A Webber main's thoughts on the Webber rework

[CatLord9001]

So the Webber rework gave him a lot of the tools he needed to become more of a team player, especially the decorated nests, or at least the concept of them. Currently, they pacify spiders in an area around them, with the area getting bigger the higher tier the nests are, a t1 gives 3 tiles, t2 gives 4, and t3 gives 5. Once the spiders wander outside of this range, spiders will attack walls, aggro onto other players, and generally behave as normal spiders. But having the nests pacify the spiders they spawn would work much better I think, as there wouldn't be this area of spiders around the nest that aren't pacified and provide an incentive for the player to keep all the nests decorated. While I don't like that the decorations fall off if a spider gets hit near it, It does kind of make sense, but given that spiders main use is for combat (for example I set up a tree farming area with nests to kill treeguards), it seems odd that using the spiders for what they are intended for knocks off the decorations

Another problem with the decorated nests is that there is a split second that spiders aren't pacified when they spawn from a decorated nest. This allows them to start attacking players that are standing a bit too close to the nest before they are hit by the niceness (for some reason, spiders will play their hit animation when transitioning from happy spiders to angry spiders)

Another concern i have with the rework has to do with the shoo box. One of it's uses is to make any spider near the player stop attacking when used. But the effect of this item is instantaneous, so once the spider is made to stop attacking, it will just aggro back onto what ever it was attacking as it is still close to the spider. For example, you and a non-Webber friend are going through the deep forest. They get a little bit too close to a spider and it starts chasing them. You use your shoo box to try to get the spider to leave your friend alone, and it does. But then it is still too close to the other player and starts trying to attack them again.

Another odd (seems like a bug/oversight) thing i found is that while you can feed switcherdoodles to spiders in your inventory and make them change, they will not tame to you. You can tame other spiders in your inventory by feeding them meat items, and you can both change and tame a spider using a switcherdoodle as it is walking around. So it seems odd that using a switcherdoodle in your inventory won't tame the spider.

While there are a few odd choices regarding the rework, I still love the rework, its certianly a step in the right direction for webber, the added control over your minions that the webby whistle gives you is great, and now that you can pick up spiders, transporting your army to and from the caves isn't a problem. The switcherdoodles and nurse spider is great, allowing webber to create armies of spiders specialized to each task with survivability that the didn't have before. 

[minespatch]

13 minutes ago, CatLord9001 said:

Another odd (seems like a bug/oversight) thing i found is that while you can feed switcherdoodles to spiders in your inventory and make them change, they will not tame to you. You can tame other spiders in your inventory by feeding them meat items, and you can both change and tame a spider using a switcherdoodle as it is walking around. So it seems odd that using a switcherdoodle in your inventory won't tame the spider.

Sounds like that needs a bug report.

[CatLord9001]

6 minutes ago, minespatch said:

Sounds like that needs a bug report.

actually it seems to crash the server right now, something must have changed, its been reported

27 minutes ago, CatLord9001 said:

Another problem with the decorated nests is that there is a split second that spiders aren't pacified when they spawn from a decorated nest. This allows them to start attacking players that are standing a bit too close to the nest before they are hit by the niceness (for some reason, spiders will play their hit animation when transitioning from happy spiders to angry spiders)

I reported this too

[Alienm]

What you brought up with decorated spider dens having a radius instead of pacifying all its spiders and decorations falling off of the dens when spiders are attacked are really important points, and i think it should be posted in the bug tracker forum. 

 

It means that webbers still cant be useful while being near other players since decorating a den makes it useless and friendly spiders still drain other players sanity for some reason. 

[Cowboy Maxwell]

Excellent point about the decorated den. I've noticed how that effects Chester. Poor little guy never catches a break unless I actively brefriend the spiders.

[Friendly Grass]

I would hope most of these are not intentional because they completely antithesize the intention of the items.

[Cowboy Maxwell]

48 minutes ago, Friendly Grass said:

I would hope most of these are not intentional because they completely antithesize the intention of the items.

I hope so too. I think they might be bugs though.

[RaikoLegend]

I would like webber to be able to transform into different spiders :c

[Intrepidpioneer]

They should make a webby sack like the seedsack that is like a backpack but for spiders only just for Webber's use.

[kilobit]

7 hours ago, CatLord9001 said:

Currently, they pacify spiders in an area around them, with the area getting bigger the higher tier the nests are, a t1 gives 3 tiles, t2 gives 4, and t3 gives 5. Once the spiders wander outside of this range, spiders will attack walls, aggro onto other players, and generally behave as normal spiders. But having the nests pacify the spiders they spawn would work much better I think

I think both would be good. It would suck to bring over spiders from somewhere else, or have a spider considered not from that nest because of a transformation, and then have it go hostile (provided it's not by Webber's side)

[Vultureneck]

Overall I've really liked the idea behind all of the changes, but I'd agree that in practice they feel a little off. The biggest problem I've had with Webber in the past is that my first natural inclination is to put spiders all around the base, which obviously means you can't base with the other players. 

When the decorated dens were announced it seemed like my biggest problem with Webber would be solved, he could finally chill with the other players in base and drop spiders everywhere, as long as he spent the necessary amount of time decorating the spider dens. So I started playing with a couple of friends and dropped a tier 3 nest in our base and slapped some decorations on it, only to have spiders wander outside the aura of friendliness and start attacking people while they're chilling in base. This led to one of the players taking their stuff and moving their base somewhere else. 

Later I tried placed 3 spider dens in our base and decorated all of them, and this improved the overall quality significantly; nobody was getting attacked anymore, and the spiders would kill the batalisks that were from a nearby sinkhole. This worked wonderfully until we realized that if a batalisk flew a little too close to the nest before it attacked it would know the decorations off, causing the spiders to aggro onto everyone in the base.

I guess I'm just wondering if the decorations fall off during combat what is the point of having them at all? Having them inside your base is a terrible idea because in addition to constantly having your sanity dropped by the smiling spiders for some reason (they're cute enough they should just raise sanity), using them for protection simply makes them start attacking players, decorating them a short ways away from base simply means the spiders will walk outside the pacifying influence of it and start attacking players, so I guess the only real use for them is to decorate wild spider dens just so you could walk past them I guess? Oh, and even though you want the decorated tier 3 dens because they're the best you explicitly can't upgrade a lower tier den if it's been decorated, I'm pretty certain it stunts the growth so it won't grow into a bigger den either.

Other than the decorations and the shoo box, which feels very unintuitive while using, the rework has been fantastic; The whistle hats and being able to put spiders in inventory have vastly improved my interactions with spiders, and while only one spider I tamed with a switcherdoodle survived, it followed me for days and days and only stopped when I logged out, so I appreciate the long taming times with those.