I don't understand why hound/depth worm wave mechanics are in the game

[HowlVoid]

Here is my idea for an alternative hound wave...

Make a declaration of war against Charlie.

Place down a war banner to let her know, to bring it.

Charlie's shadow hands will come out even in bright day light to rip through it letting you know its on. 

Ever see a weaponized Varg, Koelafant, or Euwecus?

Armored behemoths ridden by shadow jokeys that easily stampede through walls and statues. An entire Season worth of hounds all at once. Giant tall birds that shoot lasers out of their eye... Ok maybe that's too much.

Jist of it is if you clear it you will have the entire season hound free. Plus some nice koelafant trunk, euwecus wool, maybe some unique weapons and armor. The event wouldn't be easy and you'd need an army of your own. Maybe a unique warlord trumpet that lets you pull back and give the order of attack to mobs to triumph over  bosses that use aoe. 

Making it an event also means if you're gonna be at base that season building, you can just do the normal hound waves.

 

[Aeglefire]

I'm predicting a "Don't Starve Together: Revenge of Charlie" coming to the game next year. 

[DajeKotlyar]

Don't Starve become popular cause it hard enough. Game must keep challenge for players, and maintain dangerous atmosphere to simply don't become boring.

The game give you a challenge and give you enough tools to solve problem, it's only way to keep "flow effect".

Without hound or worms there is no dangerous, which can be unpredictable.

So it's a cool and important game mechanic, without it game simply don't work as it have to.

[sudoku]

Perhaps there could be some mechanic where it works like antlion, where you offer a sacrifice of some sorts to delay a hound wave from coming for a set number of days. On the flip side I'd like to see you be able to offer something to iniatiate a challenge, where if you're prepared for it there's like a horde style mini game with near endless waves of enemies and a timer in between rounds to let you build/cook food. Would be a  cool way to get rewards, and switch up the gameplay.

[Masked Koopa]

They're not a bad mechanic per se, but I don't like how much the hound attacks rely on multiple enemies stunlocking you. The early hound waves are a lot more enjoyable since they can be played around with kiting and good teamwork, but the later ones just end up being obnoxious. If you have a wendy or a wormwood (bramble husk) they end up being a total joke as a result. IMO the main change needed for hound waves is to add stronger hounds that do more damage and have more HP rather than simply spamming more hounds, that way the challenge can increase without relying on the player being literally unable to attack.

In the case of depths worms, they just have far too much HP for how many of them can spawn later on. It's very easy to kite them, but the later attacks end up being huge time sinks, and unlike bosses they don't really reward the player for the massive time investment. I would say 300-450 hp is much more appropriate.

Also, PLEASE add another use for hound's teeth. They're apparently made of brimstone, so maybe let them be used instead of rotten eggs for gunpowder? It's really dumb how much they end up piling up late game.

[mima_]

i think hound wave is fine but too monotone and way too often .. 
cave worm is doable and the loot is useful ..


anyway...

can we just talk about how often we get frog rain recently?? 
today my world have 5 frog rain with around 2 segment delay
its sucks  
should i turn this sh*t off  

[BezKa]

1 minute ago, prettynuggets said:

i think hound wave is fine but too monotone and way too often .. 
cave worm is doable and the loot is useful ..


anyway...

can we just talk about how often we get frog rain recently?? 
today my world have 5 frog rain with around 2 segment delay
its sucks  
should i turn this sh*t off  

I haven't had one in like three in-game years. It's super random

[mima_]

1 minute ago, BezKa said:

I haven't had one in like three in-game years. It's super random

man all ur frog rain share is in my world pls take these back ! 

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

4 hours ago, Generic_oz said:

It's free food at your base every other day... Not so bad

Finally someone said it. I'm usually glad the hounds are coming, cause i get free monster meat (gems are also pretty good). Even when i'm not at base, there is usually a mob i can let deal with the hounds within a biome distance. Whether it's treeguard, some seasonal boss, tentacles, merms, beefalos, pigs, bees...

[BezKa]

24 minutes ago, prettynuggets said:

man all ur frog rain share is in my world pls take these back ! 

I'll do what i can but no promises

[ArubaroBeefalo]

59 minutes ago, sudoku said:

Perhaps there could be some mechanic where it works like antlion, where you offer a sacrifice of some sorts to delay a hound wave from coming for a set number of days. On the flip side I'd like to see you be able to offer something to iniatiate a challenge, where if you're prepared for it there's like a horde style mini game with near endless waves of enemies and a timer in between rounds to let you build/cook food. Would be a  cool way to get rewards, and switch up the gameplay.

The you can do it before a boss and be sure they wont appear in the middle of a df fight which will remove all the spice. The risk of hounds is what makes raid bosses more exciting if not you are fighting a boss with all the gear you wish to be sure you win

[Cr4zyFl4mes]

6 hours ago, Dwight34 said:

To me this mechanic is extremely unfair, unenjoyable, and binary in its outcomes: either you're near a killbox and you win easily, or you're not and you're instantly dead.

1) Unfair - Life is unfair. Maybe the game has a hidden lesson for us?

2) Unejoyable - I don't mind it; I like the spoils.

3) Binary in its outcomes - I can't disagree more. For me it has a range of outcomes

• Sometimes it helps me, because i need the monster meat or light.
• Sometimes it prolongs my plans.
• Sometimes it hurts me real bad (whether i lead them to killbox that i haven't taken care of properly, or whether i'm stranded on one of the small Lunar islads in Woodie's goose form.)
• Sometimes they are real easy (again, whether I use the killbox, or whether i am traveling and use a beefalo horde or something.)
• Sometimes I just run away and ignore them. (if i'm not playing on public, that wouldn't be cool)
• And sometimes I am in the middle of another fight, and that's where the real fun begins.
• Sometimes i can save a fellow player and feel good about it.
• Sometimes i can be saved by a fellow player and  well, feel good about it just the same.
• Sometimes I survive the ruins with a little hp and get the wave, just as I leave the cave.

[clickrush]

I think for those who struggle against waves and with combat generally there are several characters that make them easier to tackle. The best options (random order):

1. Wendy is the best anti swarm fighter and the best fighter for players who struggle otherwise with combat due to nerves or being a slower with the mouse and keyboard (nothing wrong with that!).

2. Winona can build powerful static defenses and other useful utility. Apparently they can even be used on boats. She might be a very underplayed and underrated character IMO. Granted this needs a bit of planning and setup, but I think it would be worthwhile to at least try, because she has no significant downsides and is just a well rounded character.

3. Wigfrid provides fantastic team combat support. She makes the best "bang for your buck"-helmet in the game, has improved combat and tanking modifiers and a few powerful team-wide buffs (songs).

4. A Wolfgang with a full belly will make short work of hounds. They have only 150hp for normal hounds and 100hp for blue/red hounds, so he can kill them in 1-2 hits with a decent weapon.

But again, just carry around a decent weapon (hambat/tentacle spikes or better) and a helmet, tank the first few hounds, so you don't get swarmed, then you can kite the rest. It's really not that big of a deal!

Are players who struggle against them simply not carrying armor and then think they have to be kited perfectly or something? I play this game with a track-pad on my laptop, sitting on a couch and I mostly play non-combat focused characters like Warly recently. I get hit by spiders now and then, I sometimes miss butterflies and so on, but I don't find hound waves particularly scary (anymore), difficult, annoying or otherwise. They disrupt the flow and force you to be ready to fight, both are good things, that's it!

[HowlVoid]

4 hours ago, clickrush said:

 

I hate to admit it but Wormwood is good too. I don't like admitting it because I want his crafts reworked... Anyways, you don't have to tank them... Sort of, place 3 bramble traps and 1 bramble husk in a bee queen bundle. 

Pretty cheap to have a one time use discount abigail for the price of 1 inventory space.

Anyways when you hear the hounds place the 3 traps down and equip the husk. Run around to group them the best you can and guide them to the traps. Take a hit to ensure they all get caught in it because they have a stupid 1 sec delay and I swear to god they miss 50% of the time for me.

3 traps+ 1 husk = 142.6 damage. Every hound will be 1 hit away from death or just eat another attack to kill them with the husk *shrug*. 

They wont all die but the few that survive will be easy to kite, especially if you're already blooming.

[Spino43]

I just don't like hounds past day 100. It's like experiencing shadow monkey trains every 2-3 days, I don't find it fun. Otherwise they are fine. Depth Worms are easy to fight, but they can be deadly if you are not careful, and fighting them can be long due to their massive health pool.

At least they deliver free glow berries for your Moggles need during ruins clearing.

[Cheggf]

8 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

IMO the main change needed for hound waves is to add stronger hounds that do more damage and have more HP rather than simply spamming more hounds, that way the challenge can increase without relying on the player being literally unable to attack.

How is punching one enemy for a long time adding a challenge? The difficulty of hound waves is because there's a lot of them so you have to think and can't just mindlessly hold F for a certain amount of time then press D and repeat it.

8 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

In the case of depths worms, they just have far too much HP for how many of them can spawn later on. It's very easy to kite them, but the later attacks end up being huge time sinks, and unlike bosses they don't really reward the player for the massive time investment. I would say 300-450 hp is much more appropriate.

If they had 450 HP you could literally kill them by dodging once then holding F. At most, from day 100+, the maximum amount of depths worms that can spawn is 3-5. Wilson can kill a depths worm in about 12 seconds with a dark sword or about 15 seconds with a ham bat. I don't know why you're calling something that takes 30-75 seconds a "huge time sink" and "massive time investment" and comparing it to bosses who can take multiple days to fight.

Hounds can easily take way longer to fight than depths worms because you can't just freely hit them 6 or 7 times in a row.

8 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

Also, PLEASE add another use for hound's teeth. They're apparently made of brimstone, so maybe let them be used instead of rotten eggs for gunpowder? It's really dumb how much they end up piling up late game.

Make blowdarts.

[mima_]

29 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Also, PLEASE add another use for hound's teeth. They're apparently made of brimstone, so maybe let them be used instead of rotten eggs for gunpowder? It's really dumb how much they end up piling up late game.

i agree even make blowdarts (i have many stacks of them) teeth still pilling 
i just simply hope somehow we can turn the teeth to bone shard .. 

[Aeglefire]

Random ideas, just throwing it out there:

- Hound's tooth necklace

- Hound's tooth soup

- Hound's teeth used to make hound station to pray to the hound gods so that they don't spawn as often, etc.

[Masked Koopa]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

How is punching one enemy for a long time adding a challenge? The difficulty of hound waves is because there's a lot of them so you have to think and can't just mindlessly hold F for a certain amount of time then press D and repeat it.

If they had 450 HP you could literally kill them by dodging once then holding F. At most, from day 100+, the maximum amount of depths worms that can spawn is 3-5. Wilson can kill a depths worm in about 12 seconds with a dark sword or about 15 seconds with a ham bat. I don't know why you're calling something that takes 30-75 seconds a "huge time sink" and "massive time investment" and comparing it to bosses who can take multiple days to fight.

Hounds can easily take way longer to fight than depths worms because you can't just freely hit them 6 or 7 times in a row.

Make blowdarts.

If you think stunlocking a player by spamming enemies at them is an appropriate challenge I suggest you go fight splumonkies. Most people prefer something that can be reasonably kited. There's a reason people make hound traps, and it isn't because they can't deal with the sheer challenge hounds provide. It's because they suck and they're unfun to deal with.

Sure, if you perfectly synch them up and you're playing solo, 5 depths worms can be manageable timewise. But when you throw into the mix that you might be more than 1 person things start getting a lot more irritating since the worms collide with each other and aggro isn't super consistently held. There's only so many worms you can reasonably get to parallel attack, and that shortens the time span you have available to hit them. I don't see why the game should be throwing 4500 hp worth of enemies at you at random intervals. And that's more than deerclops and spider queen, and entirely comparable to malbatross, antlion and bear. I don't see why I wouldn't be comparing them to bosses. They even deal comparable damage at 75 per bite. Furthermore, if it takes 12 seconds with a dark sword, that's up to a minute of just attacking depthsworms nonstop to kill them with one of the most powerful weapons in the entire game. And you're going to use up 2/3 of the thing just dealing damage to these things.

And whether you like it or not, the overwhelming majority of bosses don't reasonably take several days to fight. The fact that people can solo raid bosses is cool and all, but it's not the intended way to deal with them, nor should it be taken into account for a mechanic that doesn't deliver the player any choice. When actually fought with 2-4 players raid bosses can be dealt with in just under a day.

Hounds don't take longer to fight than depths worms if you have literally any form of AOE damage, something many characters just have on hand. It's not even a consistent threat.

I should also inform you that reed traps are not in fact generated in every world, and that i'd rather not farm 20+ stacks of reeds manually just to have something to invest hounds teeth into. And that's not even going into the reeds id need for using wickerbottom to farm that many feathers.

[Cheggf]

49 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

If you think stunlocking a player by spamming enemies at them is an appropriate challenge I suggest you go fight splumonkies

A standard group of hounds can't really stunlock you for very long. There's not nearly enough and they spend a lot of time barking.

49 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

Most people prefer something that can be reasonably kited.

They can be reasonably kited, especially in summer & autumn. Just because you don't want to put in more thought than counting to a number then pressing a movement key doesn't mean kiting hounds is unreasonable.

49 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

There's a reason people make hound traps, and it isn't because they can't deal with the sheer challenge hounds provide.

Yeah it's because it's a lot faster, safer, and easier.

49 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

It's because they suck and they're unfun to deal with.

I'm pretty sure if I asked a hundred players why they build tooth traps they wouldn't answer "Because hounds are unfun". They'd say it's a lot faster, safer, or easier. Or they don't know how to fight hounds at all.

It's your opinion that fighting hounds sucks and is unfun to deal with, so don't fight hounds. No one is stopping you from using traps to kill hounds and just walking away from depths worms.

49 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

The rest of the comment.

Play the game more and read the wiki less. It'll solve a lot of your problems. 

[Masked Koopa]

Alright then pal. Thanks for solving the reed problem.

[Notecja]

21 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

I'm pretty sure if I asked a hundred players why they build tooth traps they wouldn't answer "Because hounds are unfun".

Hounds are unfun after longer time in game, at point when deerclops and bearger turns into meat/wood/living logs delivery.

[eiusmodi]

When I started playing the game without any changes to it, mod-wise or in the world settings, the things I found annoying/unfair was Frog Rain, Poison Birchnut Trees and Disease...At the beginning beginning, I even turned off entire seasons because I couldn't handle them. Hound Waves however I never touched. It didn't even occur to me to turn that mechanic off despite knowing I could. Which is why I greatly disagree with OP here. Hound attacks make the early game just the right amount of challenging to me...and given the fact that - despite I'm having like 400+ hours in the game now - I still see myself more on the "noob" side of things, they are still a neat challenge to me late game too (because everything always is xD).  Sure they are tedious, and my reaction to Wickerbottom saying "something is approaching" or hearing the hound sounds always is something along the lines of "oh s***, here we go again -.-" Because yes, they ALWAYS interrupt something, but instant death? Like even if they surprise me somewhere incredibly unsafe with no defense on myself or nearby, I legit always manage to simply outrun them, since their attention shifts rather quickly to something else if they cannot get a bite out of you. They are only a threat if you just had to deal with something else and are almost dead already and/or in combination with nighttime around the corner...that's when they usually get me... Either them or Charlie :P 

I still rather enjoy the mechanic, despite everything. Which is why I never turned them off or even just lowered the frequency. I (still) find stuff like the Poison Birchnut and Frog rain so much more annoying because you get no warning in advance (like with the hounds or the giants) and so you cannot make sure to have these spawn away from your base. The Birchnut is super easy to avoid though, which granted, hounds are not unless turned off, but I don't know. Like someone else already said, without them hounds it's just a game about picking berries, carrots and having a thermal stone. And I mean... I also see them as somewhat of a reliable source for meat delivered right to you

So yeah I wouldn't generally say they are bad and its bad game design...proof of the replies being split over that one as well. It's just to each their own. If you don't like them, turn them off. Problem solved <3

 

 

[Well-met]

If you complain about hounds and rely on trap fields, perhaps it's exactly because you've never learned to fight them head on? It's a paradox.

Without hound waves I would've never known how useful the blue hound freezing is.

Worms are some of the most fun mob in the game to fight i don't know why you hate on those. Hounds I can somewhat understand.

[Falkenpelz]

Am I the only one who just calls hounds "pierogi ingredients delivery"?

And while the red ones can eat poop, I never say no to blue hounds, cause for some reason I'm always short on blue gems.

Only time they are pretty problematic is when you're in the middle of the ocean or at Pearl's island, since then you're lacking the speed and space you need for a somewhat fair fight. I'd really like to see Klei adjusting the mechanic somehow to deal with these problems, for example through a sea version of hounds more fit for boat fights, but other than that I consider the loot quite worth the annoyance.