Maxwell rework?

[adamipiotr]

So, it's no news that Maxwell is not the best character. Besides gathering resources, he poses no danger during the fight for even with the top notch armor, he's ultimately very, very frail. I think he deserves not much a buff, but a fundamental change to the Codex Umbra.

I came with an idea on how to fix Maxwell. A set of ideas, that is. The first thing would be enhaning his gathering puppets AI to make them chop or dig ONLY when Maxwell's holding respective tool. And when the puppets would be doing so, avoiding the trees Maxwell will chop soon - so basically, choosing the farthest available tree whenever Maxwell is in a highly clustered set of trees - like every wood farm. 

The second and the most important thing are his warriors. The definition of useless - dies in a single or a few swings and deals nearly no damage. To buff them, I would suggest allowing Maxwell giving his shadows items such as better weapons or armor. These items would be lost indefinitely as the puppets die, but would never be destroyed when onnpuppets. Armor would grant only 1/3rd of its defensive power. It would be very useful if Maxwell could "feed" his puppets additional Nightmare Fuel to grant them bonus HP - 75 for each piece and 25 for each piece beyond 3rd. These fighting minions would slowly regenerste their health outside of combat.

regardless, the minions would always drop a single piece of nightmare fuel.

The last thing Maxwell would need to top the rework off are some kinds of booster shots for his sanity, allowing him to hire theoretically infinite amount of puppets - produced with some nightmare fuel, bee sting and 2 papyrus.

The idea behind this rework sprouts from my experience of 500 days of Maxwell and subsequent 1200 days of WX-78. Maxwell simply doesn't get any better than 2 free chopping guys. I think that having the possibility to sacrifice industrial amounts of nightmare fuel (every 400 HP minion with a night sword and a nightmare armor costs 18 noghtmare fuel, and 26 for each beyond the 2nd. It is a lot) for external, permanent buff such as WX's would fit extremly well with Maxwell's story and his powers. 

There may be some balance issues, but there's plenty of aspects to work around - minions HP, damage modifier, armor effectiveness, hp re-gaining, hp scaling off nightmare fuel pieces, even the cost of puppets and insanity syringe. 

given enough love, Maxwell would really become one of the most fun and rewarding characters to play. And I would love to try out such a character - high risk, high reward, versatile and very good in the late game. That's what Maxwell should be in my mind. 

I hope you like the idea and if you don't, let me know what part of this extremly balanced not at all broken rework do you not enjoy. Cheers!

[Seero]

8 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

So, it's no news that Maxwell is not the best character. Besides gathering resources, he poses no danger during the fight for even with the top notch armor, he's ultimately very, very frail. I think he deserves not much a buff, but a fundamental change to the Codex Umbra.

 

if he's very frail

8 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

I came with an idea on how to fix Maxwell. A set of ideas, that is. The first thing would be enhaning his gathering puppets AI to make them chop or dig ONLY when Maxwell's holding respective tool. And when the puppets would be doing so, avoiding the trees Maxwell will chop soon - so basically, choosing the farthest available tree whenever Maxwell is in a highly clustered set of trees - like every wood farm. 

 

how does giving him this ridiculous nerf going to make him any better

 

 

[Rhovious Aran]

Really don't like the idea having to hold the respective tools for the puppets to work, I don't wanna carry a shovel and and axe each time I wipe out a forest, imagine constantly switching between shovel and axe, just for the minions to do their job, would tremendously slow down the whole process, at that point I might just do it myself. No thank you.

Can't we just have an on and off button like with abigails flower? 

[Cheggf]

12 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

So, it's no news that Maxwell is not the best character.

That most certainly is news, he's arguably the best character in the game. He's by far the best resource gatherer, can read Wickerbottom's books (making him inarguably the best character if you have a stockpile of books), above average at farming spiders, and slightly above average at combat. 

12 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

The first thing would be enhaning his gathering puppets AI to make them chop or dig ONLY when Maxwell's holding respective tool.

That's a huge nerf to him. Now instead of being able to walking cane pick everything up, or lantern pick everything up, you need to constantly be swapping between an axe and a shovel so your minions do their jobs.

12 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

And when the puppets would be doing so, avoiding the trees Maxwell will chop soon - so basically, choosing the farthest available tree whenever Maxwell is in a highly clustered set of trees - like every wood farm. 

And the minions are also wasting a bunch of both their time and your time because they're chopping distant trees for no reason... These changes combined probably make him worse than Woodie at gathering logs.

12 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

The second and the most important thing are his warriors. The definition of useless - dies in a single or a few swings and deals nearly no damage

They are not useless, they are difficult to use and their use cases aren't all encompassing. They make Maxwell pretty good at farming spiders and can help out quite a bit against most bosses, basically all of them without an AoE attack. Their damage also isn't really that low, there's two of them and they each deal 40 damage per swing. That's in between the strength of a spear and a tentacle spike.

12 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

The last thing Maxwell would need to top the rework off are some kinds of booster shots for his sanity, allowing him to hire theoretically infinite amount of puppets

Four is fine, especially with the load on a server this could cause.

12 hours ago, adamipiotr said:

The idea behind this rework sprouts from my experience of "500 days" of Maxwell and subsequent 1200 days of WX-78. Maxwell simply doesn't get any better than 2 free chopping guys.

He can summon 4, not 2.

[Mike23Ua]

I want the former puppet king to have appropriately fearsome abilities- Shadow Workers of himself are Meh.. this dudes been pulling nightmare hands out of his book and dancing shadows by campfires since Hallowed Nights of years past.

His workers should still be PART of his design but not the ENTIRE Design- I’m expecting some higher tier abilities- This official image shows he can make the shadows dance for him (and terrify everyone except Wendy who looks mildly unamused)

Other than that- I would love it if he could hold his book in his hand (again like in the above image to summon things..) rather than having to Drop that book on the ground to conjure up his shadows.

Cant really think of anything else suiting to give him. 

[micmou]

I disagree and agree with some of your balance ideas. Some revisions to what you have suggested.

 

Reduce the shadow types to one and depending on what item you give them determines there function. Items giving to them are never returned but there durability is infinite. Raising the puppets health to 200 and allowing them to use armor normally would be nice and essential. 

 

Allow the codex umbra to toggle the puppets behavior on and off say you dont want them to fight you use the book and they stop doing there role.

 

Allowing us to summon the nightmares without nightmare fuel by using the book would be benefical as well. The current amount of shadows we have aswell as there functions works fine. The only other change I would suggest is to give the duelist form of the puppets better AI.

 

To counteract his low health and maybe incentivize shadow armor give it like a 5% boost while on him and maybe take like 33% less durability loss for him.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

Why no mixing single player maxwell with the dst one

I mean, summon shadows with the book+nightmere fuel and in the tab you choose what work you want them to do but without needing to use danm flint tools, just the orden so you dont need to summon choppers to chop and after you finish killing them to summon fighters. You just change their shape in the tab (i say tab because is more confortable than creating a new codex umbra menu and is kinda emty with only the book recipe if the tools requirement are removed) and it can be added a "dont do anything" choice

6 hours ago, Cheggf said:

They are not useless, they are difficult to use and their use cases aren't all encompassing

But needing to use spears to summon them is so annoying for the little work they can really do. They are strong for some task but so annoying

[Hornete]

 I just want maybe more shadow minions and a bit of control over the shadow minions. That's all I want, nothing too game changing.

[micmou]

I dont know I think that maxwell is deserving of more especially with all the lore he has tied with him. Sure he can stay another companion based character but making him more unique isnt a bad thing. At the very least some significant changes need to be made to his shadows.

[thegreatJash]

8 hours ago, Rhovious Aran said:

 

Can't we just have an on and off button like with abigails flower? 

Yes, you should be able to pick up the book and read it to deactivate and activate puppets. 

[AileTheAlien]

10 hours ago, Rhovious Aran said:

Can't we just have an on and off button like with abigails flower?

I wouldn't even need an on/off button if his minions had better behavior. (Although it could still help with some less common situations, and I think it would be simple enough for players to understand, like Abigail's flower.) His digger is pretty OK already, since it only digs stumps and graves (things which take up a lot of time and shovels normally) and they avoid digging up things that players would normally avoid (mushrooms only regrow if you leave the hole alone, rabbits need their dens intact, you don't want your transplanted bushes getting dug, etc). His axe-man is annoying to try and control, since he chops any choppable trees, but you don't get seeds if they're small. Miner's pretty good, since boulders and petrified trees don't grow over time, and mini-glaciers will disappear in the spring.

Instead of allowing his warriors to equip things or be healed, I'd rather have them as temporary summons so you don't have to worry about them after fights. That could also be the place where he gains some depth to his mechanics. Right now he only summons one type of warrior, but he could have stronger warriors that need a more advanced book to summon (like the 'alchemy' version of his book, or an ancient-pseudoscience super-warrior), or different types of warriors like spear- or ice-throwers for range and crowd control. Then he could fulfill different roles for the team, depending on who else is on the server, or the player's preferred fighting style. That would also fit better with his 'puppet king' theme that Mike23Ua points out is currently under-utilized in his mechanics. Also +1 for having his book be a hand-item to give him his recipes, rather than dropping it on the ground; That would let him be more mobile during fights, especially fitting the temporary warriors I propose.  If his warriors only cost normal sanity and not sanity capacity, that would add a bit of decision-making there too - players would need to not have any workers taking up space, if they wanted to go 'all in' on combat.  : )

[adamipiotr]

18 hours ago, Rhovious Aran said:

Can't we just have an on and off button like with abigails flower? 

Very good point

I also see the points of Egg and agree with them somewhat - sure, lantern picking is nice and 4 choppers are nice, but I like to have decent sanity backup so I go with digger and 2 choppers and also chop myself. I see it more practical, but whatever - I'd like the AI of choppers to accomodate to the player's actions to not disturb him nor to waste their time regardless of how they're playing. 

My idea of workers rework can be summed up in two changes:

Better AI - Maybe not the one I proposed, but I'd assume few new AI patterns to fit what Maxwell's doing and not to interrupt each other in the chopping work, which they do constantly in my experience

Switching them on and off OR controlling them

And my idea of combat shadows rework can be summed up in as someone pointed out "More depth". Some items, some new mechanics, some better AI- maybe they'd copy player's kiting pattern? I think that's pretty good and manageable.
I would just love Maxwell to start as a "weaker" woodie and during the game and the progress player does (Maybe upgrading Codex Umbra in the Pseudoscience using various boss items, granting him more shadows, special item recipes or stronger shadows?) become the real puppet master. He seems like a amn that gets stronger wih every nightmare fuel piece he gathers.

thanks for the responses, and I hope this thread won't be dead and useless