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[Poll] On Ranged Combat


Ranged Weapons  

102 members have voted

  1. 1. Are ranged weapons lacking in terms of utility or game design?

  2. 2. If yes, why so?

    • Ranged weapons aren't cost-efficient.
    • Ranged weapons are inferior to beating your enemies to death with your melee weapon.
    • Ranged weapons do not provide flavor and depth to the game aside from being used as aggro tools.
    • Ranged weapons are a pain to manufacture and amass.
    • Other (do explain in the comments!)
    • I answered no.
  3. 3. If no, why so?

    • Ranged weapons are cost-efficient.
    • Ranged weapons are better at killing mobs than melee.
    • Ranged weapons do provide new flavors and depths to the game.
    • Ranged weapons aren't so hard to accrue.
    • Other (do explain in the comments!)
    • I answered yes.
  4. 4. If given the chance, would you buff ranged weapons, nerf them, or keep them as is?

    • Buff them!
    • Nerf them!
    • Leave them be!
    • A small rework would be nice.
    • Other (do discuss in the comments!)


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Next on the list of questions are some regarding a rather underrated feature I return to discussing:

Do you guys think ranged weapons are lacking? Why or why not? And how do youthink they must be expounded upon? 

I must note that I considered only ranged weapons like the darts, staves and the Weather pain, leaving out structures like the Catapult and the Houndius Shootius.

Do feel free to drop by your own ideas and discuss your opinions!

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If ranged combat were to be changed so that people would use it more commonly I think it should be tweaked to do less damage as well.

Straight up reducing damage shouldn't be the case though, there should be a cooldown as to how fast someone can fire a ranged weapon (like pulling back the string on a bow) so that projectiles do not out DPS melee weapons but are still a safe method for people who cannot melee combat well or just want to provide ranged support.

Would love to see people using darts and such more often but if the ability to create darts or obtain them were any easier I think some balancing would need to be done to ensure that ranged combat doesn't become too strong over melee.

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16 minutes ago, GetNerfedOn said:

Next on the list of questions are some regarding a rather underrated feature I return to discussing:

Do you guys think ranged weapons are lacking? Why or why not? And how do youthink they must be expounded upon? 

I must note that I considered only ranged weapons like the darts, staves and the Weather pain, leaving out structures like the Catapult and the Houndius Shootius.

Do feel free to drop by your own ideas and discuss your opinions!

I think the game should initially lead the player to use melee weapons, and then in more advanced stages, to use ranged weapons. In short, there should also be progress in the "fighting style", not just a brutal increase in the damage.
Let me explain: fighting with a spear at the beginning of the game, or with a dark sword at the end of the game, is identical. Only the amount of damage per second changes.
I think Hamlet's shotgun is a good ranged weapon, maybe building ammunition should be cheaper (1 gunpowder + 1 iron bar = 10 bullets?).
Darts, on the other hand, should be made much cheaper, but also less fast. They would be a good compromise.
Hybrid weapons could also be created: the spear, for example, could also be launched.
I would add that even bows and crossbows (as well as arrows with special effects) would increase the strategies in combat exponentially.
Currently, most bosses defeat themselves through the use of tricks: walls, traps, tentacles, bunny... it wouldn't be nice to be able to face them "openly" with the right toolkit?
In short, if I could have a respectable arsenal, I wouldn't need to trick the larvae into killing the dragonfly ;)

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1 minute ago, 4 Da LOLs said:

what if you could craft the blow gun sepritely to the actual darts and you would make more darts per craft?

This. Also, getting to load different kinds of ammo, one at a time, into a pipe. 

I also suggest to use stingers as cheap, low-dmg dart material. As for sleep darts i suggest using material out of mandrakes. Like dipping the darts in mandrake soup or sticking them in a dead or live one to add a sleep effect to their damage.

Also, that glitch where darts trigger a hit animation and deal no damage nor deal their effect needs to be patched out

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My thoughts:

  • Remove the Fire Darts or update them somehow. They're useless because it's easier to craft a Fire Staff, they deal almost 0 damage, and killing a burning enemy turns all the loot into ashes instead of dropping burning loot.
  • Sleep Darts are also rarely used because they need time to work, you need to know how many you need to use, the enemy doesn't get slowed down and the time how long they're sleeping is only 30s or even shorter. Also: Using Pan Flute or Sleepytime Stories is again way more effective.
  • Blow Darts can be only crafted during winter and deal more than 50 times less damage compared to a Dark Sword. Perhaps rename then into Improved Darts, make them more useful and add a 2nd variant, called Hunter's Darts which are crafted with crimson feathers and deal bit less dmg.
  • The Electric Darts were actually useful before Wormwood has been released. You could use 5 of them to kill a Big Tentacle without troubles, but now you can do the same with a Bramble Husk.

I'd like to see the Spear Gun or Wheeler being introduced in DST. The Spear Gun is a pretty nice weapon which is actually used against Prime Apes, but it can be still useful in DST, and Wheeler will be able to get rid of the stingers.

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In the Forge when you wanted to preform a special attack with a ranged weapon you had to actually aim your attack, that was a good mechanic they should add it to every ranged weapon so you can't just hold force attack then they should lower the cost of ranged weapons make them less expensive and a pain to get.

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18 minutes ago, Warbucks said:

that was a good mechanic they should add it to every ranged weapon so you can't just hold force attack then they should lower the cost of ranged weapons make them less expensive and a pain to get.

That or a ranged charge attack would mean half of its durability would be removed. Which would give a good setback and make the weapon easier to break... Unless its the cane.:wilson_ecstatic:

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Personally I love ranged weapons. But there's not enough or really good options. 

I'm pretty sure theres only 2(counting all blow dart variants as one). Just blow darts and a boomerang which will most likely also hurt you too.

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4 hours ago, 4 Da LOLs said:

what if you could craft the blow gun sepritely to the actual darts and you would make more darts per craft?

That and this.

4 hours ago, GetNerfedOn said:

This. Also, getting to load different kinds of ammo, one at a time, into a pipe. 

I also suggest to use stingers as cheap, low-dmg dart material.

And a million times that and this. Although I don't think it is a good idea having to load it in 1 at a time. Might be better to make it take/"load" a full stack, but in between each shot the character loads the pipe for half a second (just to reduce DPS a bit). Plus the stingers being low damage ammo is amazing, I would say 10 damage (equivalent to no weapon equipped) is a fair amount for such a common and for the moment useless item, heck, maybe less damage might be better anyway so you can use it to kill things like rabbits and such.

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Other ways to improve ranged weapons indirectly, is to improve magic combat in general. For example:

  • Magic items require sanity to work, if you don't have sanity, you can't use them. Therefore, if you have 0 sanity, the dark sword (a magic item), is unequipped/dropped on the spot. The only exception to this might be the night armor. This would make the thulecite suit far more useful, and would make sanity healing items more important in the mid to late game.
  • All staves can deal damage or be used for combat, but they consume sanity; at which point they are impossible to use.
  • Maxwell could increase the damage of all magic weapons. Willow could increase the damage of all fire-based weapons (fire dart, fire staff, her lighter, and the torch). Wickerbottom could have some books for direct combat (like the one that petrifies in the Forge, and also one that summons meteors, or things like that). Wendy could lose less sanity when using magic ranged weapons and she deals regular damage with them (she would still do less damage with melee, or non-magic ranged weapons). Wolfgang and Winona lose more sanity when using magic weapons (making them less effective with it). WX might be unable to use them at all because he is a robot? Wormwood improves any life-giving magic (life giving amulet, living staff equivalent in DST if it is ever added?).

You know, that sort of stuff.

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It's hard for me to see range weapons working in a game like DST. Most mobs can only use melee attacks and some of them have long "recharge" times. Doesn't help how darts can be even more OP when you consider the incoming ship update and how you can just safely kill mobs on your boat.

I would rather prefer if ranged weapons were most effective when playing in groups and have special effects that isn't just DPS-ing.

I could see how ranged weapons can be fun and balanced to use if they had:

  • Damage scaling based on range (more powerful the further you are and/or less powerful the closer you are to target)
  • Somewhat long wind-up time (2 sec?)
  • manual aiming (or actions) for powerful/special weapons
  • Buff and add more range weapons
  • Synergy between certain characters and ranged weapons (Example: Wendy's .75 dmg penalty not being applied to magic ranged weapons)
  • Have to be on the same island to attack target
  • Can't attack mobs across gaps
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the solution seems obvious

just make blow darts have many uses per tube, exactly like melee weapons. Or make the blow tube alone and be charged with darts separately.

reduce dart dmg to that of Mactusk's to compensate

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With combat as it is, and how the ai works, I don't think ranged combat should be more powerful than it is.  It certainly should not be a tool for dps.  I do think it would be nice for some more effect based ranged items though.  Fire darts just light everything on fire, that sucks.  If there were poisoned darts that didn't do much damage but did something else, such as slowing a mob, lowering its damage output, or increasing damage taken, that would be cool.  Maybe balloons with AOE effects and ground targeting.

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