Is there a "best" beefalo temperament and saddle combination?

[Uncrushed]

I think the most serious contenders are:

• Ornery with War Saddle
• Ornery with Glossamer Saddle
• Rider with Glossamer Saddle

The Rider with Glossamer is the fastest transport in the game, but 25 damage is kind of pitiful.  I imagine someone using this combination would park and dismount when they get where they're going, ideally a safe distance from any likely fighting.

On the Ornery, the Glossamer saddle is 24% faster than the War saddle: 10.85 vs. 8.75.  A walking cane on cobblestones goes 9.75, about halfway between the two speeds.  To me, this feels like the difference between easy kiting and hard kiting.  Rider-Glossamer is faster at 12.5-ish, but 11-ish is pretty great.

For most mobs, the difference between 50 hp damage (Ornery without War saddle) and 66 (Ornery with War saddle) is irrelevant because it takes the same number of hits to kill a mob with 200hp or less.  Spiders: 100hp, 2 hits either way.  Hound: 150hp, 3 hits either way.  Pig: 250 5 hits vs. 4 hits, so there's a 20% difference there, but how often do you need to fight a pig?  And how important is the number of hits vs. ease of kiting?

I'm guessing for the Ornery, there are 2 ways to play it.  1 is to have a single all-purpose ornery that maybe has the Glossamer all the time, maybe switching to the War Saddle for specific boss fights (Antlion?).

The 2nd way to work the Ornery is to have 2 beefalo and carry both bells.  Take the Rider-Glossamer to get where you're going, then drop that bell and mount the Ornery for the fight.  Not sure if that would be the best of both worlds, or just extra complexity?  It's certainly a big investment!

I've recently been playing Maxwell and just took the War Saddle off my Ornery beefalo and put the Glossamer back on.  I used the Construction Amulet to make the Glossamer and felt pretty good about that.  I kind of doubt I'll use the War Saddle again.

What do you do and why?

[Yuuko]

I've found my preference is a neutral tendency with a war saddle.  The speed is still pretty good (8.75) and the damage (base 36 + war saddle 16 = same 50 an ornery hits) which hits the most important cutoff I think.  Then I don't have to feed it before mounting it.  When I do a beef I typically relegate all non-boss combat to it, so I don't even carry weapons / armor.  If I see a terror beak, or hear a hound wave I want to get on that mount quickly and needing to feed it is always a pain in those moments.

Raising a neutral beef is a bit more of a challenge too because you have to balance the tendencies.  If you use it to fight too much early on you might lose track of your other tendencies locking you out unless you strike the beef to buy you more time...  This means as you raise it you still might want to keep fattening it up and be careful when you fight with it.

I don't use beefs on bosses because I'm unfamiliar with the kiting pattern, and while 1000 health SOUNDS like a lot, Maxwell (75 health) with Night Armor (95% protection) has 1500 effective health (although he'd need 3-4 night armors to put this to the test lol).  Basically beefs are actually pretty fragile if you don't kite well and the risk of losing the investment feels much worse.

Usually when I use a beef I am playing Warly.  I've found if you feed garlic spice to the beef they do benefit from the spice effect which would probably make them safer for bosses (feed spices to the beef, but special effect food like chaud fraud yourself.)  Ups the beef to 1300 effective health, far greater effect then a player gets from the spice.  Chaud fraud spikes their damage to 75-125 if wet.  I feel pretty strong on my beef when I use Warly's stuff!  I do need to practice beef vs boss more, and would probably tame an ornery beef for it (damage is 118-198 if wet + chili !!  we're talking Wanda / Wolfgang levels of damage and I love it lol)

ps - I don't feel bad about turning hunting surprises to More or Tons to ensure I can make a war saddle reasonably quickly lol

[Tranoze]

Just use 2 beef, duh...

Or atleast, use 2 saddle. Consider beefalo bell is butt equip slot, war saddle is darksword, and glom saddle is cane. 

[Maxposting]

what Tranoze said, there isn't really a downside for just getting off your beefalo and swapping the saddles before a fight, considering most threats don't suddenly spawn

[flamboyant wolf]

usually, I go for ornery with saddle swap as Wendy, neutral with saddle swap as Wortox and rider with glossamer as mostly anyone else. (I did go with ornery with glossamer on Wortox yesterday though, I'll see how it goes. Also wanna try out ornery with Max combo, but maybe later).

[Mike23Ua]

I have three slightly noob questions to ask but since I’m playing on Xbox the only way I can test the data for myself is with Punching Bags/Boxers, but.. does holding a particular weapon while mounted on a Beefalo increase the damage you deal?

I naturally figured it WOULD.. but I want to be absolutely sure that I’m not just holding a Darksword in my hand taking sanity drain when it wouldn’t matter if I was holding a Darksword, Brightshade Sword, or a freaking axe.

If the weapon equipped does not boost damage done on a Beefalo can we petition to have this changed? The fencing sword seems like a perfect candidate for a mounted “Jousting” type Weapon.

Then finally my last question: if the different saddles and taming behaviors change the Beefalos speed/damage/sanity Regen stats, does wearing a hat increase sanity Regen or holding something like a walking cane boost its speed? 

[Yuuko]

6 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

I have three slightly noob questions to ask but since I’m playing on Xbox the only way I can test the data for myself is with Punching Bags/Boxers, but.. does holding a particular weapon while mounted on a Beefalo increase the damage you deal?

 

The weapon you hold does not effect your damage.  If you are holding a ranged weapon like a fire staff / weather pain / etc it will use that to attack instead.  Wearing a thulecite club, cane, or magi does not change your move speed.  It does not change over roads either, beefs use a fixed move speed.  Other stats are effected like temperature, sanity, hunger, etc.  The beef only fixes melee damage and move speed.

idk if we can petition to have this changed, but tbh I don't really care.  Hopefully Planar damage gets sorted out to actually be good, instead of this "xyz replaced everything" bs but w/e.  Beefs are good for what everything else is good for.

[Mr Giggio]

Ornery beef + gloosammer is the deal for day by day fights and exploring, SOME bosses could use war saddle but in general glossamer is Just fine. The only two ones I think its really necessary due huge hp time sink is dfly and toadstool

[Uncrushed]

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Neutral tendency with a war saddle...  I don't have to feed it before mounting it.

I can't count the number of times I've died due to the feed-before-mounting of an ornery.  It's always a rollback death too because taming is so time consuming!

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The speed is still pretty good (8.75) and the damage (base 36 + war saddle 16 = same 50 as ornery)

It's probably a reasonable trade-off.  Where I think I got hung up was when I tried to kill a Ewecus from my Default beefalo in order to craft the war saddle and my beefalo died.  I gave up at that point, laid cobblestone roads everywhere I went often and used a walking cane.

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When I do a beef I typically relegate all non-boss combat to it.

Reasonable

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Raising a neutral beef is a bit more of a challenge too because you have to balance the tendencies.  If you use it to fight too much early on you might lose track of your other tendencies locking you out unless you strike the beef to buy you more time...

That's exactly what happened to me when I tried.  The strike was accidental, but I wouldn't have gotten a Default without it.

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Usually when I use a beef I am playing Warly.  I've found if you feed garlic spice to the beef they do benefit from the spice effect which would probably make them safer for bosses (feed spices to the beef, but special effect food like chaud fraud yourself.)  Ups the beef to 1300 effective health, far greater effect then a player gets from the spice.  Chaud fraud spikes their damage to 75-125 if wet.  I feel pretty strong on my beef when I use Warly's stuff!

Fascinating!  Though taming a beef as Warly sounds really hard.  He's always scrounging for different foods already, to have another mouth to feed for 20 days on top of that?  In the early game?  Ouch!

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Turning hunting surprises to More or Tons to ensure I can make a war saddle reasonably quickly

That explains a fair bit!  Getting the steel wool can be really time consuming!  Easier to go to the ruins for a Construction Amulet and use less wool.  That says a lot because green gems are one of the rarest basic resources in the game.  I suggested they let you shave spider queens for Steel Wool.  As humorously awkward and difficult as that would be, it's still a little easier than the alternatives.

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Does holding a particular weapon while mounted on a Beefalo increase the damage you deal?

Not in DST.  In DS it does, or at least it used to.

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I want to be absolutely sure that I’m not just holding a Darksword in my hand taking sanity drain

I'm usually holding a lantern at night.  During the day, a Lazy Explorer or Walking Cane so I don't have to remember to equip it when I get off the beefalo.  Anything ranged can be useful too.

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If the different saddles and taming behaviors change the Beefalos speed/damage/sanity Regen stats, does wearing a hat increase sanity Regen or holding something like a walking cane boost its speed? 

Beefalo don't have sanity, so any sanity items are just for you.  Your items don't affect the beefalo's speed or damage directly, though I learned from Shosuko's post that some effects like electrical damage from what you ate carry through.

There are a lot of little weird corner cases with Beefalo and I like to test my assumptions.  I just learned that they won't eat Frozen Banana Daiquiri even though it's vegetarian.  It made no sense to me until I looked at the picture.  Beefalo can't use straws and feeding something in a cocktail glass to an animal the size of a horse seems incredibly unwise.  I bet they won't eat the Vegetable Stinger either, though I didn't try.  I was investigating the best and most practical ways to heal your beefalo.

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Just use 2 beef...  Both!  Both is good!

What about the training time?  Leaving the Rider where it won't get killed?  What character do you do this as?  Which do you train first?  I'm currently playing Maxwell, for whom this might make a lot of sense.

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Ornery with saddle swap as Wendy, neutral with saddle swap as Wortox and rider with glossamer as mostly anyone else.

This is incredibly brief and illuminating - thank you!  It's incredibly helpful to say how you play different characters because one size doesn't fit all.

Why Neutral for Wortox instead of same as Wendy?

[Guille6785]

rider with glossamer for me and I wouldn't tame ornery if I was paid to 

[Dextops]

6 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

rider with glossamer for me and I wouldn't tame ornery if I was paid to 

What if I robbed you if you didn’t tame an ornery instead 

[Tranoze]

1 hour ago, Uncrushed said:

What about the training time?  Leaving the Rider where it won't get killed?  What character do you do this as?  Which do you train first?  I'm currently playing Maxwell, for whom this might make a lot of sense.

You can train both at the same time.
For Ornery, all you need is feed 3 steamed twigs per day for 20 days, that 240 twigs. After 18 days, you can start spam attack on boxer for ornery points.

For rider, just ride them as usual and feed what ever you got. You can use steamed twigs for it too. At the very max, 480 total twigs for both.

You only need one saddle at the start for rider, and move it to ornery when you need to get ornery points. Then you can start hunting for war saddle later. Maxwell are very good at farming glossamer saddle with duelist + flower.

If you playing maxwell, he is really good at farming stone fruit and collect twigs using shadow gathering. All you need is dig lots of twigs around the world. Even twiggy tree world, you can collect spiked twigs from desert/oasis (shadow does not take damage), or lunar twigs. 480 total twigs needed for 20 days are not that much, you only need 96 sapling to fill it.
When taming 2 beef, steamed twigs are your best friend.

If you playing on a pub/friend server, you can use my hp bar mod to monitor beef's hunger and obedience. If you hosting your own, having a beefalo status mod help a lot.

[Baark0]

Neutral beefalo is pointless unless you really cant stand feeding one grass/twig before mounting your beefalo, which cant even begin to compete with 16 extra damage. After having tamed a rider beefalo I can honestly say that ornery is just the best tendency, as it's only marginally slower than the rider tendency while outputting 2x the damage. Bonus points if you're playing wendy, as abigails 40% damage increase applies to beefalos, but wendy's -25% damage decrease doesn't, you end up with enough dps to stun dragonfly and get her to drop a scale (assuming you're able to attack cancel correctly)

[Electroely]

1 hour ago, Baark0 said:

Neutral beefalo is pointless unless you really cant stand feeding one grass/twig before mounting your beefalo, which cant even begin to compete with 16 extra damage. After having tamed a rider beefalo I can honestly say that ornery is just the best tendency, as it's only marginally slower than the rider tendency while outputting 2x the damage. Bonus points if you're playing wendy, as abigails 40% damage increase applies to beefalos, but wendy's -25% damage decrease doesn't, you end up with enough dps to stun dragonfly and get her to drop a scale (assuming you're able to attack cancel correctly)

That depends entirely on how you use the beefalo. If you go around fighting bosses with beefalo, sure, you'll want Ornery for that. But if you mainly use it for getting around but want it to be more useful for combat than a Rider beefalo then Default is a perfectly good choice. 50 damage is a good damage number already - for things like spiders, hounds and other common mobs, the difference between War Saddle Ornery and War Saddle Default is little to none. And for those scenarios I don't think the constant grass/twig cost & extra mounting time of the Ornery Beefalo is worth it.

[Baark0]

2 hours ago, Electroely said:

That depends entirely on how you use the beefalo. If you go around fighting bosses with beefalo, sure, you'll want Ornery for that. But if you mainly use it for getting around but want it to be more useful for combat than a Rider beefalo then Default is a perfectly good choice. 50 damage is a good damage number already - for things like spiders, hounds and other common mobs, the difference between War Saddle Ornery and War Saddle Default is little to none. And for those scenarios I don't think the constant grass/twig cost & extra mounting time of the Ornery Beefalo is worth it.

If you use a rider/normal beefalo with war saddle then you're straight up slower than an ornery with a regular saddle, and rider beefalo doesnt reach the 50 damage threshold that is so important for killing smaller mobs in minimal hits, and while you could carry around both saddles, this not only costs you an extra inventory slot (as ornery beefalo can afford to leave war saddles at base, only taking them for boss fights or other combat heavy scenarios), but the time spent swapping saddles is equivalent, if not longer to the time spent feeding an ornery beefalo. Default beefalo are quite literally worse in every single way compared to an ornery beefalo except for minimum obedience, hell even the way you obtain them is more difficult, having to maintain a balance of all 3 tendencies instead of just killing every mob you come across.

[Brago-sama]

I actually love my defauly beefalo. Ornery has more damage but i use my beefalo a lot outside of fighting. Although it is just 1 grass, over time it adds up. Not the grass cost, but the mental cost of having to waste a second or 2 to feed, or to try and get on but you were a bit too slow.

I love my ornery on pubs/other peoples worlds but on my long term worlds? Default for life

[Electroely]

15 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

If you use a rider/normal beefalo with war saddle then you're straight up slower than an ornery with a regular saddle, and rider beefalo doesnt reach the 50 damage threshold that is so important for killing smaller mobs in minimal hits, and while you could carry around both saddles, this not only costs you an extra inventory slot (as ornery beefalo can afford to leave war saddles at base, only taking them for boss fights or other combat heavy scenarios), but the time spent swapping saddles is equivalent, if not longer to the time spent feeding an ornery beefalo. Default beefalo are quite literally worse in every single way compared to an ornery beefalo except for minimum obedience, hell even the way you obtain them is more difficult, having to maintain a balance of all 3 tendencies instead of just killing every mob you come across.

The time spent swapping saddles is only comparable to the time spent feeding the beefalo if you're swapping saddles every time you mount. So it depends on how you play. The way I play involves having the Glossamer Saddle on the vast majority of the time, since the 34 damage is passable for things like Spiders, and swapping it out for the War Saddle when dealing with mobs I know I'm about to fight like Hounds, MacTusk (and his ice hounds), Shadow Creatures, etc...

You're also really overestimating the difference between Ornery and Default tendency beefalo. "worse in every single way" is an overstatement when they've got two functional differences (base damage & minimum obedience) and one difference in obtaining (having to balance categories vs having to fight a lot.) You're also overstating how much more difficult it is to balance the categories - Steamed Twigs are a very easy way to keep high hunger to gain both domestication and Pudgy tendency points. Riding around is something you passively do with the beefalo and fighting is the one thing you need to go out of you way to do. And you do it even more with an ornery beefalo! One isn't any worse than the other, they're just different. One is cheaper in the long-term, the other has higher damage output.

[lowercase skye]

My take on this whole argument above is that once I took off the combat goggles and stopped focusing on numbers and more on how it feels in-game, I realized that a default beefalo's damage is incredibly incredibly satisfactory for 90% of fights even when tanking, and I'd rather have marginally-less-efficient fights over a slow as heck beefalo that I have to feed twigs to every time I dismount to do a single thing. The convenience factor of a default beefalo far outweighs the raw damage of an ornery beefalo.

I should add that I have a lot of experience taming a combo of 1 rider 1 ornery beefalo in previous worlds, and now I just replaced that with a single default one.

[flamboyant wolf]

14 hours ago, Uncrushed said:

 

Why Neutral for Wortox instead of same as Wendy?

Cause as Wortox I mostly want that 34-50 damage for mobs like spiders, hounds, etc, so that I don't have to get off my beefalo to fight them and so I don't have to bother with constantly crafting/getting weapons. While ornery is nice for early 50 dmg, it's not that necessary, as I mostly use beefalo for mobs as Wortox. For bosses it's just easier to utilize souls.

meanwhile on Wendy, fighting on a beefalo is pretty important for me, due to her lower dmg and the way it synergieses with Abigail, so ornery, as annoying as it is to deal with, might very well be worth it. 

In short:

Wortox:

I don't really need dmg higher than what neutral provides, and it's just more convinient to use than ornery. 

Wendy:

I do most of the fighting on a beef, and as such, it is essential to have higher dmg, even if it comes at a price of convinience. 

[abrocator]

I think I have settled on ornery with both saddles with glossamer being the main one. The other saddle is in Chester.

Like many others here I agree that glossamer is best for ornery outside of boss battles. War saddle is much slower, and I don’t really need the damage output.

I also have a rider beefalo with a permanent glossamer. Why did I tame a rider as well? Really only because of the annoying obedience or whatever it’s called that ornery has (one twig per ride). But maybe I should have tamed a default one instead… after reading the replies here.

Between the two, ornery is much more versatile, and I often regret bringing my rider instead of my ornery when I head out of the base. But of course you can use the double beefalo bell trick to use your rider as a taxi while hauling the ornery along to the destination.

[Gashzer]

We all know big Woby is the best beefalo, no saddle needed, no bell needed, she is immortal, no 20-23 days of taming needed, just monster meat that is everywhere.

Combat on beefalos just doesn't compete with the dps and potential tankiness of fighting on foot. So rider with glossamer saddle is the second best beefalo after Woby 

[Gotheran]

I'll use a normal saddle when taming, especially in the early days so if it gets shaken off i don't lose 68 butterflies or 4 steel wool of my personal time. (i may have set hunt surprises to low and only found one ewecus after about 600+ days and finally upping hunt surprises)

I have only used Ornery Beefalo sofar, haven't done much with DST's mechanics since I haven't played in a few years, and as I'm playing Wendy I wanted something that wasn't getting nerfed damage. I would prefer to have a rider for day to day running around but I'm too lazy to tame a second one, so i swap between glossamer or war saddles as the situation demands, gotta move stuff around, glossamer, gotta kick butt, war saddle.

[abrocator]

Both of my beefalos (first the rider (bees) then the ornery (Bee Queen tentacle trap)) died in the span of a year. So I tamed a new beefalo.

Just one beefalo this time since I found out that maintaining two was not worth it.

I was considering a normal beefalo but I changed my mind when I read that it just has the same speed as an ornery.

So I tamed an ornery one with glossamer. This combination is just incredible for me as I mostly play Wickerbottom and Maxwell.

1. Speed is great: you don’t zooom like on a rider+glossamer but the speed is more than enough to get around + to kite
2. Damage output is good for normal mobs
3. Damage output is good enough for bosses
4. If I learned to attack cancel it would be even better
5. I get to be more sloppy in boss battles since I can rely more on my speed

What is annoying about the ornery in my case, I find, is really the stick consumption moreso than the constant feeding to mount. I should really have a better setup at my day count. So I guess the next task will be that. Should make the beefalo lifestyle 30% more pleasant.

[Baark0]

17 minutes ago, abrocator said:

What is annoying about the ornery in my case, I find, is really the stick consumption moreso than the constant feeding to mount. I should really have a better setup at my day count. So I guess the next task will be that. Should make the beefalo lifestyle 30% more pleasant.

Set up a grass gekko farm and ornery beefalo effectively becomes free to use.

[Yuuko]

58 minutes ago, abrocator said:

Both of my beefalos (first the rider (bees) then the ornery (Bee Queen tentacle trap)) died in the span of a year. So I tamed a new beefalo.

Just one beefalo this time since I found out that maintaining two was not worth it.

I was considering a normal beefalo but I changed my mind when I read that it just has the same speed as an ornery.

So I tamed an ornery one with glossamer. This combination is just incredible for me as I mostly play Wickerbottom and Maxwell.

1. Speed is great: you don’t zooom like on a rider+glossamer but the speed is more than enough to get around + to kite
2. Damage output is good for normal mobs
3. Damage output is good enough for bosses
4. If I learned to attack cancel it would be even better
5. I get to be more sloppy in boss battles since I can rely more on my speed

What is annoying about the ornery in my case, I find, is really the stick consumption moreso than the constant feeding to mount. I should really have a better setup at my day count. So I guess the next task will be that. Should make the beefalo lifestyle 30% more pleasant.

You ARE the setup lol how do you not have 100000 sticks and grass as these two?  Book to re-grow, shadow servants to harvest, then you just walk around and cook or w/e until they bring you a stack of each lol