Wendy's Rework, Math and Analisis

[ShadowDuelist]

8 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

I just came here to say that I would love to see Woodie do this

Its a bad example, Woodie as a moose can kill and entire server's worth of 4 players frog rain, taking only some damage, and it can be done over a really extended period of time so long you use the charges correctly. I do it every frog rain, and its not really that much of a flex, just practice charging without getting hit a few times, and you are all set.

Abigail can kill "a bunch" of frogs but it will inevitably die after a while unless you keep boosting her with the healing potion. You basically do the same thing, less efficiently, and at a much more expensive cost...

About the rework I have the same experience I had when I played woodie as soon as he got reworked: great ideas, great QOL changes, bad numbers. 

Wendy got a few tiny buffs, and about the same nerfs, basically leaving her in a weird debatable spot where I dont know if you could say she's better now. I don't think this is what they intended to do in first place.

I still think Wendy's strongest (unintended) perk was the sanity station. The sisturn is an okay-ish replacement but its not quite there yet. Maybe they could increase the area of influence a bit so we can at least stack 2 auras, or, let us place dark petals inside for a much stronger negative sanity aura (which you can then turn to positive through bee queen crown). EG: if you place normal petals it works exsctly as it is now. If you put dark petals you get -200/min sanity aura which with the crown will give you about 100 a minute in positive aura. Also petals inside should last a lot longer.

I think the new abigail is generally fine, I'd make some fine tuning on these aspects: 

• Pipspooks should have a slightly higher drop rate if you complete all his "quests". Or helping more than one pipspooks in a 3 days timeframe could provide more drops each time.
• Shield potion mechanic should be double checked, I feel it doesnt work as intended. The shield immunity after getting hit should be a lot longer, or just give her a straight -% damage received for its duration. Duration should also be longer.
• Damage potion is only worth using is Wendy is hurt or very hurt. I'd raise its base damage value to 10 extra damage, and then be it Wendy's Hp dependant after that. The duration, given the high cost, could be longer too.
• Wendy's Hp should scale Abi's damage faster. I think Abi's max damage should be reached when Wendy is at 20 hp or lower, not just 1 hp. Otherwise you just can't use wendy at all if you want to go full damage, not even over a beefalo (yes i know 1 HP runs are a thing, but in this case it's really not worth staying at 1HP for the reward you get. 20 seems more reasonable)

[CremeLover]

Okay, I have figured out how Abigail shield works. The shield acts in a similar manner as to thulecite crown and bone armor in that it nullifies all incoming damage. Abigail has a natural shield, but you can reinforce said shield by giving her the defense elixir. The shield activates on being hit and ONLY upon being hit, much like thucelite crown.

The shield duration is actually tied to the shield animations, and this might have been a difficult thing to observe on the naked eye, but here it is.

Now, I've never dwelved into the animation part of this game, so my numbers might be wrong, and I'm not sure if there's a regulation on posting the game's assets on the forums, I do hope I don't get a warning.

Default last 0.42 seconds

And the ones with elixir buffs lasts 0.72 seconds, roughly 70% more of default shield duration

So the elixir is working as intended

[QuartzBeam]

6 minutes ago, CremeLover said:

snip

 

Have you figured out what the cooldowns are, if there are any?

 

Also, while I love the shield idea, I'm worried that the shields might not actually block enough damage to matter in practice. The enemies would have to be synchronized pretty well for enough of them to attack during the split second the shield is up.

[CremeLover]

2 minutes ago, QuartzBeam said:

 

Have you figured out what the cooldowns are, if there are any?

 

Also, while I love the shield idea, I'm worried that the shields might not actually block enough damage to matter in practice. The enemies would have to be synchronized pretty well for enough of them to attack during the split second the shield is up.

There doesn't seem to be any, just adquiring a shield upon being hit if you don't have one already. And yes, other than monkeys, frogs and mobs you purposely syncrhonize like a pack of worms, I don't see this getting much use. You also only get retaliation upon mobs hitting the retaliation shield and not abigail with the retaliation buff. Good thing is there's no limit in how many mobs it can target for retaliation for a single shield pop, so there's that.

[QuartzBeam]

I finally got time to do some more testing and I've come to the conclusion that Abigail is definitely better than she was before.

Provided Wendy is at full health, Abigail can reliably take on 10 hounds with no help from the player and no elixirs. She'll take quite a beating in the process (400-500), but she'll come out on top. Unyielding Draught reduced that damage down to ~300. Not an overly impressive buff imo, but it works.

She fares even better against 20 frogs under the same conditions, suffering ~140 damage without Unyielding Draught and ~80 with it.

She can also fight off a beefalo herd (tested with 6 beefalos), but she needs Wendy to be at very low health (~30). A Choleric Tonic, Distilled Vengeance or Unyielding Draught might allow her to pull it off with Wendy at higher health, ut don't expect too much from them.

 

Overall impressions:

• Abigail is definitely better, but the rate at which her damage increases is abysmal and most of her potential will thus go unused in a survival game. Making the damage formula a linear function of Wendy's lost health % would be a huge improvement while still being fairly risky. I mean, I can live with Maxwell-level health in exchange for a ghost wiht 32 AoE damage/second.
• The three "combat booster" elixirs are not half bad actually, but each fills a particular niche.
• Unyielding Draught is cheap and not reliant on Wendy having low health to do its job. And that kinda balances out the fact that it's job is not very impressive. The best use for it is probably hounds, which will do 100-200 less damage with it. The other mobs that attack en mass won't see as drastic a difference cause they do not deal as much damage in the first place and, of course, it's completely wasted against enemies that Abigail can stunlock. Still, it's decent as a poor man's combat booster.
• Choleric Tonic is almost as cheap, but is reliant on Wendy's health. It's hard to say is the tonic itself needs buffing or if fixing Abigail's damage formula would be enough. Perhaps raising it to a 30% damage boost would be fine, but a flat damage increase would ruin it. The tonic seems designed to be a cheap damage boost for risk-taking Wendys. Plus, it is the only combat booster that works on everything, including solo mobs; the other two only work on groups of enemies with roughly synchronized attacks.
• Finally, Distilled Vengeance is more expensive than the other two, but it seems to combine their effects while not being reliant on Wendy's health. It extends the shield's duration and deal a flat 20 points of damage to anyone that hits it. Definitely an upgrade on Unyielding Draught and also a great alternative to the Choleric Tonic if you prefer to keep your health high. The jury's still out on whether it's better than the Choleric Tonic for a low health Wendy.