Planar damage and defense worries me

[WolfoIsBestWolf]

For those who do not know (and how would you if aren't into reading code and math).

The new weapons and armor deal and protect Planar damage. A new type of damage.

Planar Damage ignores regular armor. The new Brightshade Sword deals 38 damage + 30 Planar damage.
On most mobs this means 68 damage, however lets say on a Pig with a Football helmet this would mean 7.6 + 30 (37.6) damage. The 30 Pierces and the 38 gets reduced. 
For comparison, a Dark Sword against a football helmet deals 13.6 damage. 

If new bosses moving forward have damage reduction against normal damage this would basically make most old weapons bad, restricting us into using the new sword. 
While using the sword for anything else could be considered a waste as Glass Cutters & Dark Swords are cheaper alternatives for the same damage.
The sword does do 10% more damage against shadow enemies and if you wear both pieces of Brightshade armor you also deal 10% more damage against shadows, but 10% is not high enough to be noticible on the usual nightmares. The 200 durability is quite nice tho.
It should also be noted that Planar damage as of writing this does not scale with character damage multipliers.

Planar Defense protects against a flat amount of Planar damage.
The Brightshade Helmet has 80% damage reduction + 10 Planar Defense. For testing again a Pig wearing it.
68 damage Dark Sword hit would be reduced to 13.6, simple 80% armor reduction no additional effect.
A 38 + 30P Brightshade Sword hit would be 38*0.2 + 30P -10P, resulting in 27.6 damage. (As listed before against a football helmet it's 37.6 damage)

The new Deadly Brightshade enemy deals a 100 + 30P damage on it's aoe self defense move.
A football helmet would reduce it to 20 + 30P damage resulting in you taking 50 damage.
Thulecite or Dreadstone would be 10 + 30P damage you take 40.

The Brightshade Helmet has a 10% damage reduction for all Lunar creatures. Damage reductions like this reduce Planar damage. (Wigfrid and garlic spice work too)
It would go 100*0.2*0.9 + 30P*0.9-10P for 35 damage taken.

When wearing both pieces of Brightshade Armor the lunar damage reduction goes up to 25% ;
100*0.2*0.75 + 30P*0.75-20P, 17.5 damage taken.

While wearing one piece isn't noticeably better than regular armor, both pieces together reduce the damage by a noticeable amount.

If new bosses were to deal Planar damage this could make most old armor kind of bad, restricting us into using the new armor.
While using the new armor against non Planar non Lunar sources would be a waste as other armor is just better.
Since the new armor has rather low Planar damage protection, it might not make a difference tho. Healing is also still spammable after all.

Additionally any enemy tagged with planardefense has incoming damage reduced by "(sqrt(damage+ 64) - 8) * 8"  this formula.
Basically that means the more damage you do the more it gets resisted.
A Spear gets reduced to 15.2, Dark Sword 27.9, Mighty Dark Sword to 49,13, Blowdart to ~66, Mighty Blowdart to 138.3.
Weirdly enough both new enemies have an actual Planar Defense of 0.
Because of this the Brightshade Sword deals it's extra 30 damage resulting in ~46.8 damage, the best weapon for fighting it.

 

This basically means any new enemies using this system would require us to get the new items to deal with them effectively.
(or the System gets used with such low numbers that it wouldn't matter at all)
While in theory it's good having a reason for us to use and engage with new content but it's entirely arbitrary.
Most progression games would simply up the damage and up the hp of enemies, making it so old enemies can easily be dealt with and you feel powerful against them. 
The powercreep nature of games like Terraria feel very satisfying, so why is DST afraid of it, when it's turning more and more into a progression game.
Would it really be that bad if the sword dealt 50% more damage than a Dark Sword, but endgame bosses are balanced around that damage?
Keep in mind this is After Celestial Champion, you will have access to Character Switching and the Celestial Crown and Ruins gear. 

Maybe it's fine that it's arbitrary, there are many other places in the game that out of nowhere require a specific item, but in those cases I often thought it was as a unique solution. (ie Teleporting, Insanity).
While simply higher stats wouldn't be unique, it'd certainly be more fun to work towards the next stronger weapon that's stronger against everything, instead of needing it for a boss specifically with very little uses outside of that.

Tho it needs to be said that as of now all of this basically applies to one enemy, ironically the enemy that we need to kill to get these items in the first place. So the items make getting the items easier.
The beta just came out and this system might not even be intended for bosses, things will inevitibly change. And even on full update release it's just the beginning of the arc.
But this entire system has got me worried that we'll never get much combat progression, and that many new items will feel samey instead of standing out or being desiderable.

[Theukon-dos]

Something else I'd like to add is that this "Planar Damage" mechanic is being added to a game that absolutely refuses to actually give the player any feedback on the damage they're doing.

 

Obviously, players can just look it up, which they'll probably be doing anyways if they managed to get to this point. But imagine you were a new player. How would you ever manage to figure out just how these planar damage mechanics work?

 

"Ah, I see, this sword has the same damage as the sword I've been using for 90% of my run, except that part of that damage isn't affected by my character's damage modifiers but also ignores the defense of a few specific monsters that scales based on how much damage they take in a single hit". By Charlie's bodacious bosom, can't you just make the sword deal 96 damage and balance around that instead of making a whole new complicated system so that you can't progress without this moon stuff?

 

And hey, maybe they just wanted to ensure that getting this gear wouldn't make earlier fights too easy. But "making earlier things easier" is usually how progression's supposed to work. If someone wants to go through all these loops just to do 50% more damage to BQ, then they should be able to have their cake and eat it too.

[Hornete]

15 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

Something else I'd like to add is that this "Planar Damage" mechanic is being added to a game that absolutely refuses to actually give the player any feedback on the damage they're doing.

This is what I'm most scared of in this update. I've always generally commended DS/T's simple health and damage values. A lot of things have their healths in multiples of 100s. The weapons in the game base their values off the magical value of 34 which is something that goes into 100 3 times. A spear kills a spider in 3 hits, it kills a crawling horror which has 300 hp in 9 hits, and the numbers are generally really nice in that regard for the rest of the game and intuitive to figure out, with weapons like hambat and dark sword breaking through important thresholds like 50 hp.

Now we have this update and there's... so much math along with it. It's not necessarily a bad thing but like you said, how do you figure this out? Even I with the code in hand had to sit down for a little bit to figure out these multipliers with my friend .

I highly doubt they'll radically change this system considering how much work they've put into it, so unfortunately I think we're stuck with it, while the items in the same update likely will be getting changes/additions to make them mechanically interesting.

[Cruvimaster]

My concern is with Wanda as she has a damage reduction penalty when aged. If this weapon is essential for any boss, Wanda is handicapped.

[ShadowDuelist]

1 hour ago, Theukon-dos said:

Something else I'd like to add is that this "Planar Damage" mechanic is being added to a game that absolutely refuses to actually give the player any feedback on the damage they're doing.

 

Obviously, players can just look it up, which they'll probably be doing anyways if they managed to get to this point. But imagine you were a new player. How would you ever manage to figure out just how these planar damage mechanics work?

 

"Ah, I see, this sword has the same damage as the sword I've been using for 90% of my run, except that part of that damage isn't affected by my character's damage modifiers but also ignores the defense of a few specific monsters that scales based on how much damage they take in a single hit". By Charlie's bodacious bosom, can't you just make the sword deal 96 damage and balance around that instead of making a whole new complicated system so that you can't progress without this moon stuff?

 

And hey, maybe they just wanted to ensure that getting this gear wouldn't make earlier fights too easy. But "making earlier things easier" is usually how progression's supposed to work. If someone wants to go through all these loops just to do 50% more damage to BQ, then they should be able to have their cake and eat it too.

Perhaps I'm not understanding the math entirely, but couldn't this new system of dual damage be the workaround the Devs found to deal with Wolfgang being OP? as in, if they made a new sword deal flat 96 damage Wolfgang would eternally be unbalanced around it in the new meta. 

Still I agree that perhaps the new "lunar damage" could be higher so we feel that we can make a lot of damage against all that we currently know of, and that way make these new items more desirable while the Wolfgang/Wigfrid's extra damage would be less of an obvious choice in the "new" late game. 

23 minutes ago, Cruvimaster said:

My concern is with Wanda as she has a damage reduction penalty when aged. If this weapon is essential for any boss, Wanda is handicapped.

I suspect that is the point, to make a new late game where all characters are around the same power level in terms of raw damage, and so we (probably) have to fight more with our wits and secondary perks.

[Theukon-dos]

1 minute ago, ShadowDuelist said:

Perhaps I'm not understanding the math entirely, but couldn't this new system of dual damage be the workaround the Devs found to deal with Wolfgang being OP? as in, if they made a new sword deal flat 96 damage Wolfgang would eternally be unbalanced around it in the new meta. 

Still I agree that perhaps the new "lunar damage" could be higher so we feel that we can make a lot of damage against all that we currently know of, and that way make these new items more desirable, and the Wolfgang/Wigfrid's extra damage would be less of an obvious choice in the "new" late game. 

To be honest I like if you need to design an ENTIRELY NEW SYSTEM around a single character being too OP otherwise, then you should probably be adressing the character itself instead. I don't know, maybe they could have just given Wolfgang diminishing returns on damage once he started hitting more than 150 damage/hit. Would it have been tricky to code? Yes, obviously. But probably not as hard as *waves hands at the planar damage mechanic*

[ShadowDuelist]

4 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

To be honest I like if you need to design an ENTIRELY NEW SYSTEM around a single character being too OP otherwise, then you should probably be adressing the character itself instead. I don't know, maybe they could have just given Wolfgang diminishing returns on damage once he started hitting more than 150 damage/hit. Would it have been tricky to code? Yes, obviously. But probably not as hard as *waves hands at the planar damage mechanic*

Agreed, but that should have been made probably during his rework and it would have had a very negative impact on the community (specially Wolfgang Mains, and I don't blame them for it).
This is probably a way to make a new super late game where all characters can deal more or less the same damage to the new bosses or threats ahead of us, while they will still retain all the same speedrunning or high damaging skills of the early game we know. If that is the case I think it's a non-nerf clever solution, honestly.

[Cruvimaster]

8 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

I suspect that is the point, to make a new late game where all characters are around the same power level in terms of raw damage, and so we (probably) have to fight more with our wits and secondary perks.

The central issue here is Wanda having to fight a new boss with a 1/4 life reduction, as she couldn't get old.

[maxwell_winters]

2 minutes ago, Cruvimaster said:

The central issue here is Wanda having to fight a new boss with a 1/4 life reduction, as she couldn't get old.

What's the issue? Just keep her young or middle-aged. 

[ShadowDuelist]

1 minute ago, Cruvimaster said:

The central issue here is Wanda having to fight a new boss with a 1/4 life reduction, as she couldn't get old.

But she would be dealing a lot of damage with the new weapons like any wilson would, and you'd be using Young wanda instead. Plus retaining all your late game Wanda perks, of teleporting around the map, stepwatch dodge, and reviving friends for free. It would be a new late game meta for her, and for all the trash mobs or currently existing bosses you can keep destroying everything with your alarming clock + old age combo.

[Theukon-dos]

3 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

Agreed, but that should have been made probably during his rework and it would have had a very negative impact on the community (specially Wolfgang Mains, and I don't blame them for it).

150 damage threshold means that None of the weapons currently in the game would hit the diminishing returns threshhold. Only massively over-buffing or these new weapons would see damage falloff. And that sounds fair to me.

3 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

This is probably a way to make a new super late game where all characters can deal more or less the same damage to the new bosses or threats ahead of us, while they will still retain all the same speedrunning or high damaging skills of the early game we know. If that is the case I think it's a non-nerf clever solution, honestly.

Right, right. Question. If these changes are too even out damage numbers in the late game, then what is the point of having damage modifying perks at all? Imagine, playing a character who's entire gimmick is "Being good at fighting", and barely being any better at it than the mime. It's a blatantly awful design decision.

[Cruvimaster]

1 minute ago, maxwell_winters said:

What's the issue? Just keep her young or middle-aged. 

The other characters have an infinite healing system, she doesn't. Her mechanics are special for exactly that reason.

[Theukon-dos]

6 minutes ago, Cruvimaster said:

The central issue here is Wanda having to fight a new boss with a 1/4 life reduction, as she couldn't get old.

Presumably; Planar damage not being effected by damage modifiers goes both-ways. So Wanda would be able to use the new sword without loosing too much. Even though that goes against the entire point of her "Glass Cannon" design.

Personally, I'm more worried about Walter; who currently lacks any sort of round that deals planar damage.

[ShadowDuelist]

14 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

Right, right. Question. If these changes are too even out damage numbers in the late game, then what is the point of having damage modifying perks at all? Imagine, playing a character who's entire gimmick is "Being good at fighting", and barely being any better at it than the mime. It's a blatantly awful design decision.

I'm not entirely sure that's the reason, but its what I suspect may be driving these changes, at least in part. Still as I said earlier, it's not like Wolfgang would be nerfed, he can still be a massive hulk against everything we currently know of the game.

If he loses some umpf in terms of raw damage in the very late game it won't make the character entirely bad TBF. And he will still deal much more damage than Wes if I'm understanding the math, just not twice as much as most of the others.

10 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

Personally, I'm more worried about Walter; who currently lacks any sort of round that deals planar damage.

Walter definitely needs some QOL changes soon. He was lacking even before these changes.

30 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

I suspect that is the point, to make a new late game where all characters are around the same power level in terms of raw damage, and so we (probably) have to fight more with our wits and secondary perks.

Back at the forge (and the current reforged mod) there was no character that was the definitive character for boss fights. If they manage to change the new late game sort of like that, as long as it's as fun as the forge was, I'd be fine with it

[Cruvimaster]

The character going into combat with 40 Tall Scotch Eggs (60 health each) is different from a character with 4 Ageless Watch and life reducer. Point to Wolfgang. But I believe that everything must be within the planning of the developers. So let's wait and see what will come.

[Theukon-dos]

5 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

I'm not entirely sure that's the reason, but its what I suspect may be driving these changes. Still as I said earlier, it's not like Wolfgang would be nerfed, he can still be a massive hulk against everything we currently know of the game.

If he loses some umpf in terms of raw damage in the very late game it won't make the character entirely bad TBF. And he will still deal much more damage than Wes if I'm understanding the math, just not twice as much as most of the others.

I'm not saying Wolfgang would be bad, But it would still be stupid for a character's main perk to suddenly drop off hard at an arbitrary point. Also, the damage resist of the planar resistance scales dynamically, remember? Looking at the numbers in OP's post, I'm going to roughly estimate that Wes would deal ~15 damage with the new sword while Wolfgang would deal ~28. Adding the +30 planar damage, that's ~45 damage on Wes and ~58 damage on Wolfgang. That's only about a 23% increase in damage, which is less than Wigfrid gets against average characters. That is... genuinely quite sad if you ask me.

[Mysterious box]

22 minutes ago, Cruvimaster said:

The other characters have an infinite healing system, she doesn't. Her mechanics are special for exactly that reason.

True but she has a healing that doesn't run out on the flipside if your careful enough. Also she wouldn't be the first character inconvenienced by a specific content due to character perks *Woodie and Walter waves in the background* 

25 minutes ago, Theukon-dos said:

Personally, I'm more worried about Walter; who currently lacks any sort of round that deals planar damage.

Personally I'm still working out my thoughts on this new mechanic but honestly it does feel like Walter is getting screwed the most by it considering he's gonna suffer just as bad as against bee queen with these penetrating effects... (Also Kiel please increase the stack size of his rounds.)

[ShadowDuelist]

Also this will strongly change the meta of Beefalo fighting, as they deal flat damage and would take a bunch of extra damage, while also being harder to heal mid battle and with a limit to max healing (beefalos can only eat so much healing food before they start puking it).

Characters that rely on beefalos would have to change their late game strategies as well, probably much more than Wolfgang.

[Well-met]

Agreed, this is dangerously approaching RPG nonsense territory. Klei please don't steer gameplay mechanics toward visiting the wiki every 15 minutes

[goblinball]

I commend klei for trying to avoid raw dps power-creep and instead trying to make these new late-game weapons and enemies stronger in more interesting and creative ways. Conceptually I definitely prefer this over enemies and weapons dealing more damage, and I can see this being expanded into a fun mechanic. Do you try to prioritize planar-damage-reducing armor, or do you use stuff like marble suits? It’s so much more interesting than having other weapons/armor becoming entirely irrelevant and late game enemies just being stat bloat abominations. 
HOWEVER, I do agree that this execution could’ve been better. It’s a good first step, though, and I can see this being a much more fun system in the future.

[Spino43]

Idk why they have to make these new items... not powerful. It's already locked behind a very long quest, have to woop at least 2 bosses (if you fight dragonfly to allow wilson to quickly craft the 3rd opal gem, or visiting the ruins), one of them being the worst boss in the game. Who cares if I have OP gear at that point? Jeez.

Tha flat damage reduction thing in a game where you usually deal small damage per hit is also straight up bad design imo.

[Evelo]

I like the new mechanic. Just need more enemies with armor to make use of it. However hiding it behind the lack of a UI can be iffy considering you dont know it's even a thing unless you look it up (like me, I had no idea it was a thing till this post and I love the idea)

[Waitdire]

23 hours ago, WolfoIsBestWolf said:

Planar Damage ignores regular armor. The new Brightshade Sword deals 38 damage + 30 Planar damage.

On most mobs this means 68 damage, however lets say on a Pig with a Football helmet this would mean 7.6 + 30 (37.6) damage. The 30 Pierces and the 38 gets reduced. 

Do planar damage ignore Snurtles, Celestial Champion in first phase or toadstool innate armor? It just seems to be currently only ignoring the player's armor...

[maxwell_winters]

Enlightened crown seems very good when fighting new plants. I assume they don't have damage absorption to gestalts.

[Waitdire]

29 minutes ago, maxwell_winters said:

Enlightened crown seems very good when fighting new plants. I assume they don't have damage absorption to gestalts.

Gestalts deal 18 damage to them.The formula still works.