Stats on equipment are pretty crazy if you think about it

[Wonz]

1. Initial Equipment and Their Effects:

• Spear: Deals 340% of your base damage.
• Log Suit: Reduces incoming damage by 80%.
• Pierogi: When combined with a Log Suit, it provides an extra 200 health, making the maximum health of 75 not much different from 200. Having 5 Pierogi raises your health to 1075 or 1200 health, with little difference.
   

You don't see that drastic values in games often especially the armor.  

 

2.Importance of Equipment might be too high:

With just the basic equipment mentioned above, players can effectively clear most content.

 

3.Conclusion about character state:

• Characters are weak individually.
• Equipment changes that massively.

 

4.Proposal for Equipment and enemy Changes:

• Reduce equipment damage reduction values for example 20%, and also reduce enemy attack strength by a lot.
• This would make players sturdier, resulting in losing about as much health as before the changes.
  • This lowers the bar for inexperienced players. 
  • With the change in point 6. below makes the game harder for veterans The people who know how to find tons of healing
     

 

5.Introducing Equipment with Other Stats:

• Lower damage reduction allows for introducing equipment with additional stats like movement speed during combat or trading 20% damage reduction for a 10% damage increase. This adds risk and reward choices for players.

6.Valuing Health Points:

• Add an overeating effect that makes healing less effective when eating in quick succession or when missing a lot of hunger. This prevents players from excessively healing with food.
  • Now that enemies hit weaker you don't need to bring as much healing as before but also you can't heal much making bad performance not forgivable by amount of food you've taken.  
• Apply a health penalty for eating rot to prevent bypassing the healing limitations.

7.Balancing Head and Body Equipment:

• If damage reduction values are lowered, consider allowing head and body equipment stats to combine.
• Implement diminishing returns to avoid excessively high values on a single stat. For example, a helmet with 20% damage reduction and body armor with 20% damage reduction combined would not result in 40%, but rather 30%. The first item's stat is applied normally, while the same/weaker's item's identical stat is reduced by 50%.

8.Encouraging Mix-and-Match Equipment:

• Implement the diminishing returns to encourage players to mix and match equipment with different stats instead of stacking the same stat excessively.
• Let's say 20% damage reduction will be as valued as 10% damage increase and that exist variants of both stats for helmet and armor then your options are:
  • 30% damage reduction (Both pieces with 20% DEF) Forgiving Option for newbies, learning
  • 20% damage reduction and 10% attack increase (20% DEF piece + 10% ATK piece) Balanced option
  • 15% damage increase (10% ATK ) Veterans gonna speedrun

 

Weapons, monster health values would probably need some treatment too after all this above but that's already long post.

Also I hope you get my image of why I think don't starve equipment approximating 100% damage reduction is limiting some cool possible stuff as alternate stats.