I think shadows should be 2-3 hit by bosses.

[Copyafriend]

Maxwells shadows at this point are THICC. Too tough in my opinion. Im fine with them being able to survive a couple hits, but they’re almost costless at this point. They shouldn’t survive four whole hits and die on a fifth from ANY boss in the game with no additional setup or effort. I have twenty shadows in my book, thats more than enough for most bosses without refueling. In other words, a bit overkill. Anything short of deerclops cant even kill one shadow before dying. 
 

I dont think we need a fancy mechanic change or anything to fix this, a simple number adjustment will allow for it to not be quite so extreme.

 

we can either make the shadows more expensive - 25% on cast and 30% sanity bringing maxwell to 90% sanity on 3 summons. This will lower dps but need less summoning to keep up the spell during fights.
 

alternatively (id prefer) we can weaken the shadows down to say 30-40 damage cap instead. At 30 damage they will still survive two hits and contribute to boss fights, but will no longer literally tank deerclops and bearger. At 40 they will be returned to mostly fragile warrior helpers, but able to take at least one hit from anything without collapsing like a stack of cards. This will keep the higher dps but need to be refreshed fairly often for fights

Please do one of these klei, maxwells shadows shouldn’t be competiting with abigails durability.

 

[Gi-Go]

No. Maxwell dosen't need nerf. Duelists are perfect the way they are now. 

[Copyafriend]

Just now, Gi-Go said:

No. Maxwell dosen't need nerf. Duelists are perfect the way they are now. 

No they absolutely are not.

duelists have the survivability and damage of abigail, while being spammable with no downsides. 

like, literally imagine if you could just have a book of abigail in your inventory that just resummons abigail when she dies. And you used that to fight bosses. 
 

except the total health pool is also at 450 and it has 15 damage max from any source so a single target attacker needs 30(!) attacks to survive the shadows. 
 

also they’re actually tankier than abigail against high damage attackers. 
 

why is my SPAMMABLE, almost completely free summon, able to outtank the one single summon that is the entire focus on a character whose loss literally causes them to lose 25% of their damage output and nerf the summon for the next three days.

 

Not balanced.

[ThymeSpirit]

13 minutes ago, Copyafriend said:

No they absolutely are not.

duelists have the survivability and damage of abigail, while being spammable with no downsides. 

like, literally imagine if you could just have a book of abigail in your inventory that just resummons abigail when she dies. And you used that to fight bosses. 
 

except the total health pool is also at 450 and it has 15 damage max from any source so a single target attacker needs 30(!) attacks to survive the shadows. 
 

also they’re actually tankier than abigail against high damage attackers. 
 

why is my SPAMMABLE, almost completely free summon, able to outtank the one single summon that is the entire focus on a character whose loss literally causes them to lose 25% of their damage output and nerf the summon for the next three days.

 

Not balanced.

I agree that they need tweaking, but comparing them to Abigail is not fair as she is clearly intended to be good against multiple weak targets, and the shadow puppets seem to have the opposite role of focusing on 1 strong target, it's good that they have different niches and it should stay that way.

[Copyafriend]

10 minutes ago, ThymeSpirit said:

I agree that they need tweaking, but comparing them to Abigail is not fair as she is clearly intended to be good against multiple weak targets, and the shadow puppets seem to have the opposite role of focusing on 1 strong target, it's good that they have different niches and it should stay that way.

But…

they’re equally strong against a group of enemies too?

like they get hit and dodge out and dont get stunlocked. 
 

the shadow duelist are BUSTED atm.

honestly i dont know how people dont look at them and go yeeeshhh thats a little much

[King Maxwell]

39 minutes ago, Copyafriend said:

Maxwells shadows at this point are THICC. Too tough in my opinion. Im fine with them being able to survive a couple hits, but they’re almost costless at this point. They shouldn’t survive four whole hits and die on a fifth from ANY boss in the game with no additional setup or effort. I have twenty shadows in my book, thats more than enough for most bosses without refueling. In other words, a bit overkill. Anything short of deerclops cant even kill one shadow before dying. 
 

I dont think we need a fancy mechanic change or anything to fix this, a simple number adjustment will allow for it to not be quite so extreme.

 

we can either make the shadows more expensive - 25% on cast and 30% sanity bringing maxwell to 90% sanity on 3 summons. This will lower dps but need less summoning to keep up the spell during fights.
 

alternatively (id prefer) we can weaken the shadows down to say 30-40 damage cap instead. At 30 damage they will still survive two hits and contribute to boss fights, but will no longer literally tank deerclops and bearger. At 40 they will be returned to mostly fragile warrior helpers, but able to take at least one hit from anything without collapsing like a stack of cards. This will keep the higher dps but need to be refreshed fairly often for fights

Please do one of these klei, maxwells shadows shouldn’t be competiting with abigails durability.

 

I posted this on [Game Update] - 529972
What do you think of this change in duelists?
 

As a maxwell main (practically mono, I don't like switching to other characters even momentarily through the portal) I have a probably unpopular opinion about duelist changes.
Duelists shouldn't solo bosses at a low cost, I did the tests with the 4 seasonal bosses and dragonfly and I was able to solo the 5 with 0 risk and very cheaply:
Deerclops: 2 nightmare fuel
Moose/Goose: 1 nightmare fuel
Antlion: 3 nightmare fuel
Bearger: 4 nightmare fuel
Dragonfly: 5 nightmare fuel (probably reducing if I played better and didn't let her rage)
On the other hand I thought they got worse when dealing with hordes of mobs because they lost healing and mobs don't usually hit much above the damage limitation in my opinion duelists should be more useful against hordes of mobs and less useful against bosses being just one expensive option to fight bosses but never better than maxwell fighting normally against them (working more like magic projectiles)
My suggestions: Return healing to duelists, remove damage limitation, shield duelists that ignore first incoming atk.
With these changes I believe that duelists would be more in line with what in my opinion they should be, the shield guarantees at least 1 atk against bosses, being able to take more value from them but they would still die quickly and the return of healing in line with the new changes would put the duelists in a good place to face hordes of weaker mobs
Please decrease the book reading animation time to summon servant and duelists now that they are spammed with limited duration time is long, especially when using the duelist in combat.
Shadow servant must have 75 health or be immune to indirect damage.
Shadow Sneak still seems very unhelpful to me (maybe I'm missing something so anyone who knows good ways to use it feel free to talk) and I still think it should be reworked into a completely new spell or swap fear for damage.

Sorry if there are too many errors, I used the translator.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

instead of nerfing the duelist to make them not worth they should affect maxwell survival. We need useful stuff not underwhelming

costing max hp like in ds (iirc) would be funnier

[Copyafriend]

2 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

instead of nerfing the duelist to make them not worth they should affect maxwell survival. We need useful stuff not underwhelming

costing max hp like in ds (iirc) would be funnier

I believe it was still sanity, but this is a not unreasonable compromise.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

3 minutes ago, Copyafriend said:

I believe it was still sanity, but this is a not unreasonable compromise.

oh right, there were no duelist recipe. Just shadows that mimic you

still, bring back glass cannon summoner q.q

[gamehun20]

The wiki tells me that it cost 15 health and 55 sanity to summon a shadow

[ArubaroBeefalo]

1 minute ago, gamehun20 said:

The wiki tells me that it cost 15 health and 55 sanity to summon a shadow

i need to play again DS single player xD

[gamehun20]

Just now, ArubaroBeefalo said:

i need to play again DS single player xD

Atleast you will be able to remind yourself of what we lost with these refreshes

[ThymeSpirit]

28 minutes ago, Copyafriend said:

But…

they’re equally strong against a group of enemies too?

like they get hit and dodge out and dont get stunlocked. 
 

the shadow duelist are BUSTED atm.

honestly i dont know how people dont look at them and go yeeeshhh thats a little much

But they still get hit and die after a few hits, unlike Abi who just sits there doing AOE attack constantly keeping an entire horde of spiders or monkeys stunlocked. Again I agree, they need to be nerfed, but not to the point of making them useless again. Maybe increase the damage cap, or the casting cost, or the max sainty reduction (so you can have less of them at the same time), or all of the above. Another thing that could be done is make Maxwell spawn with like 20-30% charged Codex and no nf, so he needs to prepare before he becomes powerful. Wanda is quite OP too, but she needs to do some work first, Abigail doesn't spawn with 600 hp at the beginning, WX needs to scan creatures for the chips, etc. No other character has access to their full powers from day 1.

[Ohan]

10 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

instead of nerfing the duelist to make them not worth they should affect maxwell survival. We need useful stuff not underwhelming

costing max hp like in ds (iirc) would be funnier

I like this idea too but as we’ve seen auto-battling duelists with 5 hit armor can solo bosses without maxwell doing anything.

shifting the max stat reduction from sanity to hp with current duelists would just incentivise maxwells to backseat even more since the duelists dont need his help. Its wendy refresh all over again. 

Idk what the perfect fix is but what i do know is that the cost to summon both duelists and cage/snare is way too low.

I dont understand how they went from borderline useless wicker books costing 33 sanity per read, bookcase to unlock and materials to make to Maxwell spawning with a codex that can summon 20 duelists before u have to refill it (with only 4 fuel).

[flamboyant wolf]

honestly I was surprised when I learned they can survive 5 hits now, when I read the hotfix I thought it would be, like, 3 at max.

[Mr_Vol]

I'll recommend having them cost 5% book duration still, only having a max of 3 duelist out with a 30% sainty cap on Maxwell and lowering there damage to 34 half of a Dark sword (still have that 1.5x lunge attack) and cut the armor to a max of 3 hits pre duelist 

This will fix the *permanent low sanity*  old Maxwell we had to farm nightmare creatures with out have to punish players and everything costing 5% codex duration will keep it so that you don't have to play math games the whole time.

[BB Marioni]

30 damage cap would seem more balanced. 3 hits before they die

[Toroic]

I agree with OP, getting oneshot makes them useless in many scenarios but 5 hits minimum means they shred bosses pretty hard with low overall fuel cost.

Dying on the 3rd hit would increase the fuel cost considerably, but at the end of the day being able to pump out cheap minions will still let you overwhelm bosses without aoe for cheap

[ApoIIo]

6 hours ago, Copyafriend said:

why is my SPAMMABLE, almost completely free summon, able to outtank the one single summon that is the entire focus on a character whose loss literally causes them to lose 25% of their damage output and nerf the summon for the next three days.

Not balanced.

Are they to become more fun when they require you to spam them slightly more? This applies to more or less every case of minion spam in the game.
You don't need to 'nerf them until it feels right'. This is game balance fallacy. All that matters is what's going to be the most enjoyable: People wanted more durable duelists and here they are.
In the end, the only difference is that it costs less NF and less casts to keep them up now. They still cost nothing, and no; they're not going to be more interesting if you make them drink through stacks of NF.

[Copyafriend]

5 minutes ago, Siegmund said:

Are they to become more fun when they require you to spam them slightly more? This applies to more or less every case of minion spam in the game.
You don't need to 'nerf them until it feels right'. This is game balance fallacy. All that matters is what's going to be the most enjoyable: People wanted more durable duelists and here they are.
In the end, the only difference is that it costs less NF and less casts to keep them up now. They still cost nothing, and no; they're not going to be more interesting if you make them drink through stacks of NF.

Ive never heard of game balance fallacy, and i doubt it applies here.

 

the problem is that the duelists are far stronger than they should be given the utility that maxwell currently has. They effectively have 5 hits, not 75 health, so that means each shadow duelist has EFFECTIVELY 1000 health when fighting bearger for instance (200 damage per attack to npcs 100 to players) obviously this varies, but even 750 for deerclops (150 against npcs) while being unflinchable and immune to status effects while having moderate to high damage each is still quite a lot 

 

that is an insane amount of survivability for an extremely cheap and easily replicated summon. I have nothing against a summoner character. I love them, but being able to stand back and repeatedly summon one thing until it defeats the boss is not going to be fun. People asked for tougher shadows because they were being one shot, this is an overcorrection.

[Cloakingsumo198]

Just assume that a shadow duelist will always survive 5 hits enless it's attacking some dumb weak enemy like frogs and bees.

They have insane durability for fodder.

I'm surprised by how many people are in support of a pretty cheap busted ability when almost all other forms of cheap busted mechanics are frowned on.

[ApoIIo]

24 minutes ago, Copyafriend said:

that is an insane amount of survivability for an extremely cheap and easily replicated summon. I have nothing against a summoner character. I love them, but being able to stand back and repeatedly summon one thing until it defeats the boss is not going to be fun. People asked for tougher shadows because they were being one shot, this is an overcorrection.

Well, 5 is pretty unnecessary, 3 would've been enough imo. Still, this 'overcorrection' is more of a convinience than an actual end-of-the-world crackedness, so I don't mind taking it. Before the patch you could still spam2win at a marginal cost. Only the nf price tag decreased very slightly.

Also, consider this since you used the likes of deerclops for your comparisons; some marble and a ham bat to hold f with, already removes the minimum thinking requirement for most threats. You're basically a live tank with 95% reduction and a load of durability that can easily be further doubled. Virtually invulnerable against anything without gimmicks that don't already completely invalidate the current 'busted' duelists. And it isn't even character-specific!

So, where does that take us? By using the duelists, you bypass procuring marble in order to avoid thinking! At that point, why not be brainless as someone else with other benefits? Marble isn't expensive.

There are far more non-specific yet cracked things in this game, but it's just easier to focus on one character at a time. So you don't see people asking for a marble suit or bee box nerf.

[MadMatt]

1 hour ago, Siegmund said:

So, where does that take us? By using the duelists, you bypass procuring marble in order to avoid thinking! At that point, why not be brainless as someone else with other benefits? Marble isn't expensive.

I'm sorry what? This makes no sense. You can only make a marble suit by going out of your way to get marble and progressing through the game as normal. Maxwell can kill Deerclops theoretically as soon as he spawns with no damage, no *insanity, no research lab, or resources used other than a couple of nightmare fuel which he spawns with. Maybe i'm missing something but this isn't close to a fair comparison considering you need to actually play the game for a significant amount of time to use the "brainless" marble suit method, unlike Maxwell.

[ApoIIo]

34 minutes ago, MadMatt said:

considering you need to actually play the game for a significant amount of time to use the "brainless" marble suit method, unlike Maxwell.

Significant only when compared to an instant, yet back to square one; you skip a marble suit to get away with effortless kills. So exactly what I typed on there.

Typically, this implies at least thirty days spent without finding any marble or a single alchemy engine made. A truly impressive feat, but only if you exist solely to kill seasonal bosses that don't have any gimmicks. Any form of following basic progression makes it save a lot less effort.

Admittedly, I find five hits excessive, but not to a point where it's actually harmful. This game already has a metric ton of cracked things, why not pay a little bit less NF for the same service? Needing to refresh them more often with a durability nerf or costing more nf, neither will accomplish anything meaningful. All roads lead to "get more of x lol".

Max will probably be broken op for a week before people withdraw to their wendy/wigfrid comfort zones because '75 hp is scary' for the layman, even with the current duelists.

[Cloakingsumo198]

They can lower the amount of hits they can survive and give maxwell the ability to recall them so they can avoid hits probably some invincibility frames so they could still keep agro as they disappear.

It would add some micromanagement and make them less tanky but that doesn't necessarily mean more fun.

But right now they just seem like free guaranteed damage since they'll get in hits no matter what and are cheap enough to not care about their livelyhood.