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A rant about ice staves. (Discussion/Change ideas)


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Hey everyone. I wanted to post my feelings about a beloved magic item, possibly see what others thoughts are on it, and offer some "cool" (hehehe) ideas for what could make it better in this ever-changing sandbox game.

The ice staff is a pretty weird item. On one hand I end up making them almost every run I do, because I love having a decent option to lock down a target or boss I'm doing on demand when I need some breathing room. When I play warly, they're a nice alternative to boomerangs in terms of convenience and durability for aggroing voltgoats, and other fast mobs like koalaphants, for that juicy meat. It's even essential for some of my strats, depending on what my goal is for that run. For instance, when rushing Dragonfly, I've more or less mastered completely nullifying Dragonfly's infamous "running attack" where she gets a free hit from her attack windup while running at you. Using the ice staff on her from the perfect distance will ministun her, allowing you to walk up, bait a normal and kiteable attack, and dodge it. It's not much, but saves so much armor in a more drawn out and solo fight, and feels very satisfying.

However, conventionally speaking, most bosses these days have some insane freeze resistance that gets exponentially harder during the fight to freeze. I think that on paper, it's an appropriate design choice to stop literally freezing a boss in its tracks from becoming too useful. What really ends up happening is that it's completely discouraged their use at all for those situations. You'd need to spend half the ice staff, and maybe 15 sanity (which is a pretty negligible amount in honesty) to.. make a boss just kind of sit there. It can immediately start fighting again when you so much as breathe at it, so what's the point? And even the most high damaging thing you can do, which is gunpowder, would unfreeze it as the gunpowder lights up under its feet, rendering even that pretty useless. Wickers' sleep books or a panflute are better for that, as they should be, since flutes are pretty rare, and blue gems are available with some luck from stalagmites and earthquakes, and vast abundance in ruins.

One of my suggested changes for this would be, what if the ice staff's effects are apparent on bosses before they've actually frozen?  I always found it weird how basically giving something hypothermia with magic frost attacks seems to do nothing to them lol.  I think the ice staff should slow down a bosses attack and movement speed, similar to how poison works in Shipwrecked with a poison spear. This would occur as you build up that blue tint on a boss right before they actually freeze, and after consecutive freezing, would actually reward using them a few more times as their "freeze resistance" would allow a few more stacks of this effect.

On a cooperative level, I think ice staves are nice as a tool. I often manage to save another players' backpack or items after a pretty close call from firehounds or dragonfly lavae,  and one time preventing the need for a rollback as i brought time for a griefer with a torch to be kicked just extinguishing flames for a minute straight lol.

However, their use kind of stops there. I'm not saying it's a bad item at all, it's actually one of the better T1 magic items in my opinion. I advocate for their usefulness wholeheartedly and continue to use them. But it doesn't stop me from seeing potential in what else they could do.

For  example, it's a staff that literally summons ice, but.. you can't get ice from it. Now I'm not saying it should generate ice at a rate of one to one, but hear me out. What if landing the killing blow on a frozen target rewarded you with ice as well as their normal drops? This is obviously in relation to weak mobs like rabbits and spiders, which die in one to three hits on average. It would just be matter of understanding that you want ice, and are willing to spend magic resources to implement that ice with your normal monster farming. They've been frozen solid and encased in ice anyways, so I think that makes sense with the ice shattering them and whatnot. Even just a chance to give 1 ice (or more, depending on their size) would be.. nice. Perhaps even after freezing a larger creature, such as a beefalo or koala, attacking it does not do full damage. They are given damage reduction for a few seconds, remain frozen, and attacking them chips away ice during this. Sort of like forcing them to be a psuedo-glacier, lol.

My last suggestion would be, ice staffs being able to refreeze the ice puddles that are ever present in rocky biomes. Maybe 6-8  uses to fully regenerate a single ice glacier. I always found it interesting that you can light a fire by these and actually cause them to melt, so an interaction that works in reverse would make sense.

That's pretty much all I have. What are your thoughts on ice staves, any stories you may have from using them, or ideas of your own?

Thanks for reading!

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1 hour ago, Well-met said:

remember dst is a multiplayer game. If a single ice staff player can considerably debuff a boss then a couple additional players with even poor equipment will make the experience a complete joke.

Yes. It is multiplayer, and I would counter that, with enough armor and healing, many fights are trivialized already in sufficient numbers. The recent server limit increase from 8 to 12 in Klei worlds for example has substantially increased the odds that more boss-challenging minded people are in world, and even an inexperienced player with a spear or hambat adding their damage to fights rapidly just ends them quicker. I am not against things like that at all, but if we're talking about the game in terms of the experience with a group of people fighting a boss, the current meta makes the majority of these fights already pretty easy. I wouldn't say it's a joke, but just not something a tool like this makes a difference in either way. 

Consider Walter's slowdown rounds for instance. I saw a Walter use them for the first time a month ago after playing this game for years. I don't even think he knew what he was doing with them, just found a purple gem in the chest and wanted to try them out, which was fine. Me and one other person were fighting Klaus, and Walter used them from the distance. It did... basically nothing. In fact it actually interrupted the flow of combat because we're so used to Klaus' normal movement speed for kiting, and suddenly he's reduced to a crawl.

After a while into the fight,, it did seem a bit useful, but Klaus is still able to fight and defend himself, the only thing that's changed is his chase potential is out the window for a few seconds. Could this have been useful in many other situations? Probably. But the Walter actually felt very useful, changed a fight i have done dozens of times times into something interesting and memorable, and did have to consume a magic gem that honestly nobody else was going to use in that entire servers' lifetime (before resetting) since we already had a manipulator and people don't really make batbats or teleport staves 

Definitely would be very noticeable against a boss reliant on movement entirely, like Guardian or Eye of Terror. I don't think neutering those bosses with use of a magic item is inherently that bad, it's magic after all, it's allowed to be useful. Also worth mentioning that currently the Eye doesn't care who it targets anyways when someone summons it. If we're going to talk about someone's experience, imagine their confusion and dismay when a giant monster is suddenly chasing them at night when they don't even know how to kite a Pigman yet. This game is pretty brutal for the inexperienced either way.

More tools and options to crowd control monsters or bosses for those situations where there are fewer players in a boss raiding group might be interesting. I'm not sure if you're tracking the current beta status of Maxwell, but his shadow prison will be performing leagues above what I'm suggesting either way, which while it has mixed opinions in the community, I think opens the path for more mechanics like that.

Not everyone is a master at dodging, kiting and even cares much about fighting at all. More options to help players feel comfortable helping or engaging the fighting content is a good thing IMO, even if it's from a distance and they aren't even doing a single point of damage.

 They're doing something and it's helpful.

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2 hours ago, Gramugazy said:

refreeze the ice puddles

I would want this to be a thing, but with an endothermic fire instead. But sorry, I don't think the ice staff needs a rework.

I think the simplicity of DST's fighting mechanics makes the game feel unique, and the status conditions showing/losing their effects immediately after a certain treshold is part of it. I know we have increasing status resistance as a more "complex" mechanic in the game, but that at least feels more like a precaution against spamming status weapons, which are already quite powerful.

Plus, like you point out, the ice staff is a much better magic item than others in its tier. I would even argue its the best after dark sword in terms of availability vs. usefulness. I don't mind giving weapons stronger effects, but I would rather have a direct buff to the ice staff at that point instead of a "complex" buff. What you suggested sounds cool of course, but I think multiple effects from a single status condition is not a thing for DST.

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1 hour ago, mr. brj said:

I would want this to be a thing, but with an endothermic fire instead.

I quite like that. Perhaps Mooncaller would be more efficient/capable of doing it as well. It would give endothermic and Mooncaller more clever applications, especially outside of summer, for sure.

And fair enough with your take, My background in gaming before primarily playing DS and DST a lot more has always been strategy games and (unfortunately) for a time MOBAs. Convoluted mechanics were always second nature to me, so hopefully that explains my constant push and pull with this game's simple combat on my time in the forums. Indeed there is charm to it as you say.

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Personally I'm on the ice staff rework boat too, not as a tool (it's great as is) but for combat because as you pointed out, yeah it's actually completely worthless for that because even after you manage to freeze the boss (which takes maaany hits) smacking them once just puts them back to normal which is frankly pretty pointless

I think it's worth looking at how other games handle freezing to get a good idea of how it could serve more as a support tool in combat:

-In bioshock a frozen enemy will not thaw for a decent amount of time so you can wail on it, but the catch is once they thaw any damage you did while frozen will only be reduced to a fraction of its original value, and on top of that if you manage to kill them while frozen you lose the drops (kinda how it works with fire in dst). While in practice it ends up not being particularly useful it is undoubtedly a safer option that a lot of people other than me enjoyed in that game

-In dark souls games (and elden ring) the "frostbite" status activates after hitting an enemy with enough frost attacks to counter its resistance, which results in them losing a % of their max hp and applying a debuff which makes them take slightly more damage from other sources for a while, the catch is while frostbite is active it cannot activate again until its duration is over. While the % damage part is probably too much, I think the extra damage debuff would be a really good incentive for lower damage characters to rush magic early on,

and personally the way I'd like an ice staff buff (what you also suggested) is how in a lot of games (plants vs zombies for example) any enemy afflicted by frost will move slower and attack slower even when not completely frozen (just while they have a blue tint). I always found it weird that in DST any enemy that is partially frozen (with the blue-white effect that shows up when you hit them with an ice staff) is no different from an enemy that hasn't been frozen at all, and I think a slight reduction in speed/attack speed would be a good and intuitive way to make ice staff a better support tool for raid bosses

 

just putting some ideas out there, yeah I know ice staff op because you can use it to move goats in pens blah blah I know jesse pls read my suggestions

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42 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

-In dark souls games (and elden ring) the "frostbite" status activates after hitting an enemy with enough frost attacks to counter its resistance, which results in them losing a % of their max hp and applying a debuff which makes them take slightly more damage from other sources for a while, the catch is while frostbite is active it cannot activate again until its duration is over. While the % damage part is probably too much, I think the extra damage debuff would be a really good incentive for lower damage characters to rush magic early on,

As much as I liked that mechanic in Elden Ring myself, the raw damage negation would mostly only work to further the gap in combat prowess that characters like Wolfgang and Wanda would achieve, so I'd be against it.

42 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

In bioshock a frozen enemy will not thaw for a decent amount of time so you can wail on it, but the catch is once they thaw any damage you did while frozen will only be reduced to a fraction of its original value,

Freezing basically being a stun that gives reduced damage is something I'd love to see, as long as it also generated a few ice at a decent rate as you hit the target as a byproduct. The tradeoff would be youre barely damaging the boss/mob, extending the fight and increasing the risk of something else entirely going wrong, which loves to happen when you're not careful in this game.

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40 minutes ago, Gramugazy said:

As much as I liked that mechanic in Elden Ring myself, the raw damage negation would mostly only work to further the gap in combat prowess that characters like Wolfgang and Wanda would achieve, so I'd be against it.

I think it's a matter of comparing the net time save of using said damage increase with and without damage multipliers, for example let's say that wilson using that bonus damage killed dragonfly in 7 minutes and they'd otherwise take 8, you're saving 60 seconds by crafting and using an ice staff, a fair trade IMO, then on the other hand let's say wolfgang using the ice staff would kill dragonfly in 4.5 minutes instead of 5, thereby saving only 30 seconds on an already fairly short fight. I think it'd be balanced and wouldn't disproportionately affect characters with already existing damage multipliers

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15 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

I think it's a matter of comparing the net time save of using said damage increase with and without damage multipliers, for example let's say that wilson using that bonus damage killed dragonfly in 7 minutes and they'd otherwise take 8, you're saving 60 seconds by crafting and using an ice staff, a fair trade IMO, then on the other hand let's say wolfgang using the ice staff would kill dragonfly in 4.5 minutes instead of 5, thereby saving only 30 seconds on an already fairly short fight. I think it'd be balanced and wouldn't disproportionately affect characters with already existing damage multipliers

Yes, from a solo standpoint there is definitely a point to be made. And for the record, as someone who fights bosses solo more often than with others (most-often by their own will of not having interest in fighting said bosses), I would appreciate having something like that available.

But unfortunately I can't see a way to balance that when you add the damage of multiple people beating up on a more fragile Dragonfly. Suddenly it would only take anywhere from a minute to 30 seconds of a fight, and that becomes something I wouldn't personally find fun. Perhaps if damage calculations were much lesser with said negation in the presence of multiple persons fighting a boss with that debuff, but this where I can see it getting too complex, and more trouble than it's worth.

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3 minutes ago, Qairon said:

Yes, from a solo standpoint there is definitely a point to be made. When you add the damage of multiple people beating up on a more fragile Dragonfly, suddenly it would only take anywhere from a minute to 30 seconds of a fight, and that becomes something I wouldn't personally find fun. Perhaps if damage calculations were much lesser with said negation in the presence of multiple persons fighting a boss with that debuff, but this where I can see it getting too complex, and more trouble than it's worth.

if 6 people beat up dragonfly in 30 seconds without the ice staff, a 10% damage increase would only save them like 3 seconds reducing the fight to 27 seconds which is basically a completely negligible difference no matter how you look at it

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The game I’m currently playing the most is Gotham Knights, and I Too am now on the Ice staffs need reworking train.. freezing effects in Gotham Knights = Useful.

Freezing in DST requires burning through most your staffs durability and it’s only good for one hit.

If freezing the enemy dead in its tracks is the intended perk: The Maxwells new Shadow Pillars will be what I’m using instead of these highly ineffective Ice Staffs.

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