A dragonfly rework idea

[Sacco]

Hi, i've always seen the dfly fight as one of the most boring one.

neither challenging or mechanically interesting, 9 times out of 10 you'll put some walls to stop the larvae and the fight is just a "attack 6 times and dodge, repeat the process until dfly enrages and put her asleep".

All of my fights against dfly consist in me counting to 6 hits and then dodge, for like 1 or 2 consecutive minutes.

I tried to do her without walls, and i managed to kill her, but what's the point in doing so if you can just get a free kill on her with walls?

so i came up with a rework to the boss fight which aims to fix the boring and not mechanically interesting fight.

First of all i thought about adding a new attack to dfly, which is totally random.

Sometimes she'll perform a new attack, smashing her two paws on the ground, dealing increased damage, slightly moving forward like the armored bearger swipe attack, leaving a small crater (like the werepig one) and dealing knockback to you, it will also deal some aoe damage.

Before performing this attack she'll raise up her paws for a brief period, giving the player the time to dodge the attack by moving towards the boss or just getting as far as possible from her.

This attack gives some flavor to the fight, interrupting the boring kiting pattern.

Now, the larvae.

My change suggested is to lower their health to 375 and also lower their "ice staff resistence" from 3 to 2 hits, but they now jump over walls, and if there is more than one layer of walls they'll start attacking them, or maybe like UM when they explode they deal damage to them.

It sounds controversial, obviously, but it's my opinion.

Now i'd like to talk about some changes to dfly's phases.

When she has 80%, 50% and 30% health she will go to her ponds to spawn 5, 7 and 9 larvae corresponding to her remaining health.

She will ALWAYS enrage when the last larvae dies, but you can still put her asleep/freeze her to stop the enrage phase.

Now, when she has less than 2000 hp she will enrage, but now you can't put her to sleep nor freeze her, so you have to fight the boss enraged until she dies or you die.

This is meant to make the fight more immersive, by giving the idea to the player that the boss knows she's going to die and so she tries to do everything to kill you, and alongside to the fixed spawn of larvae at certain health it also gives somehow an idea of the total remaining health.

I don't think this would make the fight harder by any means, and alongside the boss rework maybe some changes to her loot could be made too.

Feel free to share your opinions!

 

 

[grm9]

better to leave it as it is because trying to make the process of fighting itself fun by adding more attacks doesn't work because of multiplayer, lag, how hard it is to make a boss that's hard enough to not be boring, while trying to remove all strategies other than using a ham bat and one or two helms for errors will leave nothing fun, since many strats was the fun part of ANR bosses 

5 minutes ago, Sacco said:

what's the point in doing so if you can just get a free kill on her with walls?

fun? you can fight enraged dfly without flute too if you want the fight to be more interesting, do you need the game to force you into having fun even though you can do that on your own already?

[Sacco]

1 minute ago, grm9 said:

better to leave it as it is because trying to make the process of fighting itself fun by adding more attacks doesn't work because of multiplayer, lag, how hard it is to make a boss that's hard enough to not be boring, while trying to remove all strategies other than using a ham bat and one or two helms for errors will leave nothing fun, since many strats was the fun part of ANR bosses 

fun? you can fight enraged dfly without flute too if you want the fight to be more interesting, do you need the game to force you into having fun even though you can do that on your own already?

do you find hard hitting an enemy 6 times and dodging for like, 8 minutes?!

i don't.

i know that i can force dfly to stay enraged to make the fight more challenging, but as i said before you can do it if you want a challenge, but there's literally no point in doings so, you are just creating a problem to yourself.

removing the wall strategy would be the only "strategy" i'd remove with this change.

i don't even think this can be considered a strategy, it doesn't require any effort from the player except from collecting some rocks, which literally spawn near the boss arena.

[arubaro]

17 minutes ago, Sacco said:

what's the point

Making her slightly less boring, having fun is the point of playing a videogame

 

I would make her have fire attacks that we can telegraph like sand spikes from Antlion or CC's lasers

[grm9]

2 minutes ago, Sacco said:

do you find hard hitting an enemy 6 times and dodging for like, 8 minutes?!

that's the point, almost all bosses aren't hard if you fight them using all mechanics and all items that are available in the game

4 minutes ago, Sacco said:

but there's literally no point in doings so

fun?

4 minutes ago, Sacco said:

i don't even think this can be considered a strategy, it doesn't require any effort from the player except from collecting some rocks, which literally spawn near the boss arena

a strategy doesn't need to be hard to be a strategy, that's why tanking is a thing, you can say "approach" or "method" instead if you want 

[Sacco]

1 minute ago, arubaro said:

Making her slightly less boring, having fun is the point of playing a videogame

that's what i was trying to accomplish, making the fight funnier and more challenging but not that much harder

1 minute ago, grm9 said:

that's the point, almost all bosses aren't hard if you fight them using all mechanics and all items that are available in the game

fun?

a strategy doesn't need to be hard to be a strategy, that's why tanking is a thing, you can say "approach" or "method" instead if you want 

dfly isn't hard because you can fight her with end game gears, it's so stupid and boring because the fight is just about pressing a button and hitting her 6 times and dodging for minutes.

yes, making her enraged is for fun, but that's it.

in a normal run you don't want to make her harder just for the sake of it.

i consider the wall method a cheese, but i didn't want to use that term.

[grm9]

3 minutes ago, Sacco said:

dfly isn't hard because you can fight her with end game gears

i meant restricting yourself beyond fighting a boss before fighting another boss, e.g. not using flute despite being able to

3 minutes ago, Sacco said:

in a normal run you don't want to make her harder just for the sake of it

in a normal run you wouldn't want to pick wes, should wes be deleted and never thought about in any conversation then?

6 minutes ago, Sacco said:

i consider the wall method a cheese, but i didn't want to use that term

walls preventing enemies from passing through them is cheese?

[Sacco]

1 minute ago, grm9 said:

i meant restricting yourself beyond fighting a boss before fighting another boss, e.g. not using flute despite being able to

in a normal run you wouldn't want to pick wes, should wes be deleted and never thought about in any conversation then?

walls preventing enemies from passing through them is cheese?

wes is meant to be the challenge character, almost all runs with him are meant to be some kind of a challenge.

walls are meant to slow down enemies, not to stop them,they have health indeed, so i think larvae should be able to damage them.

[grm9]

11 minutes ago, Sacco said:

wes is meant to be the challenge character, almost all runs with him are meant to be some kind of a challenge

but if a challenge character that's worse than almost all other characters is fine, why is a challenge strat that's worse than almost all other ones but is harder and is more fun not considered for this?

11 minutes ago, Sacco said:

walls are meant to slow down enemies, not to stop them,they have health indeed, so i think larvae should be able to damage them

then you'd just need to get more rocks if you want to use the wall strat and that's it, won't bring more fun   

[Sacco]

3 minutes ago, grm9 said:

but if a challenge character that's worse than almost all other characters is fine, why is a challenge strat that's worse than almost all other ones but is harder and is more fun not considered for this?

then you'd just need to get more rocks if you want to use the wall strat and that's it, won't bring more fun   

it seems like you are saying "if you find the game easy make it artificially harder" and that's a bad design in my opinion, referring to dfly case.

without walls she is so tedious to fight, without pan flute she is pretty hard too.

in this strat you won't be able to use walls at all, yes technically you can craft like 10 rings of walls to sorround the ponds, but it takes less effort to kill the larvae at that point.

[grm9]

20 minutes ago, Sacco said:

in this strat you won't be able to use walls at all, yes technically you can craft like 10 rings of walls to sorround the ponds.

that depends on if they'll get unlimited attack speed when attacking walls like moonstone hounds & werepigs, since if they won't, you won't need that much

20 minutes ago, Sacco said:

it seems like you are saying "if you find the game easy make it artificially harder" and that's a bad design in my opinion, referring to dfly case

imo that's good design, the only difference in comparison to adding a difficulty setting is that you don't pointlessly impact others if you want to make the game harder for yourself

21 minutes ago, Sacco said:

without walls she is so tedious to fight

ice staves?

22 minutes ago, Sacco said:

without pan flute she is pretty hard too

do you consider "hard" a synonym of "tedious", since you said "too" after saying "tedious"?

[Sacco]

1 minute ago, grm9 said:

that depends on if they'll get unlimited attack speed when attacking walls like moonstone hounds & werepigs, since if they won't, you won't need that much

imo that's good design, the only difference in comparison to adding a difficulty setting is that you don't pointlessly impact others if you want to make the game harder for yourself

ice staves?

they would start attacking them until they destroy the wall between you and them.

adding things to a fight that can be straight up ignored is just a bad design choice in my opinion.

ise staves are one of the two non cheese methods meant to kill larvae, alongside hitting them to that.

[grm9]

23 minutes ago, Sacco said:

they would start attacking them until they destroy the wall between you and them

then you still wouldn't need that many walls because their attack speed is very slow and they'd be hitting different walls, although that still would just require you to get more rocks

23 minutes ago, Sacco said:

adding things to a fight that can be straight up ignored is just a bad design choice in my opinion

it allows you to choose difficulty on your own without a difficulty setting that would impact others

23 minutes ago, Sacco said:

ice staves are one of the two non cheese methods meant to kill larvae, alongside hitting them to that

i meant that you can just use them so you only need to have one lavae alive after dfly stops summoning so you only need to tank/dodge one hit after that to finish the last lavae and then just fight dfly                      

[NoodlemanNed]

maybe instead of asking for them to rework the enemy you could try approaching the fight in different ways

[Guille6785]

every boss can be completely trivialized and turn into a snoozefest with the right items, zero exceptions, if you force yourself to fight enemies in boring ways that's kind of just your fault since this is a sandbox game that simply gives you the freedom to choose how to approach fights

personally I love the dragonfly fight and I never fight her with walls, it seems like a complete waste of time to me when I can just kill the lavae

[ADM]

2 hours ago, Sacco said:

My change suggested is to lower their health to 375 and also lower their "ice staff resistence" from 3 to 2 hits, but they now jump over walls, and if there is more than one layer of walls they'll start attacking them, or maybe like UM when they explode they deal damage to them.

I do enjoy the DF combat as it is but, yeah, I agree with this segment a lot. Removing a wee bit their tankiness would make it more tolerable for a fair share of the wall-user society; to which I'm a part time member based on my mood and friends. I'd even increase the amount of lavaes based on the participating players so that they target everyone if they were weaker.

[grm9]

8 minutes ago, ADM said:

I'd even increase the amount of lavaes based on the participating players so that they target everyone if they were weaker

the devs' intention was different, although that's hardly important now

[Yuuko]

3 hours ago, Sacco said:

Hi, i've always seen the dfly fight as one of the most boring one.

neither challenging or mechanically interesting, 9 times out of 10 you'll put some walls to stop the larvae and the fight is just a "attack 6 times and dodge, repeat the process until dfly enrages and put her asleep".

 

Variety is the spice of life.  Try fighting her differently.  No one forces you to build a wall, no one forces you to kite, etc.  Lavea health doesn't need to be lowered, nor the freeze resistance reduced.  It is perfectly manageable in single player with any character to clear her without a wall.

If you like her rage mode - don't cancel it.  You can fight through it if you're good enough.

Random attacks are bad.  The worst part of NMWP is when it randomly decides to do a sprint in phase 2, or a pound in phase 3.  All it does is tax you.

imo the fight is fine how it is, one of the best in the game b/c there are actually many ways to approach it from powering through lavae or freezing them, setting up walls, repositioning her, dropping twin terrors, bringing an army of merms, etc.

What makes a fight boring imo is when there is only 1 allowed approach.  nmwp makes you dodge differently, but its still just dodge 3 times then attack, but you can't tank through him, ride a beef, put him to sleep, etc.  The options are so reduced that every fight is the saammee which imo is the worst.  Dfly does not suffer from this.

[Gotheran]

I'm not sure about how to rebalance the fight itself but I've felt there's room to rework D-Fly in general. I can't recall if I've suggested it yet but a rework to summer to create a "wildfire" mechanic similar to how forest petrification works, with a large area of trees becoming a wildfire zone many trees going up quickly but some staying on fire for  a longer period and not easily spreading outside this zone, D-Fly could be drawn away from her nest during these events to forage for food in the burn zone, in her place a dragon hoard of gems and gold that you can try to loot from while she's gone, and alternatively give her gems or gold during other seasons while she's at her hoard. Making her passive in all seasons except summer unless you try to take from her hoard while she's present or attack her.

[ECS.98]

If anything, i'd be happy with just removing the randomness from Dragonfly spawning and phases.

Right now, whenever all her lavae die, she can either go into enraged mode, or go in another round of lavae spawning. If you're trying to actually fight the lavae, her going on another round of spawning is really detrimental for the fight, because you will have much less time to actually attack her and a much higher demand for fighting lavae, especially because every spawning phase brings 1 more lavae (and if you're using something like ice staves, that also becomes a bigger resource drain). The enraged phase, and the period she keeps attacking you after that, are the best moments to deal damage to the boss, and if she keeps spawning lavae, you barely have any opening for it.

And second, this is the absolute killer if you're trying to fight the lavae: The fact she can spawn multiple lavae from the same lava pond. Lavae are tanky, 500 health will mean 8-9 hits for most characters even with a Ham Bat or Dark Sword, and the 3-5 seconds Dragonfly takes flying from one lava pond to the other is crucial to be able to kill them in time as they come... but then Dragonfly decides to spawn 3 lavae from the same lava pond and you get swarmed by them with no chance of retaliation.

There's a reason using walls is just objectively the best strategy for the majority of players.

[grm9]

7 minutes ago, ECS.98 said:

Right now, whenever all her lavae die, she can either go into enraged mode, or go in another round of lavae spawning

only if the last lavae that got spawned died on it's own 30 seconds after spawning instead of getting killed, did you ever have that happen when fighting lavaes?

8 minutes ago, ECS.98 said:

Dragonfly decides to spawn 3 lavae from the same lava pond and you get swarmed by them with no chance of retaliation.

ice staff?                                                     

[Yuuko]

11 minutes ago, ECS.98 said:

There's a reason using walls is just objectively the best strategy for the majority of players.

Yeah imo the better way to change behavior isn't to make changes obviously aimed towards known meta strategies like lavae having some specific counter to walls, but instead to go after the real reason people use them - accessibility.  Before AG got its rework it was cheesed a lot b/c the arena gave you the cheese so you didn't need any preps but also b/c the fight was so bad that without cheese it was a long, drawn out affair without really giving players the tools to combat it.

Lavae are quite high in health, and having multiple spawn from a single pond can easily overwhelm a player.  Even with Wanda or Wolfgang when I plan to fight through the lavae I carry an ice staff to handle if she spawns multiple from the same pond.  With these characters I don't typically use a wall b/c they can keep up with minimal prep BUT for non-damage mod characters I'd need either a decent amount of ice staves or just build a wall...  If their health were reduced to make it a bit easier for non-damage mod characters to keep up with their spawn rate I think the wall tech would subside some naturally.

Kinda the same thing with AFW / CK and their healing.  If they get heals it can really ruin the fight so things like bees cheese or other stuff to counter these bosses becomes valuable b/c the risk of failing a fight b/c it out heals what your supplies can sustain eh...  kinda shows bad design imo.  Ironically, again not a big problem for combat characters b/c healing is essentially half as effective against them.

[MondayNight]

So your rework of DF, OP is... to buff her. Lol.

[Sacco]

16 minutes ago, MostMerryTomcat said:

So your rework of DF, OP is... to buff her. Lol.

i can totally understand why my suggestion can have some (even lots) of flaws, but saying this doesn't add anything to a constructive criticism, what you should do instead.

[Jakepeng99]

4 hours ago, Sacco said:

but they now jump over walls

4 hours ago, Sacco said:

when they explode they deal damage to them.

 

4 hours ago, Sacco said:

First of all i thought about adding a new attack to dfly, which is totally random.

Sometimes she'll perform a new attack, smashing her two paws on the ground, dealing increased damage, slightly moving forward like the armored bearger swipe attack, leaving a small crater (like the werepig one) and dealing knockback to you, it will also deal some aoe damage.

Before performing this attack she'll raise up her paws for a brief period, giving the player the time to dodge the attack by moving towards the boss or just getting as far as possible from her.

This attack gives some flavor to the fight, interrupting the boring kiting pattern.

I really like this though in all seriousness. I hope it gets added.