Wolfgang's dumbbell developer skill is underwhelming (+ suggestion)

[cybers2001]

Does anybody actually use Wolfgang's dumbbells from this skill? Ice and fire staves have been niche for as long as they've existed. Even now, any case where I'd use a fire/ice staff, I'd still prefer those over lobbing a dumbbell. What purpose does combining them with dumbbells do, aside from freeing up an inventory slot?

How about, in addition to these functions, fire/ice bells also raise/lower Wolfgang's temperature a fixed amount every time he gains mightiness from using them? This gives a better synergy to the primary function of dumbbells, since while Wolfgangs stand around lifting, they can also regulate their temperature.

Same thing with thermbells: Literally just an inventory slot saver. What if Wolfgang can generate heat by lifting, and surplus heat can be channeled into the thermbell?

[Arcwell]

23 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

Does anybody actually use Wolfgang's dumbbells from this skill?

Yes

[Cruvimaster]

From what I saw, the area damage potential of these items is extremely broken against monkeys (ruins) and even more broken against Crab king only needing to use the ice version.

I hope that Klei really brings something new to the other characters and doesn't just remake characters that were already supposed to be completed, as was the case in the last update (Wormwood / Wigfrid / Willow).

If developers keep redoing already implemented skill trees, it will take about 10 years for all the other characters to have their skill trees.

Edited April 20 by Cruvimaster

[cybers2001]

17 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

Yes

 

Dear god... how long does that take to clear full clockwork zones with? Is this more of an early-rush style strat?

[Arcwell]

5 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

Dear god... how long does that take to clear full clockwork zones with? Is this more of an early-rush style strat?

I usually don't full-clear ruins (and would not recommend doing so, aside from statues and bishops), this is just to showcase you can get purple gems from double bishops without taking damage. It works on other (though not all) enemies as well, and a few bosses. 

[Mike23Ua]

I only want one thing from Wolfgang’s heaviest dumbells, and that should be pretty obvious..

If Eye of Terror can smash the ground leaving behind small craters that slow the player down, Wolfgang’s dumbells being yeet’ed through the air should’ve done that too.

[SSneaky]

46 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Wolfgang’s dumbells being yeet’ed through the air should’ve done that too.

that slow Grounded enemies?

sure

Edited April 20 by SSneaky
Grounded enemies

[Gashzer]

3 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

Does anybody actually use Wolfgang's dumbbells from this skill? Ice and fire staves have been niche for as long as they've existed. Even now, any case where I'd use a fire/ice staff, I'd still prefer those over lobbing a dumbbell. What purpose does combining them with dumbbells do, aside from freeing up an inventory slot?

How about, in addition to these functions, fire/ice bells also raise/lower Wolfgang's temperature a fixed amount every time he gains mightiness from using them? This gives a better synergy to the primary function of dumbbells, since while Wolfgangs stand around lifting, they can also regulate their temperature.

Same thing with thermbells: Literally just an inventory slot saver. What if Wolfgang can generate heat by lifting, and surplus heat can be channeled into the thermbell?

Well what else are you gonna spend your skill points on tho?

Whistle, leg day, and all the gym skills are pretty useless. Its so easy to stay 100% mighty all the time which makes using piggyback a no brainer. 

Critical Miner skills, planar damage and lunar skills should be every wolfgang player's loadout lol

[Cheggf]

The dumbells are a lot closer to overpowered than they are to underpowered. In addition to them being just as good as a gembell in every way other than durability where there's a minor penalty, the elemental effects they have are extremely powerful. The icebell freezes all enemies in an area, allowing you to easily freeze dangerous enemies (such as Bishops) while focusing on others, or even just stunlock them since the throw does damage and you can just keep throwing over and over again. The firebell will automatically stunlock certain enemies like spiderqueens to death without even needing to toss it over and over again.

[grm9]

10 minutes ago, Gashzer said:

Well what else are you gonna spend your skill points on tho?

Whistle, leg day, and all the gym skills are pretty useless

it's a choice between 2nd dumbbell damage perk and +10% speed when normal since you might not use pig backpack and benefit from +10% speed

2 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

The dumbells are a lot closer to overpowered than they are to underpowered. In addition to them being just as good as a gembell in every way other than durability where there's a minor penalty, the elemental effects they have are extremely powerful. The icebell freezes all enemies in an area, allowing you to easily freeze dangerous enemies (such as Bishops) while focusing on others, or even just stunlock them since the throw does damage and you can just keep throwing over and over again. The firebell will automatically stunlock certain enemies like spiderqueens to death without even needing to toss it over and over again

tbf it's just bishops, spider queens and CK and you can use fire for 2 out of them to get the same result, just need to stop hitting before they get extinguished if you're igniting them instead of an item under them, i haven't seen them used on other stuff and 3 enemies isn't much

Edited April 20 by grm9

[Echsrick]

i was thinkin all of wolfgang skills feel a bit underwhelming

[Cloakingsumo198]

I thought this would be about their atrocious targeting when using a controller.

[Theukon-dos]

Wolfgang's bell developer skill is actually the best part of his skill tree.

 

It's still awful and that's only because the rest of his skill tree is even worse. But it's still the best part!

[cybers2001]

17 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The dumbells are a lot closer to overpowered than they are to underpowered. In addition to them being just as good as a gembell in every way other than durability where there's a minor penalty, the elemental effects they have are extremely powerful. The icebell freezes all enemies in an area, allowing you to easily freeze dangerous enemies (such as Bishops) while focusing on others, or even just stunlock them since the throw does damage and you can just keep throwing over and over again. The firebell will automatically stunlock certain enemies like spiderqueens to death without even needing to toss it over and over again.

My point is, though, that if you want to freeze or burn an enemy, you just as easily could with the staves instead. Plus staves have longer range, are targeted, and you can keep casting without having to run and pick up the dumbbell. People say its OP but I rarely see anybody use them (though I would consider actually using the crab king cheese strat now that I know about it)

The bishop example is interesting for a super early ruins rush strat, but outside of that, it's pretty trivial to just wear thulecite armor and tank the bishops with a hambat or dark sword. Can kill them with no hits, too, once you get your first bone armor.

Edited April 21 by cybers2001

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

My point is, though, that if you want to freeze or burn an enemy, you just as easily could with the staves instead. Plus staves have longer range, are targeted, and you can keep casting without having to run and pick up the dumbbell.

No you couldn't. Ice staves have half the freezing power, deal zero damage, have much worse durability, affect only a single target at a time, and are exclusively used for freezing so you need to dedicate a slot specifically to them. Fire staves work completely differently to the firebell.

The range of the staff is largely irrelevant since you can already freeze things with either weapon without being hit by the enemy, and they freeze every enemy in an AoE so I'm not sure why it matters that you need to pick up the dumbbell which is now completely safe to pick up since every enemy in an AoE is frozen.

2 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

People say its OP but I rarely see anybody use them (though I would consider actually using the crab king cheese strat now that I know about it)

I never see anyone make staves of any kind. People don't like engaging with the mechanics or thinking about combat, they just want to hold F. 

2 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

The bishop example is interesting for a super early ruins rush strat, but outside of that, it's pretty trivial to just wear thulecite armor and tank the bishops with a hambat or dark sword. Can kill them with no hits, too, once you get your first bone armor.

If the dumbbells suck because they aren't completely mandatory and can be replaced with some combination of more difficulty, more resources expended, and rare items dropped at the end of the game, then literally every single character perk in the entire game sucks. No perks are mandatory.

[cybers2001]

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

If the dumbbells suck because they aren't completely mandatory and can be replaced with some combination of more difficulty, more resources expended, and rare items dropped at the end of the game, then literally every single character perk in the entire game sucks. No perks are mandatory.

My suggestion for the gembells is a rather simple one that is a more natural extension of Wolfgang's normal playstyle. Throwing dumbbells was always a weirdly unconventional addition to Wolfgang's core gameplay.

2 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The range of the staff is largely irrelevant since you can already freeze things with either weapon without being hit by the enemy, and they freeze every enemy in an AoE so I'm not sure why it matters that you need to pick up the dumbbell which is now completely safe to pick up since every enemy in an AoE is frozen.

This is a very flaky argument. Even in the example video above with the bishops, the whole approach changes if the enemies aren't all conveniently clumped up and standing still.

Edited April 21 by cybers2001

[Cheggf]

54 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

My suggestion for the gembells is a rather simple one that is a more natural extension of Wolfgang's normal playstyle. Throwing dumbbells was always a weirdly unconventional addition to Wolfgang's core gameplay.

Sitting around not doing anything while an animation loops itself is far more unconventional than performing a ranged attack.

55 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

This is a very flaky argument. Even in the example video above with the bishops, the whole approach changes if the enemies aren't all conveniently clumped up and standing still.

No it doesn't. Literally just throw a dumbbell at one of the bishops then go attack the other one. That's what you'd do with an ice staff, the only difference is the dumbbell is thrown once and does other things, while the staff is swung twice and does not do other things. The thing that he's doing in the video has him picking the dumbbells up because he's using the damage from the dumbbells to kill them. Ice staves can not do that, they deal 0 damage. The only option for killing the Bishops with the ice staff is freezing one then attacking the other. The dumbbell doesn't need to be regrabbed for that. 

[cybers2001]

8 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Sitting around not doing anything while an animation loops itself is far more unconventional than performing a ranged attack.

Well yeah, but transitioning to and from mighty also holds you in place, too. At least you can avoid it by doing tasks that can keep you mighty.

8 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

No it doesn't. Literally just throw a dumbbell at one of the bishops then go attack the other one. That's what you'd do with an ice staff, the only difference is the dumbbell is thrown once and does other things, while the staff is swung twice and does not do other things. The thing that he's doing in the video has him picking the dumbbells up because he's using the damage from the dumbbells to kill them. Ice staves can not do that, they deal 0 damage. The only option for killing the Bishops with the ice staff is freezing one then attacking the other. The dumbbell doesn't need to be regrabbed for that. 

So do you play like this yourself, then?

[Cheggf]

29 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

Well yeah, but transitioning to and from mighty also holds you in place, too. At least you can avoid it by doing tasks that can keep you mighty.

How are you comparing an animation that takes less than 1 second and is very easy to avoid to an animation that takes up to 42 seconds and can only be avoided by actively swinging something against something else?

32 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

So do you play like this yourself, then?

The few times I play Wolfgang, yes. 

[cybers2001]

2 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

How are you comparing an animation that takes less than 1 second and is very easy to avoid to an animation that takes up to 42 seconds and can only be avoided by actively swinging something against something else?

I have no idea where you're going with this.

2 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

The few times I play Wolfgang, yes. 

Lol okay.

[Antynomity]

On 4/20/2024 at 8:04 PM, Cruvimaster said:

From what I saw, the area damage potential of these items is extremely broken against monkeys (ruins) and even more broken against Crab king only needing to use the ice version.

I hope that Klei really brings something new to the other characters and doesn't just remake characters that were already supposed to be completed, as was the case in the last update (Wormwood / Wigfrid / Willow).

If developers keep redoing already implemented skill trees, it will take about 10 years for all the other characters to have their skill trees.

Better to have good skill trees for most than unfinished ones.

[cybers2001]

9 hours ago, Antynomity said:

Better to have good skill trees for most than unfinished ones.

It's a shame he has so few QoL skills that aren't just raw stats or gimmicks. The chore workout skills are the most enjoyable ones for me. Super gratifying to get those crits.

Edited April 22 by cybers2001

[Gashzer]

8 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

It's a shame he has so few QoL skills that aren't just raw stats or gimmicks. The chore workout skills are the most enjoyable ones for me. Super gratifying to get those crits.

In fairness wolfgang is the least gimmicky character there is. Hes bland but the best character if you just want to play the game faster without messing around with character gimmicks.

I wouldnt change a thing about him tbh. Its good to have a few blandish characters on the roster with minimum gimmicks.

[Cloakingsumo198]

1 hour ago, cybers2001 said:

It's a shame he has so few QoL skills that aren't just raw stats or gimmicks. The chore workout skills are the most enjoyable ones for me. Super gratifying to get those crits.

Yeah I was hoping for different tools and abilities feels weird when I look back at it.

The single damage brawler got a limited follower buff ability, elemental grenades and a few stat buffs to make his actual skills seem appealing "dumbbell throwing damage", "mighty gym pushing the mighty cap" and planar damage just fixing his DPS for endgame.

It feels like they could have pushed more for a Wolfgang "subclass" with how some of these skills just don't compliment each other and their perk dump requirements just seem like an offset because there wasn't enough options for him to choose.

I suppose that my concerns are that as other characters get their skill trees they will have actual abilities that will combo better whilst creating a unique play style akin to their base selves.