Since klei just fixed the bee queen boat cheese, do you think they should tackle the other ones?

[PetulantPansy]

15 minutes ago, dzzydzzy said:

What are the other boss cheeses? I know technically the walls at Dfly are a cheese but I don’t consider them to be as it is a heavy enough resource cost for the technique. Does Bearger getting killed by treeguards count as a cheese? if so, I don't want that patched. there are plenty of toadstool cheeses ive never used but don't like the idea of those being patched since that fight is miserable solo and the rewards arent game breaking, just base building pretty.

I think this boat cheese for BQ was a great loss tho, only time ive ever beaten her solo was as Wurt with 20 merm guards on a boat.

 

ermm Dzzy - the OP posted some of the other ones in this thread. Although the crab king and twins examples are debatable. 

 

The boat cheese is not a great loss. BQ can still be easily killed with a nightshade abi as-is. You just have to take some extra steps. The armor requirement differences are negligible, and the chances of Abi dying might have increased a little. I havent done it 10 times to test it but I tried it after the patch yesterday and abi finished the fight with ~300 hp. 

[Yuuko]

2 hours ago, PetulantPansy said:

In fairness, I don't think the Wanda/Klaus example was a good one. If you let one specific survivor make a boss fight significantly easier than for any other survivor, that's not good for game balance. In a multiplayer world, the chances that a wanda could solo Klaus at the start of every winter (because she didn't need to prepare anything other than some nightmare fuel and 1 piece of armor she probably already had on her) are fairly high. 

That makes such a world not fun to play in for all the other non-wanda survivors. So two things happen - the other players rarely get to fight Klaus and experience the fun fight, or more and more people play wanda to experience her "op" powers. That's not good for game balance. 

Now of course, the argument isn't as simple as I made it. The real issue began when wanda was introduced with a powerful ranged weapon, but that's an entirely separate discussion (and the cat has long been out of the bag). 

 

Except without the loot sack Wanda still trivializes Klaus with her range.  She just kites it out.  Which is partly why I think such changes are just so soo sooo foolish.  Not only do they change things to specifically gut an interaction without regard to consistency in the gaming experience, they do so incompletely where it appears they simply sanction some cheese while forbidding others.

imo the loot sack was far less important to Wanda then it was for other survivors who wanted to use the sack as a method to block Klaus' charge attack, and in order to nerf one thing they didn't like, they took away a skillful interaction from everyone.

If they want to change something they need to go all the way, redesigning it to maintain game logic and cover all the bases, or just leave it!  b/c who cares if Wanda can solo Klaus every winter?  Its a co-op game, if someone else wants to do the fight I'm sure they can just speak up.  The only time in my games the Wanda player is tasked to solo klaus is when we are running behind and just want the loot.  Often someone wants to do the fight (because its fun) and we do it as we normally would.

[xhyom]

5 hours ago, nimzowitsch10 said:

 

Except Toadstool and Queen Bee cheese, which has been fixed hundreds of times but someone always figures out how to make it again, they all seem like a normal strategy wouldn't see much reason to change. I'm relatively neutral on fixing bugs like the Ancient Guardian simply not being able to hit you and staying still the whole fight just because you go behind a pillar, or the Bee Queen staying still just because she's on top of a body of water, which makes no sense at all But I don't think it's necessary either, a little freedom doesn't hurt but since it happened I don't see much reason to complain

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, dzzydzzy said:

What are the other boss cheeses? I know technically the walls at Dfly are a cheese but I don’t consider them to be as it is a heavy enough resource cost for the technique. Does Bearger getting killed by treeguards count as a cheese? if so, I don't want that patched. there are plenty of toadstool cheeses ive never used but don't like the idea of those being patched since that fight is miserable solo and the rewards arent game breaking, just base building pretty.

I think this boat cheese for BQ was a great loss tho, only time ive ever beaten her solo was as Wurt with 20 merm guards on a boat.

 

Did they ever fix that boring crap where you afk outside of afw for like 8 and a half weeks while your family is worried and hoping for your safe return from the long journey? Because that would probably be some cheese they're talking about.

[Mysterious box]

3 hours ago, PetulantPansy said:

That makes such a world not fun to play in for all the other non-wanda survivors. So two things happen - the other players rarely get to fight Klaus and experience the fun fight, or more and more people play wanda to experience her "op" powers. That's not good for game balance. 

Why balance matters in a nutshell

[Thrul]

If you do not have the SKILL to take down a boss without CHEESE do not do the BOSS. Every boss in this game is OPTIONAL. NOBODY is FORCING you to beat a BOSS. If ANY BOSSES get NERFED for CHEESERS then I want the loot to be SIGNIFICANTLY LESS, as the loot is a reward for SKILL, NOT your ability to MEMORIZE CHEESE.

[Theukon-dos]

Quite frankly, I think anyone justifying keeping those exploints by saying "it's a sandbox" are missing the point. 

Yes sandbox games are about freedom, but they're also games. And games have rules, otherwise you end up 9 year olds declaring that their alien soldiers from mars are wearing magic monocles that make them immune to the pee-your-pants beam their sister's Amazonian River Dolphin warriors use. In other words, a massive mess. 

And thus, if the game breaks those rules, and you try to justify it by saying "Well it's a sandbox game, you're supposed to have options", then you open up a really smelly can of worms there. "Why shouldn't wearing an extremely specific combination of skins and items give me a 2000% damage modifier? It's a sandbox game! Players should have options!"

Yeah, that's stupid. And not something anyone would like. 

 

Needless to say, I'm strongly in the "Fix the exploits" side of things. Though I'd also think it would be a good idea to re-visit a lot of the commonly-cheesed bosses to adress why they're cheesed so much in the first place. This doesn't inheritly mean that the bosses should be made "easier", and obviously some people just can't be bothered. But looking back and adressing some common complaints and design issues would do the game some good work. 

 

>Bee Queen is frequently cheesed because it's a god-awful fight to do solo. It takes forever, sponges up resources like there's no tomorrow, and is generally a miserable time for all but very specific characters. Therefore, reworking this fight to be actually; y'know; good would be a good way to justify removing a lot of her cheese.

>Crab King is an extremely oppressive fight with constant micro-management that punishes the player severely for even minor mistakes. Getting frozen in particular is a guaranteed death sentence due to the fact that CK can't un-freeze you, thus by the time you warm up you will most likely be unconsentually cosplaying the sinking of the Titanic. 

>Dragonfly is particularly notable here sense her "cheese" method with the walls isn't absolute cheese. Mainly because all it does it turn an awful, boring, resource-intensive fight into an awful and boring fight. There would be absolutely no reason to fight D-fly if her cheese got elimated unless you were a Megabaser or something. 

 

Bold claims these may be, but it's not like they're baseless. Klei re-worked Ancient Guardian after they removed the one tolerable way to fight it without cheese after all. So it's not like such a thing couldn't happen again. 

[MondayNight]

7 hours ago, nimzowitsch10 said:

@xhyom

Here are all the "broken" cheese I know:

The toadstool lureplant cheese. It is not complicated at all. All you need is maybe 3 ice staffs or a panflute to make toadstool immobile and use the push mod or fossils to push him away from his hole and then set up the lureplant. After that all you do is hit toadstool and chop trees and he uses none of his moves. It is really broken.

There is also the fuelweaver lureplant cheese. You trap fuelweaver on the corner of the atrium using a lureplant, Use gates to push yourself in the void and kill him from outside the atrium, he will not use any of his moves. Any character can do this and it is also very broken.

There is the bee queen oven cheese where you set up a beefalo barrier or a no eyed deer barrier, she will try to fly towards you but the beefalo will prevent her from doing so. Set up a stack of 24 individual smoldering items where she is stuck. The best item to use is grass tuft or rope because it has the longest burn timer. Then cast a star under them to burn and use a flingo to extinguish them. This takes about a day which isn't bad.

There is the crab king cheese where you catch 30-40 bees and you put them in a chest near crab king, spawn crab king, let him destroy the boat, then get another boat and row around him, not too far away or he will use his freeze move. The bees will sting him to death and it takes around half a day.

There is the knight boat cheese where you put 40+ knight statues on a boat. When you spawn the shadow pieces only the knight cannot cross the water so you can set up 40 + 1 gunpowder and a firestafff to kill all the tier 3 shadow knights to farm crazy amounts of fuel, hearts, swords, night armor.

Use panflutes or sleepytime stories on the twins of terror forever and they will never be able to attack even once.

All these cheeses are available on youtube, I mostly learned all this from klei public servers

For Toad, it needs you to use additional mods, like Geo-Placement to see precisely where to put Fossils and push (Push Mod actually performs poorly vs toad since it does so very slowly, solo-scenario, on account of target being a boss-mob/heavy - translated into more Ice Staff/Panflute uses) and/or actions appraisals to know exactly when to use Ice Staff (to not unfreeze it prematurely). Sure, can estimate from experience, but is prone to failure, more-so if lagging (pub plays). Doing the bait at opposite sides of pods from center of Toad's arena and burning Sporecap is a much more efficient strategy, since, with pushing exploit, can remain locked into an infinite loop of cutting Sporecaps (can't burn since Lureplants will catch fire as well) as a soloing player. A lot more to write about Toad fight topic, but is neither here nor there. Sufficient to conclude it still needs a lot of resources and experience to pull it off consistently from mid-game onward.

For AFw, you can simply use Gunpowder for the most anticlimactic finishing move in the game - literally it spawns, explodes, dies -> bonjour loot! It doesn't require waiting for Lureplants to spawn in world, can be done 1st autumn, with morsels from Monkeys via Wendy or from birds via Wicker/Walter converted into Eggs and rotted by Toad. Burn a forest and Maxwell the Mosaic off of resources et voila. This requires patching as well I reckon, yes?

Any type of DS/T "oven" needs quite a bit of creativity, time and resources. It balances as an investment, especially for solo and late-game.

Crab King fight is as fun as a bag of beaten rats dumped into one's cramped torture room, in middle of the chimney. Except for people going in numbers at it (and failing often on account of Monke Raids, faulty freezing its spells, etc), taking it down via Bees kinda is "da uai"/meta. It doesn't help various gem combinations yield 0 additional loot to make this fight desirable outside of CC quest-ark. Most likely entire CK fight & drops need revamping.

Kinda funny Shadow Knight gets stuck in Ocean-Land margin. The on-water take-down strat was patched, remaining only the land one you described. What can I say, same scenario as AFw (or other bosses) vs Gunpowder, which is pretty much "working as-intended" since DST's Sandbox facet and the multiple ways of tackling its challenges, including no-player-fingting "wins". Same for STS and Panflute usage.

Lately I go at Forest-shard bosses with my very-own OP "pokemons", the Twins of Terror. They absolutely destroy all seasonal bosses, CC, BQ in a most entertaining way. You just hide in Bush Hat/Snail Armor beside a Star and munch irl some pop-corn/sandwich/shoelaces (who am I to judge, bon appetit!). Is not without danger or failure, but is a viable, amusing way of tackling/"farming" bosses in Sandbox context.

 

Yes, blatant bugs and such should be fixed, especially crash-inducing ones; yet "squashing" anything "farm" related, especially for late-game, and the "bread-and-butter" of Sandbox that became "emergent game-play", is kinda proverbially shooting the foot of DST, cutting short its replayability factor. If only way to go at game would be melee kiting and-only-that, my 12k irl hours since initial Beta probably wouldn't have reached even the 1k mark.

[Guille6785]

33 minutes ago, Thrul said:

If you do not have the SKILL to take down a boss without CHEESE do not do the BOSS. Every boss in this game is OPTIONAL. NOBODY is FORCING you to beat a BOSS. If ANY BOSSES get NERFED for CHEESERS then I want the loot to be SIGNIFICANTLY LESS, as the loot is a reward for SKILL, NOT your ability to MEMORIZE CHEESE.

Crafting 3 marble suits and holding f is truly a display of skill, it's not like some people cheese bosses to save time and resources and not because they lack the ""skill"" to do a fight ""legit""

[Thrul]

2 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

Crafting 3 marble suits and holding f is truly a display of skill, it's not like some people cheese bosses to save time and resources and not because they lack the ""skill"" to do a fight ""legit""

Even though I don't think the boss is that easy, if you think it's so easy, why do you cheese it to become even easier? Doesn't using a boat just use more time and resources?

[ArubaroBeefalo]

38 minutes ago, Thrul said:

If you do not have the SKILL to take down a boss without CHEESE do not do the BOSS. Every boss in this game is OPTIONAL. NOBODY is FORCING you to beat a BOSS. If ANY BOSSES get NERFED for CHEESERS then I want the loot to be SIGNIFICANTLY LESS, as the loot is a reward for SKILL, NOT your ability to MEMORIZE CHEESE.

>DST

>skill

pick one

i hope they dont make bosses easier but talking about skill in a game that has 1 atack buttom that automatically moves your character to hit the enemy...

[Thrul]

1 minute ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

>DST

>skill

pick one

i hope they dont make bosses easier but talking about skill in a game that has 1 atack buttom that automatically moves your character to hit the enemy...

So you think it doesn't need skill, what is the point of cheesing?

[Guille6785]

32 minutes ago, Thrul said:

Even though I don't think the boss is that easy, if you think it's so easy, why do you cheese it to become even easier? Doesn't using a boat just use more time and resources?

nobody said anything about me using it, I actually don't

the point is that even though I don't use it, I believe having it is good to give players more freedom, having different strats is half the fun of the game

[PetulantPansy]

1 hour ago, Shosuko said:

Except without the loot sack Wanda still trivializes Klaus with her range.  She just kites it out.  Which is partly why I think such changes are just so soo sooo foolish.  Not only do they change things to specifically gut an interaction without regard to consistency in the gaming experience, they do so incompletely where it appears they simply sanction some cheese while forbidding others.

imo the loot sack was far less important to Wanda then it was for other survivors who wanted to use the sack as a method to block Klaus' charge attack, and in order to nerf one thing they didn't like, they took away a skillful interaction from everyone.

If they want to change something they need to go all the way, redesigning it to maintain game logic and cover all the bases, or just leave it!  b/c who cares if Wanda can solo Klaus every winter?  Its a co-op game, if someone else wants to do the fight I'm sure they can just speak up.  The only time in my games the Wanda player is tasked to solo klaus is when we are running behind and just want the loot.  Often someone wants to do the fight (because its fun) and we do it as we normally would.

You're not wrong, but from an optics standpoint, it at least resembles a fight a little more. It also requires more skill than just holding f and dealing with a pair of krampi. 

Wanda using the old loot stash cheese most definitely did not encourage co-op play. You literally couldn't do it with another survivor or the deer would cast a spell and the cheese would be "messed up." And while I know you're a nice person and are willing to share kills/loot, that doesn't apply to everyone. Lots of people operate by the my kill/my loot mantra. 

It's not a complete fix as you mention, but at least the devs tried to improve balance and make the game more fun for everyone. 

(just my opinion of course)

[ArubaroBeefalo]

30 minutes ago, Thrul said:

So you think it doesn't need skill, what is the point of cheesing?

skill=!experience

[. . .]

only if the fights will be greatly improved like with AG or else no.

[Yuuko]

2 hours ago, Theukon-dos said:

Quite frankly, I think anyone justifying keeping those exploints by saying "it's a sandbox" are missing the point. 

Yes sandbox games are about freedom, but they're also games. And games have rules, otherwise you end up 9 year olds declaring that their alien soldiers from mars are wearing magic monocles that make them immune to the pee-your-pants beam their sister's Amazonian River Dolphin warriors use. In other words, a massive mess. 

And thus, if the game breaks those rules, and you try to justify it by saying "Well it's a sandbox game, you're supposed to have options", then you open up a really smelly can of worms there. "Why shouldn't wearing an extremely specific combination of skins and items give me a 2000% damage modifier? It's a sandbox game! Players should have options!"

Yeah, that's stupid. And not something anyone would like. 

That's quite the strawman you've built there!  But we're not talking about modded items or using console commands to change the game to literally whatever we want, we're talking about using in-game mechanics, items, structures etc to our advantage.

They gave us walls to build.  What do you think the purpose was?  Decoration? lol  Different mobs interact with walls in different ways, is it really cheating to use the item they gave us to create the interaction they coded for us?  b/c that's all dfly wall "cheese" is.  imo its on par with using the pan flute (item they gave us) to put the boss to sleep (interaction they coded for.)

And what is the real balance concern anyway?  Anyone who doesn't want to use a wall and just not build one.  Its not like you need permission to open your own world and play how you want.  Wanna join a world with other people?  Talk to them about how y'all wanna play. That's the co-op part.

1 hour ago, PetulantPansy said:

It also requires more skill than just holding f and dealing with a pair of krampi. 

 

Klaus doesn't get to attack or cast spells, only leap attack.  Its the same thing.  Can still do other cheese too.

As for co-op well Klaus is usually the last thing I see co-oped.  Its a much better fight solo where you can control the spells and probably get more dps in then 2 people sharing it.  I don't think we see merit in removing the loot stash collision from the co-op perspective.

[Thrul]

1 hour ago, Guille6785 said:

nobody said anything about me using it, I actually don't

the point is that even though I don't use it, I believe having it is good to give players more freedom, having different strats is half the fun of the game

it lets you win without any skill, that is cheese, not different strat. cheese is cheap, unfair, and requires no skill. its exploiting an issue for easy wins. actually, whether you want to try to define it as something other than cheese, an OP strategy should be fixed either way.

[Thrul]

1 hour ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

skill=!experience

mmmm i guess you are right; skill isn't needed but makes battles a lot faster. i just hate taking a "strat" off youtube then magically being able to easily beat bosses like its some kind of memorization game.

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, Theukon-dos said:

>Dragonfly is particularly notable here sense her "cheese" method with the walls isn't absolute cheese. Mainly because all it does it turn an awful, boring, resource-intensive fight into an awful and boring fight. There would be absolutely no reason to fight D-fly if her cheese got elimated unless you were a Megabaser or something. 

2 blue gems (which get turned into a bunch of rocks) is resource intensive but a ton of rocks is free?

[Guille6785]

12 minutes ago, Thrul said:

it lets you win without any skill, that is cheese, not different strat. cheese is cheap, unfair, and requires no skill. its exploiting an issue for easy wins. actually, whether you want to try to define it as something other than cheese, an OP strategy should be fixed either way.

the no cheese strat also requires no skill since it's just tanking therefore there isn't a single bq strat that isn't cheese besides bee queen no armor no healing

[Theukon-dos]

13 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

That's quite the strawman you've built there!  But we're not talking about modded items or using console commands to change the game to literally whatever we want, we're talking about using in-game mechanics, items, structures etc to our advantage.

Not a strawman, just an example. 

13 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

They gave us walls to build.  What do you think the purpose was?  Decoration? lol  Different mobs interact with walls in different ways, is it really cheating to use the item they gave us to create the interaction they coded for us?  b/c that's all dfly wall "cheese" is.  imo its on par with using the pan flute (item they gave us) to put the boss to sleep (interaction they coded for.)

Ah, it's not just walls that this technique requires, no? It's the Lavae's inability to "see" lava pools and get stuck on them that makes this strategy possible? This is an interaction that is not intentionally coded for. And is thus; by all definitions of the word; and exploit. If walls worked 100% as intented, then the Lavae would target them once they realized they couldn't get to you. 

13 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

And what is the real balance concern anyway?  Anyone who doesn't want to use a wall and just not build one.  Its not like you need permission to open your own world and play how you want.  Wanna join a world with other people?  Talk to them about how y'all wanna play. That's the co-op part.

Believe it or not, balance is actually extremely important. Even in PvE games. If it wasn't, then; well; we'd never get any balance changes. Like when a ton of overpriced items got cost-dropped across the board. Or when we got Wolfgang 3.0. And "Just don't use it" also isn't the witty come back you seem to think it is. Believe it or not, game balance isn't as simple as letting people self-moderate what they think of as balanced.

3 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

2 blue gems (which get turned into a bunch of rocks) is resource intensive but a ton of rocks is free?

Only 2 blue gems? Maybe as Wolfgang, but I can't see that being nearly enough for anyone with a default damage modifier. It's 3 ice staff blasts per Lavae, a staff only has 20 durability, and D.fly summons a lot of Lavae. I'd expect atleast 4-5 for an average fight. 

[NoodlemanNed]

2 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

Believe it or not, balance is actually extremely important. Even in PvE games. If it wasn't, then; well; we'd never get any balance changes. Like when a ton of overpriced items got cost-dropped across the board. Or when we got Wolfgang 3.0. And "Just don't use it" also isn't the witty come back you seem to think it is. Believe it or not, game balance isn't as simple as letting people self-moderate what they think of as balanced.

i think all the examples you gave are perfectly fair, except for the fact that they really wernt done for balance purposes. When you want to balances things in a game you want to make every about as powerful as anything else, more or less.

Overpriced items getting cost reduced across the board was more because those overpriced items wernt being used by many people, its perfectly good content that gets ignored because of how little it does compared to the cost. Making pearl's shop items cost less isnt about making them on par with other strong items, its so people can reasonably play with those items without going through unreasonable effort.

The reason i bring all this up is to say that balance really doesnt matter in a pve game, especially in a more sanboxy one like dst. What i think matters most for this game is to give players lots of options to choose from, if the world is going to open it would be a shame to be locked into a small number of gameplay strategies. Focusing purely on balance results in things like the original wolfgang rework, they nerfed the character to the point where he was on par with most of the cast, the problem is that it made him incredible boring. The reason that rework went through multiple iterations is because it seems klei realized that players enjoying a character is what matters most in the end, i mean you could even argue wolfgang is even stronger now than he was before all of the changes.

[Cassielu]

Well, I think it's about the nature of the cheese, the fact that game content, including the boss, should interact with the player in a way that is understandable, logical and experiential, rather than simply "this boss is out of the programmer's mind and everything programmed is broken." In the case of the twin cheese which was also fixed in this update, it was clearly unreasonable for the twin to stop all activities and sleep indefinitely. There was a clear "bug" feeling, so it was fixed. BQ's pathfinding isn't quite as "over-the-top", but the logic is similar, BQ has the ability to move on the water, so why would BQ move differently on the water to fight the player? There is no reason for this.

(I don't know if you know it, I haven't seen anyone mention it in the forums yet, but basically you hypnotize the twins and they go out of loading range, come back in and they go into permanent sleep, they don't wake up even if attacked, and they don't leave during the day. You can keep attacking them until they die.)

[Theukon-dos]

4 minutes ago, NoodlemanNed said:

i think all the examples you gave are perfectly fair, except for the fact that they really wernt done for balance purposes. When you want to balances things in a game you want to make every about as powerful as anything else, more or less.

Overpriced items getting cost reduced across the board was more because those overpriced items wernt being used by many people, its perfectly good content that gets ignored because of how little it does compared to the cost. Making pearl's shop items cost less isnt about making them on par with other strong items, its so people can reasonably play with those items without going through unreasonable effort.

No, that's  just what... balancing is. 

Marble armor was strong, but was considered Underpowered because it was too expensive. So by reducing the cost, Mable armor became balanced. 

4 minutes ago, NoodlemanNed said:

The reason i bring all this up is to say that balance really doesnt matter in a pve game, especially in a more sanboxy one like dst. What i think matters most for this game is to give players lots of options to choose from, if the world is going to open it would be a shame to be locked into a small number of gameplay strategies. Focusing purely on balance results in things like the original wolfgang rework, they nerfed the character to the point where he was on par with most of the cast, the problem is that it made him incredible boring. The reason that rework went through multiple iterations is because it seems klei realized that players enjoying a character is what matters most in the end, i mean you could even argue wolfgang is even stronger now than he was before all of the changes.

No, no. Balance matters tons, actually. Because without balance, then there are no "tons of strategies". There's one strategy that outclasses everything else, and strategies that aren't worth doing. It's why so many people use bee mines to fight Crab King. Because they're so much better and safer at killing him than any other strategy the player can employ. Other than other cheese methods. 

 

And as for the Wolfgang rework... I do agree that the first itteration was extremely boring. But honestly I feel like Klei just couldn't win in this situation. They couldn't give Wolfgang a full rework, sense everyone who played Wolfgang played him for that massive attack stat. And when they made it so that Mightyness was something you had to actively sustain it was just plain annoying. Honestly it feels more like throwing in the towel than saying that "Balance isn't important". Especially sense Wolfgang still doesn't have his pre-rework speedboost.