An analysis of boss health scaling (and a possible solution to the debate)

[Gashzer]

16 hours ago, Shosuko said:

tbh - trying to label what is "cheese" or not is just your own preference.  Its one of the worst arguments to get into.  Unless you're actually glitching, ie exploiting bugs, it should be free game....)

Are you telling me mobs getting stuck on statues/fossils is not a glitch?? It 100% is, you cant debate that. Explain to me how it was an intentional feature that statues/fossils block mobs better than the actual ingame walls you can craft?

Klei needs to make a legit invincible wall craft to replace the current stupid looking fossil and statue "walls", watching mobs sprint into a statue indefinitely looks so buggy and highlights how bad the pathfinding/ mob AI in dst needs fixing.

16 hours ago, Shosuko said:

Utilizing the world for what it is.  The reason we do things like character swaps, or specific combos are ways in which we utilize the world.  Deciding to use dark swords, glass cutters, hambats etc is all about choosing how to use the game we're given.  Do you walk a boss through a forest to gather logs?  Do you run hounds to beefalo?  Look at the map boarders to find lunar island?  Use Wicker's new books?  All cheese.

Non of these are cheese obviously. But why balance bosses to fight with 1x damage with no minion support when we have a celestial portal to swap to whichever character is best for the boss we want to fight; wolfgang for toadstool, winona/webber/wurt with minions for bee queen and all other bosses are not tedious to fight with 1x damage solo. 

The leave the game in a fun state is a terrible arguement too, this is don't starve together not the goat simulator where bugs are needed for fun.

I feel like now all boss fights are in a good spot. Ancient guardian was the main boring boss that got fixed. Rest are perfectly balanced now. Crab king is annoying until you figure out the best way to kill him... the fact that you have to fight crab king differently is good. Challenges you to use mechanics you would not normally use... cough cough bunnymen/minions for 90% of players...

[Capybara007]

10 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Klei needs to make a legit invincible wall craft to replace the current stupid looking fossil and statue "walls", watching mobs sprint into a statue indefinitely looks so buggy and highlights how bad the pathfinding/ mob AI in dst needs fixing.

i disagree, you just seem to be the only person that dislikes how they look

[ArubaroBeefalo]

1 minute ago, Capybara007 said:

i disagree, you just seem to be the only person that dislikes how they look

i hate how they look, feels like bugged but aslong as i dont build certain things that doesnt affect me

[Cloakingsumo198]

The fact that statues and fossils are better at being walls than actual walls has always bugged me.

Makes actual walls feel redundant and it's extremely ugly especially since it looks silly with mobs moonwalking against them cause of their broken pathfinding/ai.

On the other hand if It wasn't that way then we probably wouldn't have all the mob traps.

It doesn't seem like it would be changed any time soon though like a mistake kept in as a feature.

[DVGMedia]

2 hours ago, Cloakingsumo198 said:

The fact that statues and fossils are better at being walls than actual walls has always bugged me.

Makes actual walls feel redundant and it's extremely ugly especially since it looks silly with mobs moonwalking against them cause of their broken pathfinding/ai.

On the other hand if It wasn't that way then we probably wouldn't have all the mob traps.

It doesn't seem like it would be changed any time soon though like a mistake kept in as a feature.

 

15 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Are you telling me mobs getting stuck on statues/fossils is not a glitch?? It 100% is, you cant debate that. Explain to me how it was an intentional feature that statues/fossils block mobs better than the actual ingame walls you can craft?

 pathfinding/ mob AI in dst needs fixing.

The whole blocking mobs was done way before statues and the skeleton pieces were a thing.
People would use signs since they were placeable really close to walls.

I think it would cause a big problem if every creature had to check for some sort of collision within their brains to avoid considering there is lots in the world that have collision

Its been many years of farm making if it was a bug klei did not wan't they would have removed it by now.  klei ultimately have the decision to take things out.
And they for sure have seen the creativity of their community making use of this "buggy thing"
Because you know what thats a thing to take into account for in game development

Just because something looks strange doesn't mean it needs to be taken out.
developers have to look at how it affects the playerbase and if its not something that is absolutely breaking a concept of the game "experiment and survive"
then they make the final judgment.

Honestly things are much better with the statues and walls because you have 2 ways to affect mobs  one that does affect their pathfinding
and another that doesn't.
And both have their uses. One can get broken when unloaded
While the other acts as a proper wall and the player has to take this into account when building.

 

[Frosty_Mentos]

I don't want or need any of the boss heath scaling because there's set automatic farms to kill those bosses already and strategies on how to deal with them without the farms if you're that kinda person. The game's a sandbox to farm and shred anything just for own enjoyment or building bases and what not.

If the game had RPG aspects to it and different balance or goals to win or something maybe it would be okay to have health scaling.

Health scaling shouldn't be a thing of just player presence but I think that each boss should have some way or another buffing the bosses like how Misery Toadstool is. I wish enraged klaus would provide more presents but it's been out for maybe 4 years and no changes were made

[Pig Princess]

On 10/28/2022 at 12:31 PM, Gashzer said:

Are you telling me mobs getting stuck on statues/fossils is not a glitch?? It 100% is, you cant debate that.

 

On 10/28/2022 at 12:31 PM, Gashzer said:

Klei needs to make a legit invincible wall craft to replace the current stupid looking fossil and statue "walls", watching mobs sprint into a statue indefinitely looks so buggy and highlights how bad the pathfinding/ mob AI in dst needs fixing.

Mobs not pathfinding correctly around statues, fossil fargments, and also around structures and natural objects is 100% oversight. It looks strange, although one can also say that it looks funny. But I would be very sad if it was fixed, because I had a lot of fun time designing farms and traps, which utilised both ways to block mobs - walls that affect pathfinding and statues/fossils/etc. that don't. The way mobs behave around statues and such enriched game experience for me, and I think that is what's important, as gameplay diversity should be top priority.

Some of the examples of such farms/traps - some I made myself, some were designed by other people and I refined them:

Spoiler

Pig farm, fully fireproof for summer, could be modified to be silk farm as well (just put bunnymen to the other half), monster characters compatible:

Pig farm + silk farm, version for ruins and specific terrain, monster characters-compatible:

Krampus farm that doesn't need character switch (Wickerbottom is enough):

Monkey defence (simple):

Monkey defence (to kill them faster):

Monkey oven/defence without anenemies:

More farms/traps made by other people:

Spoiler

Hound defence (I recreated it since I can't find that video on bilibili):

Tallbird farm (J J is author, link for video is below):

and those are what came to mind first, I'm sure there are more.

How can one say that all those builds (all that effort and creativity) needs to be removed?

[MondayNight]

On 10/28/2022 at 12:31 PM, Gashzer said:

Are you telling me mobs getting stuck on statues/fossils is not a glitch?? It 100% is, you cant debate that. Explain to me how it was an intentional feature that statues/fossils block mobs better than the actual ingame walls you can craft?

Klei needs to make a legit invincible wall craft to replace the current stupid looking fossil and statue "walls", watching mobs sprint into a statue indefinitely looks so buggy and highlights how bad the pathfinding/ mob AI in dst needs fixing.

Probably mobs running ad infinitum into a Wall/Fossil/Lureplant/etc - as a pathfinder fluke - originally wasn't intended. Maybe. But in time, with players' clever use of this issue, it became the "emergent game-play" KLei proud themselves of in relation to their games. Or perhaps was intended from beginning for the exact stated reason, who knows. Thing is, after years, all the farms coming out of pathfinder's "infinity loop" became established elements in most mid-to-late game worlds, enriching by leaps and bounds the Sandbox creativity of DS/T. If, suddenly, pathfinder gets updated, and mobs simply destroy the walls, go around a.s.o., all above-listed farms, for example, get nullified and late-stage game-play becomes so much more lacking. For people like myself will either mean I will solely play worlds till around 150 in-game days mark or ditch DST completely. Likewise your proposal ("invincible walls") will more-or-less mean the same thing that now can be achieved via pathfinder fluke, but with the added annoyance of mobs forever punching/biting said walls with appropriate & very-irksome sounds. Bottom like: why fix something if it works in a fun, interesting way? And if realism is what you also want to touch upon, from my childhood at my grandparents' farm I still remember chickens and pigs trying to compulsively grab through a fence some herbs/worms/etc to no avail, while the opened pen door was 1-2m away - hence yeah, most animals aren't very bright.

[Zeklo]

This reminds of... what was it? The infinite lantern glitch? People said a lot of the same things, but when it was fixed it really didn't change much.

I can't recall if it was fixed around the same time as new methods of lighting were introduced or not—but seeing bugs/glitches/exploits fixed is something I always want to see. If those janky mechanics allowed for some neat things, then Klei should introduce new genuine mechanics to make up for it rather than not fix the issue.

[sudoku]

Its definitley a balancing act for sure. I think you used to be able to get the same behavior of blocking enemies with burnt trees in singleplayer and it was patched out in DST which makes sense since it took very little effort to achieve. At least with statues you need to collect the materials and then craft and carry them indivually to their desired location - this balances out the idea of an indestructible wall imo. 

Fossils i think take less effort but idk. 

Itd be cool if they patched out the behavior with fossils and statues but made a new wall type called a pillar that functioned and worked similarly to how statues already work. Or maybe you craft a pillar head at the pottery then carry it to a wall segment and that upgrades the wall to a pillar.

[goatt]

On 10/16/2022 at 9:06 PM, Guille6785 said:

the point of my post is not to address the difficulty nor the fun of the fights, it's to address the fact that with certain characters and weapons some fights just take way too long no matter what and no amount of QOL updates to bosses can change that, the purpose of my suggestion is to put more power in the hands of the players to reduce the length of certain fights without needing to pick specific characters and without forcing those changes on every single player

It seems you think bosses are too hard for most of the players / characters, because I think HP is part of the difficulty and they are one thing in some sense.

 

The method you called cheese is to use game mechanism to make boss fights easier.

 

The method you recommended is that the game provide items to make boss fights easier, in other words, legalize “cheese” items because such powerful unique weapon would otherwise be locked behind some difficult boss.

 

If your main point is too much hp, then the solution should be lower default hp, instead of creating an extra layer of damage modifying buffs.

 

I don’t have an opinion about the topic. But I think your suggestion has a weird inner conflict. It seems you want the bosses to stay the same because you like it. But you want them to be easier for others by providing the means XYZ, as if you are not part of “the others”?

 

so are you going to use the XYZ?

if you are, too. Then is the boss too hard for everyone and the bosses difficulty should be tuned?

 

if you are not going to, then why aren’t you? It’s like trying to kill a boss spears when hambat is equally available.

[Thrul]

Should be added. Only 2 points I've seen to not do it is "ooh I want to solo in an online server" and "iT dOeSnT fIt ThE fEeL" first if someone joins when you want to raid a boss you help them get to your level and if they refuse help you just kick them, plus it's the most stupid thing to not add an amazing feature because your scared someone's going to exploit it, so dumb.

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, Thrul said:

Should be added. Only 2 points I've seen to not do it is "ooh I want to solo in an online server" and "iT dOeSnT fIt ThE fEeL" first if someone joins when you want to raid a boss you help them get to your level and if they refuse help you just kick them, plus it's the most stupid thing to not add an amazing feature because your scared someone's going to exploit it, so dumb.

The reason to not do it is that its the wrong thing to do.  Pig Princess broke it down pretty well, and its what I was talking about in my first reply.  The health pools aren't the problems with these bosses, the problems are their fights.  Simply reducing health doesn't change their fights so all of the pain points remain.  Ironically this change also encourages more cheese b/c what cheese does is strip out all of the other elements of the fight so reducing health / increasing damage basically is a buff to cheese while players who are actually trying to engage the fight are pushed off just the same.  You can almost measure how bad a fight is by how much people are willing to cheese to avoid it lol

Thinking the problem of these bosses will be solved by adjusting health bars is absolutely wrong.

AG is a great example.  AG was cheesed a lot because the fight was very unfair.  AG only had 10k health, but the time you could spend actually attacking it was very limited because its attack pattern was fast, and unforgiving.  Even if they reduced it to only 5k health it would have still been a target for cheese b/c who wants to actually fight that nightmare of a boss?  Most "legit" players who enjoyed the fight actually enjoyed exploiting a bug that gave them a few extra hits, an entirely unintended "feature" that allowed for skill expression.  When Klei fixed that exploit the extremely poorly designed fight was in the spotlight for just how bad it was.  Just reducing its health wouldn't have done anything to fix it - in fact it would only reaffirm that you should cheese it b/c cheesing is now even faster lol

BQueen and Toad still have very bad mechanics.  When you fight either of them legit you're probably spending around 10% of your time actually attacking them, with 90% of the time just running around.  For bqueen you have to get space between the queen and the bees, and for toad you have to take care of trees, escape spoor clouds, avoid cave ins etc.  Adjusting health or damage only effects that 10% of the time you're able to damage them.  If they gave every player 100% damage boost you're still dealing with 90% of the fight that is just atrocious.  Meanwhile if you're cheesing a fight you're getting a total freebie b/c you've reduced the fight to only health bars and damage ticks, and this change is a pure buff to that.

This is just the absolute wrong way to go about it.  Its a massive buff to cheese and a negligible buff to "legit play."

[Guille6785]

8 hours ago, goatt said:

It seems you think bosses are too hard for most of the players / characters, because I think HP is part of the difficulty and they are one thing in some sense.

HP and difficulty are related in the sense that increasing a boss's HP will obviously make them harder but they are completely unrelated in the sense that a bossfight taking longer doesn't automatically make it harder than another, for example fuelweaver (with or without weather pains) and enraged dragonfly are both very difficult fights for most people even here in the forums despite being relatively short while bee queen and toadstool take close to no skill but take forever, that's the entire point I've been trying to convey

8 hours ago, goatt said:

The method you called cheese is to use game mechanism to make boss fights easier.

I agree cheese is a good thing, I just don't like to be forced to use it because of the alternative being a 20 minute fight where I just run in circles and hold F, good cheeses are the ones that you don't mind not using because the legit fight is still a perfectly reasonable option (the new AG and dfly for example are bosses that can technically be cheesed but there's little reason to because the fights don't have absurd requirements, I never cheese FW either because the fight is so fun to me)

8 hours ago, goatt said:

The method you recommended is that the game provide items to make boss fights easier, in other words, legalize “cheese”

cheese involves an element of triviliazing some (or all) of the mechanics of the fight, the suggestion that I made specifically brings up that the point is to let players shorten fights WITHOUT resorting to techniques that trivialize mechanics, most notably minions or catapults, which don't just shorten the fight but remove any semblance of strategy from it

8 hours ago, goatt said:

If your main point is too much hp, then the solution should be lower default hp, instead of creating an extra layer of damage modifying buffs.

the point is to not force players to participate in this mechanic if they don't wish to, also lower default HP would harm multiplayer unless direct scaling is added which brings up the whole list of problems I wrote in the post

8 hours ago, goatt said:

I think your suggestion has a weird inner conflict. It seems you want the bosses to stay the same because you like it. But you want them to be easier for others by providing the means XYZ

I don't want the bosses to be "easier" because you can already make them easier by cheesing the crap out of them, for the 340925th time the point of my suggestion is to let players participate in fights that still feel "legit" but don't last 20 minutes as a default damage character

8 hours ago, goatt said:

as if you are not part of “the others”?

I never implied that I wouldn't benefit from this addition as well, but there's nothing even wrong with suggesting something that would benefit others even if it doesn't benefit you

8 hours ago, goatt said:

so are you going to use the XYZ?

if you are, too. Then is the boss too hard for everyone and the bosses difficulty should be tuned?

 

if you are not going to, then why aren’t you? It’s like trying to kill a boss spears when hambat is equally available.

if you had spent more than 10 seconds reading the post you would've seen the part where I said that the recipe should be balanced in such a way that it competes with other useful items so that you have to make a choice between killing big bads faster or getting those other items, in my case it would depend entirely on what I feel like doing on that world

[goatt]

4 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

HP and difficulty are related in the sense that increasing a boss's HP will obviously make them harder but they are completely unrelated in the sense that a bossfight taking longer doesn't automatically make it harder than another, for example fuelweaver (with or without weather pains) and enraged dragonfly are both very difficult fights for most people even here in the forums despite being relatively short while bee queen and toadstool take close to no skill but take forever, that's the entire point I've been trying to convey

I agree cheese is a good thing, I just don't like to be forced to use it because of the alternative being a 20 minute fight where I just run in circles and hold F, good cheeses are the ones that you don't mind not using because the legit fight is still a perfectly reasonable option (the new AG and dfly for example are bosses that can technically be cheesed but there's little reason to because the fights don't have absurd requirements, I never cheese FW either because the fight is so fun to me)

cheese involves an element of triviliazing some (or all) of the mechanics of the fight, the suggestion that I made specifically brings up that the point is to let players shorten fights WITHOUT resorting to techniques that trivialize mechanics, most notably minions or catapults, which don't just shorten the fight but remove any semblance of strategy from it

the point is to not force players to participate in this mechanic if they don't wish to, also lower default HP would harm multiplayer unless direct scaling is added which brings up the whole list of problems I wrote in the post

I don't want the bosses to be "easier" because you can already make them easier by cheesing the crap out of them, for the 340925th time the point of my suggestion is to let players participate in fights that still feel "legit" but don't last 20 minutes as a default damage character

I never implied that I wouldn't benefit from this addition as well, but there's nothing even wrong with suggesting something that would benefit others even if it doesn't benefit you

if you had spent more than 10 seconds reading the post you would've seen the part where I said that the recipe should be balanced in such a way that it competes with other useful items so that you have to make a choice between killing big bads faster or getting those other items, in my case it would depend entirely on what I feel like doing on that world

I saw that part. I read your original post 3 times. And have read all the comments on the first page. I just felt your way is not all the way. You seem to have it half and half.

if glimmers’ goop or goats’ horn is like limited resources, then so are flesh bulbs.
 

You say you don’t want players to spend 20 min as default damage. Then it is indeed a boss balancing issue by itself. It requires tuning on bosses. Providing a workaround to make boss easier and “feel legit” seems to be not seeing the problem as is (I’m running out of words to describe this very weird feeling, English my second language). 20 min is the original intended design. If you think it’s too much, then your focus should be simply changing that.

 

and I’m sorry, managing big threads is exhausting. I can totally relate.