Klei shouldn't be afraid to make boss drops good

[Sir Noel]

Now that the beta is ending soon I am still a bit sad that the Scrappy Werepig's drops are still... not great. Deerclops drops an item that helps counter a whole season with some other good perks. Bearger gives a good backpack that helps with food storage. Dragonfly gives access to scaled furnace, an invaluable tool for long-term survival with so many uses.

All these drops not only help you when you obtain them, but will help you throughout the entire game. The boss drops lately have mostly lost this sense of progression and usefulness. In fact, items like the horizon expander are made completely redundant due to the point you will actually get it in the game, as well as being inferior to a mod many players use (not that they should base their items around mods, but when it is so clearly inferior to the mod it is just disappointing). And then there's other ones like Strident Trident... which probably doesn't need explanation.

Bosses, especially those later into progression, should not have such mediocre drops when we've seen that they can make cool and useful drops to newer bosses like the possessed variants. Some of these drops just feel so detached from earlier boss drops that it almost seems unfair to compare them.

[-Variant]

Reading the title absolutely sent me back in time. Woah.

I'm wanting to know where the line between 'good' and 'powerful' is drawn. (Note, I'm not excusing Scrap Pig's current drops. They're fun but not super useful for how late they are.)
I have never liked how powerful the Eyebrella was, honestly.
One of the first drops you get and it is essentially permanent once you know how to repair it. I'm not sure I'd like more drops to be like it, unless they feel earned, like a big accomplishment. Scrappy Werepig is like, in a weird middle ground with how late his fights can be.

I often feel like the 4 seasonal boss drops sort of contribute to why recent drops don't feel as impactful, honestly. Not a whole lot, but a small bit. I feel it's one of a few factors at least. (When you get items, how useful they are in an isolated bubble, whatever.)

Anyhow, I'm rambling, what all are you expecting for these drops? I'd be interested in hearing some ideas, I often try to come up with ideas of my own but mind most niches I think they could be used to fill are already filled by other items and mechanics.

[Sir Noel]

12 minutes ago, -Variant said:

Reading the title absolutely sent me back in time. Woah.

I'm wanting to know where the line between 'good' and 'powerful' is drawn. (Note, I'm not excusing Scrap Pig's current drops. They're fun but not super useful for how late they are.)
I have never liked how powerful the Eyebrella was, honestly.
One of the first drops you get and it is essentially permanent once you know how to repair it. I'm not sure I'd like more drops to be like it, unless they feel earned, like a big accomplishment. Scrappy Werepig is like, in a weird middle ground with how late his fights can be.

I often feel like the 4 seasonal boss drops sort of contribute to why recent drops don't feel as impactful, honestly. Not a whole lot, but a small bit. I feel it's one of a few factors at least. (When you get items, how useful they are in an isolated bubble, whatever.)

You bring up a good point honestly. To me, the game has always been balanced around the seasonal boss drops and really set the standard for future drops.

My overall point with these drops is that they really feel like a boss drop and make me want to go out of my way to get them with how useful they are in survival. Eyebrella on the surface is just an umbrella on your head, but also has other functionality with resistance to lightning and assists with summer heat. Whether or not they're too "powerful" is probably a different discussion for how easy some of the fights are, but with Scrap Pig's drops, I definitely feel like the developers are worried about introducing more powerful items out of fear for how it would be perceived by the community. Which is a shame, because some of these items could be in a much better shape if they were allowed to be revisited. 

The fight isn't easy, and personally, boss drop(s) should give me

a.) a good reason to want to seek out and fight the boss myself

b.) a feeling of accomplishment with how much utility it provides me.

... something I don't really get with the Scrappy Werepig currently.

[00petar00]

29 minutes ago, -Variant said:

I'm wanting to know where the line between 'good' and 'powerful' is drawn. (Note, I'm not excusing Scrap Pig's current drops. They're fun but not super useful for how late they are.)
I have never liked how powerful the Eyebrella was, honestly.

You can only use a limited amount of items at once so it shouldn't matter if there are more items as powerful as eyebrella if it matches the boss difficulty. I do think that seasonal bosses are exceptions and deerclops should be even more so because it spawns to attack player.

I do agree that eyebrella is a very powerful item but that's our experience, new players will have more trouble killing her and surviving without eyebrella in the next 2 seasons would be much more difficult.

 

Edited March 26 by 00petar00

[CuteC]

37 minutes ago, -Variant said:

I have never liked how powerful the Eyebrella was, honestly.

To be fair deerclops is quite difficult for a first boss, I've always thought what's supposed to be probably the first boss you face drains your sanity at an extremely high rate.

Besides, rain is EXTREMELY detrimental and very difficult to deal with, feel like it's fair that dealing with deerclops would grant the chance to make an item that will help you down the road.

[Faintly Macabre]

56 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

I do agree that eyebrella is a very powerful item but that's our experience, new players will have more trouble killing her and surviving without eyebrella in the next 2 seasons would be much more difficult.

I think people forget this a lot. When DS was new, the game was still simple and unknown enough that the solution a lot of people had for dealing with Deerclops was to, you know, not. Just run away. This made sense when Deerclops was still nominally dangerous, because just letting him despawn would "solve" the problem, but you'd be missing out on an excellent tool for survival in other seasons.

As for the Scrappy Werepig, I think I've finally figured out what the issue is: the update is being pitched as the "Scrappy Scavengers QoL" update, and I don't think we've processed the Scrappy Werepig as being mostly a vehicle for QoL features: specifically, W.O.B.O.T, more readily renewed scrap, the adjusted experiment repair materials, and (ostensibly) the Horizon Expander.

The Horizon Expander still has a huge flaw as a QoL feature in that by the time you actually get it, its value has been significantly decreased by the fact that unless you're very specifically rushing it (which among other things means having to defeat the Nightmare Werepig first) you have probably done so much exploring already that it's just not really very useful anymore.

I think this could be fixed with just a couple changes:

1. As many people have been requesting, the Scrappy Werepig needs either to be the first of the two fights available, or the two just need to both be available at the same time. Both of these possibilities seem temporally out of whack in different ways, I admit, but I really don't feel like "it kinda doesn't make sense!" is a good reason to make your new toys largely pointless.

2. Either the Scrappy Werepig needs significantly less HP, or instead of having to defeat him, you can get him to drop his drops mid-fight: the Chapauldron naturally drops when that attack pattern ends, and the Horizon Expander falls off when he's finished with his junk axe. The second seems weird, but he could just like, spin out of control or trip on his last swing and fall, and it falls off. Extend the two attack patterns a bit so they're not totally free, and boom. If you want, you can make him only drop the items the first time he's disarmed, or extend his attack pattern after the first drop, etc.

...but the update is scheduled to drop tomorrow. Whoops.

[Habakkuk]

14 hours ago, Sir Noel said:

Now that the beta is ending soon I am still a bit sad that the Scrappy Werepig's drops are still... not great. Deerclops drops an item that helps counter a whole season with some other good perks. Bearger gives a good backpack that helps with food storage. Dragonfly gives access to scaled furnace, an invaluable tool for long-term survival with so many uses.

All these drops not only help you when you obtain them, but will help you throughout the entire game. The boss drops lately have mostly lost this sense of progression and usefulness. In fact, items like the horizon expander are made completely redundant due to the point you will actually get it in the game, as well as being inferior to a mod many players use (not that they should base their items around mods, but when it is so clearly inferior to the mod it is just disappointing). And then there's other ones like Strident Trident... which probably doesn't need explanation.

Bosses, especially those later into progression, should not have such mediocre drops when we've seen that they can make cool and useful drops to newer bosses like the possessed variants. Some of these drops just feel so detached from earlier boss drops that it almost seems unfair to compare them.

Totally agree, bosses must have good drops. If it is hard to defeat the drop must be rewarding.  No reward no reason to fight against it.

Edited March 27 by Habakkuk

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, Habakkuk said:

Totally agree, bosses must have good drops. If it is a hard to defeat the drop must be rewarding.  No reward no reason to fight against it.

There’s plenty of reasons to fight a boss other than a reward. And that’s the problem with DST, it’s bosses drop luxury items that make staying alive in a survival game most players playing a survival game want to actively be challenged by… that much easier.

Unfortunately for me DST has lost ALOT of its charm, don’t get me wrong I LOVED solo DS and it’s two DLCs but DST… I kinda wish could be Retconned from existence at this point- and the reason WHY I feel like that is we wait several months for a game update.. and every update Klei can’t resist the urge to add a new raid boss.

I don’t understand how the franchise went from being a survival game, to being a group based, boss raid simulator.. but that’s the point we are at now & I really don’t think there’s any saving it at this point.

All I can say for certain is that when/if Klei ever makes a Dont Starve 2 that I hope they go back to their roots, otherwise I don’t think I’m up for Boss Raid Simulator 2.

I need new stuff to do, and new types of challenges that ARENT some optional boss fight.

Put me in a puzzle labyrinth where I need to activate floor platforms and escape a room that’s filling with poison clouds of gas.

Or here’s an idea- Much like repairing Pearls broken down hermit home, give me a bridge I need to rebuild to access a new area I otherwise can’t reach…

the boss fights of this game is exactly why the rest of the game is lacking in creativity.

[Gi-Go]

9 hours ago, -Variant said:

I have never liked how powerful the Eyebrella was, honestly.

The most overrated hat in the game. Simple umbrella with a helmet does the same job. 

[CuteC]

2 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

There’s plenty of reasons to fight a boss other than a reward. And that’s the problem with DST, it’s bosses drop luxury items that make staying alive in a survival game most players playing a survival game want to actively be challenged by… that much easier.

If there is no reward for a boss then players are very likely to simply pretend they do not exist unless they are specifically looking to "prove" themselves and most players do not fall in that last category, so either you give them something that could be useful or make them mandatory to be beaten (which makes people only do them once), personally I don't see myself ever going for scrappy werepig after I saw they drop absolutely nothing of value.

2 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Unfortunately for me DST has lost ALOT of its charm, don’t get me wrong I LOVED solo DS and it’s two DLCs but DST… I kinda wish could be Retconned from existence at this point- and the reason WHY I feel like that is we wait several months for a game update.. and every update Klei can’t resist the urge to add a new raid boss.

Scrappy isn't raid and not even remotely the highlight of the update, also these people ain't epic games they won't be updating a game every 2 days and honestly I prefer them take their time with updates to ensure they come with better quality and also feedback.

[Retepeter]

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

I don’t understand how the franchise went from being a survival game, to being a group based, boss raid simulator.. but that’s the point we are at now & I really don’t think there’s any saving it at this point.

Because people got bored of the surprisingly barebones survival aspect of ds. The ruins was sucseeesful, then RoG was successful, then A new reign was successful, people very clearly prefer killing bosses instead of rotting at base and occasionally killing hounds

[Mike23Ua]

27 minutes ago, Retepeter said:

Because people got bored of the surprisingly barebones survival aspect of ds. The ruins was sucseeesful, then RoG was successful, then A new reign was successful, people very clearly prefer killing bosses instead of rotting at base and occasionally killing hounds

Yeah maybe.. but should the differences REALLY be Soul Knight (a Bullet Hell RogueLite Shooter) and it’s Prequel, Soul Knight the Prequel (action RPG with a bunch of story dialogue & quests) 

Theres a million and one ways to improve the survival aspects of dst, Klei could start by instead of just increasing the speed & Melee damage of the Depth Worms in Acid rain, they actually get a brand new look and attacks (such as popping up at a distance from the player spitting acid at them)

Mega Basers don’t have to worry about their mega carnival bases getting destroyed, they only need to worry about stepping in a puddle of spit up acid..

Ya know just stuff like that that actually UPS the survival aspects of the game outside of Boss fights..?

[grm9]

2 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

survival

it doesn't work unless you're going to always be busy surviving but then you wouldn't have time for bosses and less people would play the game because there'd be a lot of mandatory things that are hard to do or figure out how to deal with

[Habakkuk]

6 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

There’s plenty of reasons to fight a boss other than a reward. And that’s the problem with DST, it’s bosses drop luxury items that make staying alive in a survival game most players playing a survival game want to actively be challenged by… that much easier.

Unfortunately for me DST has lost ALOT of its charm, don’t get me wrong I LOVED solo DS and it’s two DLCs but DST… I kinda wish could be Retconned from existence at this point- and the reason WHY I feel like that is we wait several months for a game update.. and every update Klei can’t resist the urge to add a new raid boss.

I don’t understand how the franchise went from being a survival game, to being a group based, boss raid simulator.. but that’s the point we are at now & I really don’t think there’s any saving it at this point.

All I can say for certain is that when/if Klei ever makes a Dont Starve 2 that I hope they go back to their roots, otherwise I don’t think I’m up for Boss Raid Simulator 2.

I need new stuff to do, and new types of challenges that ARENT some optional boss fight.

Put me in a puzzle labyrinth where I need to activate floor platforms and escape a room that’s filling with poison clouds of gas.

Or here’s an idea- Much like repairing Pearls broken down hermit home, give me a bridge I need to rebuild to access a new area I otherwise can’t reach…

the boss fights of this game is exactly why the rest of the game is lacking in creativity.

I can agree with the need of new challenges, but I really think bosses should reward, most people need a incentive to fight a boss, the amount of people complaining about Crab King loot here is huge. One thing does not exclude the other. 

Edited March 27 by Habakkuk