World setting: Boss health scaling with number of players.

[Captain_Rage]

There are different weapons in the game which deal different amounts of damage already. Why not use a specific weapon in case you want to deal a specific amount of damage?? There is no logic to this boss scaling idea.

The game is consistent and fine as it is; different bosses have their own unique flair and some are simply better suited for fighting in groups (by design, including lore and mechanics). If you want the difficulty of bosses to scale proportionally to the number of players don't make their HP linear because that is horrible game design.

[AlternateMew]

On 5/3/2023 at 4:38 PM, Mike23Ua said:

Dragonfly has Higher Health

Why does she magically become more durable when there are more people around? Why is she magically physically more fragile just because there's only one little ant around to poke her with a stick instead of three ants to poke her with sticks?

The minions scaling makes sense. More ants poking her, call more help. The health scaling does not make sense. More ants poking her, more... thick skin? Because... Uh.. She can sense more people so casts a magic spell to be buffer, I guess?

No, thank you. I'd much rather different routes be taken.

[Antynomity]

14 minutes ago, AlternateMew said:

Why does she magically become more durable when there are more people around? Why is she magically physically more fragile just because there's only one little ant around to poke her with a stick instead of three ants to poke her with sticks?

The minions scaling makes sense. More ants poking her, call more help. The health scaling does not make sense. More ants poking her, more... thick skin? Because... Uh.. She can sense more people so casts a magic spell to be buffer, I guess?

No, thank you. I'd much rather different routes be taken.

rework bossfights that are bad 
I know, I'm a genius

[Mike23Ua]

52 minutes ago, AlternateMew said:

Why does she magically become more durable when there are more people around? Why is she magically physically more fragile just because there's only one little ant around to poke her with a stick instead of three ants to poke her with sticks?

The minions scaling makes sense. More ants poking her, call more help. The health scaling does not make sense. More ants poking her, more... thick skin? Because... Uh.. She can sense more people so casts a magic spell to be buffer, I guess?

No, thank you. I'd much rather different routes be taken.

From a Gameplay Perspective- Anymore than 3-4 players vs a Boss makes the boss Too Easy, Especially if most players are use to fighting them Alone. This is bad because it actually makes the fights boring and bland & over far too soon when you want to do them with friends & On the Flipside 2 or Less Players make the fights drag out for 10-20 minutes with a ton of setup to be prepared for them.

From a Story Perspective, Dragonfly feels more threatened by multiple players and therefore opens up more Magma Ponds to Spawn Larvae to defend & heal her.

Boss Scaling doesn’t just need to go down, it can go up as well.

 

[Dragonboooorn]

Cant wait to see Celestial Champion with 500 hp on each stage with such suggestions.

Isnt game designed to be played with another players? Bosses become literally just a fun activity when you vs them with teammate(s), of course they would be harder to kill when you playing solo.

Toadstoal, Crab King, Fuelweaver, and other bosses are designed to be a raid bosses. Like with fuelweaver, one player kills pests while other destroys thingy that spawns them. Crab king? One player attacks while second player can row boat from geysers and freeze attacks.

Bosses are balanced, and were designed to be fought against with some players. Even so, solo players can use alternative methods if they lack teammates. Ice staffs to stop crab king spell casts, weather pain vs fuelweavers healing minions and so on. 

[firoborn]

8 hours ago, AlternateMew said:

Why does she magically become more durable when there are more people around? Why is she magically physically more fragile just because there's only one little ant around to poke her with a stick instead of three ants to poke her with sticks?

Because charlie empowers her to deal with the multiple Stick ants just like charlie magically empowered dragonfly at the beginning of her reign and how she magically created beequeen.

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, Dragonboooorn said:

Cant wait to see Celestial Champion with 500 hp on each stage with such suggestions.

Isnt game designed to be played with another players? Bosses become literally just a fun activity when you vs them with teammate(s), of course they would be harder to kill when you playing solo.

Toadstoal, Crab King, Fuelweaver, and other bosses are designed to be a raid bosses. Like with fuelweaver, one player kills pests while other destroys thingy that spawns them. Crab king? One player attacks while second player can row boat from geysers and freeze attacks.

Bosses are balanced, and were designed to be fought against with some players. Even so, solo players can use alternative methods if they lack teammates. Ice staffs to stop crab king spell casts, weather pain vs fuelweavers healing minions and so on. 

I mean this sounds a bit overly dramatic if I’m being honest, DST has been changing for better or for worse to be more accessible then it has ever been. If you want to.. you can toggle a setting so Shadow Monsters, Starvation, Freezing, Overheating, & even Darkness itself can not kill you. You can also toggle a setting so that all enemy mobs deal 40% decreased Damage to you. You can also turn shadow Monsters completely Off if for some reason you choose not to deal with them, making bosses like Deerclops no longer have extra dangers to have to deal with on top of fighting him/her, such as Freezing, or Low Sanity.

I think it’s time we let people play their game the way that they want to play, as long as the way they play does not interfere with, or worsen the way you prefer to play.

Therefore I think you should either host your own servers or only join servers that suit your playstyle.

And what we most certainly should NOT be doing is locking players out of experiencing all the content Klei has been adding to the game since it’s 2017 release (on Xbox) by Skill gating content from them.

Take the new Lunar Rifts and Brightshades an example- I toggled this Content to ON in Day 1 Worlds & when the swords dealt 72 damage, the plants always had vulnerable easy to exploit hit points, the content was Easy enough to be considered Early Game Content..

However Klei decided rather than make this new content more accessible regardless of your skill level that instead it wasn’t hard enough so they reduced the damage of the sword from 72 down to 68, and gave Brightshades enough intelligence to hide their vine under ground so their less exposed.

That’s fine I suppose but it cycles back to gatekeeping content, stuff people may otherwise enjoy that’s new in a game they’ve played a billion times before.. behind needing to hit some “Skill Check”

I can tell you that if I was REQUIRED to Fight Dragonfly or even Bearger I’d had deleted DST a long long LONG Time ago..

Because for 1- That’s just not the type of game the DS franchise was when it first started & it’s sad to see that it has become such a heavy focal point of DST.

And 2- If I wanted to fight bosses with a ton of health, I’d play a different game that’s focus is on fighting bosses.

Using logical thinking here: What good does it do to “Skill-Check/Gate-Keep” players from experiencing boss/content that requires bosses?

[Catteflyterpill]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

[snip]

What good is "skill-checking" boss content behind DST? It's because it is boss content. It's mean to be a reward for killing a boss. It's just supposed to be something satisfying given to the player as a reason to pursue, and accomplish, DST's larger goals. If anybody could just get through the boss content without killing the boss it just takes away from the reason to play the game. People want end-game content, that's why it's 'skill-gated.' I

And DST does have a lot of focus on combat. The fighting system isn't as intricate as other games, but fighting off monsters and bosses has been a part of the game since the beginning. The reason the Forge was fun is because people like the intensity of fighting in the game. 

[Neu7ral]

Some bosses are too spongy so I agree, and they consume a lot of time.
Most of them are in a fair state but I don't mind some 80~90% of their original hp and tone down their gimmicks aimed to play with more than one person.

 

[Yuuko]

6 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

I mean this sounds a bit overly dramatic if I’m being honest, DST has been changing for better or for worse to be more accessible then it has ever been. If you want to.. you can toggle a setting so Shadow Monsters, Starvation, Freezing, Overheating, & even Darkness itself can not kill you. You can also toggle a setting so that all enemy mobs deal 40% decreased Damage to you. You can also turn shadow Monsters completely Off if for some reason you choose not to deal with them, making bosses like Deerclops no longer have extra dangers to have to deal with on top of fighting him/her, such as Freezing, or Low Sanity.

That's fair.  They did introduce a lot of new settings in world-gen aimed at ways to effect the difficulty of the game.  I think a general "boss health" slider that went from less at like 50% health up to "most" at 200% health would be useful without being intrusive into the "normal" mode that most public servers are going to run on.

6 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

And what we most certainly should NOT be doing is locking players out of experiencing all the content Klei has been adding to the game since it’s 2017 release (on Xbox) by Skill gating content from them.

 

I disagree on this though.  You're literally talking about boss rewards being bad...  Like of course you need to defeat the boss in order to get their loot.  Bundle wraps, furnace, enlightened crown - these things are not required to play.  We all learn how to deal with spoilage, heat sources, and light sources before we get to these.  They are a reward for accomplishing enough in game that now you get some items that ease the tedious nature of the game so that you can sit back and enjoy it a bit more.

[maradyne]

The backend of this is fairly simple, including checking nearby players and all that fun stuff. Don't think too much about it, it's fine.

Design that people can generally agree on is the actual challenge.

 

Personally, I still think that most boss health is overinflated for single player. It's unnecessarily padded.
Do I think the game needs to be easier? Not really, easy/hard isn't even a good metric. It's better to focus on how engaged the player is with the content. And in that vein...
If you can kite for 5 minutes, you can kite for 10, you know? It just gets old, that's all.
Set the bosses to a good base for solo, then scale up for multi. That's what I'd like to see.

 

I think minion scaling is also a good idea.

[bjanmanjs]

1 hour ago, Shosuko said:

That's fair.  They did introduce a lot of new settings in world-gen aimed at ways to effect the difficulty of the game.  I think a general "boss health" slider that went from less at like 50% health up to "most" at 200% health would be useful without being intrusive into the "normal" mode that most public servers are going to run on.

I'd prefer to have a "singleplayer health values" setting that sets mob health to the values used in DS (except for Dragonfly, since that's effectively a completely different boss than it was in DS), since while a flat 50% multiplier would work perfectly for most bosses like Deerclops that have had their health doubled, it wouldn't work so well for treeguards whose health has only been multiplied by 1.5, or for the Ancient Guardian whose health has been quadrupled.

I'd also like it to not just affect bosses, since many non-boss mobs have also had their health increased.

Settings to disable the other balance changes made for multiplayer would also be nice, such as the nerf to armor durability or the doubling of the speed at which the Spider Queen spawns minions.

All of these can be done very easily with mods, and as such I have no use for them to be added, but I imagine this would be useful for people playing on platforms that don't support modding.

 

[Mike23Ua]

2 hours ago, Shosuko said:

That's fair.  They did introduce a lot of new settings in world-gen aimed at ways to effect the difficulty of the game.  I think a general "boss health" slider that went from less at like 50% health up to "most" at 200% health would be useful without being intrusive into the "normal" mode that most public servers are going to run on.

I disagree on this though.  You're literally talking about boss rewards being bad...  Like of course you need to defeat the boss in order to get their loot.  Bundle wraps, furnace, enlightened crown - these things are not required to play.  We all learn how to deal with spoilage, heat sources, and light sources before we get to these.  They are a reward for accomplishing enough in game that now you get some items that ease the tedious nature of the game so that you can sit back and enjoy it a bit more.

If it was JUST yet another completely Optional Hat that made staying alive easier, I would agree with you.. but lately that hasn’t been the Case, NOW bosses are becoming a Requirement to progress the game world, story and unlock new Content-

The PROBLEM With DST is that it doesn’t give players Accessibility Options on how Easy/Hard that Content is going to be.. for example you can go right now and play the Absolutely Amazing Batman Arkham City which had some really Epic Boss Encounters but you could also play the game on several different difficulty levels that made those encounters easier/harder, Let’s use the epic Mr Freeze fight as an example- on Easy it takes less hits to take him down and you don’t need to use so many gadgets, on Hard: Mr Freeze remembers every move you do and programs his suit to prevent you from using the same gadget on him again until your forced to use every takedown in batmans arsenal.

This is just one example of making a boss fight fun for players of varying skill levels.

With DST you don’t HAVE those Options, outside of which Character you pick… and to make matters worse- Even though Klei added Crab King and gave him multiple difficulty levels based on what you socket into him, they made sure that to progress the Story and unlock some actual new content that you had to socket in the hardest version to fight.

Kinda defeats the whole purposes in giving the boss varying difficulties huh?

The bosses themselves may actually end up being fun content players enjoyed engaging with if they were able to be brought down (or up) to their preferred skill level.

[goblinball]

I wouldn’t like boss health scaling because it’d actively punish players for being in multiplayer. This isn’t like terraria, where bosses have health scaling but they drop individual treasure bags for each player in expert. Bosses would still drop the same amount of loot (assumedly) so ppl in multiplayer would be having to invest more resources into bosses for the same loot… even if the boss fight is “easier” it doesn’t seem very fair, does it?

It also just opens up a lot of issues. What if there were ppl in the world who weren’t participating in the boss fight? Should they be accounted for in the fight? If not, then how do you determine who is? What if you were playing on a pub lobby, and a handful of new players wanted to join the fight? If they did, the boss would have much more hp and they’d die instantly, so new players would screw you over just for existing. 
I’d personally rather stick with klei’s hand-tailored boss hp numbers rather than them potentially being screwed up by some scaling (even if some bosses do need their hp toned down a bit).

[Zeklo]

26 minutes ago, goblinball said:

I wouldn’t like boss health scaling because it’d actively punish players for being in multiplayer. This isn’t like terraria, where bosses have health scaling but they drop individual treasure bags for each player in expert. Bosses would still drop the same amount of loot (assumedly) so ppl in multiplayer would be having to invest more resources into bosses for the same loot… even if the boss fight is “easier” it doesn’t seem very fair, does it?

It also just opens up a lot of issues. What if there were ppl in the world who weren’t participating in the boss fight? Should they be accounted for in the fight? If not, then how do you determine who is? What if you were playing on a pub lobby, and a handful of new players wanted to join the fight? If they did, the boss would have much more hp and they’d die instantly, so new players would screw you over just for existing. 
I’d personally rather stick with klei’s hand-tailored boss hp numbers rather than them potentially being screwed up by some scaling (even if some bosses do need their hp toned down a bit).

Most of these are easy to remedy.

It's less about scaling to make things harder, but scaling to make things less dragged out for solo. So all you have to do is have an upper cap—configurable or just the numbers we have already.

As for the latter, there's already a mod that alters boss difficulty based on participants rather than world-wide. So that's more than possible.
We already have the means, so that's no issue at all.

[Cassielu]

In Don't Starve, interactions and battles between Mobs and Mobs are common, and understanding and learning about the ecological behavior of Mobs is an important part of the game experience. So you can't just think about the number of players, also have to think about other Mobs (even items, structure and more. For the same reason), which makes things doubly complicated...

[bjanmanjs]

14 hours ago, goblinball said:

Bosses would still drop the same amount of loot (assumedly) so ppl in multiplayer would be having to invest more resources into bosses for the same loot

This is essentially already the case: none of the mobs that have had their health increased for multiplayer drop any extra loot (save for Dragonfly). Although there are the figure sketches, but Wolfgang is the only one who has a non-decorative use for them.

Deerclops for instance has double the health he has in DS, but still drops the same amount of loot as in DS (save for the mostly-decorative figure sketch). Of course, dropping more than one eyeball would be extremely immersion-breaking, but most mobs have loot that could be increased without breaking immersion, and even with Deerclops the amount of meat dropped could still be doubled.