Scaling

[Squidyfoo]

Oh boy another player = boss scaling thread. I was just talking to a friend of mine and they asked me if there was scaling for bosses and farming in thr game and I answered no. That got me thinking about how much time I spend farming in DST.

I actually play the game by myself but in the time I spent playing with my friends I had a blast. There was a lot of possibilities. I remember we would all take turns gathering resources, exploring, and farming. I remember my two friends sailing off while I stayed back farming and they discovered the Lunar isles. Unfair you could say but then later on I got to go with someone to the Waterlogged biome and someone else stayed behind. There was a lot of strategy and fun for us that occured. It also worked out very well and was overall fair. Fighting bosses was also a challenge, but not too hard to the point it felt unfair.

Now I mostly play by myself for one reason. My friends want more direction in DST so that they don't miss out on cool stuff. That's a whole other topic but point is I play by myself now. Whenever I start a world I just find myself farming for half of the time I play, and I never get to explore, and by that time it's Winter making it harder to explore. I also bulk up to fight bosses but die so easily. I'm not a professional DST player, in fact I've never made it far in any of the story arcs, so you could just say skill issue, and while that's kind of true, it seems unfair. I spend so much time farming that it's not fun. The bosses are all too tough for me to tackle by myself. I know this is a multiplayer game and it's encouraged that you do this stuff with friends, but they should still add some sort of balance for loners like me. That's where the widely suggested scaling comes in. Instead of sweeping bosses with 6 players (or more) the health/defense could be adjusted to compensate. Instead of the biggest baddie demolishing one person,  health/defense can be toned down to make it a challenging but fair fight. It can even be expanded for farming in some way so that they have a longer time until they rot and or something else. 

Also, I'm just going to put this here because someone is going to ask... Public servers are cool and all but I want a world that I can grow with and see till either I'm done playing or I die and joining and then coming back and seeing all the progress that happened while I was gone is not my preference.

Now I know there are a lot of threads about this (at least from what I've seen), but the big thing I want to know is why it's not in the game. I'm not like demanding it to be in or anything it's just out of curiosity sake. Would it be too controversial or make the game easier or something? I'm just curious to see what you all think the reason is for not having boss scaling as a feature. Is it something you would want? Is it something you would hate? Do you just think I'm bad? I want to hear all your thoughts.

Spoiler

( Any suggestions for how I can get better would also be appreciated )

 

[ToXic Cur3]

1 hour ago, Squidyfoo said:

Is it something you would want? Is it something you would hate?I want to hear all your thoughts.

The boss scaling is a useful feature as a majority or some games have it which i like it because not only does it help balance out the difficulty but it keeps the player engage to play and i find that to be the point of any game which a person plays, enjoy and learn anyway you like  

also i do not like it as well because its a multiplayer game it cannot always be easy plus it benefits everyone to come up with different ways to approach obstacles instead of relying on the same way that its usually done

1 hour ago, Squidyfoo said:

Do you just think I'm bad?

Dont worry everyone had a interesting learning experience for the first time when they play  you will be fine 

1 hour ago, Squidyfoo said:

( Any suggestions for how I can get better would also be appreciated 

A pigmen can be fed 4 monster meat that can be obtain via killing hounds,spider and other creatures that drops it when you do that they will be turned into a werepig which is enough to craft a hambat-a infinite weapon that does good damage the fresher it is, the less fresh it is the damage goes down with it

Also if a werepig eats any vegetable item like mushrooms,carrots,kelp,light bulbs and more they create a easy supply of poop 

You can rush a alchemy engine in order to make yourself a lantern or miner hat which lightbulbs can be obtain fron skidder squids,in caves,slurper 

Blue mushrooms heals you for 20 hp and losing 15 sanity per bite

Cookes Green mushrooms gives 15 sanity and lose 1 hp, when eating green mushrooms raw you will lose 50 sanity which may sound bad but its not its a easy way to help you farm nightmare creatures

If you want to know more about something or questions you have you can go here theres alot of useful stuff that can help 

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/120919-questions-that-dont-deserve-their-own-thread/

 

[Mike23Ua]

One of the biggest problems with bosses in DST is their Minion Spam, if you have multiple players then you can spread out, one draws boss aggro the other tackles the endless minion spam etc… Eye of Terror is an excellent example of this.

Fighting it Alone you need to kill it quick which while that isn’t hard… it CAN spawn more minions then you can deal with and quickly overwhelm you.

this is a problem that continues to persist through out the game.

DST is designed to be played in 4-6 player groups, so obviously everything is designed with the intention that you at least have one other player to help out.

For boss fights to be more fun solo not only do they need lowered health, but less minion spam would be nice too.

 

[Squidyfoo]

42 minutes ago, ToXic Cur3 said:

also i do not like it as well because its a multiplayer game it cannot always be easy plus it benefits everyone to come up with different ways to approach obstacles instead of relying on the same way that its usually done

That's a thought I had. I suppose there is strategy to be had that depends on how much players you have.

13 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

For boss fights to be more fun solo not only do they need lowered health, but less minion spam would be nice too.

Yeah minion spam is another problem that I forgot to mention. Thank you for bringing it up!

[Popian]

I'd suggest meeting more players in public servers and invite people who you are familiar with and like playing with to join your hosted world, or keep the world with open slots to let others join. You can also try to coordinate with others on the forums, but that may need more filtering to find someone that works with your schedule.

Not all fights have to be dealt with head on with more or less weapons, armor, and healing. It may be more fun and efficient to find other ways of getting the damage and tanking done. If you do want to get better at fighting with gear or aren't sure if your setup will be successful, spawn in everything you might need in a hosted world and practice the fights.

 

As to why there may not be scaling it may be that there's a gross imbalance with the combat capabilities for the cast of characters, and extensive testing would have to be done to make it feel fair, not to mention having to have at least 3 more settings to account for more players. There could be a lazy fix to add a worldgen setting to set raid boss health to specific percentages (40% looks good for solo) but if it does get added there should be one for dampening their attacks as well.

[Wardin25]

Call me crazy, but (Appart from Dragonfly and Bee queen) I think the health bars should increase as more players join the fight. After playing dst for a while and revisiting normal Dont Starve, the boss fights feel incredibly short.

Like, I've traveled through 2 cave systems to find the ruin levels, went through the wilds and whatever the ruin biomes are called, and finally found the Ancient Guardian. And I can kill it in like 2 minutes because it only has 2500 health. Felt kinda underwhelming to me. The higher health pool of the DST version makes the fight more tense and enjoyable

And when Im not playing alone, the bosses also get shredded. I went to fight Celestial Champion with two friends and the fight lasted less than a day (Granted, they were Wolfgang and Wanda, but still)

[ADM]

As some damage taken config has been added, I'd say a boss / minion health one would benefit a lot of struggling players as well, yes.
(and I suppose challenge for who wants more boss HP)

[Evelo]

I wouldn't be opposed to a world setting to toggle health scaling. That way people who want the scaling can have it and those who dont, wont.
There are so many things that could be done by adding a world setting it would make world generation kind of intimidating for newer players, so having some simple and advanced categories would help too.

[lenship2]

honestly i feel like wolfgang/wigfrid are the two characters designed for players like you: wolfgang effectively halves the amount of health all enemies have (so they can be similar to the DS counterparts), and wigfrid has easier survivability while also effectively decreasing enemy health by 25%

[Squidyfoo]

42 minutes ago, Wardin25 said:

Call me crazy, but (Appart from Dragonfly and Bee queen) I think the health bars should increase as more players join the fight. After playing dst for a while and revisiting normal Dont Starve, the boss fights feel incredibly short.

Yeah that's why I think there could be options to toggle bosses. Maybe in the world settings. That way you could increase or decrease health and then there would be a separate setting for player scaling.

49 minutes ago, Popian said:

If you do want to get better at fighting with gear or aren't sure if your setup will be successful, spawn in everything you might need in a hosted world and practice the fights.

I never considered this a possibility. It could help me get ideas for certain bosses. Thanks for the advice!

15 minutes ago, lenship2 said:

honestly i feel like wolfgang/wigfrid are the two characters designed for players like you

I usually just play Wilson except when I play with other people (so basically just Wilson). So I'll give Wolfgang a shot and see how I feel.

[Jandri]

34 minutes ago, lenship2 said:

honestly i feel like wolfgang/wigfrid are the two characters designed for players like you: wolfgang effectively halves the amount of health all enemies have (so they can be similar to the DS counterparts), and wigfrid has easier survivability while also effectively decreasing enemy health by 25%

Wigfrid deal 25% more damage but it means enemies' health is reduced by 20% (25% = 20% of 125%)

Wolfgang deals 100% more damage, but it does not mean enemies' apparent health is reduced by 100%, only 50% (100% = 50% of 200%)

[Nnumber3]

21 minutes ago, lenship2 said:

honestly i feel like wolfgang/wigfrid are the two characters designed for players like you: wolfgang effectively halves the amount of health all enemies have (so they can be similar to the DS counterparts), and wigfrid has easier survivability while also effectively decreasing enemy health by 25%

sooooo I can't use any other characters but them if I want bosses to be fair? how fun, not like there's 15 other characters or anything or that Wolfgang is quite boring.

I think there should be a option in the world settings to have the max player count of the world determine boss health, as with pc up to 12 (max on official servers) players can decimate any boss in the game Easly, they could get a small buff in hp, while smaller servers with newer players have a chance with lower hp.

The minion spam is ludicrous alone for a mid-level player, even for a duo for some bosses, there was a reason for DS to have much lesser health pools, as if your not playing wolfgang your dps is much lower without friends, = less damage

And some tips?

the above tips are great, and here's my input: you don't have to farm that much. you can survive off forage for a while and kill things like koalphants, spiders, werepigs, etc. since the forage is tuned for Mutiple players, you would have much more food than normal. I personally never even make a farm till around spring unless I'm wormwood, only exception are the basic resource farms, about 40 each should suffice and not take too long to shovel. (Twigs, grass, MABYE berrys)

For characters, as you play wilson a lot, trying to not generalize but Wilson main players seem to have trouble committing to a choice and pick wilson as he is a jack of all trades. I would just pick random, see what you get, think of how you feel about the character, and if you don't like it make a new world and pick a random again, or rollback if you want to keep the world as it takes you back to character choice. What I do when I'm not sure what character to commit to.

I always practice my boss fights in a practice cheat world, like @Popian said.

Hope everything goes well! 

[Jandri]

If you keep moving, searching for food, hunting, you don't need to farm. If you go from time to time in a spider forest to farm spiders, you don't really need nothing more than a crockpot and a birdcage in this biome, maybe a firepit, a fridge and a chest with the resources that are hard to find there like grass. Or if you built something in the birchnut biome maybe you could avoid staying there during winter since it will not give birchnuts anymore.

The garden digamajig lets you dig 4 farm tiles, you could have 2 tiles in some place and 1 tile in 2 other places for example. 4 tiles are a pain to take care of anyway and you will always find seeds here and there you can just plant and let grow on their own when you are somewhere else.

[Antynomity]

I think boss health should scale a little bit, but minion health needs to scale properly and should make a huge difference.

[Yuuko]

6 hours ago, Squidyfoo said:

Now I mostly play by myself for one reason. Whenever I start a world I just find myself farming for half of the time I play, and I never get to explore, and by that time it's Winter making it harder to explore. I also bulk up to fight bosses but die so easily.

Eh, don't farm early.  Its a trap.  Farming is great if you have multiple players on the server but if you're solo you should prioritize exploring and gathering key resources before you ever till a plot.  Save farms for after you've established where everything you'll need is.

That was one of the big turning points for me playing Warly.  When I first picked up Warly I was looking at using his spices (gardening) and dish variety (more gardening) but it was rough.  Everything clicked when I finally ditched gardening, and instead set up a volt goat farm for horns and a hive for honey.  These were pretty easy to do after exploring the top side and then I had all the Volt Goat Chaud Froid I needed to turn the tables on combat.  (I also tamed a beefalo during this time.)

As for bosses well, there are a lot of cheese methods you can do.  Some people like to whine about the cheese, but tbh I think its more fun to be a bit creative in dealing with a boss rather than trying to drag the game into the mud.  Plenty of people defeat the bosses solo without being professional DST players lol  You can to, it just takes some practice.  I use rollbacks a lot when I'm learning a boss.  Setting up the things I feel I need for it, and then roll back and repeat it multiple times from that point.  Win or lose, I just roll back and redo it to learn the fight better.  It helps to know how much armor, healing and weapons are needed for a fight so you can be confident going in.  You usually don't need whole stacks of healing foods and a mess of armor on the floor, but even if you start there just do it, do it and go fight, and as you improve you'll need less and less.

[Squidyfoo]

6 hours ago, Shosuko said:

Eh, don't farm early.  Its a trap.  Farming is great if you have multiple players on the server but if you're solo you should prioritize exploring and gathering key resources before you ever till a plot.  Save farms for after you've established where everything you'll need is.

This is very helpful. I suppose the only reason I was farming was because I did in multiplayer.

Also I don't know if it counts as cheese but I beat Bee Queen with followers and Klaus with followers as well. Those were my biggest accomplishments in this game to be honest, so I can definitely try different things for other bosses. Thanks for the advice!

[Wardin25]

13 minutes ago, Squidyfoo said:

Also I don't know if it counts as cheese but I beat Bee Queen with followers and Klaus with followers as well. Those were my biggest accomplishments in this game to be honest, so I can definitely try different things for other bosses. Thanks for the advice!

Honestly, beating Klaus with followers is the opposite of cheesing... Whats the opposite of cheese? Yogurt?

[Milordo]

6 hours ago, Wardin25 said:

Honestly, beating Klaus with followers is the opposite of cheesing... Whats the opposite of cheese? Yogurt?

Yum, Yogurt!

[goatt]

Most raid bosses take less than 15 min or 2 days to defeat (example: dfly, ancient gardian, klaus, shadow bosses, malba). 10 min is not too much for a boss.

So I think the current boss difficulty is not too hard. It doesn't need to be scale down. On the contrary, I think the bosses' hp should scale up a little if more players are in the fight, and also increase the boss loot drop amount at the same time. Bosses usually melt too fast and the loot is too little for all the participants.

[bloopah]

9 minutes ago, goatt said:

Most raid bosses take less than 15 min or 2 days to defeat (example: dfly, ancient gardian, klaus, shadow bosses, malba). 10 min is not too much for a boss.

So I think the current boss difficulty is not too hard. It doesn't need to be scale down. On the contrary, I think the bosses' hp should scale up a little if more players are in the fight, and also increase the boss loot drop amount at the same time. Bosses usually melt too fast and the loot is too little for all the participants.

People consider 10 minutes for a single boss "not too much"? Either that's not true at all or I'm getting really out of touch. And Malbatross is a raid boss??

[Mike23Ua]

48 minutes ago, goatt said:

Most raid bosses take less than 15 min or 2 days to defeat (example: dfly, ancient gardian, klaus, shadow bosses, malba). 10 min is not too much for a boss.

So I think the current boss difficulty is not too hard. It doesn't need to be scale down. On the contrary, I think the bosses' hp should scale up a little if more players are in the fight, and also increase the boss loot drop amount at the same time. Bosses usually melt too fast and the loot is too little for all the participants.

I mean.. it’s not our fault that dst doesn’t have some super super late game Duplication staff or something.. as many wacky items as this game has, and I can’t take a staff and copy boss loot for other players without having to wait 20 days for bosses cooldown timer to expire to fight them again..?

I remember back when Don’t Starve made its Name off of world exploration and puzzle solving, not endless optional boss fights.. And I don’t understand WHY so many players expect every… single… update.. to include a new boss fight.

Thats not what got me into DS, and shouldn’t be the focal point of DST.

[goatt]

54 minutes ago, bloopah said:

People consider 10 minutes for a single boss "not too much"? Either that's not true at all or I'm getting really out of touch. And Malbatross is a raid boss??

Ok let me tone it down. I think, ok. I think 10 min is not too much. And I'm basing my opinions on what the game offers, not based on my experience in other games such as WoW or my own preference.

And you are not out of touch either. It's just your prefrence.

[BendingUnit647]

I don't think the base boss health is the most important factor, except, yeah, some of the fights take a long time solo and in that time lots of things can go wrong (rain, hounds, etc).  But if you are making progress and have armor and healing, you're going to win.

For solo, I find the boss healing to be the most frustrating to overcome.  Some bosses can erase all your gains and then some with enormous amounts of healing. The most popular strategy to counter this seems to be using a Weather Pain, but as a controller player you're lucky if you can even get the Use Gadget prompt to come up, let alone the fact it can't be targetted at range.  So, I recently fought Crab King and scaled his healing down to 100 per rock.  It was still a very challenging fight with all the same mechanics and no rage quits.

I agree too on the minion spam being hard for solo.  I walled off three of the five lava pools and that turned the Dragonfly fight into something manageable without totally erasing the character of the fight.  Nobody wants to stand in a wall box and tank it out.  This gave me a few larvae I could freeze without being overwhelmed.

Scaling the healing and minion count seems like something that could be done dynamically based on how many players are in proximity during that round of the fight.

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, BendingUnit647 said:

For solo, I find the boss healing to be the most frustrating to overcome. 

Scaling the healing and minion count seems like something that could be done dynamically based on how many players are in proximity during that round of the fight.

I think Klei should just avoid healing as a mechanic entirely.  Its just a bad loop for a game where you're already on resource restrictions.  1 bad heal and you might literally not have the damage to finish the fight.  You're already restricted by needing to prepare and bring these things, horrible that healing can undo so much.  Especially since we don't have health tickers in the game.  Sure there are mods for it, but that's besides the point.  We don't have health bars for bosses so there is no way of knowing just how much they've healed, or to even realize they are healing in the moment as a player just playing the game...

imo they should remove boss healing completely.

[Popian]

5 hours ago, Shosuko said:

I think Klei should just avoid healing as a mechanic entirely.

I know this is more about healing being a bit too punishing if you don't counter it for Ancient Fuelweaver and Crab King, but Klaus and Nightmare Werepig use healing in a good way.