadow creatures while collecting it so I don't think that papyrus is a big issue or too time costly.

You don't need to make the 4 armors at once but you kinda have to fill the Cloak to 100% or close. Remember that for 5 nm fuel you only get 112.5 hp on the Cloak. You get 750 hp for the same amount with papyrus.

Heck, you can get them for even cheaper too. Night Armors are only 20 oincs in the Pig shops. You can sell 4 nm fuel for 20 oincs so you don't even need papyrus after all and you get 5 armors for the price of refueling the Vortex Cloak.

Truly these prices can't be beat!

[theJas0n]

On 20/05/2019 at 10:14 PM, SouthTom said:

It's not usually impossible to get a stack of 40 reeds from a single trip to the swamp in RoG. You can even farm shadow creatures while collecting it so I don't think that papyrus is a big issue or too time costly.

You don't need to make the 4 armors at once but you kinda have to fill the Cloak to 100% or close. Remember that for 5 nm fuel you only get 112.5 hp on the Cloak. You get 750 hp for the same amount with papyrus.

Heck, you can get them for even cheaper too. Night Armors are only 20 oincs in the Pig shops. You can sell 4 nm fuel for 20 oincs so you don't even need papyrus after all and you get 5 armors for the price of refueling the Vortex Cloak.

Truly these prices can't be beat!

you're missing the scope of my argument. if you're purely looking at it from a fuel cost/armour hp then yes, you can say that night armour is more efficient. but that's only in a vacuum. in normal gameplay, fuel is dirt cheap and super easy to get, if you link to rog and visit ruins you'll be swimming in it, so the limiting factor isn't fuel because you'll always have more than enough. you'll want to go to the ruins anyway for thulecite and gems and fuel just drops for free every cycle. whether you visit the swamp for reeds or not you will have enough fuel. so in reality, you either need to get reeds (quite time consuming even with coffee, you could be doing something else or at least using the reeds for something more useful) or use oincs to buy the night armour. there's many ways to farm oincs, so that's not the hard part. its actually getting the resources to build more shops and the lack of accessibility in the early game. if you only have one arcane shop, its not guaranteed that it will have night armour and you can only sell nightmare fuel once a day for 5 oincs, meaning that in the 4 days it would take you to get 20 oincs for an armour in order to break even, you could just be fighting shadows and using it on your cloak or for other magic items. you in the time that you farm pig skins to build shops or farming oincs you can passively farm fuel, go about doing more important things and keep your armour/backpack hybrid fuelled, take no damage from non-shadow creatures so no need for healing items and no need to carry armour taking up more inventory space. the excess fuel that you get (and you will have a lot) you can sell it or turn into a few night armours for fights that are better fought with large amounts of hp like bosses where vortex cloak isn't the best unless you're very confident at kiting, but at that point you probably don't need armour anyway so you'd rather have a backpack that grants you stun immunity and 100% dmg resistance.

[paoweeotter]

I don't see the problem. Wear it when going for a farm run. Take it off when not 

[hyiltiz]

But did they "fix" the Vortex Cloak sanity drain now!?

[Alexias]

8 hours ago, hyiltiz said:

But did they "fix" the Vortex Cloak sanity drain now!?

They change it in the last update 

“

• The Vortex cloak doesn’t drain sanity constantly now, instead it does sanity damage to the character relative to how much damage it absorbs. 

“

[Tumalu]

Seems like a great backpack upgrade for all characters now.