Strident Trident Rework

[Baark0]

@chirsgsaid I was obligated to turn this comment in the ocean feedback thread into it's own thing, so here it is.

We all know Crab King and his loot sucks, and despite how plentiful gems are, they don't really have that many uses outside of purple and green gems. The goal of this rework is to not only provide unique and interesting uses for the gems, but to also make Crab King a boss you should want to fight and be excited about getting his loot. 

The default trident should have it's ocean based damage removed and instead be given a flat amount of damage, 51 makes sense since this requires crab king in order to be defeated, but an option I'm much more fond of is having 35-40 damage, increasing to say 59.5 when you have a gem socketed in it. Speaking of gems, each one would have their own effects. Each gem should have at least 150 uses of durability. Gems can be removed at will, but will shatter if missing even a single point of durability, or they can be directly swapped out with another gem, having the same shatter effect.

Red gem - Something fire related seems obvious, however red gems also have the power of revival, so healing isn't off the table either. Due to the impracticality of fire during combat I'm going to lean towards healing, and since the bat bat already has the niche of healing on hit, I'm thinking healing on enemy kill would be interesting. 

Revision: chirsg suggested that red gems could heal creatures with a right click ability. I'd have to disagree, simply for the fact that it'd feel out of place having the red gem be the only one with a right click ability, and while I could think up abilities for each gem, I honestly think it's fine leaving the trident with just the geyser ability. 

Blue gem - Freezing enemies is obvious, but instead of rendering them immobile I think slowing their movement speed and/or attack speed is more unique, allowing you to effectively increase your dps as you're able to get more hits in.

Purple gem - Could summon a terrorclaw claw, but that feels a little too similar to the thulecite club, so instead maybe it could poison the creature it's being used against with nightmare fuel, dealing ramping damage over time, making it great for bosses with large health pools. 

Green gem - Could cause enemies to drop rarer items more frequently, but there's a shockingly low amount of rare drops in this game, the krampus sack being more or less the only notable one, so causing enemies to drop extra items seems more useful. 

Yellow gem - Produces a small area of light (similar to a very hot thermal stone) around the player, which grows and eventually remains even if the player isn't holding the trident while attacking enemies, eventually rivaling the lantern in terms of light. A bit redundant perhaps, since having yellow gems usually means you could instead make star caller staves and use those for light, however those are stationary while the trident is portable, plus they cost 2 gems instead of one.

Orange gem - Provides the player with a shield that blocks all damage from one attack every few seconds, as long as you avoid getting hit. Would instead have 15 uses per orange gem, however an argument for 10 uses could be made considering how little use orange gems have, especially due to the refuelability of the lazy forager.

Iridescent gem - Instead provides 72.25 damage (equivalent to the morning star vs a wet target). Removes the sanity auras of enemies (note: would not reverse auras like bee queen crown). At first I thought 300 uses would be appropriate due to the little amount of time available to convert star caller staves into moon caller staves, however the moonstorm throws a wrench in that idea completely. I personally would prefer if the moonstone event would be disabled while moonstorms are occuring, allowing the 300 durability to work fine, as balancing this rare gem around a fairly late game event where you can consistently get 2 gems a night would take away from the feeling of this gem being extra special and powerful.

Revision: The void robe now provides immunity to insanity auras making this more or less redundant. Sure it's not inherently bad having 2 items that do the same thing, but considering the original intention was to make the Iridescent gem feel extra special. The first idea I had was to let the player gain 1 sanity every few hits, but that's not particularly interesting. A much more interesting ability would be to revive creatures killed within a few seconds of being hit by a Iridescent gemmed trident and have them fight for you for a short duration.

[Nnumber3]

6 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

@chirsgsaid I was obligated to turn this comment in the ocean feedback thread into it's own thing, so here it is.

We all know Crab King and his loot sucks, and despite how plentiful gems are, they don't really have that many uses outside of purple and green gems. The goal of this rework is to not only provide unique and interesting uses for the gems, but to also make Crab King a boss you should want to fight and be excited about getting his loot. 

The default trident should have it's ocean based damage removed and instead be given a flat amount of damage, 51 makes sense since this requires crab king in order to be defeated, but an option I'm much more fond of is having 35-40 damage, increasing to say 59.5 when you have a gem socketed in it. Speaking of gems, each one would have their own effects. Each gem should have at least 150 uses of durability. Gems can be removed at will, but will shatter if missing even a single point of durability, or they can be directly swapped out with another gem, having the same shatter effect.

Red gem - Something fire related seems obvious, however red gems also have the power of revival, so healing isn't off the table either. Due to the impracticality of fire during combat I'm going to lean towards healing, and since the bat bat already has the niche of healing on hit, I'm thinking healing on enemy kill would be interesting. 

Revision: chirsg suggested that red gems could heal creatures with a right click ability. I'd have to disagree, simply for the fact that it'd feel out of place having the red gem be the only one with a right click ability, and while I could think up abilities for each gem, I honestly think it's fine leaving the trident with just the geyser ability. 

Blue gem - Freezing enemies is obvious, but instead of rendering them immobile I think slowing their movement speed and/or attack speed is more unique, allowing you to effectively increase your dps as you're able to get more hits in.

Purple gem - Could summon a terrorclaw claw, but that feels a little too similar to the thulecite club, so instead maybe it could poison the creature it's being used against with nightmare fuel, dealing ramping damage over time, making it great for bosses with large health pools. 

Green gem - Could cause enemies to drop rarer items more frequently, but there's a shockingly low amount of rare drops in this game, the krampus sack being more or less the only notable one, so causing enemies to drop extra items seems more useful. 

Yellow gem - Produces a small area of light (similar to a very hot thermal stone) around the player, which grows and eventually remains even if the player isn't holding the trident while attacking enemies, eventually rivaling the lantern in terms of light. A bit redundant perhaps, since having yellow gems usually means you could instead make star caller staves and use those for light, however those are stationary while the trident is portable, plus they cost 2 gems instead of one.

Orange gem - Provides the player with a shield that blocks all damage from one attack every few seconds, as long as you avoid getting hit. Would instead have 15 uses per orange gem, however an argument for 10 uses could be made considering how little use orange gems have, especially due to the refuelability of the lazy forager.

Iridescent gem - Instead provides 72.25 damage (equivalent to the morning star vs a wet target). Removes the sanity auras of enemies (note: would not reverse auras like bee queen crown). At first I thought 300 uses would be appropriate due to the little amount of time available to convert star caller staves into moon caller staves, however the moonstorm throws a wrench in that idea completely. I personally would prefer if the moonstone event would be disabled while moonstorms are occuring, allowing the 300 durability to work fine, as balancing this rare gem around a fairly late game event where you can consistently get 2 gems a night would take away from the feeling of this gem being extra special and powerful.

Revision: The void robe now provides immunity to insanity auras making this more or less redundant. Sure it's not inherently bad having 2 items that do the same thing, but considering the original intention was to make the Iridescent gem feel extra special. The first idea I had was to let the player gain 1 sanity every few hits, but that's not particularly interesting. A much more interesting ability would be to revive creatures killed within a few seconds of being hit by a Iridescent gemmed trident and have them fight for you for a short duration.

I think that fire could work for the red gem, the problem is A: you're at sea and your boat is flammable and B: the enemies are in the sea. but i have a solution for both of those problems: instead of normal fire, it could use a green colored Greek fire, known for burning when its touch's water, and won't damage the welder. 

The Blue gem effect seems pretty cool (not sorry) and sounds useful against anything.

The purple gem summoning a terror claw sounds nice but im guessing it would only spawn in the water, limiting its uses. the ramping damage sounds balanced depending on how high it, and do you mean ramping as in how many hits it gets the more damage it does or you hitting with the effect ramping your own damage?

Green gem sounds like a god send so i don't have to farm hours for enough volt goat horns for the 1056th Weather pain for a boss fight. kind of reminds me of a Warly skill tree post that allows him to get more food related items with a butcher knife.

Yellow gem seems a bit underwhelming as you could just drop a lantern to so the same thing, and the stars radius is HUGE so seems to be the worse 1 so far. maybe it should make your running speed faster while holding it? like faster than a walking cane slightly but you know, has durably in is attack usefulness. also, the star caller staff has 20 uses, lasting 3 and 1/2 days long, so it the staff last about 70 days until it breaks if you use it once every 3 and 1/2 days, and the trident with gem lasts 150 attacks each, 2 gems equal 300 uses, making the staff is better in the long run.

Orange gems sound a bit OP. like a more expensive bone armor, but as people tend to hoard their orange gems as there not used much, they would have like 60 uses, whitch is insane, or on the lower end around 40-30. maybe give it like a 30 second cooldown so its not like bone armor too much, just gives you some le way if you get hit.

Iridescent gem: damage is pretty good! i think 300 uses are fine as your trading 2 yellow gems for 1 iridescent. what are the limitations for the reanimation ability? like does it only effect enemy's that have a lunar equivalent? or does it affect all enemies except bosses, because if it did i can hear the artists in pain making new sprites for every enemy in the game distant enough so you know they are on your side. I don't see the sanity aura immunity as redundant as you get it before the robe, that's like saying all rain gear is redundant because the eyebrella exist, there should be options.

i agree with the damage and gem shattering, i don't think you should be able to insert an iridescent gem in it before you get the astral detector though, as i can see someone rushing crab king, getting trident, go down to archives, take all the gems for your tridents and use once, and break them. don't think it would be too intrusive as people normally use the astral detector to find crab king.

Your idea is great and after a little tuning should be perfect!

The idea is Great! just a little tuning and it will be perfect. 

 

[lenship2]

i think the effects should be based on the effects crab king gets:

red gems increase his health, so having a health on kill would be in theme, though maybe have the healing scale depending on the health of the creature?

blue gems increase his freezing, but the idea of more consistently slowing an enemy instead of outright freezing them sounds not only fitting but also fun

yellow gems increase his casting times for both his spells, so maybe a faster attack speed would be good albeit with slightly lower damage

orange gems increase his healing, but also are used for all the 'lazy' items, so some sort of lazy healer would probably work better- maybe when active have it give a salt effect to every source of healing you can get?

green gems make his imposing claws stronger, but honestly having an item that can increase drop chances is so much more appealing than another debuff weapon

purple increases his geysers, so i think it should give the stock strident trident water abilities it has right now, keeping it good against the very few deadly water enemies there are

iridescent increases everything so obviously it should have the most op of all the gems, having it increase the damage would be fitting, but maybe have it do some sort of more thematic ability like a right click thrust aoe attack or just making it outright throwable

pearls pearl gives it every single ability at once and lasts infinitely but needs to be refueled with fish or something idk

[Mysterious box]

1 hour ago, lenship2 said:

yellow gems increase his casting times for both his spells, so maybe a faster attack speed would be good albeit with slightly lower damage

I think a better choice for this would be increased crafting speed while holding it. I imagine it would be amazing for big crafting tasks and even better if you stack it with Winona.

[Baark0]

3 hours ago, Nnumber3 said:

I think that fire could work for the red gem, the problem is A: you're at sea and your boat is flammable and B: the enemies are in the sea. but i have a solution for both of those problems: instead of normal fire, it could use a green colored Greek fire, known for burning when its touch's water, and won't damage the welder. 

The Blue gem effect seems pretty cool (not sorry) and sounds useful against anything.

The purple gem summoning a terror claw sounds nice but im guessing it would only spawn in the water, limiting its uses. the ramping damage sounds balanced depending on how high it, and do you mean ramping as in how many hits it gets the more damage it does or you hitting with the effect ramping your own damage?

Green gem sounds like a god send so i don't have to farm hours for enough volt goat horns for the 1056th Weather pain for a boss fight. kind of reminds me of a Warly skill tree post that allows him to get more food related items with a butcher knife.

Yellow gem seems a bit underwhelming as you could just drop a lantern to so the same thing, and the stars radius is HUGE so seems to be the worse 1 so far. maybe it should make your running speed faster while holding it? like faster than a walking cane slightly but you know, has durably in is attack usefulness. also, the star caller staff has 20 uses, lasting 3 and 1/2 days long, so it the staff last about 70 days until it breaks if you use it once every 3 and 1/2 days, and the trident with gem lasts 150 attacks each, 2 gems equal 300 uses, making the staff is better in the long run.

Orange gems sound a bit OP. like a more expensive bone armor, but as people tend to hoard their orange gems as there not used much, they would have like 60 uses, whitch is insane, or on the lower end around 40-30. maybe give it like a 30 second cooldown so its not like bone armor too much, just gives you some le way if you get hit.

Iridescent gem: damage is pretty good! i think 300 uses are fine as your trading 2 yellow gems for 1 iridescent. what are the limitations for the reanimation ability? like does it only effect enemy's that have a lunar equivalent? or does it affect all enemies except bosses, because if it did i can hear the artists in pain making new sprites for every enemy in the game distant enough so you know they are on your side. I don't see the sanity aura immunity as redundant as you get it before the robe, that's like saying all rain gear is redundant because the eyebrella exist, there should be options.

i agree with the damage and gem shattering, i don't think you should be able to insert an iridescent gem in it before you get the astral detector though, as i can see someone rushing crab king, getting trident, go down to archives, take all the gems for your tridents and use once, and break them. don't think it would be too intrusive as people normally use the astral detector to find crab king.

Your idea is great and after a little tuning should be perfect!

The idea is Great! just a little tuning and it will be perfect. 

 

What I mean by ramping damage is the damage increases the longer the target is affected by the debuff. So if say dragonfly is afflicted by the debuff for 10 seconds then she'd take 50 damage, but if she's afflicted for 20 seconds she'd take 150. 

I was kinda stumped on what to do with yellow gems, I tried to avoid simple stat changes (such as speed) because it's not that interesting. Maybe something to do with electric damage?

Not sure if you don't understand orange gems, but when I say it has 10 uses, I mean each orange gem can block 10 hits before breaking. The cooldown could be 2x that of bone armor.

I considered adding a little tidbit about how the reanimate just give the enemy a light blue overlay but didn't think anyone would actually pick up on the artists struggling to do that, but yeah doing special lunar art for every mob sounds terrible. As for limitations, I was thinking that shadow and lunar creatures would be immune to the effect.

I really don't think people stealing the iridescent gems from the archives would be an issue, if any world where people bother to fight crab king they usually have already ventured to the archives so that they can locate him. A simple solution though would be to just remove the option of removing iridescent gems after they're inserted, but again this really doesn't seem that problematic.

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

I think a better choice for this would be increased crafting speed while holding it. I imagine it would be amazing for big crafting tasks and even better if you stack it with Winona.

No disrespect, but this just sounds boring. Not a bad ability, but considering the goal was to make the trident a powerful late game weapon with plenty of uses, having one of it's 7 perks being unrelated to combat doesn't interest me.

[Nnumber3]

1 hour ago, Baark0 said:

What I mean by ramping damage is the damage increases the longer the target is affected by the debuff. So if say dragonfly is afflicted by the debuff for 10 seconds then she'd take 50 damage, but if she's afflicted for 20 seconds she'd take 150. 

I was kinda stumped on what to do with yellow gems, I tried to avoid simple stat changes (such as speed) because it's not that interesting. Maybe something to do with electric damage?

Not sure if you don't understand orange gems, but when I say it has 10 uses, I mean each orange gem can block 10 hits before breaking. The cooldown could be 2x that of bone armor.

I considered adding a little tidbit about how the reanimate just give the enemy a light blue overlay but didn't think anyone would actually pick up on the artists struggling to do that, but yeah doing special lunar art for every mob sounds terrible. As for limitations, I was thinking that shadow and lunar creatures would be immune to the effect.

I really don't think people stealing the iridescent gems from the archives would be an issue, if any world where people bother to fight crab king they usually have already ventured to the archives so that they can locate him. A simple solution though would be to just remove the option of removing iridescent gems after they're inserted, but again this really doesn't seem that problematic.

No disrespect, but this just sounds boring. Not a bad ability, but considering the goal was to make the trident a powerful late game weapon with plenty of uses, having one of it's 7 perks being unrelated to combat doesn't interest me.

Ty for the Clarification for the ramping damage, I get that you want to avoid stat changes, so how about making you immune to wetness while holding it and makes enemy's wet, so you won't need rain for your morning star or electric jelly, maybe some electric damage? I thought I got how the orange gems worked, nice nerf, as in your first post it was only a few seconds. tanking 10 hits for each, and as there's not much to invest your orange gems in, and you get about 3-6 during your ruins rush depending on luck. so about 30-60 uses for 1 ruins rush. with the cooldown nerf it seems balanced now. The first thing i thought when i heard of the reanimating thing was it would be simple like that, just making sure. On second thought, yeah, the archives thing won't be an issue, as wickerbottem book exists and the whole astral detector thing, also griefers are far too lazy for that. yeah, it was kind of boring, no disrespect taken, mine and box man.

[GreenBowers]

I find myself having whiplash because ive thought about making the trident into a gem socketed casting weapon before and this post lined up quite a lot with my own thoughts.

 

Making the trident a powerful magic weapon would make crab king all the more appealing to fight, and being able to slot in gems for different abilities is really neat. 

 

Initially I thought more on some kind of special craft of turning the gems into pearls before loading them in, and giving them durability so someone could swap them between uses. 

 

I do think it would be neat if the gem inserted changed the geyser ability into something else. Like purple being a lightning strike, since lightning is involved in teleportation, red and blue being similar to klaus's deer spells, ect. Tbh, anything changing the trident is probably a good decision. I do agree that yellow being just a light option is a little lacking though, the speed would be neat