Some small Woodie suggestions

[FourthLess]

Some, hopefully, small and not difficult to do changes that I would like to see for Woodie. 

>>Werebeaver: the most fine wereform out of all of them, here's just a little tweak to make him feel a bit better:

• When Werebeaver chops a tree it automatically digs up it's stump. 

Yeah, it won't make him as fast in gathering resources as Maxwell or Wurt but the trade off with Werebeaver is the no rng Treeguards to slow you down. 

>>Weremoose

•Increase recipe cost to 5 monster meat and 9 grass. 

•Increase damage per hit to 63,75

•Remove the speed decrease and make him actually 10% faster(not sure about the additional speed part but he's bigger so his steps should be bigger too, right? :] :] :] ) 

•Give him ability to stop mid charge if that's possible, please? He already does that when reaching land border. 

>>Weregoose

•Make him faster (pretty sure he's 150% rn so make him 165%) 

•Give him a lazy forager effect(with the additional ability of automatically doing "pick" action on saplings and stuff other than just picking up items from the ground) while in the form but with a very very small radius. 

I think Woodie has a really high potential in how you can go with his abilities but I know it's pretty silly to expect anything significant like new versions of the current forms from lunar stations or smth so I just hope devs (hi Jesse!) will consider adding those tweaks at least partially. 

[UbiAnomaly]

Yes please! This is exactly what Woodie needs, imo. 

He'd be a perfect jack of all trades.. If his jacking of all trades wasn't outclassed by every alternative available.

[MadMatt]

The Beaver is already stupid efficient when it comes to stumps, addressing the weremeter/action limit bottleneck would go a much longer way to making him feel better as a gatherer while only making him comparable to others. Maybe reintroduce the eating wood mechanic for Beaver only to detransform quickly? Or let him wear lazy forager...? 

I'm doubtful giving Moose a bit more damage and speed would make him much more viable. For most bosses that Moose can't handle the issue is weremeter either lasting too long or not lasting long enough(raid bosses). Giving him damage comparable to Dark Sword doesn't reduce smaller mobs like Spiders or Hounds to lower hit numbers, and I can't think of many bosses that these number changes would make possible for Moose compared to before since so many bosses are limited because of item requirements. Stopping mid-charge would be handy, but not too useful outside of just saving a bit of time/killing spread out hoards. Defo not worth the double cost of items, the extra 2 monster meat is of course not good but almost a quarter of a stack of grass is egregious to me. 

The Goose AFAIK moves at 140%, so 165% would be a 25% increase. Generally a buff to the Goose's speed I tend to agree with since boats move pretty damn fast anyways and Goose is a questionable investment post first autumn since you could just get a beefalo, + cane which is more than half it's extra speed with no downsides. However, having Goose be able to "pick" items/gather is missing the point of Goose. Sure that change would make using Goose as early mainland exploration more efficient since you could gather as well as explore but you already save on grass and twigs by transforming at night, and the main strength of Goose is the ocean/caves exploration. Not necessarily a BAD suggestion, but I feel would go against the point of Goose as a scouting tool rather than a gathering tool.

 

Sorry for the text wall 3 days after this was posted, I love talking about Woodie and appreciate discussions about him  

[FourthLess]

Sorry for some reason I am not able to quote you properly so I'll reply this way! @MadMatt

 

I think werebeaver is fine. My suggestion was just a little buff. I think the form de transforms quickly enough if you don't chop for quite some time and I didn't really want him to become as good as other characters because Woodie is supposed to have a little bit in everything. 

 

You do bring some good points regarding moose form though! I agree damage change maybe won't do much but I think being able to stop mid charge would probably make Weremoose feel much better. Current Moose is not that useful but it's all justified by the idol being dirt cheap so I just wanted a reason to go a little bit more brave with the buffs for the form. 

However there's one issue I missed. I don't think any of the forms last too short because they drain really quickly. This issue especially comes up when you use Moose. So what if the meter would drain even faster than it currently does after not doing those specific actions for a while but make the meter replenish itself by a little bit every time you do those actions! 

 

Regarding Goose though. I think focusing him on just travelling through caves and water won't do him any good. I believe also making him a forager is the way to make the form useful, but that's simply how I see it. 

[MadMatt]

@FourthLess Yeah it has something to do with themes, the Don't Starve theme is broken and can't be changed on here for some reason

I'm biased towards Beaver being much stronger since he has a disproportionate amount of effort required compared to the payoff. You have to play such an active role in chopping trees, as well as preparing to chop them with the cost of the idol + consumption taking away all your hunger and significant sanity and non-insignificant health, and you aren't even that overall efficient at gathering since you can't pickup logs and have to wait out your transformation. Compared to Maxwell having half the process automated + made 2-3x more effective for just 6 nightmare fuel, Wurt being like that but on crack after a while, and Bearger doing it all without ANY investment other than waiting for him, Beaver is just not very good at it's job. Compared to a Wilson sure... but that's basically it. 

I don't quite understand what you're specifically saying here, but it's an interesting idea making the weremeter basically Wolfgang's mightiness meter. When I talked about the meters being too short I was referring to some bosses simply having too much health to do with one idol, and although that is manageable for some bosses like Klaus, with others (Bee Queen) it's WAY too dangerous to detransform and so the meter just makes it nigh impossible. Making the meter drain faster but regain may exacerbate this issue since some bosses simply require you to stand away for some attack or do something else during the fight that isn't fighting related. Although this is dependent on how much it'd theoretically give back and drain, I feel the more consistent drain is better since you can prepare more easily for fights via number of idols.

I suppose, but even foraging is questionably useful since past the early game what would you really need to gather/pickup that you'd require 40% or more speed for? Also taking into account the walking cane and Goose would serve as just an expensive way to recover lost items/pick up basic commodities. Ironically salt crystals is probably the area that this would be most useful, and would be really handy only having to mine the crystals and then you can abandon ship with Goose while simultaneously collecting them. Goose is just way too good for Caves/Ocean because of the night vision and water walking I don't see it being effectively used for anything else.

[FourthLess]

@MadMatt My justification for Werebeaver being not as efficient as Maxwell or Wurt is that he trades off pure speed for consistency of no Treeguards that can ruin your flow.

Regarding Weremoose. I wouldn't mind more consistent and longer timer. I don't think you're really supposed to be able to do just fine against BQ with Werebeaver it's more of a low-tier "weapon". You see, in my ideal world Woodie would simply have new stronger variations of his transformations for higher cost that he could craft maybe at some lunar station or somewhere else. That way he would keep his current not-so-powerful but cheap forms and have new ones with more gimmicks and stuff. But I tried to work with what we have.

Also yeah, even with the lazy forager Goose wouldn't see much use later on in the game but at least he would be better at the beginning. You really need to come up with something more unique to give the form more uses but I tried keeping my suggestions more or less simple.

[MadMatt]

@FourthLess Fair, i've just never seen treeguards as a significant roadblock for those characters when the comparisons are brought up so maybe I see Beaver as too weak because of that blind spot. 

Moose is pretty damn good compared to the equipment, just not the best of the best. I do agree that giving him more long term progression is the best way to go for Woodie best case scenario, his issue right now is that there isn't much to him that's useful after a session of gameplay. I also wouldn't say Moose should be able to "easily" take on BQ but more so pointing out that his kit just cannot do the job that it's made to do for much of the game which contributes to Woodie falling off so quickly.

True. Goose is the hardest to change because of how one dimensional it is, I think it's fine though since it gives so much more utility by comparison to the others much earlier on. 

To finish off I understand that this is a "limited" suggestion, but still want to make sure that Woodie is steered in a good direction. There's flexibility in how "radical" small character changes can be, as was seen with how big of a change was made with Wortox being given map teleportation. More can be done than boosting the numbers of the wereforms. Given how painful it is to use Woodie now I feel that bigger changes in the same vein as upgraded forms should be encouraged considering how long these issues have been a thing for him, but maybe that's just me  

[ArubaroBeefalo]

buffing moose form numbers can really help him. Right now, except for fighting hordes, is safer to be in human form and you will have higher dps because moose has less dps than a hambat and, even if has huge armor, you start with 120hp and less speed.

If they increase the damage and ,maybe, the hp (to be consistent to other characters hp based on how strong or weak they are) people will use it in more scenarios like cleaning the ruins. I usually use the form to clean the ruins but because of the fun of doing in that way, not because is an effective way to clean them