Please do not rework more old bosses

[Guille6785]

I know having a discussion about this on the forums is essentially a lost cause, but this is the only medium that can actually reach Klei so I thought it was worth writing just to add my 2 cents. I already anticipate that the replies to this post are just going to strawman my arguments or insult me for being a speedrunner but whatever

I want to preface this by clarifying a few things about my position:

-I do not think old Crab King was an amazing boss. Of the bosses with the old design philosophy, Crab King was actually my least favorite. Nobody who dislikes the new CK fight thinks the old boss was perfect; we are in agreement that it wasn't. However, I do believe that old CK was massively overhated, and a lot of that hate came from outright misinformation that was spread by various youtubers who painted the fight as an overly punishing resource dump that forced you to use a dozen weather pains and ice staves when it objectively wasn't. Even as my least favorite of the old major bosses, I still liked old CK more than any of the post-celestial champion bosses because there was a lot of depth to the fight when you understood his mechanics.
-I realize that this is a beta and the boss is going to be changed. This post isn't about new CK itself or how it can be improved, but rather about how its design philosophy should not be carried over into other bosses.
-I am not asking for the boss to be reverted. I'm not stupid, I realize that Klei already spent a lot of time creating the new assets and they're not going to scrap them. Personally, I think that everything the boss needed was number tweaks to be enjoyable by everybody, but now it's too late to do anything about it. The only thing I can do is ask for other bosses to not be given the same treatment.

The actual explanation:

The "major" bosses in DST (everything with more health than the seasonal giants for the purposes of this discussion) can be identified into two distinct design philosophies, which I personally call the "old design philosophy" and the "new design philosophy" (although it's not actually new per se).

The old design philosophy (consisting of Dragonfly, Bee Queen, Toadstool, Ancient Fuelweaver, old Crab King, and, to a lesser extent, the Shadow Pieces and phase 3 of Celestial Champion) mainly consisted of having a relatively simple enemy with a basic and predictable attack pattern, usually with no more than 1 basic attack, which was important because the main difficulty of the fight did not come from dodging attacks (it was just one part of the fight), but rather from mechanics that would be introduced shortly after the fight begins. These include fuelweaver's invincibility, dragonfly's lavae, toadstool's trees, bee queen's constant grumble spawning, crab king's healing, etc. This is what I like to call the "insurmountable obstacle".

The genius of the insurmountable obstacle is that there never was one way to deal with it. The obvious response to it would be brute forcing it with armor, healing, and/or a lot of damage via multiple players, and this worked, but unless you had a lot of damage you would have to deal with the mechanic one way or the other. The next obvious solution would be to use endgame items and resources to make the mechanic easier to deal with: Lazy explorers, weather pains, tons of ice staves, bone armor, warly dishes, etc. This would be enough for most players, but if you wanted to approach these fights without the luxury of endgame items or an entire squad of players to decimate the bosses, the mechanics would, in my opinion, be at their best, because they heavily pushed you towards getting creative and finding new ways of dealing with them.

Just to list a few examples:

Spoiler

-For Dragonfly, the obvious answer to most people is to wall off the lavae. This works, but can be time consuming to set up and can result in the fight going on for much longer than with other methods because the Dragonfly is not guaranteed to enrage with this method and can instead simply repeat lavae phases infinitely. Instead, if you have blue gems to spare, ice staves 3-shot lavae regardless of your damage multiplier and, if you're skillful, can even allow you to dodge dragonfly's moving attacks. However, ice staves are not the only way to freeze lavae: Flingomatics work just as well, and both of these methods give you free rocks everytime you kill the lavae as well. However, there's less incentive to consider this if you have access to speed and/or damage multipliers; with a ham bat, it's not impossible to just kill the lavae as the Dragonfly spawns them. This is definitely riskier, but is perfectly viable even when solo. If you have 1 buddy to help you, the lavae are literally programmed to only attack the player closest to them, making it possible to simply use someone as bait while the other player kills them. However, you technically don't even have to kill them: Only the last lavae has to be killed by the player to guarantee an enrage, meaning that with enough speed, you can simply catch up to Dragonfly and stall her with a pan flute and then kill the last lavae while all the others die on their own. Or if you're really creative, you can use Dragonfly's own lavae phase against her, by leading her into tentacles which will then stun her to death while she can't fight back. This is only a tiny fraction of all the viable Dragonfly strategies.

-For Toadstool, weather pains are commonly recommended by youtubers, and as such many people wrongly assume this boss is only doable with weather pains, which is a massive misunderstanding of its mechanics. A quick trip to the lunar island for glass axes and some items to stun the boss will result in the fight giving you lengthy damage opportunities, letting it go by surprisingly quick even if you have no damage multipliers. These can be extended by exploiting Toadstool's own massive movement speed increase with 8 or more sporecaps by leading it as far as possible from its hole before chopping the trees (optionally getting it stuck behind one of its own ponds). Don't forget that the morning star is an extremely good weapon for this fight, especially if you fight Toadstool during your first or second winter/spring. However, you don't even have to chop the sporecaps; fire from torches and fire staves works extremely well, but is much more demanding in terms of positioning as burnt sporecaps create sporeclouds that are hazardous to the player. However, with a good understanding of the fight, one can even bring a ham bat as their weapon of choice; many people wrongly believe that you can't use a ham bat for this fight, but you can simply drop it when you get a spore on you to prevent it from spoiling. This isn't even to mention the many strategies that outright prevent the sporecaps from spawning, allowing this mechanic to be overcome in a completely different way.

-Ancient Fuelweaver is one of the fights with the most potential for creativity due to the depth in its mechanics, and new strategies are still being found weekly for this boss. At a surface level, it may seem like the fight simply expects you to bring multiple buddies and just click the woven shadows as they spawn, but this is simply how the fight lets you brute force it; Fuelweaver is, in reality, a very positioning-based fight in which you micromanage the positon of the Fuelweaver relative to its minions and the arena at all times while you overcome its mechanics. This can be done, as many people do, by using AOE abilities to outright kill the woven shadows, such as abigail, weather pains, bramble husk, etc. While this is viable and even efficient, you're not forced to use items such as these. With good positioning, the woven shadows can be prevented from ever reaching Fuelweaver, which albeit slower, lets you bypass the need for those items. However, you don't even have to do this: With even better positioning, the Woven Shadows can actually be killed without ever needing to walk Fuelweaver around the arena and without the need for AOE abilities. The Fuelweaver's own bone cage helps with this, as it kills all the woven shadows around it. When it comes to the unseen hands, the nightmare amulet may be the obvious answer to most people, but most forget that sanity food is just as viable. In fact, with good positioning, it can even be preferable to the nightmare amulet by intentionally tanking the mind control attack before going sane again. However, who says that you even have to go sane again? 0 sanity strategies, albeit extremely risky, are viable, and have even been performed in the world record speedrun for this boss. The lazy explorer can be a huge help in this scenario, since telepoofing makes Fuelweaver stop its mind control attack, and you're probably already bringing one to escape the bone cages. However, it's not necessary, and in fact, you don't even need it to escape the bone cages. Again, with good positioning, the bone cage can be kited just like almost every other attack in the game, as it has a range. I'm heavily simplifying here; Fuelweaver is an extremely deep and rewarding fight, and there are tons of insane strategies that I could talk about, such as how it is now consistently possible to do Fuelweaver with a single moose idol as Woodie with an extremely good understanding of his mechanics, but I'd be here all day if I discussed that.

The best part of all of this is that no one strategy that I listed is objectively "better" than the rest. They each have their pros and cons and can all theoretically be considered the "best" within a particular scenario. And as a testament to how well implemented these mechanics are, you can generally always expect the mechanics that use more late game gear to simplify the mechanics more and vice versa; the more gear you take away, the more layers the fight will have and the more things you'll have to manage at once. This is something that, in my opinion, makes the old design philosophy perfect for a sandbox/survival game like DST. DST is not a game about dodging attacks in flashy ways; combat should serve as an extension of the survival aspect, and therefore, resource and time management elements allow combat to be at its best despite the simple system. Sadly, this would essentially be removed with the new design philosophy.

In simple terms, the "new design philosophy" consists of fights where the "main" mechanic is dodging attacks, in contrast to bosses with the old design philosophy. This philosophy seems largely inspired by Klaus, a relatively simple boss compared to the other ANR bosses, which didn't follow their philosophy but rather tried to simply expand on the combat mechanics of the seasonal bosses (i.e. dodging attacks). However, Klaus doesn't truly belong to this category. The formula truly started with phase 1 and 2 of Celestial Champion, and has since been used on every boss added afterwards (Twins, New Ancient Guardian, Nightmare Werepig, Frostjaw, the 3 lunar bosses, Scrappy Werepig and New Crab King). Common characteristics in bosses that use this philosophy include having a limited pool of moves that it cycles through, having few additional mechanics on top of dodging attacks (if any), having low health pools, all its attacks being specifically designed to be dodged, even with no speed multipliers (as confirmed by the developers), all its attacks being well telegraphed, having attacks be dodged in different directions, punishing the player for trying to tank, and, most infamously, having long stun phases where the player can just hold F with no risk of retaliation, etc.

Now, to make this clear, I am not here to argue which philosophy is the "better" one. I recognize that many more people enjoy the new philosophy; I am more aware than anyone that the old design philosophy was very frustrating and unintuitive to many people who were simply expecting bossfights that were more in line with what other games in the genre do (e.g. terraria), with soulslike elements and a largely self-contained encounter that doesn't incorporate survival elements into it. However, objectively speaking, the old philosophy encouraged more creativity and allowed for more player expression. This is something that is notoriously lacking in the new fights, even if you enjoy them, as it seems that each of these fights seems heavily designed to be done in one particular way, oftentimes patching out different ways to do the fight.

Without turning this into a full-on essay, my proposition here is simple: Both philosophies can coexist. I do not mind that people enjoy the new fights; I don't, but it doesn't affect me that other people do. However, what does affect me is that many people think that the new design philosophy is objectively better when this is plain false, and beg Klei to rework the old bosses to fit the new philosophy. And, as of this latest update, Crab King was officially turned into one of the new bosses, permanently taking away 1 of the very few bosses belonging to the old philosophy. I do not think this is the right direction for the game; I don't mind if the only bosses getting added use the new philosophy, but please, if any Klei developers are reading this, don't scrap the old fights in favor of the new design. I fear that the people who designed those bosses are no longer working at Klei, and that the current team misunderstand the value of their own work. The old fights are amazing and, at most, could use a few number tweaks, but they are beautifully designed and allow a level of player expression and creativity that I've literally never seen in any other game. DST's old bosses are extremely unique even within an already niche genre of game, and it sucks that this piece of media that I hold dear to my heart is being taken away in favor of generic bite-sized encounters that are more popular with the general playerbase. I don't mind that new easier fights are being added, but please don't cave in to complaints and rework the old fights; they are special to many people and Don't Starve was never a franchise that gave up its unique ideas in favor of copying what the other games in its genre were doing.

As for what made Old Crab King good: As I mentioned, old CK was not my favorite of the old bosses, but it wasn't a bad boss in my eyes by any means. The way I see it, all Crab King needed was the following changes: A more lenient window to cancel heals, claws requiring a fixed number of hits to kill (so damage multipliers aren't required for the rowing-dependent strategies to be optimal), a slight rebalancing of the gems, and a less claustrophobic arena to encourage maneuvering. I've already explained this in previous posts, but Crab King was an extremely unique fight as the only truly "boat" fight in the game (Malbatross is essentially just a land boss like moose/goose that occasionally pushes your boat away). Crab King was a very demanding boss in terms of positioning, and some aspects of the fight could be frustrating (such as random rockjaws and seagulls putting seeds in the water that block boat placement), but once mastery of his mechanics was reached it was actually very fun and brought something new to the table that you couldn't find anywhere else. It was an intense fight that required more exertion than other bosses but put you fully in control if you knew what you were doing.

Many people wrongly believe that weather pains were the only way to cancel Pearled Crab King's heals, but this was simply incorrect. Using a small amount of followers was usually consistent enough to where he would never heal more than once or twice, and this introduced the additional challenge of unfreezing your followers with items such as dwarf stars, torches, or by preventing the attack from happening altogether. This was in addition to dodging (or cancelling) geysers, clearing nearby claws (which were a massive threat to your boat), all while always remaining close enough to cancel the heals whenever they occurred. Crab King massively benefited from later patches; the movement speed of boats with oars getting increased helped a lot, and the recent patch that made attack speed consistent actually made it consistently possible to cancel the Pearled Crab King's heals if you timed it correctly. The result was a hectic yet deep fight with many layers to it and a lot of room for the player to mix and match different equipment to help with different aspects of it: Weather pains were always useful to cancel the heals regardless but you didn't have to use ice staves with them, grass and wood boats had their pros and cons for this fight, you could either let your boat die or repair it, etc.

Was the fight perfect? Definitely not, but it had a solid foundation and I think the developers overcorrected and scrapped everything, including the good things, because they misunderstood the value of their own work. However, I don't blame Klei for this one bit; far too many people spent the last 4 years parroting the same points made by a few youtubers that painted the Crab King as the worst designed boss in the game just because they assumed they were forced to do the fight with ice staves, weather pains and/or bees. It sucks to see a boss that I enjoyed suffer this fate, and sadly it's too late now to undo it, but I hope that if some developers are reading my post they won't look at the other old bosses with shame and instead accept them for the unique ideas they bring to the table, as I believe that they are amazingly designed fights that encourage creativity like no other. I hope the new CK gets changed a bit to bring back some of what made the old fight good, but I think the new additions are fundamentally flawed and I frankly can't suggest anything that might achieve this without scrapping the new assets. I do wish the new CK ends up being as good as it can be though (it better be or otherwise the loss of old CK would've been for nothing).

[Jakepeng99]

At most i believe they should do little big things, like maybe give dragonfly a secondary attack.

 

Reworking crab king from the ground up was unexpected.

[Mike23Ua]

As someone who gasp actually “liked” disease as a gameplay mechanic, and having this community be able to just “vote” that into being removed from the game, I am now choosing to look at DST as being an Always changing gameplay experience, nothing about the game ever feels finalized because Klei is far too willing to change, edit, or remove it.

So with that said- Bosses are subject to changes at anytime just as much as any other content, character skill or small detail.

People have actually purchased skins or characters liked the way those skins looked or characters played, & then had that changed on them.

I enjoyed Wormwood when he had a harder time maintaining his health, but now that’s less of an issue with things like Health Regen while bloomed & forced bloom.

Also (the Wurt lovers are going to hate me for saying this…) I defiantly do not feel like a character that has 300 base health, should now also have perks where they can use wetness as health points.

Do you not see what I’m trying to say here? DST is a huge Work in Progress game, and as long as Klei keeps updating the game and changing the rules, even the things you enjoy about it are subject to changes at any given notice.

And because bosses take up a good chunk of what you can enjoy in the game, it’s safe to assume that they’re all being looked at closely under a microscope on how Klei can improve or change them to being more accessible to a larger variety of their playerbase.

[AliceShiki]

Agreed with Jakepeng there. I do think there is potential in making small tweaks to old bosses (like making Dragonfly never spawn the last two larvaes from the same lava pool, for example, to give you a bit of extra time to kill the last larvae consistently), but I think it would be nice if they were kept mostly as is, since they do seem to be quite fun (I only tried Dragonfly out of the bosses you listed though. So I can't comment on the other ones).

Hopefully they can tweak the Crab King well to make the new fight still be pretty fun though! The fight is already being completely reworked, after all, so might as well get something fun out of it!

[TheNugget]

So true bestie 

[ChintzyGnat]

I think all bosses are fine, toadstool hp is just too high though. And I agree maybe a tweak every once and awhile could be good like the dragonfly thing as mentioned above. I think crabking is very fun but definitly needs alot of tweaks.

[Brago-sama]

Give toadstool a licksteal attack like his smaller brothers

[SirToastyToes]

Crab King was the only boss I actively dreaded fighting. I literally would only fight him if I absolutely had to, and even while fighting him it was a delicate dance of never letting him do ANYTHING or the fight was over. Or rather your boat breaks, you lose some max HP and you have to go make a Booster Shot and come back making the whole thing feel like an even bigger waste of time. Doesn't even have the mercy to actually kill the player.

[Horsheen]

Really well said. I'm hoping that the old formula wont be completely overwritten by the new one because I definitely enjoy the older bosses a lot more 

[Echsrick]

i rather just have simple bosses, like deerclops for example, im tired of dst turning into a fighting game and with shehanigans the new stuff keeps doin

[DegenerateFurry]

I utterly despise fighting Fuelweaver solo because, like most people, I don't find stressful, tedious inventory management to be fun. You know what you said about there being more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak, with the old bosses? They should've left in our option of just using a lureplant to cheese Fuelweaver. It's the only real compromise between the people like you who somehow find Fuelweaver fun and the rest of us, who want a boss we won't find a tedious and frustrating chore that we have to slog our way through to get to the rest of the fun stuff. I've killed him solo a few times, but I've not ever had fun doing it, and it's sometimes a bad enough experience that I stop playing for at least a few days, if not a week or more, afterward.

He's only fun, in my opinion, if you have a group of two to three players who know what they're doing, each handling a different part of the fight (what you described as brute-forcing, but is without question the intended way to fight him). Any more than that and he dies too fast to be a threat, and any less and fighting him is like skinning yourself alive while taking a bath in lemon juice.

I'd legit rather do Pearl's quest, beat current pre-rework Crab King, do the moonstorms, summon and kill Celestial Champion (who's actually fun to fight, unlike Fuelweaver), and make brightshade staves to nullify Fuelweaver's BS than solo him with standard gear as anyone who doesn't have over a 2x damage modifier. If that's the intended point in the game where I fight him, he shouldn't be accessible immediately after the shadow pieces (which you can do on night 1 with good RNG, and I know because I've done it). He's just way too much of a pain to deal with solo, and I'd appreciate some world setting or change to his behavior that'd widen the gaps between his immunity-and-healing phases to accommodate those of us who like to play other characters than Wolfgang by ourselves. 

So, yeah, don't get too upset about Crab King getting a much-needed total overhaul that nearly everyone in the community constantly begged for. I'm sure that if anyone else cares about it, they'll make a reversion mod just like they did for the unfortunate removal of the lureplant cheese against Fuelweaver. I very much hope they change Fuelweaver too, at least to scale his phases to the number of players present. 

[GreenBowers]

Okay but rework bee queen next though

[somethin]

18 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

 

Agree. There are so much things I would rather do than fighting in this game, like rift stuff and make my base pretty, which this updates definitely delivers with the new trees. The only thing I wish the new fight changed is the crab guards ai and the cannon ai. In videos I saw the canons are waaay too inaccurate to do anything to you and the guards lose aggro too easily and stay still most of the time.

[DegenerateFurry]

3 minutes ago, somethin said:

Agree. There are so much things I would rather do than fighting in this game, like rift stuff and make my base pretty, which this updates definitely delivers with the new trees. The only thing I wish the new fight changed is the crab guards ai and the cannon ai. In videos I saw the canons are waaay too inaccurate to do anything to you and the guards lose aggro too easily and stay still most of the time.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I actually like fighting in this game. I main Warly and I do enjoy farming, making a nice base, and feeding everyone (if it's multiplayer), but I also like to use voltgoat jelly and go to town on bosses, or rush the ruins with only glowberry mousse as a light source. It's Fuelweaver I have a problem with, not fighting.

[Tranoze]

To me Old crab king was a decent boss, problem is you have to fight it on boat.
Fighting anything on boat is a pain, you have no control, no room to make any mistake, and if you fail, you got teleport 5 screen away to nearest land and crab king respawn because no players nearby to keep boss there.

Same as fighting Malbatros, fighting Monkey raid, those fight would've been 10 times better if you dont have to fight them on boat.

[somethin]

Just now, DegenerateFurry said:

Oh, don't get me wrong, I actually like fighting in this game. I main Warly and I do enjoy farming, making a nice base, and feeding everyone (if it's multiplayer), but I also like to use voltgoat jelly and go to town on bosses, or rush the ruins with only glowberry mousse as a light source. It's Fuelweaver I have a problem with, not fighting.

Of course! Different strokes for different folks. I do like fighting bosses too (some of them, anyway), but the thing I hate the most is the resource I need to grind to fight them, especially when the reward is not worth it. Old crab king is not fun, a huuuge resource sink if you want a smooth and safe fight and the loot is complete garbage. Not counting the tribute which I wouldn't even count as a loot in the first place. At least the new crab king is easier and last I check I think they add a message in a bottle as reward as well? At least it's something.

[Szczuku]

12 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

Without turning this into a full-on essay, my proposition here is simple: Both philosophies can coexist

Question - in what way? Do you propose Klei tries to mash the two philospohies together, giving us a NR-type boss with the Kle patented free-boss-smacking-time. Effectively breeding a third design philosophy. Or is it more of a 'every other boss uses the old philosophy' approach

I also like the New Reign bosses, as tiresome as they sometimes can be

[Cheggf]

22 minutes ago, Szczuku said:

Question - in what way? Do you propose Klei tries to mash the two philospohies together, giving us a NR-type boss with the Kle patented free-boss-smacking-time. Effectively breeding a third design philosophy. Or is it more of a 'every other boss uses the old philosophy' approach

I also like the New Reign bosses, as tiresome as they sometimes can be

He means leave the old bosses alone and make the new bosses use the new philosophy.

[Mike23Ua]

3 hours ago, Cheggf said:

He means leave the old bosses alone and make the new bosses use the new philosophy.

But why? Here’s my question.

People seem to completely forget that prior to hosting a game world you can choose to host that world as “Classic” or “Together” 

But what does that even actually DO?! Because I can give a million suggestions on what it SHOULD DO.

Starting with reverting playable characters to Their DS counterparts, and changing the behavior and mechanics of bosses to be more accessible to adapt towards each mode preference.

[hoxi]

16 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

As for what made Old Crab King good: As I mentioned, old CK was not my favorite of the old bosses, but it wasn't a bad boss in my eyes by any means. The way I see it, all Crab King needed was the following changes: A more lenient window to cancel heals, claws requiring a fixed number of hits to kill (so damage multipliers aren't required for the rowing-dependent strategies to be optimal), a slight rebalancing of the gems, and a less claustrophobic arena to encourage maneuvering. I've already explained this in previous posts, but Crab King was an extremely unique fight as the only truly "boat" fight in the game (Malbatross is essentially just a land boss like moose/goose that occasionally pushes your boat away). Crab King was a very demanding boss in terms of positioning, and some aspects of the fight could be frustrating (such as random rockjaws and seagulls putting seeds in the water that block boat placement), but once mastery of his mechanics was reached it was actually very fun and brought something new to the table that you couldn't find anywhere else. It was an intense fight that required more exertion than other bosses but put you fully in control if you knew what you were doing.

I personally think that the old fight is bad mainly because:

1. Freeze attack has no proper indication (only a rough estimate with the snowy particles) and is extremely punishing and limiting. And requires you to get a dwarf star (so it's a gear check), or to tediously try to tell apart the edge of the freeze radius to put something just outside of it in case you're caught. This is a trial and error thing, as you won't be able to come back from it if you mess up due to the +20 second freeze. Also did you know that Crab King was always intended to instantly start a geyser spell after a freeze one? Yeah, it's absolutely intended but was missed due to a slight oversight, and it's the same reason as to why purple gems shine in the old fight instead of blue ones when the freeze spell cast starts. Anyhow, the part of the spell that makes things around cold? That works really nicely and I think that should come back. Even a very short freeze of say, 3-4 seconds (instead of the +20 one) wouldn't be bad.
2. Healing interruption mechanic requiring multiple hits combined with completely unintuitive time windows that, once again, you'd only find out due to trial and error after testing specific things. The beta massively improved on this by both removing the amounts of hit required part, and also making the interruption window last until the heal applies, instead of ending way, way too early. This is nice and should be kept.
3. Claws having massive health, while also being able to destroy structures (even ones not really near the edge), including bumpers, the one thing that you'd think would protect against them. They also completely stop the boat, because they don't actually get physically attached, and just remove the part about boats from the fight completely, and most players simply find a specific spot to kill two and ignore the rest, or are forced to freeze crab king to deal with them. I like them dealing damage to players now, but I think some should be able to attach to the boat like before, just without the extreme instant damage, and less damage over time, as well as without completely preventing sailing around.
4. Geyser attacks can be impossible to recover from on boats that can have leaks. If it was a single big geyser, or two at most, that'd probably be better. And spawning them around the whole arena rather than always directly under the boat would work a bit better, as long as there's space to dodge them.
5. Red gems massively buff health, healing is massive by default and gets boosted even more with orange gems, on top of issue number 2. Purple gems make the geyser attacks even more devastating. Yellows make spell casts go off way faster, especially the freezing spell. Etc. The beta gem effects are similar, but way less, you know, massively overtuned. All purple gems + pearl means that if you can deal with the crab minions, everything else is pretty tame, at least currently. Orange gems are way more viable as an option, but it's an option that will likely undo some progress of the fight until you're able to land hits properly (and even then, way less than before).

Basically, a lot of the old fight is just trial and error, of the unfun kind, until you find a specific strategy that works, and a lot of it goes against completely removing boat mechanics, despite implying to be a boat fight. Sure, it can become fun once you went through it and tested everything slowly, for some people, but that also can completely turn off people from wanting to do it. Killing CK with bees or similar is better for a lot of people because the fight is clunky and extremely punishing without really letting the player figure out how to do it outside of rolling back and testing, definitely not in a fun way.

A lot of people, you included, kinda just, don't consider that mastery of a fight shouldn't be required for it to be fun in the first place (or maybe you do, but it's not everyone's cup of tea). If the fight is inherently fun, then mastering it will naturally go in hand with it, and this doesn't mean removing challenge completely. As an example, the pan flute being effective against the minions doesn't mean much, pan flutes can always trivialize or make things infinitely more doable, that's just how powerful that item is. They could just make the minions wake up fast, or make them wake up on crab king taking damage, etc, but that might not necessarily be a good idea, the former maybe not being as bad.

 

Regarding the new fight

I feel like it could use a few aspects of the old fight back, but just a few, along with tweaks and fixes to the new one. The crab tower cannons are fine as an idea, they just feel a little non-threatening now. There could be less of them and they could punch holes in your boat more easily if they want to replace geysers entirely. That'd make people not ignore them, just make sure to make the projectiles take a long time to charge and to land so you have time to move out if your boat was completely still and to compensate for the damage they'd do to your boat (if a raft is used, they could just take more damage since they can't have leaks), or to let players dodge them if they wanna try doing that. The alternative instead is to make them fire faster and more accurately.

Crab King could occasionally stop healing and instead do a freeze attack that doesn't take the whole arena and doesn't freeze you for long, allowing you to deal with the minions without him constantly healing, even if that isn't as bad as it used to be. This could result in most cases in you just taking a free hit from a minion if too close, or some cold damage. He'd just need to not cast it constantly.

I don't know, I feel like the new fight opens up a lot of doors for new ideas along with combinations from the old boss fight, similarly to what was said in this topic about the different designs. Maybe the ice arena stuff could be a third final phase instead of being a second one that happens at the very high 85% health threshold. A final push where crab king goes all out, but not too much to avoid repeating the bad stuff from the old fight (which would feel worse if it happens at the end of the fight). Finishing the fight and defeating crab king, and watching all the ice start to break so you need to retreat to your boat could maybe be cooler (and at that point, it won't punish you if you mess it up).

 

16 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

At most i believe they should do little big things, like maybe give dragonfly a secondary attack.

 

Reworking crab king from the ground up was unexpected.

That'd be nice, though I also feel like the first thing that should be addressed about Dragonfly is the retreat mechanic, which for some people I rarely see being brought up.

It's not communicated, there's no warning, and sometimes can happen while it feels like you're inside the arena depending on world gen, since it's completely based on the spawn point of Dragonfly, and for some reason, this moves whenever Dragonfly is put to sleep (or when it wakes up, I forget which even does it specifically). Erasing all progress in the fight instantly is easily the most annoying and frustrating mechanic about that fight. Making it work like Toadstool or Bee Queen and making the "arena center" unmovable would be extremely welcomed.

[grm9]

10 minutes ago, hoxi said:

requires you to get a dwarf star (so it's a gear check)

only if you want to be able to continue the fight after messing up, you can consistently dodge freeze by just moving to the edge of your boat, need to also be slightly away from CK in case of grass boats but you can easily see when you're too close

12 minutes ago, hoxi said:

Healing interruption mechanic requiring multiple hits combined with completely unintuitive time windows that, once again, you'd only find out due to trial and error after testing specific things. The beta massively improved on this by both removing the amounts of hit required part, and also making the interruption window last until the heal applies, instead of ending way, way too early. This is nice and should be kept

that dumbed heal down to the point of being F holding time, keeping minions unfrozen and aggroed onto CK or timing hits was more fun

13 minutes ago, hoxi said:

Claws having massive health, while also being able to destroy structures (even ones not really near the edge), including bumpers, the one thing that you'd think would protect against them. They also completely stop the boat, because they don't actually get physically attached, and just remove the part about boats from the fight completely, and most players simply find a specific spot to kill two and ignore the rest, or are forced to freeze crab king to deal with them. I like them dealing damage to players now, but I think some should be able to attach to the boat like before, just without the extreme instant damage, and less damage over time, as well as without completely preventing sailing around

i forgot about them breaking stuff because you wouldn't normally place stuff onto a boat that you're doing CK on, their hp only needed to get decreased so it'd be around 4 hits for everyone, the rest was fine, you were supposed to avoid as many as possible and kill the rest to be able to move

17 minutes ago, hoxi said:

Geyser attacks can be impossible to recover from on boats that can have leaks. If it was a single big geyser, or two at most, that'd probably be better. And spawning them around the whole arena rather than always directly under the boat would work a bit better, as long as there's space to dodge them

place another boat

17 minutes ago, hoxi said:

Red gems massively buff health, healing is massive by default and gets boosted even more with orange gems, on top of issue number 2. Purple gems make the geyser attacks even more devastating. Yellows make spell casts go off way faster, especially the freezing spell. Etc. The beta gem effects are similar, but way less, you know, massively overtuned. All purple gems + pearl means that if you can deal with the crab minions, everything else is pretty tame, at least currently. Orange gems are way more viable as an option, but it's an option that will likely undo some progress of the fight until you're able to land hits properly (and even then, way less than before)

yeah gems system sucked

[arubaro]

"CK was good after you expend hundreds of hours in test worlds and reading code"

Not everyone who hate him simply jumped into youtube to watch your archienemies videos

[Well-met]

very much agreed with old crab king being fine, all it needed was a revision of gem effects and scaling

[Guille6785]

5 hours ago, arubaro said:

Not everyone who hate him simply jumped into youtube to watch your archienemies videos

huh???

[Gi-Go]

3 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

huh???

"You blame youtubers for crab king hate, but many players hate him on their own, after trying the fight a few times and realizing it's the most obnoxious thing ever"