Dragonfly: rant, review, rework.

[Gi-Go]

Let's have a conversation about our beloved dragonfly - first raid boss ever added to DST. Dragonfly is trully iconic and is my personal favorite, which is why I'd like to discuss this boss thoroughly. What I love about her, what I hate about her, what I think should be changed, and what I think should stay as it always was.

Wall cheese:
Let's begin our discussion with infamous wall cheese. This strategy existed since the dawn of time and is probably the most overused cheese in the whole game. Everyone I know uses it. Everyone I watch uses it.
I play a lot on public servers, and whenever I force my team of strangers to fight without walls, they either kick me or beat dragonfly and say that this is the first time they ever fought her without walls. It's none of my business, but it really does say something about a boss design, when most players never even considered to try the fight legitimately.
Or maybe it's not even dragonfly's fault? The boss is actually quite fair, and is pretty easy without walls (that is, as long as you are using strong character or have at least one teammate).
This strategy is more of a bad tradition passed down from generation to generation, rather than an actual nessesity to which people resulted to, after failing fair fight over and over again.
The reason I want this cheese gone - is because I want people to see that their fears were for nothing and the boss isn't actually all that crazy.
That being said, solo character without damage modifier might find legitimate dragonfly a little bit too annoying to deal with, and that's why I'll discuss potentially welcomed changes below.
Oh, and how would you fix this cheese? It's super easy. Whenever larvae are stuck on walls or structures they tend to preform their jump attack, even if noone is in range. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's a perfect foundation for cheese patch. Just let them pass through obstacles when they preform their jump.

Relocation cheese:
Before moving on to complaints, I'd like to briefly talk about a less known cheese that I would very much like to keep in this game. And that is the "homepoint reset" or however you wanna call it. As you all know, dragonfly is bound to her territory and will despawn if you lure her too far away. However, center of that territory updates every time dragonfly is put to sleep or is frozen. Thus you can lure her anywhere you want, if you keep stunning her before she dispawns.
Why would you wanna do this? The very reason you weren't supposed to.
When you are too far from lava ponds - they unload. Dragonfly cannot find them and thus results to spawning minions while standing still - which completely immobilizes her for a brief time.
This is extremely efficient in boss farms involving minions, as it allows them to deal free damage instead of having to chace or wait for dragonfly while she flies around her ponds.
If you pair it with tentacle box - dragonfly will die preforming a total of 1(one) hit on tentacles. It's a very good cheese for people interested in being efficient and not so much in fighting the same boss over and over again.
I hope it will stay. And that it will be a good replacement for wall huggers if the wall cheese gets fixed. 

Minions:
Now this is the worst part about dragonfly's design and is exactly why she is the most cheesed boss in the game.
Everyone hates minions, and not just the movie.
But WHY do people hate larvae so much? Well, there are 5 reasons:

1. Unfair and luck based.
Larvae are absolutely unfair! Dragonfly will spawn them from a random pond and that includes the one she just used. This creates bs scenarios where you get overwhelmed with minions because dragonfly felt like it, and gave you no time at all to deal with them.
The time you are given to kill larvae before getting overwhelmed is luck based, and getting overwhelmed by minions means fight is over.
I suggest making dragonfly incapable of using the same pond twice in a row, and also incapable of using neighbor ponds. 

2. Broken AI.
Larvae share the sake AI glitch as (most noticeably) bishops. Whenever target is in attack range - bishop and larvae are in attack mode (they stand still while periodically attacking). When the target is outside of range - larvae and bishop are in chase mode (they try to get in range).
However, when target was outside of range but now isn't - bishop and larvae glitch out and attempt to chase their target to the point of hugging them.
This is actually beneficial in case of bishops, because you can lure them out of highly secured area for a gentle hug of death.
However, hugging larvae will result in a third degree burns, which is exactly why it's so unbelievable frustrating to deal with multiple of them at once. You can't fight them because they WILL do contact damage to you.
Dst is notorious for terrible AI, but I belive klei are capable of fixing this nonsense.

3. Ice staff method is expensive.
Here is a simple math: dragonfly spawns a total of 5, 6, 7 minions per summon phase, and each larvae needs 3 ice staff hits to die.
Each ice staff has 10 uses, thus you need five and a half ice staffs just to counter her minions.
Dragonfly is one of the first raid bosses people fight, and her loot even suggest you to kill her before rushing ruins, so it's understandable that noone wants to gather 6 blue gems in the first autumn.
If you'll try to kill half of the larvae yourself and freeze the other - you are in for a nasty surprise. Dead larvae explode into fire, and fire makes it impossible to freeze someone. Thus you are going to have to not only kill larvae fast, but also do it fast enough to not kill them in the same place.
If klei are to implement the fixes above, ice staffs will become completely trivial.
Thus I want it's efficiency to greatly increase, so that they could instantly kill larvae.

4. Overheating.
The last thing anyone would want in their raid boss fight is enviromental damage. But as it turns out, that might be what you gEet.
Due to whole arena being covered in lava, constant minion explosions, the fact that early autumn means summer just ended, and everyone's favorite boss rusher (Wolfgang) having a new perk of builded-in insulation - overheating is quite common when fighting dragonfly legitimately.
This isn't as big of a deal as the other issues, but I'd still like it to be fixed somehow.
Solution that comes to my mind is - removing lava pond in the middle.
This will make it the zone in which players will stay and defend themselves from larvae that comes at them from every direction.

5. Dragonfly AI bug?
Okay, I seriously have no clue why, but some times instead of going into rage dragonfly desides to go for another baby spitting round. Sometimes multiple times.
This probably shouldn't be a thing???

Now, let's talk a bit about other mechanics of this fight, and then I'll make a controversial rework suggestion.

Rage:
Okay, what's up with it?
why is it so busted? And yet so easy to counter?
Double damage, double attack speed, crazy aoe attack, fire damage from simply standing nearby, guaranteed fire damage on each attack even if you dodge, and worst of all - unavoidable slide attacks after each aoe stomp.
I don't know what the initial idea was with dragonfly's rage, but it clearly wasn't "bring flute or die".
And yet this is how players view it. Theoretically, enraged dragonfly dosen't even exist.
And I'm not a fan of neglected mechanics.

Stunlock:
In order to encourage players to fight together, klei implemented a mechanic that makes this boss unable to fight back when it gets completely owned?
This doesn't need to exit.
Just the raw power of having allies is enough to encourage co-op.

Attacking while moving:
Is it possible to learn this power?
Jokes aside, this is the real reason why I wrote this post. Altho by the time I finished it - klei already patched the issue, and the whole controversy turned out to be an accident.
Still, I've come this far so might as well finish writing.
First of all, downside of slide slaps - you can't dodge them. No matter how good you are at kiting, dragonfly will preform at least 4 if them.
At the start, after every minion cycle, and if you are fighting her enraged - after every stomp (she will do a total of 9).
This means 300 unavoidable damage from normal fight, and 1350 more from enraged.
While this isn't actually an issue if you have a range weapon and you know a special trick, it would still be nice to not have to rely on something so specific.
As for the upsides - they don't matter anymore since the attack is not going anywhere.
But in short: Dragonfly kiting is about timing. It's what makes this boss challenging in a fun way. Removing timing removes risk - lack of risk removes effort - if you loose effort you loose interest.
Simple as that.

As for my controversial rework suggestion - I want enraged dragonfly to be final phase of the fight.
Dragonfly is seriously cool when enraged, and I'd like her to be natural part if the fight. I Invision it like so:
When dragonfly gets below 20% hp (5500) she goes into rage. After preforming stomp attack, dragonfly knocks herself out, allowing free hits and removing her follow up slide attack. When she wakes up she goes into rage again (same if you panflute) and starts doing her normal attacks with double speed and damage. Fire aura and guaranteed fire damage mechanics seem to be unnecessary to me. After a few of those attacks she goes for the fire stomping again and the cycle continues.

TLDR: meaningless rumbling about dragonfly that I choose to do instead of sleeping. 

[Guille6785]

16 minutes ago, Gi-Go said:

Before moving on to complaints, I'd like to briefly talk about a less known cheese that I would very much like to keep in this game.

and the right way to keep it in the game is to not bring it up on the klei forums

[ArubaroBeefalo]

i have seen people in pubs placing walls even we were like 5 to easily deal with the lavaes. I dont think is DF but players, playing a x2 damage character already makes dealing with them really easy so when you are +2 people you shouldnt make such boring cheese and instead enjoy the fight. I guess is something related to fear so players use the known safe method or who knows 

[00petar00]

3 hours ago, Gi-Go said:

Wall cheese:
Let's begin our discussion with infamous wall cheese. This strategy existed since the dawn of time and is probably the most overused cheese in the whole game. Everyone I know uses it. Everyone I watch uses it.

There's a reason everyone uses walls, no one likes 500 health minions with already strong boss. While it works in multiplayer if you have 2 decent players but even in multiplayer i know a lot of people who just solo bosses.

3 hours ago, Gi-Go said:

I play a lot on public servers, and whenever I force my team of strangers to fight without walls, they either kick me or beat dragonfly and say that this is the first time they ever fought her without walls. It's none of my business, but it really does say something about a boss design, when most players never even considered to try the fight legitimately.

So people kick you when you are literally forcing majority of the them to play the way you want when it should be the other way around. If 90%+ of the players use walls who are you to tell them to kill DF without them just because you are there? I obviously don't agree with a random vote to kick but if they say that they don't want to fight DF without walls and you are still trying to convince them, well it is on you.

3 hours ago, Gi-Go said:

Or maybe it's not even dragonfly's fault? The boss is actually quite fair, and is pretty easy without walls (that is, as long as you are using strong character or have at least one teammate).

This doesn't make much sense if you are playing solo it doesn't matter which character you pick, if you fight Dragonfly with and without walls and compare time/resources spent, you'll notice a big difference. With a teammate this is a bit different but it is still much more accessible but this doesn't make fighting lavae fun.

3 hours ago, Gi-Go said:

The reason I want this cheese gone - is because I want people to see that their fears were for nothing and the boss isn't actually all that crazy.
That being said, solo character without damage modifier might find legitimate dragonfly a little bit too annoying to deal with, and that's why I'll discuss potentially welcomed changes below.

So another boss that will be like bee queen where we are forced to build catapults or use wicker's on tentacles book if you want to fight alone without wasting too many resources.

[Mike23Ua]

I sincerely hope Klei is reading all these posts you guys make so they can understand that their boss fights aren’t any fun for a good group of players and could really and I mean REALLY use some tweaking.

As a game company they seem to design their game around their players, and that’s understandable but they should also sit a group of their own development team down in a room and play it for themselves to see if it’s actually any fun, or if it only sounds fun on paper.

I can recall a few of the devs even admitting that they suck at their own game, and I just really feel like it shouldn’t be that way.

They need to know how easy or hard it is to get armor, healing items, if a certain weapon is working as intended, if Ice Staffs aren’t doing a good enough job at whatever their intended purpose is for the fight, or simply just if a certain boss is overly freaking annoying to fight under normal intended circumstances and could use a few tweaks.

Klei has been making changes to a lot of their boss behavior, Deerclops for example now works properly (the player can run under its feet and out of the way of its arched smash attack) making her easier then ever to kite.. but the game really needed these changes because not everyone enjoys being a proud elitist bragging about not getting hit in a fight.

And I don’t think the intended way to fight something should be building walls to avoid an entire core part of the fight either.  So something needs to change- Lower the Bosses Health, make Larvae easier to kill or weaken, maybe even scale the amount of ponds active at any given time based on how many players are engaged in the fight.

If Ponds can freeze over and become inaccessible during Winter, then it shouldn’t be too hard to program dragonfly’s magma ponds to follow the same logic, less players in the fight = more lava ponds hardened over like solid rock magma. It prevents solo players from needing to build the Great Wall of China, makes players less likely to resort to wall cheese, and more importantly- makes the fight feel fair and less like the player is being Overwhelmed by a fight intended to be done with multiple players.

As much as I love the Dont starve franchise I kind of hate DST because most of the game is designed around the concept of playing with multiple players, enemies have more health to compensate for multiple players, core mechanics are redesigned with multiple players in mind (such as boating) or fighting off Water Stryders on boat.

DS, ROG, SW, HAM all were designed for a solo player experience so all the content in them felt fair and do-able.

Klei probably realized a long time ago that DST being designed around multiple players also meant that everything needed to be harder- (hence the massive differences in Health between DS solo Dfly & DST Dfly) yet… they also saw that “Maybe” they went a little overboard and made things too inaccessible in the process.

So we saw changes like reduced crafting costs on marble armor, easy crafting of cobblestone roads, hostile flares for farming enough walking canes/eyebrellas for your group of players, Day 1 Bell Bonded Beefalo Mount companions, Briar Bush set pieces that reward the player with decent survival items like Miners Hats and Sewing Kits just for performing some silly Stage Act.

My point is rather you like it or not… Klei realized they needed to make their game more accessible & sure- maybe it makes the game feel easier, but that’s more of a problem with lack of new weather seasons, or cool mechanics introduced in SW/Hamlet like how Pog went from friendly mildly annoying chest searchers, to highly hostile terrifying rabid monsters.

And as I said at the start of this post I hope Klei reads all your comments, plays it for themselves and then decides maybe there’s some things they could do to make it more fun for everyone.

[W0l0l0]

I agree that it's become so normalised to fight Dragonfly with a pan flute and walls that it's almost as if it doesn't exist at all. I've seen very experienced groups of 5+ still use walls and pan flute. Not even a fight at that point. I'm not gonna force a mindset onto a community however. That's just the way it is.

I personally always fight Dragonfly no panflute with walls. Sure it'd be nice to have more ways to dodge her hits when she's moving but it's not a huge deal for me. I don't really have too much of a problem with enraged Dragonfly, it's a great challenge for me.

I agree that I'd like it to be less resource intensive to deal with those larva, perhaps ice flingomatics could target them? That sounds like it'd be an interesting dynamic.

Whether or not the wall abuse should be patched? Ehhh, people will always find ways to cheese, it might be a futile effort. On the other hand, it could encourage the ridiculous flingomatic idea if it becomes too expensive to wall up.

[Gi-Go]

4 hours ago, 00petar00 said:

So people kick you when you are literally forcing majority of the them to play the way you want when it should be the other way around. If 90%+ of the players use walls who are you to tell them to kill DF without them just because you are there? I obviously don't agree with a random vote to kick but if they say that they don't want to fight DF without walls and you are still trying to convince them, well it is on you.

Well, I simply start the fight the moment we get to df and they get mad some times since they didn't placed walls yet. I don't mind being kicked for that, I secretly hope for it actually, when I see team of 4 players starts to build a wall. 

[Pig Princess]

The main problem with ice staves method for Dragonfly is that it's too RNG-dependant to gather enough of blue gems in early game (and mid-game, depending on other plans, as well as on public server at any point) to make sure one has enough freezing power even if Dragonfly goes for extra summoning round every single time (or at least on some extra rounds). Outside of ice staves method and wall cheese characters without high damage modifier don't have realistic options - I don't count panflute spamming and running in circles until larvae die on their own realistic approach, and neither it is fun one. For those who don't know: every following larvae summoning round Dragonfly spawns 1 more larvae compared to previous round, so aside from guaranteed 5, 6 and 7 players can potentially get 8, 9 and so on extra larvae to freeze, i.e. extra 120%, 255% and so on of ice staff durability because of 1, 2 and so on extra rounds. @Gi-Go , ice staff has 20 uses, by the way, but that doesn't make situation any better, since one needs 270% of ice staff durability at minimum (i.e. to craft 3 staves minimum), and potentially 390% (4) or even 525% (6) ice staves if one is unlucky enough for Dragonfly to go on extra rounds. I never was able to roll only guaranteed 3 rounds, it was always 4-5 for me.

And you know what is the worst in all of this, OP? There is no way to get meaningful amount of blue gems consistently early enough no matter what player does, because there is total of 1 method to get guaranteed blue gems: ...yes, to kill Dragonfly (and she drops only 2, i.e. less than amount needed to kill her). Blue gems are the rariest gems in the ruins since it's the only gem that isn't dropped by destroying broken pile of clockworks or from clockworks themselves; grave digging isn't a good solution either since one has only so much tries (like 10-15 graves in graveyard) to roll those 3-6 blue gems and once robbed graves won't spawn new loot (read as "forget about graves outside of solo worlds"); blue hounds have low chance to drop gem and one typically won't encounter many of them until late game unless triple mac tusk biome has spawned and player farms hunting parties on cooldown. Should I just wait afk in the caves until I have enough blue gems for Dfly or kill Dfly when reward significantly drops in value? Not to mention that at this point I might have furnace blueprint from Klaus. Should I mine every single stalagmite in the caves and pray that sheer amount of rolls upon every mining would be enough to get a few blue gems? Tall stalagmites are not an option, by the way, since they don't drop blue gems.

Wall cheese allows to bypass all this bs with extra larvae rounds and praying for RNG, while killing Dragonfly in reasonable time period. Moreover, walls around magma pools are necessity for those who like to base in Dragonfly desert (I like, for example, and for number of reasons), because they prevent random burning tumbleweeds from setting base on fire. One technically can wall up whole set piece, but I like to be able to move freely through it, plus during the fight itself one may want extra room because of all burning going on. If walls were destroyable by larvae I would need to rebuild them every single time, and at this point I'd rather not fight Dragonfly at all, or forget about her after single fight. So for all people who are in "let larvae destroy walls" camp I can only say that this potential change would make people to forget about Dragonfly, much like they do with Toadstool, myself included, or fight it 1 time and be done with it. And I say that even though I'm perfectly capable of killing Dfly without walls as character without damage buffs, and even though I enjoy difficulty and reward that comes from mastering kiting Dragonfly herself.

Another problem with blue gems sink in early- and mid-game game is that fighting Crab King legitimately and/or making snow chester/salt boxes are yet another competing sinks of blue gems, especially in multiplayer where different people want to do different things (often independently), and blue gem sources scaling with number of people is negligible for quite a while. If I want to fight both Dfly and Crab King, let alone make snow chester/good container for food preservation, I have to cheese one boss or the other, or even both of them. So I 100% understand people kicking OP for forcing OP's preferable resource sink for everyone, especially if OP just did something like destroying already build walls (wasted spent rocks). I was in similar situation in another boss fight: small group of players asked people about helping with Toadstool; I was playing as Wendy, went there with some vigor mortis and spectral cure-alls, perfectly capable of kiting Toad's attacks; but once fight started other player just killed Abigail purposely with dark sword because they didn't want me to use Abigail's help. No reasonable explanation, just "it's better this way". And after I left the fight that player even blamed me for "fleeing and not helping". All armor, weapons and such that I used I crafted from my own supplies, so what this jerk did was wasting resources of people helping them because of some ego problems. They didn't even thank me for dealing with all their terrorbeaks and nightmarebeaks who aggroed on me once I was leaving and which I had to kill. OP's description of forcing OP's preferable way of fighting Dragonfly looks very familiar.

It would be another matter if blue gems were more reliable in early game, ice staves were not the only choice for this fight for non-Wolfgangs/Wandas/volt goat jelly users, and if there wasn't such a huge difference created by extra larvae summoning phases. In other words, if fully legit fight felt fair for majority of characters, which removing cheese won't achieve.

Edit: I also started to write this message before OP's recent replies, so at least it's good to know OP didn't straight up waste resources of other players. Still not a way to go in cooperative game (i.e. neglect everybody else's opinion).

[Gi-Go]

1 minute ago, Pig Princess said:

ice staff has 20 uses, by the way, 

I failed basic math

[ArubaroBeefalo]

4 hours ago, 00petar00 said:

So another boss that will be like bee queen where we are forced to build catapults or use wicker's on tentacles book if you want to fight alone without wasting too many resources.

some silk and healing food is too many resources? 

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

I sincerely hope Klei is reading all these posts you guys make so they can understand that their boss fights aren’t any fun for a good group of players and could really and I mean REALLY use some tweaking.

you and few more that refuse to make an effort. Bosses are fun to the point that this is the only game where i have best every boss several times. Other games make me bored of them

and you can see that there is s good portion of content arround speed runs, boss runs, etc so i dont think that nerfing bosses so s minority of players that dont want to farm some materials or food in a farming sandbox but engage the boss with daily mediocre gear is the solution.

One of the last bosses is celestial champion which has tons of hp and hits like a truck but they have learned how to develop really fun fights that are balanced for groups and solo players, just that the solo plsyer, which will gather thr 100%of the loot dropped, needs some practise and farming some materials. But nothing really grindy since dst is one of the least grindy sand boxes out there

[dois raios]

i aint reading all this posts about bosses being OP/weak, or fun/unfun, or idk, but good luck for ya.

I prefer waiting endless servers to come back

[00petar00]

4 hours ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

some silk and healing food is too many resources? 

So you kill bee queen without using pan flute as a solo player? Do you not think that the whole fight becomes really boring with grumble bees there as you spend most of your time just running back and forth and not doing any damage.

Bosses using minions like bee queen or dragonfly aren't really a problem for a team while they are extremely painful to deal with solo and that isn't even fun and mostly just feels like a chore.

Now you might ask why don't i team up with other people to fight bosses? I mostly play alone but even when i don't i still fight them alone as it is too easy when you have any number of players.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

36 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

So you kill bee queen without using pan flute as a solo player? Do you not think that the whole fight becomes really boring with grumble bees there as you spend most of your time just running back and forth and not doing any damage.

Bosses using minions like bee queen or dragonfly aren't really a problem for a team while they are extremely painful to deal with solo and that isn't even fun and mostly just feels like a chore.

Now you might ask why don't i team up with other people to fight bosses? I mostly play alone but even when i don't i still fight them alone as it is too easy when you have any number of players.

it takes a lot of time by doing solo no pan flute but not a lot of resources as you said. You can use fire staffs or/and gun powder or fight her wet with morning star to make the fight faster 

you can team up with other mobs

for DF you have ice staffs which are cheap and with the lavae changes is a very confy method

[00petar00]

16 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

it takes a lot of time by doing solo no pan flute but not a lot of resources as you said. You can use fire staffs or/and gun powder or fight her wet with morning star to make the fight faster

You're forgetting that time is also a resource. If you don't have some items like pan flute and depending on your weapon damage, the fight can last much longer and thus you use more armor and healing.

Did you read what @Pig Princesssaid? Blue gems are not a resource you can just waste if you want to fight crab king and get snow chester early.

I have also said that fighting minions whether it is lavae or grumble bees is just not fun for me as they don't have any interesting mechanics and just overwhelm you with numbers so it isn't possible to get as many hits on the boss.

These minions don't make a fight really that hard for a team of players while it is infinitely harder as a solo player, this generally doesn't feel like it is good gameplay. Someone might reply with the usual that DST is a multiplayer game and that i should play with other people but that doesn't explain why are bosses a joke even with 2 players not to mention 3+.

[Pig Princess]

@00petar00, @ArubaroBeefalo, for Bee Queen according to my tests Wilson needs around 4 marble suits, 3 beekeeper hats, around 400hp of healing and 2 days to fight solo provided he has ham bat, road nearby, cane, magiluminescence and doesn't tank unnecessary hits. For comparison, Wendy needs 3 marble suits, 2 bee keeper hats, 1 nightshade nostrum, 1 spectral cure-all, ham bat and some healing, fight takes a bit more than half a day; Wes needs 5 marble suits, 4-5 bee keeper hats, road, cane, magi, healing, ham bat and fight is expectedly longer that 2 days. 2 days is nothing to neglect as time is a resource. If one substitutes marble suits with extra bee keeper hats and food, for Wilson it's around 6 bee keeper hats (more than stack of silk is not "some" silk) and 4 times more healing (around 1500-1600 hp - almost stack of perogies) compared to marble suit variant; if one tries to substitute with night armor... well, it's not worth it since sanity loss is abysmall, but one can calculate amount of night armor pieces and sanity food needed. All mentioned resources are nothing in the late game when everything is abundant, but are significant obstacle to overcome before that. Also I'm just providing numbers regarding Bee Queen for your argument (which is offtopic and I don't really want to join it), but on a side note think that characters should have access to more generic crowd control abilities than just pan flute.

2 hours ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

for DF you have ice staffs which are cheap and with the lavae changes is a very confy method

It may be cheap in late game when there is nothing else to spend blue gems on, but in early and mid-game there are too many things that also need blue gems, even though it's usually 1-time cost. Obviously, if one already has all salt boxes one plans to have, ice chester, defeated Crab King - blue gems start to pile up + ice hounds are much more common at this point. Problem is that:

1. Abundance of blue gems is late game situation;

2. Blue gems accumulation scales well with the number of players in late game (through hound waves), but until that everyone is limited to what ruins and graves can provide, i.e. everyone relies on resources that don't scale with number of players.

And yes, well organized team of at least 2 people doesn't need ice staves, problem is most of the time it's 1 person who wants to fight this particular boss and others don't care; usually multiple "lone wolfs" want to do multiple blue gem-consuming tasks independently, but have to share initially available amount of blue gems with the others. Some people are also digging all graves/mining all thulecite statues and just not care to save blue gems (if they hope for another loot), so blue gems from graves are destroyed by meteors/are stolen by moleworms, and blue gems from the ruins are destroyed by earthquakes, so even that initial supply is wasted. Speaking of earthquakes, loot from those is destroyed by slurtles and other earthquakes.

Larvae changes were related to targeting larvaes by ice staves and Dragonfly seing larvaes as "dead" once they are frozen (so player doesn't need to hit frozen larvae to anymore to avoid RNG in timing pan flute use), but it has nothing to do with the fact that it's one and only method for most characters to counter larvae without walls. There are no alternatives outside of being Wanda, Wolfgang or using volt goat jelly, and that is the problem I'm trying to draw attention to. And Maxwell in beta straight up disables larvaes much like walls do, so that case is irrelevant for discussion.

[Mike23Ua]

I’m no rocket scientist here or anything but if a creature is made of lava, wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to fight it in rain (maybe it can even be steaming but not on full fire like wildfires starting) there’s a character who can now summon rain at her own command and since Klei doesn’t seem to want to budge on letting Maxwell quit literally be Wickerbottom 2.0- Then Maxwell also can summon rainfalls.

Just seems like that should be a pretty effective method to strategically fight Dfly.

Also I’d like to see the number of larvae she can spawn at any given time scale in proximity to how many players are involved in the fight.

Why does Klei’s game NOT properly scale? It gets frustrating…

2009’s Borderlands player joins “Enemies of Pandora have grown stronger” player leaves “Enemies of Pandora have grown weaker”

2022’s Gotham Knights- Player drops in to a solo players game “Enemies grow stronger!” Player drops out of co-op “Enemies grow weaker!” Also when one player is clearing out an area of Crime but player 2 shows up at the crime before player 1 can finish the game sends “Reinforcements” Aka more criminals to adapt to their now being two players in the area.

I bring all this up because, and as pointed out above: A solo player in DST fighting any mob capable of summoning minions can become overwhelmed in sheer numbers alone.

Meanwhile: bring along a friend or 2 and you can take turns dealing with things like Suspicious Peepers, Powder Monkey, Water Spider, Larvae, Cookie Cutters- All mobs that unless your Wendy- Can be overwhelming when playing solo.

I feel like this should be changed, the number of mobs spawning at any given time should follow more of a Borderlands/Gotham Knights Formula.

[JaxckLl]

The cheese is a value thing. You can either trade a bunch of Rocks in the form of walls (a highly renewable resource thanks to Tree Petrification, Meteors, and Stone Fruit) as a one time cost for a much, much easier fight, or not and have to spend generally more expensive weapons & armour. And saying "just kite the attacks" isn't the point. The average player will still get hit some, if not most of the time. Hell that's actually a good strategy when playing as some characters since it gives you more opportunities to attack. Especially once you set up some Catapults with Winona, the fight becomes practically child's play, trading a minimal amount of healing & armour on Winona, plus two gems for the Catapults, for a bunch of gems & scales from the boss.

And you know what? All of that is fine, since it makes the game more accessible. I agree the fight needs reworking. But not because cheese exists (that's always going to be a thing in Don't Starve, and that's okay since it allows for farming mobs), but rather because an opportunity exists to make an even more fun & dynamic fight.

I totally agree with your assessment of the other parts of DFly's fight and what the actual problems are with her mechanics

• The heating from magma is too aggressive, making fighting in DFly's arena unfun. An item that fully blocks the heating effect of Magma would solve this hazard, and if it was in the right slot would create an interesting tradeoff between additional armour and protection from overheating (btw that item should NOT cost gems, since gems are already such an overused resource. It's also anti-synergistic to have to spend the resource your primarily getting from the fight as drops)
• The Lavae attack in a very awkward swarm that amps up the unfun by severely punishing players for trying to tank their attacks (an otherwise effective strategy against DFly herself). You're right that Ice Staves are completely not viable from a value perspective when used against Lavae. I would suggest a couple of changes, 1) Ice Staves only lose half durability when targeting Lavae (5% instead of 10%), 2) Lavae gain a relatively slow magma spit attack that mostly does heat damage (blockable by multiple different options), 3) Lavae no longer burst into flame when dying instead bursting into heat. This would make tanking the Lavae viable while giving much more forgiving counterplay.
• DFly has a bad habit of ******* off in the middle of the fight to spawn Lavae. This is both super annoying and super unengaging. She can also get knocked down which is similarly lame, but at least you still get to do something while she's on the ground twitching. Instead I'd change it so DFly has three or four phases (whichever works better). At the beginning of each phase, she spits some Lavae eggs into the sky which then spawn Lavae from each pool hit. This would mean the Lavae would come out all at once and DFly would stay more or less in range of the player the whole time. No more emoting in the middle of a fight while the boss picks up her kids from volcanic daycare.
• Building off the above, the stunlock does suck. It's way too easy to nuke DFly by just slamming damage on her. It ironically makes the fight less fun the better you are at it, since the level of engagement declines as you are able to dish out more damage in a smaller window. I'd cut her knockdown a ton and instead just give the player a couple of bonus scales during the middle of the fight.
• The Enraged mode is weird and too strong, encouraging Pan Flute canceling. This is another form of cheese, one which I personally consider worse than the walls since it's so much easier. If the problem is players building structures in & around the arena, that is the fault of the arena not players. Punishing players by smashing their buildings randomly doesn't seem like a great solution, especially since it's the sort of attack no one would expect if all they've fought are other giants & Bee Queen. 

[SapoLover]

On 11/14/2022 at 8:37 AM, Pig Princess said:

There is no way to get meaningful amount of blue gems consistently early enough no matter what player does, because there is total of 1 method to get guaranteed blue gems: ...yes, to kill Dragonfly

If you're not desperate to kill DF very early, you can wait for winter. Telolocating Klaus with a telelocator staff  will make their deers drop a red gem and a blue each time, assuming you get at least 3 purple gems from digging up graveyards or other means like cleaning the ruins.

[JaxckLl]

1 hour ago, DeadWhereX said:

If you're not desperate to kill DF very early, you can wait for winter. Telolocating Klaus with a telelocator staff  will make their deers drop a red gem and a blue each time, assuming you get at least 3 purple gems from digging up graveyards or other means like cleaning the ruins.

Spending three Purples to get one Blue/Red seems like a bad trade...

[Gabonzo]

6 minutes ago, JaxckLl said:

Spending three Purples to get one Blue/Red seems like a bad trade...

You can summon Klaus multiple times if you have enough keys, you will get up to 5 red and blue gems doing this, effectivelly netting you 3 purple gems for the price of 2 living logs and 4 nightmare fuel

[SapoLover]

4 minutes ago, JaxckLl said:

Spending three Purples to get one Blue/Red seems like a bad trade...

Telelocator has 5 uses. It's a profit of 3 red and 3 blue gems if you're saving 2 of each for another telelocator. You're only limited by the antlers you get from the deers.

[Mike23Ua]

Don’t gems literally just fall from the heavens during an earthquake in a cave? And can’t you find creative ways (like gunpowder) to set those earthquakes to happen more often? I guess if you play in worlds without caves content you might have a hard time getting blue/red gems- but as someone who has played a lot of both Wurt and Winona- Two characters who excel exceptional well living in a cave.. Gems aren’t that rare to come across. 

[Spino43]

How can Winona and Wurt live in caves well? I am intrigued.

Spawn rate for the gems in earthquakes are too low, and even if they do spawn they tend to get destroyed. And majority of players tend to stay on surface to establish a base early/mid game.

[Pig Princess]

9 hours ago, DeadWhereX said:

If you're not desperate to kill DF very early, you can wait for winter. Telolocating Klaus with a telelocator staff  will make their deers drop a red gem and a blue each time, assuming you get at least 3 purple gems from digging up graveyards or other means like cleaning the ruins.

Good point, I completely forgot about telelocating Klaus.

While telelocating Klaus would definitely help, until early- to mid-winter (once one finds sack and gets antlers) this method is not available, so late autumn furnace would be still RNG-dependant without walls to help. It makes sence though to get more consistent blue gems with the beginning of winter. Still, in the first year 5 gems (or 6 actually?) is all one can get due to lack of antlers, and it still doesn't scale with players, plus if one joined after winter this method is not available until the next one. During Winter's Feast I'm not sure if this is a good idea to spend all antlers that belong to everyone on telelocating instead of saving them to fight Klaus more times (by other players as well) through the year, so everyone interested could fight Klaus until the next winter, especially if there is no proper team and people are strangers.

[Mike23Ua]

How well (if at all..) do ice flingomatics work in the dragonfly fight? I kinda figure a machine that flings snowballs would subdue little larvae bugs at the very least.