I hand an epiphany, maybe I sound dumb idk

[Gi-Go]

1 hour ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

i didnt know that is more apreciated flat gameplays like WX's than fun and versatil ones like willow's...

Well, okay, you right. Willow dosen't deserve being called useless. Her bear is a lot worse than abi but still has things that make willow worth picking if you want. I was too harsh on her. 

Messing around with her bear, using extra slots of woby and range weapon of walter, and appreciating free insulation of beard. I've done these things too. And I will definetly have some fun using Wolfgang on a cow from time to time. 

But still, these 4 charcaters are kinda crappy right now. 

Also, I do think that simplicity is a good game design. Instead of asking for more and more perks people should go and look for more and more things to do with the ones they have already. 

[ArubaroBeefalo]

1 hour ago, Gi-Go said:

Also, I do think that simplicity is a good game design. Instead of asking for more and more perks people should go and look for more and more things to do with the ones they have already. 

this is wise and is what i like of using different characters. I played a lot willow when i was noob and im so curious about what things i can do as her or i never did a womwood bq with lureplants

1 hour ago, Gi-Go said:

But still, these 4 charcaters are kinda crappy right now. 

they arent as stronger as a character that can restore all his stats with with gears but, atleast for me, is preferible characters with new mechanics than just flat characters that their only good thing is making the game easier. They can make the game easier, for sure, but atleast with interesting mechanics like wendy not just flat stats even if they could be effective

[Gi-Go]

Wx78 has potential to be entertaining as long as you have creativity. You could for exsample try and beat the game (by beat I usually mean kill all raid bosses) but you are allowed to only eat gears for the whole playthrough. And making tele staffs and desidihg when to activate them is worth it - is also fun in a way. 

[Mike23Ua]

4 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

this is wise and is what i like of using different characters. I played a lot willow when i was noob and im so curious about what things i can do as her or i never did a womwood bq with lureplants

they arent as stronger as a character that can restore all his stats with with gears but, atleast for me, is preferible characters with new mechanics than just flat characters that their only good thing is making the game easier. They can make the game easier, for sure, but atleast with interesting mechanics like wendy not just flat stats even if they could be effective

Yes! Stats are boring.. and that’s all old Wolfgang was.. Higher hp, higher damage, higher speed, faster hunger drain.

Original WG in a nutshell.

NOW he has a personality & depth, it’s a little rough around the edges, could use tweaks and a true focus on being “Mighty” but other then that he’s been made less of just a change in stats & that’s what I like about reworks.

As a console player without access to Mods, these character reworks are the only way we get new content (well that and dlc characters or actual world content updates) but it is exciting & fun to have new life pumped into old characters.

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

Yes! Stats are boring.. and that’s all old Wolfgang was.. Higher hp, higher damage, higher speed, faster hunger drain.

Original WG in a nutshell.

NOW he has a personality & depth, it’s a little rough around the edges, could use tweaks and a true focus on being “Mighty” but other then that he’s been made less of just a change in stats & that’s what I like about reworks.

As a console player without access to Mods, these character reworks are the only way we get new content (well that and dlc characters or actual world content updates) but it is exciting & fun to have new life pumped into old characters.

No he doesn't - he is still just stats.  All you get is 2x damage, and a bit of work speed - time saving perks - literally at the cost of time...

[Milordo]

4 hours ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

i didnt know that is more apreciated flat gameplays like WX's than fun and versatil ones like willow's...

I know right? And i'm/was a 100% full Wx main lol

[HowlVoid]

Man, this thread blew up. 

This thread was about moving on and accepting.

Instead it's about never letting go.

[zarklord_klei]

On 12/19/2021 at 1:19 PM, Gi-Go said:

This is absolutely ridiculous. Beefalo rework, characters reworks, dlc characters added. THOSE are reasons to play other characters. The only thing removing speed achieved is it removed reasons to play Wolfgang. I'm serious, why would I play him now, other than the fact that I like his persona?

To give an example, lets take a look at the competitive scene for Super Smash Bros Brawl, in that game there are 35 characters you can choose from, but in the competitive scene you only have two options(if you're wanting to win): Meta Knight (the literal best character in the game) and Olimar (the only character with a doable matchup against Meta Knight), so despite having 35 characters, those are really fake choices, and in reality there is 2 choices(again if you want to win).

Now I am by no means saying the DST is a competitive game, or that DST needs to be balanced like a competitive game, but if a measure of balance isn't provided, our cast of 18 characters would suffer the same problem. While there are 18 characters, if you only had 1 or 2 "real" choices, we have defeated the purpose of having a wide variety of characters.
With that said, unless everything is completely identical there will always be a "best character" and a "worst character", but if the best character isn't significantly greater than any other character, and the worst character isn't significantly worse than any other character you have a game with lots of compelling character choices.

Now was Wolfgang the "meta knight" of our game? Kinda, obviously the parallel isn't perfect, and the game isn't competitive, but he had a lot of traits that pushed him into that direction pre rework, and while people can play the game however they want, its not a good look for our game to have such a large range of characters, all completely overshadowed by pre rework Wolfgang, when he is effectively the best to second best at just about anything (as an example, in farming Wormwood is the best, but the completely free 1.25x speed boost he got meant that even though not by much, Wolfgang would consistently be the second best at farming, obviously there are exceptions, like if you want to use Wickerbottom's books to grow the crops, but there are limitations on those that might make them undesirable in certain situations), again there are lots of exceptions, but as a general rule you could look at any task in the game, and Wolfgang would probably be the best or second best character to use for it(because of his speed).

When you look at it from that perspective, it becomes clear that he needed to lose his speed, not because he was OP, but because he was significantly overshadowing other characters. In terms of a single "best character for doing it all" it was pretty hard to say that Wolfgang wasn't that character, and breaking that and making what your planning on doing be relevant for picking your character(especially at the start of the world when you won't have the celestial portal), is a great thing in my opinion.

[Captain_Rage]

That was basically my previous point. Variety in character mechanics is great, but when one character can nullify so many threats by the virtue of circumventing those threats due to one trait it becomes problematic. The difficulty of boss battles revolve around kiting and timing (among other factors, like the health and damage potential of the player) and if one character has a trait that allows it to avoid the core mechanic of a boss (having to dodge attacks in a timely manner) normalization of movement speed ought to be the healthy way to go about with things in the long run for the game.

[Mike23Ua]

@zarklord_klei 

Wow a game developer who uses another game as reference for their own now that is truly awesome (it’s also probably the best way to communicate to gamers) I like your style Brother! Thanks for explaining it in a way I (and I’m sure a lot of others) can now relate to, hope you and the rest of Klei team are having a happy and safe holiday break looking forward to what’s in store for 2022!

[Guille6785]

7 hours ago, zarklord_klei said:

To give an example, lets take a look at the competitive scene for Super Smash Bros Brawl, in that game there are 35 characters you can choose from, but in the competitive scene you only have two options(if you're wanting to win): Meta Knight (the literal best character in the game) and Olimar (the only character with a doable matchup against Meta Knight), so despite having 35 characters, those are really fake choices, and in reality there is 2 choices(again if you want to win).

Now I am by no means saying the DST is a competitive game, or that DST needs to be balanced like a competitive game, but if a measure of balance isn't provided, our cast of 18 characters would suffer the same problem. While there is 18 characters, if you only had 1 or 2 "real" choices, we have defeated the purpose of having a wide variety of characters.
With that said, unless everything is completely identical there will always be a "best character" and a "worst character", but if the best character isn't significantly greater than any other character, and the worst character isn't significantly worse than any other character you have a game with lots of compelling character choices.

Now was Wolfgang the "meta knight" of our game? Kinda, obviously the parallel isn't perfect, and the game isn't competitive, but he had a lot of traits that pushed him into that direction pre rework, and while people can play the game however they want, its not a good look for our game to have such a large range of characters, all completely overshadowed by pre rework Wolfgang, when he is effectively the best to second best at just about anything (as an example, in farming Wormwood is the best, but the completely free 1.25x speed boost he got meant that even though not by much, Wolfgang would consistently be the second best at farming, obviously there are exceptions, like if you want to use Wickerbottom's books to grow the crops, but there are limitations on those that might make them undesirable in certain situations), again there are lots of exceptions, but as a general rule you could look at any task in the game, and Wolfgang would probably be the best or second best character to use for it(because of his speed).

When you look at it from that perspective, it becomes clear that he needed to lose his speed so he didn't overshadow other characters, and not because he was OP. In terms of a single "best character for doing it all" it was pretty hard to say that Wolfgang wasn't that character, and breaking that and making what your planning on doing be relevant for picking your character(especially at the start of the world when you won't have the celestial portal), is a great thing in my opinion.

With all due respect it really irks me to see the same old false arguments that have been debunked multiple times coming from a klei developer so I felt the need to respond this time:

The first argument is that "wolfgang was better than everyone else at everything because of his speed" which is totally untrue, in fact, if you actually analyze it old wolfgang was worse than wilson at many non-combat activities for the simple reason that his hunger drain would waste more time than you'd save with his speed boost; this isn't my opinion, this is an objective fact that you could've verified with a few tests.

To put this into perspective (I did these tests a while back so I'm not 100% sure about the numbers), for general world exploration if you had juicy berries and constantly picked them up to stay topped off for max speed you'd be able to travel roughly 8%-10% faster than a wilson, and the most effective way to stay topped off was with honey which could be harvested and saved for later use to go mighty once you had to travel longer distances.

All that I just mentioned sounds pretty positive all around but then the problems start to arise: As @Third Porkus pointed out, if you had no juicies, wolfgang's effectiveness as a world explorer would plummet because regular berries actually take so long to harvest you'd end up exploring slower than wilson if you chose to stay at full mightiness, and the alternative (staying in normal form) wasn't exactly better because your hunger drain used to be 112.5 a day with no upsides so in either scenario you'd be wasting time. Carrots weren't a great option either just because you'd end up running out of them trying to feed yourself the 18 carrots you needed every single day just to get a mild speed boost.

And in the topic of world exploration, you have to keep in mind that as every single character you can craft a saddle and put it on a beefalo on the first or second day if you truly want the fastest exploration; yes, a beefalo's riding timer will start at 15 seconds, it will constantly buck you off, you have to gather additional grass and twigs to feed it, you have to dismount to do certain actions, etc. But all that is absolutely worth it because an untamed beefalo moves 63% faster than wilson, putting every other early game speed boost (especially old wolfgang's) besides woby to shame, and as I've found out thanks to my testing, even with all those inconveniences I mentioned factored in, in the first 6 days of taming you will explore the world about 30%-35% faster than a normal character without speed boosts, without sacrificing valuable early game inventory space and wasting your chest slot like you would with a magiluminescence, rendering wolfgang's pitiful numbers completely irrelevant, and I think it's worth repeating that every single character can saddle a beefalo in the first couple days. Wolfgang did not explore the world faster than anyone else.

But ok, let's assume your world had juicy berries and/or you rushed a decent bee farm to sustain your mightiness with honey for that 10% or so speed boost I mentioned, well, the elephant in the room that made the speed boost even more irrelevant is that the positive numbers for wolfgang's speed I gave earlier assume you're moving 100% of the time without ever stopping to do anything which really only applies to travelling long distances. For doing base tasks and the like (like the farming you mentioned, where you're constantly stopping in place and not moving any significant distance), wolfgang would be yet again worse than wilson simply because his speed wouldn't compensate for the stupid 1.5x-3x hunger drain that you'd have to sustain at all times.

You brought up an example that "wolfgang was the second best at farming besides wormwood because of his speed", well, once you account for what I just said, you'd realize that it's the exact opposite, in that example old wolfgang was arguably the worst character at farming because of his increased hunger drain; his speed boost didn't possibly make up for it because with tasks like that you're not moving around much, but you are eating a lot more than wilson thus wasting more time than you'd save.

With the speed advantage argument debunked, it's a lot easier to see how old wolfgang was actually fairly balanced: He was much better at bossfights than everyone else (especially without cheese methods), but was objectively worse even than wilson/wes at random everyday tasks that didn't involve fighting. The rework removing his hunger drain completely is what, to me, makes it overall a buff, despite the team explicitly stating that their intention was to nerf him. I personally almost never used his speed for movement unless I already went mighty for combat; I always considered it more of a "for fun" perk that brought interesting options to approach certain early bossfights like the shadow pieces or bee queen without reliance on items like canes of magis (but I've already talked extensively about this aspect of his speed in previous posts so I'll skip it).

 

The other argument you brought up is one that doesn't really makes sense once you think about it for more than 10 seconds: "If an OP character was kept in the game nobody else would have an incentive to play anyone else". I've seen this argument being brought up multiple times for reworked wendy in the past too.

And sure, this sorta makes sense at first and I'd be tempted to agree, but all you have to do is remember that old wolfgang was in the game for 7+ years and this never happened. In fact, wolfgang has always been an ok-ish character in terms of popularity; you wouldn't see wolfgangs in every single pub like you'd see wigfrids/wendys/wilsons but solo players would often be drawn to his damage multiplier if they struggled with raid bosses, with more experienced players liking the additional options he could bring early game even if they didn't need training wheels to solo those bosses anymore. That's all I can say for this argument really, it doesn't make any sense at all to me.

 

Now one could argue that wolfgang getting """"""""""""nerfed"""""""""""" (I'm just gonna pretend that he wasn't buffed) would make the pseudo-competitive side of dst AKA speedruns more interesting, and I've seen this thought shared by some people in these forums especially. As a speedrunner myself and holder of pretty much every world record in this game that matters I'll just share my thoughts about this:

First of all, new wolfgang is only marginally slower than old wolfgang at speedruns, and I think he might actually be faster (!!!) at some like toadstool, so no, wolfgang WRs are not going away, sorry lol, he's still the best at pretty much everything he used to be the best at. But even if he was no longer the best, then I think it's important to clarify that wolfgang was more or less only the most popular choice because he was, well, the only real way to get a world record unless you had an extremely good strategy that beat all the previous ones even with a different character (I used both lmao).

World record speedruns are, however, only a fraction of the """competitive""" side of dst; challenge fights and "for fun" speedruns have always been a thing and that's exactly where you could see non-wolfgang picks shine, so no, "nerfing" wolfgang for speedruns won't change anything here because we already had lots of cool non-wolfgang videos out there which people probably would've found if they hadn't been tunnel visioning only the world record speedruns.

Some examples:
https://youtu.be/VRhfiZm2nYA the no lazy explorer no nightmare amulet FW fight with 0.75x damage I shared a while back
https://youtu.be/wHKgNMsFlGI enraged dfly almost hitless with no damage mults and no speed boosts at all
https://youtu.be/iCfOMOH_2-E same FW challenge but with wormwood for his speed
https://youtu.be/xo8alOx-2DY bee queen speedrun with no damage mults (still under 20 minutes)
https://youtu.be/sWvjlcAbqdY scienceless ruins rush as willow (back at the surface halfway through day 5 with 12 crowns, your average wolfgang would probably take twice as long with half the loot lmao, and I've done many more of these with characters like wormwood or warly)
https://youtu.be/5S9Aw4PEXTg FW world record done as wortox, who I consider one of the worst characters for speedruns (I had been practicing to do it as wolfgang but that won't be the case anymore sadly)
https://youtu.be/fBvC_YBrrUo celestial champion hitless, no damage or speed mults
https://youtu.be/66E8F4OpBdE bee queen hitless as willow by my friend milos who hates wolf so he only does challenges as other chars
https://youtu.be/P-w8LZK_Jmk enraged dfly hitless no damage mults with just a cobble road
https://youtu.be/rud9fIUJ9cA don giani's toadstool speedrun as woodie
https://youtu.be/PXMGYS53AIk malbatross world record

In short, even at what he was best at, old wolfgang didn't magically make every other character irrelevant.

 

 

I'm not gonna try to act like old wolfgang was a beautifully designed character for a multiplayer version of DS, but the rework was the completely wrong direction to take in my opinion. With no offense intended, it's clear from this dev's response (full of objectively false arguments) that the team did not fully understand what really made wolfgang's character special. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

[IIHexxyII]

10 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

With all due respect it really irks me to see the same old false arguments that have been debunked multiple times coming from a klei developer so I felt the need to respond this time:

The first argument is that "wolfgang was better than everyone else at everything because of his speed" which is totally untrue, in fact, if you actually analyze it old wolfgang was worse than wilson at many non-combat activities for the simple reason that his hunger drain would waste more time than you'd save with his speed boost; this isn't my opinion, this is an objective fact that you could've verified with a few tests.

To put this into perspective (I did these tests a while back so I'm not 100% sure about the numbers), for general world exploration if you had juicy berries and constantly picked them up to stay topped off for max speed you'd be able to travel roughly 8%-10% faster than a wilson, and the most effective way to stay topped off was with honey which could be harvested and saved for later use to go mighty once you had to travel longer distances.

All that I just mentioned sounds pretty positive all around but then the problems start to arise: As @Third Porkus pointed out, if you had no juicies, wolfgang's effectiveness as a world explorer would plummet because regular berries actually take so long to harvest you'd end up exploring slower than wilson if you chose to stay at full mightiness, and the alternative (staying in normal form) wasn't exactly better because your hunger drain used to be 112.5 a day with no upsides so in either scenario you'd be wasting time. Carrots weren't a great option either just because you'd end up running out of them trying to feed yourself the 18 carrots you needed every single day just to get a mild speed boost.

And in the topic of world exploration, you have to keep in mind that as every single character you can craft a saddle and put it on a beefalo on the first or second day if you truly want the fastest exploration; yes, a beefalo's riding timer will start at 15 seconds, it will constantly buck you off, you have to gather additional grass and twigs to feed it, you have to dismount to do certain actions, etc. But all that is absolutely worth it because an untamed beefalo moves 63% faster than wilson, putting every other early game speed boost (especially old wolfgang's) besides woby to shame, and as I've found out thanks to my testing, even with all those inconveniences I mentioned factored in, in the first 6 days of taming you will explore the world about 30%-35% faster than a normal character without speed boosts, without sacrificing valuable early game inventory space and wasting your chest slot like you would with a magiluminescence, rendering wolfgang's pitiful numbers completely irrelevant, and I think it's worth repeating that every single character can saddle a beefalo in the first couple days. Wolfgang did not explore the world faster than anyone else.

But ok, let's assume your world had juicy berries and/or you rushed a decent bee farm to sustain your mightiness with honey for that 10% or so speed boost I mentioned, well, the elephant in the room that made the speed boost even more irrelevant is that the positive numbers for wolfgang's speed I gave earlier assume you're moving 100% of the time without ever stopping to do anything which really only applies to travelling long distances. For doing base tasks and the like (like the farming you mentioned, where you're constantly stopping in place and not moving any significant distance), wolfgang would be yet again worse than wilson simply because his speed wouldn't compensate for the stupid 1.5x-3x hunger drain that you'd have to sustain at all times.

You brought up an example that "wolfgang was the second best at farming besides wormwood because of his speed", well, once you account for what I just said, you'd realize that it's the exact opposite, in that example old wolfgang was actually the worst character at farming because of his increased hunger drain; his speed boost didn't possibly make up for it because with tasks like that you're not moving around much, but you are eating a lot more than wilson thus wasting more time than you'd save.

With the speed advantage argument debunked, it's a lot easier to see how old wolfgang was actually fairly balanced: He was much better at bossfights than everyone else (especially without cheese methods), but was objectively worse even than wilson/wes at random everyday tasks that didn't involve fighting. The rework removing his hunger drain completely is what, to me, makes it overall a buff, despite the team explicitly stating that their intention was to nerf him. I personally almost never used his speed for movement unless I already went mighty for combat; I always considered it more of a "for fun" perk that brought interesting options to approach certain early bossfights like the shadow pieces or bee queen without reliance on items like canes of magis (but I've already talked extensively about this aspect of his speed in previous posts so I'll skip it).

 

The second argument you brought up is one that doesn't really makes sense once you think about it for more than 10 seconds: "If an OP character was kept in the game nobody else would have an incentive to play anyone else". I've seen this argument being brought up multiple times for reworked wendy in the past too.

And sure, this sorta makes sense at first and I'd be tempted to agree, but all you have to do is remember that old wolfgang was in the game for 7+ years and this never happened. In fact, wolfgang has always been an ok-ish character in terms of popularity; you wouldn't see wolfgangs in every single pub like you'd see wigfrids/wendys/wilsons but solo players would often be drawn to his damage multiplier if they struggled with raid bosses, with more experienced players liking the additional options he could bring early game even if they didn't need training wheels to solo those bosses anymore. That's all I can say for this argument really, it doesn't make any sense at all to me.

 

And now you could argue that wolfgang getting """"""""""""nerfed"""""""""""" (I'm just gonna pretend that he wasn't buffed) would make the pseudo-competitive side of dst AKA speedruns more interesting. I've seen this thought shared by a lot of people in these forums especially. As a speedrunner myself and holder of pretty much every world record in this game that matters I'll just share my thoughts about this:

First of all, new wolfgang is only marginally slower than old wolfgang at speedruns, and I think he might actually be faster (!!!) at some like toadstool, so no, wolfgang WRs are not going away, sorry LOL, he's still the best at pretty much everything he used to be the best at. But even if he was no longer the best, then I think it's important to clarify that wolfgang was more or less only the most popular choice because he was, well, the only real way to get a world record unless you had an extremely good strategy that beat all the previous ones even with a x1 character (I had both lmao).

World record speedruns are, however, only a fraction of the """competitive""" side of dst; challenge fights and "for fun" speedruns have always been a thing and that's exactly where you could see non-wolfgang picks shine, so no, "nerfing" wolfgang for speedruns won't change anything here because we already had lots of cool non-wolfgang videos out there which people probably would've found if they hadn't been tunnel visioning only the world record speedruns.

Some examples:
https://youtu.be/VRhfiZm2nYA the no lazy explorer no nightmare amulet FW fight with 0.75x I shared a while back
https://youtu.be/wHKgNMsFlGI enraged dfly almost hitless with no damage mults and no speed boosts at all
https://youtu.be/iCfOMOH_2-E same FW challenge but with wormwood for his speed
https://youtu.be/xo8alOx-2DY bee queen speedrun with no damage mults (still under 20 minutes)
https://youtu.be/sWvjlcAbqdY scienceless ruins rush as willow (back at the surface halfway through day 5 with 12 crowns, your average wolfgang would probably take twice as long with half the loot lmao, and I've done many more of these with characters like wormwood)
https://youtu.be/5S9Aw4PEXTg FW world record done as wortox, who I consider one of the worst characters for speedruns (I had been practicing to do it as wolfgang but that won't be the case anymore sadly)
https://youtu.be/fBvC_YBrrUo celestial champion hitless, no damage or speed mults
https://youtu.be/66E8F4OpBdE bee queen hitless as willow by my friend milos who hates wolf so he only does challenges as other chars
https://youtu.be/P-w8LZK_Jmk enraged dfly hitless no damage mults with just a cobble road
https://youtu.be/rud9fIUJ9cA don giani's toadstool speedrun as woodie

In short, even at what he was best at, old wolfgang didn't magically make every other character irrelevant.

 

I'm not gonna try to act like old wolfgang was a beautifully designed character for the multiplayer version of DS, but the rework was the completely wrong direction to take in my opinion. With no offense intended, it's clear from this dev's response (full of objectively false arguments) that the team did not fully understand what really made wolfgang's character special. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

Hi guille

[splorange]

11 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

if you actually analyze it old wolfgang was worse than wilson at many non-combat activities for the simple reason that his hunger drain would waste more time than you'd save with his speed boost; this isn't my opinion, this is an objective fact that you could've verified with a few tests.

did you forget that non mighty wolfgang exists

[Porkus]

He addresses those forms in his argument, and his point would still stand as Wolfgang would then have higher hunger drain for being equal to wilson

[Guille6785]

4 minutes ago, splorange said:

did you forget that non mighty wolfgang exists

I specifically mentioned that staying at regular form wasn't a good alternative because you'd still have 1.5x hunger drain with no upsides over wilson

[IIHexxyII]

How about we start comparing every stat to wilson's stat? for example a charged WX is 3 wilsons per minute and so on, cool idea isnt it

[Mike23Ua]

If I were a dev at this point is where I would just say: we all unanimously agreed it wasn’t coming back, there’s nothing you can say that will change our minds.. and you either adapt to the new changes or find a different character to play.

A bit harsh? Maybe but straight to the point of if we don’t wanna do it.. we’re not gonna do it.

Now as for my personal opinion: Wolfgang’s ACTUAL problems came in when not only did he have built in speed.. but his speed also stacked with other speed items AND to top that off he had high health & was able to kill enemies faster with his higher damage:

Maybe this means NOTHING in a Single-Player game but for Multiplayer I really don’t want the guy doing 2x damage running off and beating the entire game by himself leaving Me (the player who didn’t pick Wolfgang and might have choose Warly) to just come behind where he hit the place like looney tunes Tasmanian Devil leaving nothing but wreckage and leftovers in his wake.

They made Wolfgang no longer speed related AND even made him have to stand still to gain Might so: and your not going to believe this- Other people in a multiplayer setting can actually Play & enjoy their game without needing to pick Wolfgang.

Theres my two cents worth.  

[Porkus]

2 hours ago, zarklord_klei said:

the completely free 1.25x speed boost

It's not completely free cause it takes time. It's insane how many people I see arguing that point by saying "Oh I killed tons of beefalo and now I have stockpiled food, see Wolfgang hunger drain isn't a downside" ignoring how much of a waste that is. 

In tiles traveled per day, the actual data for wolfgang speed is the following:

Spoiler

 

Tiles travelled in a day by Wolfgang eating / harvesting berries: 828.06 

Tiles travelled in a day by Wolfgang eating / picking carrots: 860.69 

Tiles travelled in a day by Wolfgang eating / harvesting juicy berries: 858.47

 

Tiles travelled in a day by Wilson eating / harvesting berries: 700

Tiles travelled in a day by Wolfgang eating / harvesting berries and getting mighty: 622

Tiles travelled in a day by Wolfgang eating / picking carrots and getting mighty: 810

Tiles travelled in a day by Wolfgang eating / harvesting juicy berries and getting mighty: 836

Tiles travelled in a day by Wilson eating / harvesting berries: 700

 

This isn't some big efficiency thing either, this is realistic data of any person who plays Wolfgang and eats the basic food. But even if you take the best starting food (juicy berries) Wolfgang should just be 17% faster than Wilson. However, due to the fact you aren't always running, and are also gathering resources and standing still. he is even slower than that. Further accounting as @Guille6785 mentioned, anyone can use beefalo and be far faster.

[splorange]

3 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

I specifically mentioned that staying at regular form wasn't a good alternative because you'd still have 1.5x hunger drain with no upsides over wilson

but i thought food was not an issue in this game? lots of people in the community have the opinion and has made it very vocal that starvation is the least of their issues. but now suddenly its an issue because people just want to twist facts to appease their own arguments.

ive seen people on the forums say that 2x damage is barely an upside, and from the same side that the speed doesnt impact much

then why play wolfgang at that point? at what point do your twisted facts make wolfgang just wilson?

[Guille6785]

2 minutes ago, splorange said:

but i thought food was not an issue in this game? lots of people in the community have the opinion and has made it very vocal that starvation is the least of their issues. but now suddenly its an issue because people just want to twist facts to appease their own arguments.

ive seen people on the forums say that 2x damage is barely an upside, and from the same side that the speed doesnt impact much

then why play wolfgang at that point? at what point do your twisted facts make wolfgang just wilson?

I'm not trying to argue that wolfgang was crap or anything, my argument is directed at debunking zark's objectively false statement that old wolf was "the best or 2nd best at pretty much everything" due to his speed boost, which isn't true because his speed didn't actually let him do those tasks faster over his hunger drain. Have a good day

[Porkus]

1 minute ago, Mike23Ua said:

 

Maybe this means NOTHING in a Single-Player game but for Multiplayer I really don’t want the guy doing 2x damage running off and beating the entire game by himself leaving Me (the player who didn’t pick Wolfgang and might have choose Warly) to just come behind where he hit the place like looney tunes Tasmanian Devil leaving nothing but wreckage and leftovers in his wake.

The thing is that this is still a sandbox game, zarklord addresses it shouldn't be balanced like smash bro's but it still sort of was. I don't see how a character being able to be play well should be tried to be taken away because it limits other character play. No one even really plays wolfgang that much, and the people who do usually have to options, if they are new they can kill bosses for the first time a bit easier, which is good for learning the game, and the more skilled players able to do advanced challenges and such

2 minutes ago, splorange said:

but i thought food was not an issue in this game? lots of people in the community have the opinion and has made it very vocal that starvation is the least of their issues. but now suddenly its an issue because people just want to twist facts to appease their own arguments.

Starving is never an issue, that doesn't mean that hunger doesn't take time to gain. It's definitely not a mortal problem or going to ruin your gameplay but it's still there and it still takes time to deal with.

[-Penta-]

47 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

With all due respect it really irks me to see the same old false arguments that have been debunked multiple times coming from a klei developer so I felt the need to respond this time:

The first argument is that "wolfgang was better than everyone else at everything because of his speed" which is totally untrue, in fact, if you actually analyze it old wolfgang was worse than wilson at many non-combat activities for the simple reason that his hunger drain would waste more time than you'd save with his speed boost; this isn't my opinion, this is an objective fact that you could've verified with a few tests.

To put this into perspective (I did these tests a while back so I'm not 100% sure about the numbers), for general world exploration if you had juicy berries and constantly picked them up to stay topped off for max speed you'd be able to travel roughly 8%-10% faster than a wilson, and the most effective way to stay topped off was with honey which could be harvested and saved for later use to go mighty once you had to travel longer distances.

All that I just mentioned sounds pretty positive all around but then the problems start to arise: As @Third Porkus pointed out, if you had no juicies, wolfgang's effectiveness as a world explorer would plummet because regular berries actually take so long to harvest you'd end up exploring slower than wilson if you chose to stay at full mightiness, and the alternative (staying in normal form) wasn't exactly better because your hunger drain used to be 112.5 a day with no upsides so in either scenario you'd be wasting time. Carrots weren't a great option either just because you'd end up running out of them trying to feed yourself the 18 carrots you needed every single day just to get a mild speed boost.

And in the topic of world exploration, you have to keep in mind that as every single character you can craft a saddle and put it on a beefalo on the first or second day if you truly want the fastest exploration; yes, a beefalo's riding timer will start at 15 seconds, it will constantly buck you off, you have to gather additional grass and twigs to feed it, you have to dismount to do certain actions, etc. But all that is absolutely worth it because an untamed beefalo moves 63% faster than wilson, putting every other early game speed boost (especially old wolfgang's) besides woby to shame, and as I've found out thanks to my testing, even with all those inconveniences I mentioned factored in, in the first 6 days of taming you will explore the world about 30%-35% faster than a normal character without speed boosts, without sacrificing valuable early game inventory space and wasting your chest slot like you would with a magiluminescence, rendering wolfgang's pitiful numbers completely irrelevant, and I think it's worth repeating that every single character can saddle a beefalo in the first couple days. Wolfgang did not explore the world faster than anyone else.

But ok, let's assume your world had juicy berries and/or you rushed a decent bee farm to sustain your mightiness with honey for that 10% or so speed boost I mentioned, well, the elephant in the room that made the speed boost even more irrelevant is that the positive numbers for wolfgang's speed I gave earlier assume you're moving 100% of the time without ever stopping to do anything which really only applies to travelling long distances. For doing base tasks and the like (like the farming you mentioned, where you're constantly stopping in place and not moving any significant distance), wolfgang would be yet again worse than wilson simply because his speed wouldn't compensate for the stupid 1.5x-3x hunger drain that you'd have to sustain at all times.

You brought up an example that "wolfgang was the second best at farming besides wormwood because of his speed", well, once you account for what I just said, you'd realize that it's the exact opposite, in that example old wolfgang was actually the worst character at farming because of his increased hunger drain; his speed boost didn't possibly make up for it because with tasks like that you're not moving around much, but you are eating a lot more than wilson thus wasting more time than you'd save.

With the speed advantage argument debunked, it's a lot easier to see how old wolfgang was actually fairly balanced: He was much better at bossfights than everyone else (especially without cheese methods), but was objectively worse even than wilson/wes at random everyday tasks that didn't involve fighting. The rework removing his hunger drain completely is what, to me, makes it overall a buff, despite the team explicitly stating that their intention was to nerf him. I personally almost never used his speed for movement unless I already went mighty for combat; I always considered it more of a "for fun" perk that brought interesting options to approach certain early bossfights like the shadow pieces or bee queen without reliance on items like canes of magis (but I've already talked extensively about this aspect of his speed in previous posts so I'll skip it).

 

The second argument you brought up is one that doesn't really makes sense once you think about it for more than 10 seconds: "If an OP character was kept in the game nobody else would have an incentive to play anyone else". I've seen this argument being brought up multiple times for reworked wendy in the past too.

And sure, this sorta makes sense at first and I'd be tempted to agree, but all you have to do is remember that old wolfgang was in the game for 7+ years and this never happened. In fact, wolfgang has always been an ok-ish character in terms of popularity; you wouldn't see wolfgangs in every single pub like you'd see wigfrids/wendys/wilsons but solo players would often be drawn to his damage multiplier if they struggled with raid bosses, with more experienced players liking the additional options he could bring early game even if they didn't need training wheels to solo those bosses anymore. That's all I can say for this argument really, it doesn't make any sense at all to me.

 

And now you could argue that wolfgang getting """"""""""""nerfed"""""""""""" (I'm just gonna pretend that he wasn't buffed) would make the pseudo-competitive side of dst AKA speedruns more interesting. I've seen this thought shared by a lot of people in these forums especially. As a speedrunner myself and holder of pretty much every world record in this game that matters I'll just share my thoughts about this:

First of all, new wolfgang is only marginally slower than old wolfgang at speedruns, and I think he might actually be faster (!!!) at some like toadstool, so no, wolfgang WRs are not going away, sorry LOL, he's still the best at pretty much everything he used to be the best at. But even if he was no longer the best, then I think it's important to clarify that wolfgang was more or less only the most popular choice because he was, well, the only real way to get a world record unless you had an extremely good strategy that beat all the previous ones even with a x1 character (I had both lmao).

World record speedruns are, however, only a fraction of the """competitive""" side of dst; challenge fights and "for fun" speedruns have always been a thing and that's exactly where you could see non-wolfgang picks shine, so no, "nerfing" wolfgang for speedruns won't change anything here because we already had lots of cool non-wolfgang videos out there which people probably would've found if they hadn't been tunnel visioning only the world record speedruns.

Some examples:
https://youtu.be/VRhfiZm2nYA the no lazy explorer no nightmare amulet FW fight with 0.75x damage I shared a while back
https://youtu.be/wHKgNMsFlGI enraged dfly almost hitless with no damage mults and no speed boosts at all
https://youtu.be/iCfOMOH_2-E same FW challenge but with wormwood for his speed
https://youtu.be/xo8alOx-2DY bee queen speedrun with no damage mults (still under 20 minutes)
https://youtu.be/sWvjlcAbqdY scienceless ruins rush as willow (back at the surface halfway through day 5 with 12 crowns, your average wolfgang would probably take twice as long with half the loot lmao, and I've done many more of these with characters like wormwood or warly)
https://youtu.be/5S9Aw4PEXTg FW world record done as wortox, who I consider one of the worst characters for speedruns (I had been practicing to do it as wolfgang but that won't be the case anymore sadly)
https://youtu.be/fBvC_YBrrUo celestial champion hitless, no damage or speed mults
https://youtu.be/66E8F4OpBdE bee queen hitless as willow by my friend milos who hates wolf so he only does challenges as other chars
https://youtu.be/P-w8LZK_Jmk enraged dfly hitless no damage mults with just a cobble road
https://youtu.be/rud9fIUJ9cA don giani's toadstool speedrun as woodie

In short, even at what he was best at, old wolfgang didn't magically make every other character irrelevant.

 

I'm not gonna try to act like old wolfgang was a beautifully designed character for the multiplayer version of DS, but the rework was the completely wrong direction to take in my opinion. With no offense intended, it's clear from this dev's response (full of objectively false arguments) that the team did not fully understand what really made wolfgang's character special. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

Okay, so, let me get this straight: You agree that they buffed Wolfgang, said countless times that his speed boost made him only slightly better than any of the other characters, and even pointed out how not only is the new Wolfgang faster against certain bosses, but also how Wolfgang world record speedruns aren't going away. Then, answer me this: Why does it matter that he no longer has his speed boost?

*With no offense intended*, but you're basically acting like a spoiled little kid throwing a temper tantrum because your favorite toy broke, and you're not going to get what you want by acting like this whenever something doesn't go your way, buddy. Also, no one cares that you're the world record holder on any speedrun category, your opinion isn't any more valid than anyone else's because of that.

[Guille6785]

Just now, -Penta- said:

Okay, so, let me get this straight: You agree that they buffed Wolfgang, said countless times that his speed boost didn't make him only slightly better than any of the other characters, and even pointed out how not only is the new Wolfgang faster against certain bosses, but also how Wolfgang world record speedruns aren't going away. Then, answer me this: Why does it matter that he no longer has his speed boost?

*With no offense intended*, but you're basically acting like a spoiled little kid throwing a temper tantrum because your favorite toy broke, and you're not going to get what you want by acting like this whenever something doesn't go your way, buddy. Also, no one cares that you're the world record holder on any speedrun category, your opinion isn't any more valid than anyone else's because of that.

because I found his speed fun

[Mike23Ua]

@Third PorkusBrother what I’m trying to get into your head is that it may be a sandbox game, what you choose to do or not do may be entirely up to you.. BUT Wolfgang was still moving around the map faster and also killing things faster by only shoving food in his mouth the same food he got from killing things.

Here let’s try it this way: I paid a fortune for Batman Arkham Knight when it first came out for the game and it’s at that time over-priced 50$ additional Season Pass. A DLC pass that came with Batmobile from all throughout the history of Batman’s existence: Sounds like a pretty good deal right? But: Those Batmobiles can only be used in the open world sandbox when you COMPLETE the entire campaign & there is literally nothing left to do..

At that point: what’s the point of having the Batmobile skins to begin with?

Same logic applies to DST: Wolfgang was completing most tasks, killing all the enemies leaving everyone else not much left to do.

He can still kill enemies twice as fast.. but NOW he also has to spend significant time gathering resources for crafting dumbells, working out in a gym and standing still pumping weights.

In other words: I no longer feel like I bought a bunch of Batmobiles and only get to ride around in them looking at a open world sandbox with nothing left to do.

[Porkus]

Just now, -Penta- said:

Okay, so, let me get this straight: You agree that they buffed Wolfgang, said countless times that his speed boost didn't make him only slightly better than any of the other characters, and even pointed out how not only is the new Wolfgang faster against certain bosses, but also how Wolfgang world record speedruns aren't going away. Then, answer me this: Why does it matter that he no longer has his speed boost?

Because a lot of actual Wolfgang players liked playing with his speed. It doesn't have to be super useful to be fun. Same reason anybody plays a character that isn't the strongest, Wolfgang could be played for his unique skillset. I don't see how that's very hard to understand, He was a very fun character to many people who played him, and had been playing him for 8 years.

Just now, Mike23Ua said:

BUT Wolfgang was still moving around the map faster

Beefalo