Willow's Lunar and Shadow affinities are not equal

[splorange]

Quick side tangent, I love the theme of the player choosing between lunar and shadow affinity and being granted great powers unique to the alignment, Willow is such a great example of this fantasy because aligned Bernie looks amazing and the spells are very unique. I hope that the rest of the skill trees follow a similar design philosophy that Willow's has because I think it is incredibly fun.

Normally I don't care that much about game balance in the grand scheme of things but I believe it is important for the alignment-based skill choices to be equal in power to ensure that the player can make a decision based on preference of both the alignment and what the skill offers, I think it goes without saying that an alignment choice should never totally eclipse another in power.

Shadow Flames does not function correctly

Shadow Flames in it's current state is barely functional as-is, even after it's targeting patch in Scrappy Scavengers it still will prioritize targets like Dragonfly Larvae instead of Dragonfly, Klaus's Gem Deer instead of Klaus, Clockworks in the Atrium instead of the Fuelweaver, even in direct 1v1s the Shadow Flames tend to drift off and prioritize some irrelevant enemy (please post clips of the most ridiculous Shadow Flames incidents that you have experienced). The flames even struggle to hit stationary targets very often, they get stuck rotating around the target and eventually fizzle out. Overall the situation in which Shadow Flames functions in full compacity very rare, and even then it is very underwhelming compared to Lunar Flames.  

Why is Lunar Flames so much better than Shadow Flames?

Outside of the inconsistencies mentioned above, Shadow Flames sounds like a good source of burst damage on paper, but when you compare it to Lunar Flames most if not all of the benefits of Shadow Flames are objectively worse. When targeting more than one enemy Lunar Flames does more damage, being able to aim Lunar Flames makes it significantly more reliable, Lunar Flame's high damaging AoE provides an insane amount of utility that cannot be rivaled by any other AoE in the game, and the amount of times that Lunar Flames can proc an enlightened crown's gestalt attack makes it better at single target damage over Shadow Flames.

Shadow Flame's "advantages" are sometimes worse or barely better than Lunar Flames

Shadow Flame has the advantage of being a "cast and forget" spell, but the inconsistency of it's targeting makes this a downside more than anything, I would much rather be able to choose a specific priority target when casting. A small advantage that Shadow Flames has over Lunar Flames is that it is good increase in DPS against a single enemy, but this is the only upside that Shadow Flames has over Lunar Flames and is not a big enough advantage because Lunar Flames has the same damage with AoE, you just can't attack during the cast period. Not being able to attack during Lunar Flames is not that big of a disadvantage considering that you obliterate everything in front of you anyways.

Conclusion

The best way I can describe the power gap between Lunar Flames and Shadow Flames is that Lunar Flames can kill 3 Brightshades in a single cast with an enlightened crown, meanwhile Shadow Flames can't even kill one. Willow is not that powerful of a character so I don't think Lunar Flames should be nerfed, but instead Shadow Flames need to be lifted up and provide more than what it already does, it needs a buff that provides it with a special advantage. My suggestions for buffs would be to give Willow a small amount of healing whenever a Shadow Flame hits or give enemies hit by Shadow Flames a debuff that increases the damage of shadow weapons. For targeting, the player should be able to choose a priority target when casting.

[Captain_Rage]

Dude, Shadow Flames is already very powerful. Around one stack of embers is enough to wreck the Celestial Champion in its third phase while wearing the Celestial Crown without the boss even being able to land a hit on you.

[Cassielu]

Yes, Willow's Lunar affinity is significantly better than Shadow. AOE, high frequency attacks, and controllability are all huge advantages in this game.

But well, they are balanced and same powerful in controller friendly dark souls style boss fight, this problem will be solve itself when they make this part of the main content of DST.

[grm9]

28 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Dude, Shadow Flames is already very powerful. Around one stack of embers is enough to wreck the Celestial Champion in its third phase while wearing the Celestial Crown without the boss even being able to land a hit on you

the problem is that many bosses summon things that you can target e.g. FW's woven shadows so sometimes 4 flames try to kill them with only 1 hitting FW if you lure FW away from them instead of killing them, just making it prioritize bosses within a tile away from you would probably be enough to make it useful for killing the hard bosses

Edited April 25 by grm9

[splorange]

33 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Dude, Shadow Flames is already very powerful. Around one stack of embers is enough to wreck the Celestial Champion in its third phase while wearing the Celestial Crown without the boss even being able to land a hit on you.

The problem here is that if you used Lunar Flames 8 times with an enlightened crown you would do 11,100 total damage, whereas with Shadow Flames you would do 8,960 total damage (with the shadow aligned damage bonus on celestial champion included! on a shadow aligned target Lunar Flames would do EVEN more!)

Now imagine fighting two targets with Lunar Flames, that damage would be doubled whereas Shadow Flames would be bottlenecked as it has no AoE.

(In the process of testing these calculations I kept losing 2-3 Shadow Flames per cast because the flames kept circling around the dummy and fizzles out)

Edited April 25 by splorange

[grm9]

8 minutes ago, splorange said:

The problem here is that if you used Lunar Flames 8 times with an enlightened crown you would do 11,100 total damage, whereas with Shadow Flames you would do 8,960 total damage (with the shadow aligned damage bonus on celestial champion included! on a shadow aligned target Lunar Flames would do EVEN more!)

keep in mind that you can keep holding F for 4 seconds after casting shadow fire to deal 582 more damage or 922 if you have enlightened crown and all gestalts proc and hit

Edited April 25 by grm9

[splorange]

9 minutes ago, grm9 said:

keep in mind that you can keep holding F for 4 seconds after casting shadow fire to deal 582 more damage or 922 if you have enlightened crown and all gestalts proc and hit

I already did mention in the post that this is the one true upper hand that Shadow Flame has over Lunar, but your DPS during that period of time after casting Shadow Flame does heavily depend on your weapon and if you need to kite or not, which is not a problem that Lunar Flames has.

[Captain_Rage]

15 minutes ago, grm9 said:

the problem is that many bosses summon things that you can target e.g. FW's woven shadows so sometimes 4 flames try to kill them with only 1 hitting FW if you lure FW away from them instead of killing them, just making it prioritize bosses within a tile away from you would probably be enough to make it useful for killing the hard bosses

But there are only a handful bosses in the game. What about every other time you face enemies that keeping a distance from you? Malbatross, Celestial Champion, Nightmare Werepig, Armored Bearger, MacTusk, Powder Monkeys and other enemies that you want to keep a distance from, or that are staying away from the player. Of course the area of effect equivalent skill will be better if you are fighting hordes of small enemies in a contained area. Shadow Flames are already super powerful because of its utility. I love that skill but no buff is warranted. If it was any better most battles would be a snorefest.

[grm9]

4 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

But there are only a handful bosses in the game. What about every other time you face enemies that keeping a distance from you?

monkey and that's it, which'd normally go away before you get to anything that you'd want to pick up

6 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Malbatross, Celestial Champion, Nightmare Werepig, Armored Bearger, MacTusk, Powder Monkeys and other enemies that you want to keep a distance from, or that are staying away from the player

both spells work at range tho? all things that you've mentioned can be killed without ranged/speedboosts and they aren't hard to deal with, it's only a slight time save and iirc armored bearger doesn't even run away anyway

10 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

Shadow Flames are already super powerful because of its utility. I love that skill but no buff is warranted. If it was any better most battles would be a snorefest

make it applicable against things that spawn things that you can target, that'd be enough

20 minutes ago, splorange said:

which is not a problem that Lunar Flames has

they have a 13 seconds cd instead which makes them worse against 1 target

[djturner]

I only use shadow flames because visually it looks awesome and it syncs up better for me with Willow's lore short (or I guess Wicker's, more specifically) and my favorite skins for her. With that in mind, I appreciate all of the hard work people who use (or at least experiment with) both put in while they continue to request buffs. Just wanted to say that!

[zhangsheng]

Willow's shadow flame is indeed strong enough.
For the vast majority of bosses who are not afraid of the impact of attack frequency and have fast speed, Shadow Flame is definitely better than Moon Flame, such as Nightmare Werepig or Armored Bearer. Moreover, for the vast majority of station bosses other than Crab King, Shadow Flame has an advantage because Shadow Flame can take advantage of its cooldown to output, while Moon Flame takes a few seconds to last and cannot output, such as Toadstool.
The advantage range of Moon Flame lies in dealing with group hostile creatures and a few rare group bosses, such as Queen Bee. Nevertheless, the Moon Flame is still not suitable for dealing with Dragonflies, as they are not affected by attack frequency and have a fast speed.

[ADM]

It would surely be competing better against the Lunar Flames if there was much less cooldown on it too. It seems fair and square to have it on the other affinity but Shadow Flames are insufferably less precise and would deserve more frequent casting to compensate. I say yes to improvements in their homing capacity, but I don't think we're gonna reach anytime soon a better prioritizing of the flames but that's okay as it's very subjective, usually.

[splorange]

25 minutes ago, zhangsheng said:

Willow's shadow flame is indeed strong enough.
For the vast majority of bosses who are not afraid of the impact of attack frequency and have fast speed, Shadow Flame is definitely better than Moon Flame, such as Nightmare Werepig or Armored Bearer. Moreover, for the vast majority of station bosses other than Crab King, Shadow Flame has an advantage because Shadow Flame can take advantage of its cooldown to output, while Moon Flame takes a few seconds to last and cannot output, such as Toadstool.
The advantage range of Moon Flame lies in dealing with group hostile creatures and a few rare group bosses, such as Queen Bee. Nevertheless, the Moon Flame is still not suitable for dealing with Dragonflies, as they are not affected by attack frequency and have a fast speed.

I feel like a lot of responses on this thread are focusing specifically on bosses and aren't looking at the whole picture which ignores all the insane utility and benefits of Lunar Flame.

Regardless I think the fact that Lunar Flame even compares to single target DPS that is the single benefit of Shadow Flame is proof that Shadow Flame is underperforming. 

[zhangsheng]

On 4/26/2024 at 1:35 AM, splorange said:

I feel like a lot of responses on this thread are focusing specifically on bosses and aren't looking at the whole picture which ignores all the insane utility and benefits of Lunar Flame.

Regardless I think the fact that Lunar Flame even compares to single target DPS that is the single benefit of Shadow Flame is proof that Shadow Flame is underperforming. 

I have also emphasized this point, the advantage of the Moon Flame lies in its high versatility in daily life. And Shadow Fire leans more towards monomers.
If it's a group situation, the moon fire is definitely stronger than the shadow fire, which is beyond doubt. But when it comes to the DPS of a single unit, even with an Enlightened Crown, Moon Fire cannot be higher than Shadow Fire.
Shadow Fire can compensate for normal damage, and ideally, it can achieve an attack multiplier of 1.75 times, including cooldown time (this damage is simply added to Dark Sword's damage, not including Enlightened Crown. If Enlightened Crown is added, this damage will be even higher). However, with the blessing of Enlightened Crown, the Moon Fire cannot achieve such output.The attack frequency of Moon Fire is too high, and Willow's own sanity cannot withstand it. We can only supplement our sanity by eating, which indirectly wastes our output.

Edited April 26 by zhangsheng

[Jakepeng99]

On 4/25/2024 at 5:12 PM, splorange said:

The problem here is that if you used Lunar Flames 8 times with an enlightened crown you would do 11,100 total damage, whereas with Shadow Flames you would do 8,960 total damage (with the shadow aligned damage bonus on celestial champion included! on a shadow aligned target Lunar Flames would do EVEN more!)

Now imagine fighting two targets with Lunar Flames, that damage would be doubled whereas Shadow Flames would be bottlenecked as it has no AoE.

(In the process of testing these calculations I kept losing 2-3 Shadow Flames per cast because the flames kept circling around the dummy and fizzles out)

This is post riff anyway, you lose out on bernie by doing so too with the crown but it looks cool.

 

Also, shadow flames are a cast it once and you are done, then you can continue using your melee attack or something which gives you more dps than lunar flame against single target. It sounds contadicting but you can use it like a shotgun by standing next to them.

Edited April 28 by Jakepeng99

[Dr.Webber]

I think lunar flame should look and act the same as shadow flames but blue instead of black