Planar damage and defense worries me

[WolfoIsBestWolf]

15 hours ago, Theukon-dos said:

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.

Against normal enemies the Brightshade Sword would do 58.5/68/77.5/106 (Wimp/Normal/Wig/Mighty). Compared to a Dark Sword 51/68/85/136.
Against enemies tagged with Planar Defense; Brightshade Sword 43/46.8/50.5/60.7,   Dark Sword 21.8/27.9/33.7/49.1

1 hour ago, Waitdire said:

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...

At the moment no, damage reduction from Slurtles/Rock Lobsters/Toadstool/CC/Fuelweaver just really any damage resistance that isn't from the 2 new enemies isn't pierced. This could be a bug/oversight.

19 minutes ago, maxwell_winters said:

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

They do reduce the damage of the gestalt projectile down to ~18.6. Still quite helpful.

 

Also the numbers for the whip.

The Deadly Nightshades Whip attack does 65 + 10P damage, resulting in;
23 damage against Football helmet,
16.5 Damage against Thulecite/Dreadstone,
13.25 damage against Marble/Night
11.7 Damage against 1 Brightshade,
9.8 Damage against 2 Brightshade,
5.85 damage against 1 Brightshade + 1 Dreadstone, 
(The lunar damage reduction and Planar Defense combines well with other armor because it's a small amount of Planar damage)
AoE Spike attack would deal 26 damage against 1 Brightshade + Dreadstone, so wearing both Brightshade would still be better there.

65+10P isn't a huge difference compared to just 75 flat damage. 75 would be 15 against Football, 7.5 against Dread/Thule, 3.75 against Marble/Night
130 Flat would be; 26 against Football, 13 against Dread/Thule, 6.5 against Marble/Night. Noticeably less than 100+30P
 

[maxwell_winters]

7 minutes ago, WolfoIsBestWolf said:

They do reduce the damage of the gestalt projectile down to ~18.6. Still quite helpful.

That's lame. I wish crown gestalt damage counted as planar, or it at least gave a bit of resistance against planar damage. It would make the progression more cohesive.

[MondayNight]

While interesting in theory, said "Planar" damage/defense in practice feels very unrewarding and counter-intuitive. I don't experience any real progression, but a handicap after reaching this new DST "progression" stage post 1st CC take-down. Is about risk-reward. I don't feel am getting any reward, but further punishment. More-so, game's quite "secretive" in its damage given/taken department; with the "planar" element comes out as even more cryptic to the point bulk player-base will have no real clue what actually happens. I know KLei proud themselves on innovation and experimentation, but this road looks too convoluted for its own play-style good. "Less is more" scenario: perhaps KLei should just go with the SW route of new weapons & armors, after progression starts - they simply do/absorb more damage. No one likes Walter's "allergies" con when Bees inflict similar fix amount "planar" dmg - so why stick with this same unpopular route?!

[goblinball]

1 hour ago, MostMerryTomcat said:

I don't feel am getting any reward, but further punishment.

I don’t understand how you could come to this conclusion. Ofc the new enemies are stronger than most other regular enemies, they’re endgame content. The new items are meant to reward the player by giving them the tools to better counter this new planar system and other future content.

[Guille6785]

I really don't like the direction the new content seems to be heading in regards to planar damage

18 hours ago, Theukon-dos said:

I don't know, maybe they could have just given Wolfgang diminishing returns on damage once he started hitting more than 150 damage/hit.

damage already has diminishing returns as is, it's just not immediately obvious

the jump from 59.5 damage to 119 (ham bat as wilson vs ham bat as wolfgang) is very noticeable ofc, just by going from x1 damage to x2 damage you could say (as an example) that against a boss like dragonfly it would take you 4-5 minutes instead of 8, thereby saving 3-4 minutes just by adding one more wilson

past this point adding more players makes far less of a difference though; if you add another wilson (for x3 damage, or the equivalent of wilson with spicy jelly on a wet target) you'd be killing dragonfly in roughly 3 minutes, literally saving only 1-2 minutes this time despite the fact that you added a whole player again

at this point you can add 3 more wilsons (the equivalent of going from x3 to x6 damage, or wolfgang with spicy jelly on a wet target) and the difference is still pretty much negligible, dfly would be dead in about a minute and a half so by adding the equivalent of 3 whole players to your count you've basically saved little more than a minute, a time save so minor that you'd be wasting more time by going to the portal to swap to wolfgang instead of eating the jelly as any other character

the only boss where the jump from x3 to x6 is really significant is misery toad because that's the whole point, every other boss gets melted either way with anywhere from 3 to 6 players without much of a difference

adding a 102 damage weapon wouldn't make wolfgang unbalanced in any relevant way because his damage has already passed the biggest increase by far, any more increases at this point would be fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things considering jelly already exists; to put it simply: if you give a x6 wolfgang a 102 damage weapon instead of a dark sword the difference would literally be seconds against almost every boss

[QuartzBeam]

42 minutes ago, goblinball said:

I don’t understand how you could come to this conclusion. Ofc the new enemies are stronger than most other regular enemies, they’re endgame content. The new items are meant to reward the player by giving them the tools to better counter this new planar system and other future content.

Manufacturing a problem just so you can then "sell" its solution to people is widely recognized as a scam. Mind you, I get what you mean. Maybe we can then use this new equipment on future content to get the real rewards. But, consider the following:

1) Even if that is correct, it's gonna be 3-4 months until the next content update. That's 3-4 months where anyone who dares defeat the Celestial Champion gets rewarded with the thankless chore of having to kill all those plants, just so they can craft items that are only good for killing those plants.

2) People spent the entirety of Return of Them speculating that the increasingly complicated "lunar" questline would result in some really sweet loot, but all we got in the end was a glorified hybrid of the Miner Hat and the Tam o Shanter. And now we're adding yet another step to that same questline?

And like you said: the new enemies are stronger than regular enemies because they're endgame content. So why can't the new items be stronger than regular items, when they're endgame content too? Why are players who have beaten every boss in the game so far and conquered every challenge so far forbidden from getting items that trivialize these challenges that they have already conquered? Would the stars be catastrophically derailed from their orbits if the Brightshade Sword could deal 100+ damage to those enemies you've already shown you can fight without it? Would the heavens be torn asunder if the Brightshade Shovel could shovel Light Flowers and Cacti that you don't actually need because you're someone who has killed the Celestial Champion? Would the universe collapse unto itself if the Brightmare Staff... had any reason to exist whatsoever?

 

(That might have gotten a bit ranty at the end there. Sorry. I regret nothing.)

[Waitdire]

20 hours ago, Hornete said:

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.

In fact, the new damage resistance is no less magical than 34. If you compare the numbers a little, you can see that 2 new mobs have ±55-65% armor. And the crazier your damage, the crazier their resistance. For example, Wolfgang with Volt Goat Chaud-Froid with Chili Flakes in the rain with a dart will deal 600 dmg under normal conditions, 142 dmg against gestalt is 76% absorption. 40 gunpowder 8000 dmg under normal conditions, 654 dmg against gestalt is 92% absorption. Dark sword resistance ±60%, spear resistance ±55%.

[Theukon-dos]

2 hours ago, goblinball said:

I don’t understand how you could come to this conclusion. Ofc the new enemies are stronger than most other regular enemies, they’re endgame content. The new items are meant to reward the player by giving them the tools to better counter this new planar system and other future content.

Because when a game has a progression system, getting said progression generally means having an advantage against earlier stuff aswell. 

If you play Terraria, you use a gold bow to beat the Eye of Cthulhu on-tier, play for another 5-10 hours to reach hard mode, and then when you use those hard-mode weapons against the Eye of Cthulhu, it gets absolutely decimated because you become stronger.

 

But the planar damage mechanics don't actually make you stronger. The armor is on-tier with football helmets and log suits, while the new sword is the same damage as the Dark Sword, unless you're playing someone with a damage modifier; in which case it just doesn't scale. There is no functional difference between beating Deerclops with football helmets and class cutters or beating deerclops 200 days later with brightshade helmets and swords. It's less progression and more just an arbitrary key that doesn't really need to exist. 

[MondayNight]

2 hours ago, goblinball said:

I don’t understand how you could come to this conclusion. Ofc the new enemies are stronger than most other regular enemies, they’re endgame content. The new items are meant to reward the player by giving them the tools to better counter this new planar system and other future content.

These new post-CC items are "rewords" against 1 specific class of foes, while being mediocre in rest. Hence not real general progression.

[Zeklo]

I like the concept.

You can literally see enough people on these forums who thought the armor was garbage compared to what we already have (before realizing the planar bits). The reason for that is simple: the armors we have are ridiculously easy to craft. The numbers on 'better' armor would have to be crazy good to justify spending the effort over the extremely easy to amass [but slightly worse] alternatives. Except we're already so high on armor numbers, that it would actually need some crazy ability in tandem—weapons can go higher, but we're sort of at a dead end with armors.

This planar stuff creates an unavoidable need to use these new equipments without needing to tweak the recipe/protection/accessibility of previous armor & weapons. It's a bit gimmicky and not user friendly right now, but it's probably the most reasonable direction to take progression without changing so much of what we already have.

Of course this is under the assumption that enough new content is going to be using this system enough to justify its existence. Which I hope it does.

[Dextops]

38 minutes ago, Zeklo said:

You can literally see enough people on these forums who thought the armor was garbage compared to what we already have (before realizing the planar bits).

cause it is. They just forced you to use it instead of adding any possible creative abilities it might have. You beat celestial champion to unlock new enemies which give you armour only useful to kill those new enemies. This isn't really a good design in my opinion.

[Zeklo]

9 minutes ago, Dextops said:

cause it is. They just forced you to use it instead of adding any possible creative abilities it might have. You beat celestial champion to unlock new enemies which give you armour only useful to kill those new enemies. This isn't really a good design in my opinion.

49 minutes ago, Zeklo said:

Of course this is under the assumption that enough new content is going to be using this system enough to justify its existence. Which I hope it does.

 

[Dextops]

5 minutes ago, Zeklo said:

Of course this is under the assumption that enough new content is going to be using this system enough to justify its existence. Which I hope it does.

a problem with that is content updates are sent out in drops so we're stuck with basically a punishment for killing CC and in reward are given loot that for the time serves no reasonable purpose. This type of benefit of the doubt given to these beginning updates has a bad track history with dst especially with the ocean.

[Zeklo]

1 minute ago, Dextops said:

a problem with that is content updates are sent out in drops so we're stuck with basically a punishment for killing CC and in reward are given loot that for the time serves no reasonable purpose

I agree.

Unless there's going to be more to this Beta (which seems unlikely), it's a very weird thing to introduce by itself until the next (next couple?) content updates.

[Maxil20]

If they are going to keep the planar damage system in terms of armor, I do feel they should “retrofit” a small amount to some of the other armor pieces. I understand not wanting to make conventional gear (like log suits or football/battle helms) have the system, but it does feel weird only 2 specific pieces of armor in the game specifically give defense to this.

It doesn’t even need to be anything super special, even something like 5 points to things like night armor or thulecite pieces would be nice.

 

[Mysterious box]

26 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

If they are going to keep the planar damage system in terms of armor, I do feel they should “retrofit” a small amount to some of the other armor pieces. I understand not wanting to make conventional gear (like log suits or football/battle helms) have the system, but it does feel weird only 2 specific pieces of armor in the game specifically give defense to this.

It doesn’t even need to be anything super special, even something like 5 points to things like night armor or thulecite pieces would be nice.

 

Might sound weird but I feel like it's specifically shadow aligned gear that should be excluded from getting it and instead give the small amounts to neutral gear like shelmet, snurtle shell, football helm, grass suit etc. considering this a lunar system and it wouldn't make sense to allow nightmare gear in on it. 

[Guille6785]

4 hours ago, Zeklo said:

Except we're already so high on armor numbers, that it would actually need some crazy ability in tandem—weapons can go higher, but we're sort of at a dead end with armors.

there's still no 95% dr helmets and all the body armors that have it have significant downsides (we almost got one that didn't last update but it got reworked into something else)

the difference between 90% and 95% is very significant, it's the difference between having to make healing food and simply punching a couple butterflies along the way to avoid dying during a pure tanking fight

[DVGMedia]

The whole armor and item things make me think they should have waitied on releasing the armors and weapons. and instead just opened up the rifts.

There has been updates where we got items that were pretty useless when they were released and then were used for something later.(Atrium from shadow pieces.)

We had the whole fight to deal with first and then got to use the items later when they implemented it. I kind of feel  like we should have tried to fight these new entities  with normal equipment first  and it kind of feels hopless then seeing the new items would make it feel much better to fight.

But that would be better once the whole world starts getting their own lunar and shadow versions.

IM expecting more Brighter enemies that are spiders hounds exct that are buffed by brightstone and  dreadstone

in that these 2 items are basically going to become our flint and gold for the new era.