Your preferred beefalo tendency?

[YesterdaysLemon]

I have had a debate with a few other friends on which beefalo is the best to tame, I had said ornery as the damage is nice, but my friends noted that almost all the survivors can deal as much or more DPS with a ham bat and that having to feed it after domestication is such an annoyance and that they would rather prefer the speed of a rider or default as to not have to feed it ever again once domestication is complete.

Keep note that we were discussing assume we picked someone like Wilson, a character without combat abilities.

I would just like to ask the community what they believe is the best to rush and why.

[BezKa]

My favorite is rider. I like the speed

But with friends I take it upon myself to get an ornery so we can switch depending on the situation

[YesterdaysLemon]

Just now, BezKa said:

My favorite is rider. I like the speed

But with friends I take it upon myself to get an ornery so we can switch depending on the situation

But what about solo play? What would you domesticate if it was just you and your cow?

[BezKa]

8 minutes ago, YesterdaysLemon said:

But what about solo play? What would you domesticate if it was just you and your cow?

As I said, rider. My first ever Beefalo is rider and his name is Jeffrey. 

I'm considering getting a second one though, just so I can have easier time fighting.

[ShadowDuelist]

Ornery always.

I like to just fight without having to dismount and with the added perk of permanent protection. Maxwell can also work while mounted and you basically bypass his con entirely.

I tend to use a glossamer saddle most of the time which gives me a pretty high permanent speed/damage rate and, in more serious fights or when I know I’ll be fighting for some time, switching to the War saddle.

Using one stick/grass/whatever edible to mount again is really cheap compared to using actual weapons in the long run. 
 

I don’t like the rider because I fight a lot, and having to park the beefalo away from danger is always risky. I don’t like the default because overall it’s harder to get and you end up having a beefalo that deals less damage than the ornery and has the same speed than the ornery, just to bypass a con that I actually do not care about (feeding when re-mounting)

[Masked Koopa]

Ornery is pretty powerful in fights, especially since you can choose between a ridiculously high speed with the glossamer or very high damage with the war saddle. I generally wouldn't use it for boss fights where I prefer to do a lot of tanking (like klaus) since healing a beefalo back up isn't as practical as eating some beans or using a bat bat, but for general ruins clearing it's easily better than ham bats or w/e since the slightly slower attack speed doesn't really come into play when you are kiting enemies; you're going to hit the same number of times anyway. And that's where the higher speed and passive regen really come into play, since you can just ignore incidental damage most of the time. I end up tanking any dangling depths dwellers I come across because you can just afford to.

Also worth noting that unlike a ham bat, it doesn't spoil or force you to carry meat and pigskin with you, so it's great if you're lazy.

Rider does have a pretty strong benefit in terms of movement speed, beating out a normal character on a road with a mag + walking cane, making it easily one of the fastest and cheapest ways to get from point A to point B. That having been said, it is a bit of a luxury item, since I would never tame one of these first, only as a supplement to the much more useful ornery.

[Cheggf]

Ornery is the best, rider is the second best, default sucks, pudgy is terrible. Sure, everyone except for Wes can match the damage of an ornery beefalo on foot. But they'll need to use dark swords to do that, so that's 1 living log & 5 nightmare fuel per 100 swings at best if you never drop low durability dark swords. That's also 20 sanity drain per minute. But they also need armor, which breaks, so they need some slots for that. And they need healing, which probably spoils, and they need some slots for that.

So while they're on foot with sanity drain & resource expenditure fighting in the small confined area of a lantern, I'm on my beefalo with sanity gain (Tam) with the freedom to go wherever I need to (lantern). Beefalo is free armor, free healing, and free weapons and it is all of that without taking an equip slot. You can hold a lantern while wearing a tam and wearing a rain coat and you're gaining sanity, staying dry, and staying bright all while staying completely combat capable. You can do any combination of things and none of them need to be armor (Unless you're fighting bishops or Mactusk) and none of them need to be weapons.

And that's not even getting into Wendy's 56% damage boost on a beefalo, or Wes' 25% penalty not applying on a beefalo, or Wes & Maxwell's health penalty not applying on a beefalo (Once again sans bishops & Mactusk).

The argument that "you can be as good or better on foot" could be applied to say the rider sucks a lot more than the ornery beefalo. Rider has about an 80% or 100% boost depending on if you grinded for the glossamer saddle, but that's it. Players on foot can stack a 25% cane, and a 20% magi, and a 25% 30% road, and a 20% Wormwood or 25% Wolfgang or 50% WX and go a lot faster than beefalo. I believe they stack multiplicatively, too, so even before accounting for character specific boosts it would be something like a 95% boost. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that.

Both rider & ornery are great for a lot of reasons, but I've never made a rider because in my opinion it is not as useful as an ornery. Ornery's downside of "Once every billion years you need to feed it a single twig" is not very impactful.

[Guille6785]

rider all the way for wendy

[Muzarello]

Rider if I had to choose the first one to train, I actually like to have the Rider and Ornery both trained, as I play Wolfgang a lot, sometimes I just want to travel fast but when I switch to Warly or Wormwood for a year or two I just take the Ornery for my fights and travels.
Besides the Sanity, is there an advantage to the Pudgy?  Besides being a cute chubby happy boy also.

[Friendly Grass]

Rider + glossamer is equivalent to a 106.67% base player speed boost. Cane + mag is 50%, add on a road and it’s 95%.

Ornery + war saddle does 66 damage. But it does attack 7-15% slower (normal player attack speed is inconsistent). So assuming an average [edit: normal player attack speed] attack speed of .45 seconds, it’s dps is equivalent to a 16 second old hambat. With a war saddle it’s 46% faster than a base player speed. With glossamer it’s equivalent to an 81% speed boost and it just breaks the 50 damage threshold. It will need to be fed 1 item just about every time you mount it unless you mount multiple times within less than a minute or so.

Default is rider but it’s 14.3% speed boost is substituted for a 36% damage boost. Or ornery without it’s downside but requires a war saddle to break the 50 damage threshold.

You don’t need a saddlehorn to swap saddles btw.

I think they’re fairly well balanced and it depends a lot on playstyle and preference.

[Grim the]

Rider. "Haha beef go brrrr"
I just switch to the war saddle if I need to tank.

[Cheggf]

55 minutes ago, Friendly Grass said:

But it does attack 7-15% slower (normal player attack speed is inconsistent). So assuming an average attack speed of .45 seconds

The last time I saw someone talking about attack speed he said it's about 2.33 per second, but 2.22 per second is only about 5% slower, not 7-15%. Were they wrong?

[clickrush]

I never actually got around taming beefalo and considered this a waste of time. But from some of these responses it seems like it's actually quite strong and feasible.

Do you guys actually use them to fight some of the main island bosses or are you talking about killing spiders and koalefants, because for that I don't need a beefalo. If fighting (certain) bosses is actually a thing then I might try out taming an ornery beefalo on a character that doesn't have combat boni. I mean on Wolfgang and Wigfrid you obviously want to fight on foot.

Also it is something you could do efficiently during the first year? I think during the first winter you'd have too much stuff to do but after you've gotten McTusk, Klaus and Deerclops you could possibly start with it I guess?

[Tarciso]

In my opinion the only two uses of a Beefalo are its ability to carry heavy objects and cover great distances, so a Beefalo runner is the best option.

[Cheggf]

32 minutes ago, clickrush said:

I never actually got around taming beefalo and considered this a waste of time. But from some of these responses it seems like it's actually quite strong and feasible.

Do you guys actually use them to fight some of the main island bosses or are you talking about killing spiders and koalefants, because for that I don't need a beefalo. If fighting (certain) bosses is actually a thing then I might try out taming an ornery beefalo on a character that doesn't have combat boni. I mean on Wolfgang and Wigfrid you obviously want to fight on foot.

Also it is something you could do efficiently during the first year? I think during the first winter you'd have too much stuff to do but after you've gotten McTusk, Klaus and Deerclops you could possibly start with it I guess?

Taming a beefalo is something you do in addition to whatever else. You will be slightly slower at whatever else since you need to pick up grass/twigs more that you otherwise would, but you can still do everything just fine as long as you keep the beefalo safe. Maybe wouldn't try to ruins rush while doing it, though.

I have had great success with beefalo VS deerclops, bearger, dragonfly, treeguard, spider queen, especially Klaus (that fight was a breeze), antlion, lord of the fruit flies, ancient guardian, moose, and goose (I'm so funny).

I have had a great failure with beefalo VS bee queen, but that was probably my fault.

I assume the beefalo would be great against toadstool (if you have lackeys to do the chopping for you! Or weather pains...), the shadow pieces, and any other non-ocean boss, but I haven't tried them.

Edit: Also I recommend rushing the beefalo as soon as possible. It takes at least 20 days to tame it if you don't use a brush, and I prefer fighting deerclops with a fully domesticated one than parking it away and possibly having a public player take it for some reason, so starting before day 8 is ideal so it can fight deerclops fully domesticated. You should definitely start before day 15 because if it becomes spring the beefalo will be in heat for all of spring and trying to tame a beefalo in heat is not only obnoxious, but very easy to accidentally teamkill people (or yourself) with.

[Electroely]

I prefer default, personally. It's like ornery with less damage but doesn't need to be fed everytime I mount. I can carry both the war and glossamer saddles and switch between as seen fit. I find the 1 grass/twig to mount from Ornery to add up a LOT since I use my beefalo very often.

[clickrush]

11 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Taming a beefalo is something you do in addition to whatever else. You will be slightly slower at whatever else since you need to pick up grass/twigs more that you otherwise would, but you can still do everything just fine as long as you keep the beefalo safe. Maybe wouldn't try to ruins rush while doing it, though.

I have had great success with beefalo VS deerclops, bearger, dragonfly, treeguard, spider queen, especially Klaus (that fight was a breeze), antlion, lord of the fruit flies, ancient guardian, moose, and goose (I'm so funny).

I have had a great failure with beefalo VS bee queen, but that was probably my fault.

I assume the beefalo would be great against toadstool (if you have lackeys to do the chopping for you! Or weather pains...), the shadow pieces, and any other non-ocean boss, but I haven't tried them.

Edit: Also I recommend rushing the beefalo as soon as possible. It takes at least 20 days to tame it if you don't use a brush, and I prefer fighting deerclops with a fully domesticated one than parking it away and possibly having a public player take it for some reason, so starting before day 8 is ideal so it can fight deerclops fully domesticated. You should definitely start before day 15 because if it becomes spring the beefalo will be in heat for all of spring and trying to tame a beefalo in heat is not only obnoxious, but very easy to accidentally teamkill people (or yourself) with.

Ty! That sounds very intriguing!

[Fridgetty]

rider + war saddle is my go to. it provides decent damage and decent speed plus you dont have to feed it first to mount it which is dope

[Falkenpelz]

Pudgy + Glosommer saddle.

 

 

 

 

I'm actually being serious here, thats what I do.

[SonicDen220]

Ornery for me. Second easiest to tame and highest reward, with just the downside of having to feed it to mount it, which is fair. Default would be my second favorite, if I knew how to reliably tame one (never tried, but balancing all 3 tendencies seems difficult).

[Friendly Grass]

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The last time I saw someone talking about attack speed he said it's about 2.33 per second, but 2.22 per second is only about 5% slower, not 7-15%. Were they wrong?

Mounted beefalo attack speed is every 0.5 seconds. Player attack speed is either 0.4333 or 0.4666 seconds (often switching between them) depending on player tick rate.

 

1 hour ago, clickrush said:

Ty! That sounds very intriguing!

I heard someone made a guide for it or something 

 

[Tuesday Pidgeon]

I often go for ornery first. It's pretty much my weapon for all typical combat outside of raid bosses. The low obedience does get pretty annoying though.

After I've domesticated an ornery beefalo, I usually go for rider soon after (provided the world's beefalo aren't in heat and won't be soon) because they're just so handy for moving around. 

[Cheggf]

13 minutes ago, Friendly Grass said:

Mounted beefalo attack speed is every 0.5 seconds. Player attack speed is either 0.4333 or 0.4666 seconds (often switching between them) depending on player tick rate.

 

Oh when you said .45 seconds you meant the player, not the beefalo. Thanks for clearing it up.

[Friendly Grass]

Oh one thing. No matter WHAT tendency you choose, PLEASE don’t ever use a war saddle for general purpose riding!!! It’s slower than the default saddle. And you can switch between saddles really easily. So if you want you can keep the war saddle on you and switch to it when you want extra damage.

[Pine G]

Ornery is better for characters that don't have natural combat skills, Rider is useful for characters that don't have natural speed buffs. Pudgy... just looks cute!