[Poll] On Wendy's Rework Postmortem

[pedregales]

5 hours ago, bruhmoment23 said:

15/25/40, with 40 damage output with a pretty big aoe range during night or with elixir.

Her damage is actually 14/23/36. The Tuning code does say 15/25/40, but in Abigail prefab code they do some weird tricks to lower her damage, and then adjust it when she is petal-boosted to do the actual intended damage. Here is the piece of code:

inst.components.combat.defaultdamage = (TUNING.ABIGAIL_DAMAGE[phase] or TUNING.ABIGAIL_DAMAGE.day) / TUNING.ABIGAIL_VEX_DAMAGE_MOD -- so abigail does her intended damage defined in tunings.lua

Basically, they check the time of day or if Abby has the Nightshade elixir (which is stored in "phase"), then divide that by Abigail's petal damage modifier (TUNING.ABIGAIL_VEX_DAMAGE_MOD). The TUNING.ABIGAIL_DAMAGE.day is just a fail safe in case "phase" has the wrong data or no data (I personally think it is redundant, but I just saw the code quickly, so I might be wrong); if that were to be the case Abby would deal "day" damage. This leads us to:

• Day: 15 (base damage) / 1.1 (petal) = ~13.64 (rounds to 14).
• Dusk: 25 / 1.1 = ~22.73 (rounds to 23).
• Night/Nightshade elixir: 40 / 1.1 = ~36.36 (rounds to 36).

Then, when she is petal-boosted that damage is multiplied by 1.1 again giving the intended 15/25/40 damage. A silly "nerf" that ends up not being a nerf (kinda).

5 hours ago, bruhmoment23 said:

Such thing doesnt exist. When Abigail starts to fight petals fly around her, Wendy attacking with her can pack in bonus damage as well as other characters as long as Abigail is fighting.

That is exactly what I meant with "petal-boosted Wendy". Wendy fighting a petal affected enemy.

5 hours ago, bruhmoment23 said:

It's not bad, it's useful in certain situations. For example during the Bee Queen fight, Abby can take care of her minions easily with it. It can also come in handy against Dragonfly aswell if you want maxium damage output with Abigail and melt her down.

It is bad... For that you can use Distilled Vengeance for the same or better effect at nearly the same cost. The elixir lasts 1 in-game day (8 minutes), but there is a minimum of 1 minute of night per day (and this is only during early-mid autumn), during which the elixir has no effect at all. If the elixir added some damage on top of her current damage, it would actually be good, or at least better.

This elixir will only be useful in games with "no night" enabled.

4 hours ago, QuartzBeam said:

Abigail's damage per hit is 14/23/36. But it's affected by the petals, so every hit after the first deals 15/25/40. Only she attacks once every 1.5 seconds, so her DPS (damage per second) is 10/16.67/26.67.

For comparison, the player attacks once every 0.5 seconds. And Wendy's total damage multiplier with the petals is 1.155x, so with a fresh Hambat, for example, she'd have about 137 DPS. (Fun fact: Wigfrid's DPS with the same weapon would be ~149.)

I went to the code just to be sure since the wiki says Abby's attack period is 1 sec, and you are right, it is 1.5 seconds. I don't know if that was part of the changes or if the wiki has been wrong for a very long time, I will assume the latter.

5 hours ago, fimmatek said:

While many people say Abigail's first hit on mobs is less than 15/25/40, in my experience she does deal full damage even on the first one. She kills bats with two hits during dusk, which should require 3 hits.

Is it a bug? Or is the code misunderstood?

It is kind of intended (see first lines of this comment). What happens is that Abby applies the petal effect before hitting the mob most of the time (which is intended, but sometimes does not happen), plus it is hard to see when she hits an enemy for regular/petal or "weakened" damage without a mod. I have seen her doing 14, instead of 15, mid-fight with a mod, which is odd.

[GetNerfedOn]

6 hours ago, fimmatek said:

While many people say Abigail's first hit on mobs is less than 15/25/40, in my experience she does deal full damage even on the first one. She kills bats with two hits during dusk, which should require 3 hits.

Is it a bug? Or is the code misunderstood?

Lemme clarify:

Abby dusk damage = 25

Batilisk Health = 50

25 + 25 = 50

Therefore, Abigail takes 2 attacks each hit dealing 25 dmg to kill a batilisk.

By extension, this means that the code is working perfectly fine.

[Yuuko]

2 hours ago, pedregales said:

It is bad... For that you can use Distilled Vengeance for the same or better effect at nearly the same cost. The elixir lasts 1 in-game day (8 minutes), but there is a minimum of 1 minute of night per day (and this is only during early-mid autumn), during which the elixir has no effect at all. If the elixir added some damage on top of her current damage, it would actually be good, or at least better.

The thing is - you don't need damage from Abi anyway.  You need survivability.  When doing Bee Queen it doesn't matter if Abi is doing daytime or night time damage - what matters is she distracts and eventually kills grumbles while you deal damage to Bee Queen.  Sometimes you even get Abi's pedal bonus but even that isn't needed.  You won't use the nighttime damage elixir OR the thorn elixir.  You will use 2-3 super heal elixirs.

This is why I said before that the low-health-Wendy thing wasn't actually that great.  People liked the mechanic, but the payout wasn't there.  Abi wasn't killing bee queen or deerclops even if you were at 1 health.  The damage was laughable even when maxed.  There was no skill cap, it was just watching Abi kill things or watching her kill things slightly faster while being at 1 health, or watching her die to Bearger in 3 hits no matter what potion you used or how low your health was lol.  What makes Abi so good is her natural shield and riled up aggression.

Some people lament the "loss of skillcap" switching to day/night damage instead of low-health-wendy damage, but in reality it brought the skill cap up.  The reason is that before you were just watching Abi do things while Wendy just stood there doing nothing because 1 hp is too risky.  Now you need to manage both Abi's health and agro as well as manage wendy and kiting / tanking / health along side it.  You're playing both of them now as opposed to 1 of them as before.  The skillcap involves getting both Abi and Wendy into a fight without letting her die.

[QuartzBeam]

3 hours ago, pedregales said:

I went to the code just to be sure since the wiki says Abby's attack period is 1 sec, and you are right, it is 1.5 seconds. I don't know if that was part of the changes or if the wiki has been wrong for a very long time, I will assume the latter.

I think it's a recent change, as in from the second rework. Before that, Abigail's damage values in tuning.lua were explicitly referred to as damage_per_second, If she wasn't attacking once per second, abigail's code would have to constantly calculate her damage per hit from her damage per second, which is five different types of counter-intuitive.

I'm guessing it's meant to balance out that she can now get damage more easily (compared to needing Wendy at death's door) while keeping the shield from the first rework.

[pedregales]

11 hours ago, Shosuko said:

The thing is - you don't need damage from Abi anyway.  You need survivability.  When doing Bee Queen it doesn't matter if Abi is doing daytime or night time damage - what matters is she distracts and eventually kills grumbles while you deal damage to Bee Queen.  Sometimes you even get Abi's pedal bonus but even that isn't needed.  You won't use the nighttime damage elixir OR the thorn elixir.  You will use 2-3 super heal elixirs.

This is why I said before that the low-health-Wendy thing wasn't actually that great.  People liked the mechanic, but the payout wasn't there.  Abi wasn't killing bee queen or deerclops even if you were at 1 health.  The damage was laughable even when maxed.  There was no skill cap, it was just watching Abi kill things or watching her kill things slightly faster while being at 1 health, or watching her die to Bearger in 3 hits no matter what potion you used or how low your health was lol.  What makes Abi so good is her natural shield and riled up aggression.

Some people lament the "loss of skillcap" switching to day/night damage instead of low-health-wendy damage, but in reality it brought the skill cap up.  The reason is that before you were just watching Abi do things while Wendy just stood there doing nothing because 1 hp is too risky.  Now you need to manage both Abi's health and agro as well as manage wendy and kiting / tanking / health along side it.  You're playing both of them now as opposed to 1 of them as before.  The skillcap involves getting both Abi and Wendy into a fight without letting her die.

I agree with the first paragraph, the most useful elixir is by far the Spectral Cure-All. Although, take in account that Distilled Vengeance also works against Bee Queen for survivability: it increases the duration of Abigail's forcefield from 0.5 seconds to 1 second (for that time, Abby takes absolutely no damage, it is amazing against multiple enemies, which the Bee Queen summons) and she also deals some extra damage to enemies that hit her, killing them faster. Even then the Spectral Cure-All is a million times better and subjectively cheaper (40 health that you can heal easily + cut grass + spider gland VS living log that you could use for a night sword), so it is better to stick with it.

But where does the rest come from? In the comment you quoted I was talking about how the Nightshade Nostrum is a bad elixir (quite easily the worst) in almost all situations, and you are talking about why "Abigail doing more damage when Wendy is at low health" is bad, which I stopped talking about a while ago... I will take the bait anyway and say that I still think it is an interesting mechanic, it just lacked external factors to encourage it, most notably, a reliable way to do damage from a safer distance. You also didn't need to be at 1 HP, in fact, that was a bad idea, you had to be at low health and kite to maximize damage, but you had to have enough health to survive at least 1 or 2 attacks from the enemy and heal every time you were hit, this is why a few people consider the skill cap was "up" for that update, you had to kite too perfectly in order to do more damage and not die, and you had to manage both your health and Abby's health.

[Yuuko]

3 hours ago, pedregales said:

But where does the rest come from? In the comment you quoted I was talking about how the Nightshade Nostrum is a bad elixir (quite easily the worst) in almost all situations, and you are talking about why "Abigail doing more damage when Wendy is at low health" is bad.

I relate them because they both try to do the same thing - give Abi more damage.  Yet her damage remains insignificant regardless.  I don't disagree about the damage potion - its garbage.  Some say "now we must wait for night time to fight" but that isn't true...  you don't have to wait for anything.  You don't need that damage from Abi.  Her damage never changed the fight much, which is why low-health-wendy was bad, and why the nightshade potion is bad.  Its just not the option Abi gets to be good at.  They aren't going to give her a good damage increase option for the same reason they won't give her a %damage mitigation shield - they don't want her to auto-boss-fight the way she auto-spider farms.

They are fine letting her clear hound waves and frog rains, both of which she can do during the day time without any elixer, but they don't want her to auto-farm deerclopse, spider queens, treeguards, ect.  Some potions are useful, some are like 90% of crock pot dishes.

Against bee queen you don't need any shield elixer because you don't need to kill the brumbles fast, or at all.  What you need is for Abi to live through the fight to keep them distracted.  For this you only need health, not vengence or night time damage.  ps - Abi will die during this fight if you just use Vengence.  You must use a health potion or she won't make it.