Can damage from impaling cannon towers be toned down?

[-Variant]

CK has a new mechanic attached to his cannons that makes them impale and thrust through a boat if the boat is over where it's trying to spawn. 

For grass boats, this instantly destroys them. For wooden boats this... almost... instantly destroys them. They do some pretty insane damage, a few of my friends thought they were bugged and not meant to do this.

I quite like the mechanic myself, actually! But the damage they do is WAY too cruel for their lack of any heads up that they're happening in the first place. They're almost always a game over, especially if you're unaware you can even break them to knock the crabs off and onto your boats!

Also side note, could a quieter sound be used for hitting them? The wall-hitting sounds are a wee bit obtrusive. 

[Arcwell]

Or at least give us an indicator for where they're going to spawn.

[-Variant]

9 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

indicator

Yeah I'm uh... yeah... it just deleting grass boats is... mmrmm. Not ideal.

[Swiyss]

58 minutes ago, -Variant said:

Yeah I'm uh... yeah... it just deleting grass boats is... mmrmm. Not ideal.

It's fair. It's a boss fight, not a trip to disneyland.

[Primalflower]

1 hour ago, -Variant said:

For wooden boats this... almost... instantly destroys them.

I do not experience this. i've tested the crab king fight plenty of times to make sure that i'm capable of fighting him and almost every attempt had me impaled with a tower 2-3 times without the boat breaking. It's a fairly lenient aspect of this boss, the fact of the matter is just that you trade out keeping track of where towers are for boat patches, which you frankly should bring to a fight like this anyway the same way you should bring armor.

[lowercase skye]

58 minutes ago, -Variant said:

Yeah I'm uh... yeah... it just deleting grass boats is... mmrmm. Not ideal.

It's perfectly reasonable imo and consistent with the mechanic of grass rafts being unable to get leaks. Grass rafts aren't some kind of alternate boat, they're an early game raft mean for basic exploration. If you brought a grass suit and rabbit ear muffs to a Crystal Deerclops fight, it would be silly to complain that you're constantly freezing and taking massive damage, because you're using early game gear against a late game boss.

[-Variant]

22 minutes ago, finn from human said:

Grass rafts aren't some kind of alternate boat, they're an early game raft mean for basic exploration

I typically would agree if the smaller and more flexible boats that *did* have leaks weren't event locked.

I don't think this is as comparable to bring log armor to a Mutant Deerclops fight. I understand these are cheap early game items but their smaller stature and disposability is very much appreciated in a fight like this.
I don't mind them being super strong and powerful against grass rafts but I think an instant delete feels a bit jarring for the folks that did want to try bringing them into the fight.

I don't see this being changed but I don't think it's that crazy of an idea to want to bring them out here.

[Maxil20]

4 minutes ago, -Variant said:

I don't mind them being super strong and powerful against grass rafts but I think an instant delete feels a bit jarring for the folks that did want to try bringing them into the fight.

I personally agree with this as well. I don't mind them being a straight up "one shot" to the raft, but having it be a direct one shot on top of the fact it entirely skips the boat breaking animation meaning you get no time to react feels really bad. 

[Primalflower]

4 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

I don't mind them being a straight up "one shot" to the raft, but having it be a direct one shot on top of the fact it entirely skips the boat breaking animation meaning you get no time to react feels really bad. 

well, disregarding any thought towards this being literally bringing a canoe out into deep ocean, or predicting where towers might spawn because i'm not sure if it's consistent (it probably isn't), this action always come with ice breaking, doesn't it? If you're intent on using grass raft, why not carry a handful (or the materials to make more) and just plop an entirely new one down when the ice floe starts to break? The outer edges always break last, so you're always going to have at least a little bit of time to react if you just... don't... board the other boat? they only cost 8 grass and 2 twigs, so you'll have 5 with a full stack of grass.

[Arcwell]

45 minutes ago, finn from human said:

It's perfectly reasonable imo and consistent with the mechanic of grass rafts being unable to get leaks. Grass rafts aren't some kind of alternate boat, they're an early game raft mean for basic exploration. If you brought a grass suit and rabbit ear muffs to a Crystal Deerclops fight, it would be silly to complain that you're constantly freezing and taking massive damage, because you're using early game gear against a late game boss.

The reason I started trying grass rafts isn't because they're cheaper or can be acquired earlier, but because they have less surface area. Crab King's cannon towers have a lot of spread, so wooden boats end up taking much more chip damage because more shots connect. I don't think it's fair to say grass raft is an early game item that should be constrained to early game use when it has interactions such as this.

Also, with the Deerclops example, you at least have a warning that your health is dropping. You don't get that with cannon tower spawns.

[Primalflower]

3 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

I don't think it's fair to say grass raft is an early game item that should be constrained to early game use when it has interactions such as this.

but it is. It's not a non-early game item with a quirk that holds it back, it's an early game item that you get punished in a specific way for taking it further than it should be taken. I think its fair for the player to be discouraged from using the grass raft this way - and i think it's indeed merely a discouragement more than it is a total ban, because of both the fact that the lose state in this scenario is just washing up on land, and because i can pretty easy think of ways to work alongside it, as described by me above.

8 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

Also, with the Deerclops example, you at least have a warning that your health is dropping. You don't get that with cannon tower spawns.

to continue the hypothetical, the warning is the boat breaking. It's a lose state for the battle in a sense, but you don't die from it, and crab king deactivates afterwards so you can grab your junk and rethink your approach a lot easier than any other boss in the game.

[Arcwell]

11 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

well, disregarding any thought towards this being literally bringing a canoe out into deep ocean, or predicting where towers might spawn because i'm not sure if it's consistent (it probably isn't), this action always come with ice breaking, doesn't it? If you're intent on using grass raft, why not carry a handful (or the materials to make more) and just plop an entirely new one down when the ice floe starts to break? The outer edges always break last, so you're always going to have at least a little bit of time to react if you just... don't... board the other boat? they only cost 8 grass and 2 twigs, so you'll have 5 with a full stack of grass.

Yes, this is a viable (arguably optimal) strategy. However, it runs into problems when there are items/mobs blocking the area you'd deploy your boat in, which is largely outside of the player's control. Honestly that's my main gripe with the fight: that too much of it is RNG.

The only reason why I'd want to destroy cannon towers is so that they don't damage my boat. If destroying cannon towers has the potential to outright destroy my boat (which again, there's no indicator for), it makes me wonder why the option is there in the first place. It just feels like rolling dice.

6 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

to continue the hypothetical, the warning is the boat breaking. It's a lose state for the battle in a sense, but you don't die from it, and crab king deactivates afterwards so you can grab your junk and rethink your approach a lot easier than any other boss in the game.

I don't follow this reasoning.
If you drown, you are forced to restart the fight from the start. You could argue it's even worse than dying because you could revive on the spot if you had a life-giving amulet with you.

[Primalflower]

12 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

I don't follow this reasoning.
If you drown, you are forced to restart the fight from the start. You could argue it's even worse than dying because you could revive on the spot if you had a life-giving amulet with you.

it is equivalent to fleeing the fight with your life

[Arcwell]

Just now, Primalflower said:

it is equivalent to fleeing the fight with your life

Fleeing is a decision. Drowning is not.

A boat breaking instantly cannot be a warning because there's no action to be taken to prevent a forced retreat.

[Primalflower]

11 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

Fleeing is a decision. Drowning is not.

its sort of splitting hairs in this particular instance. you're functionally not going to beat the fight this way even if you technically can, so theres no real difference. its the same end result as the deerclops hypothetical. im not sure if i have anything more to add past this

[DegenerateFurry]

Ignore the sweaty people who're pretending that instant death somehow gives you fair warning, this seems like unintended behavior. I mean, no animation and the raft just disappears? Please, there's no way that's right. Even old Crab King didn't do that, even if you gave him nine pearls.

[lowercase skye]

3 hours ago, Arcwell said:

The reason I started trying grass rafts isn't because they're cheaper or can be acquired earlier, but because they have less surface area. Crab King's cannon towers have a lot of spread, so wooden boats end up taking much more chip damage because more shots connect. I don't think it's fair to say grass raft is an early game item that should be constrained to early game use when it has interactions such as this.

What you're describing is that this early game item has some emergent gameplay-inspiring mechanics that makes it useful in situations past the early game, which is true! I used to use rafts for gathering salt because of cookie cutters being a lot less deadly since it can't get leaks. But sometimes that emergent gameplay doesn't work out: such as in this case. It's cool when it does work out, but it won't always.

[Arcwell]

18 minutes ago, finn from human said:

What you're describing is that this early game item has some emergent gameplay-inspiring mechanics that makes it useful in situations past the early game, which is true! I used to use rafts for gathering salt because of cookie cutters being a lot less deadly since it can't get leaks. But sometimes that emergent gameplay doesn't work out: such as in this case. It's cool when it does work out, but it won't always.

The issue is that it does work out until you get a random spawn that makes it not work out (and again, you can't see where they spawn), and there is absolutely nothing you can do to save it when that happens. In the clip I posted earlier, CK was down to 468 health when that spawn happened. Grass raft was functioning perfectly fine up until that point, then one random spawn resulted in an unavoidable instant loss.

I can't think of any other boss that does this. The ones that do have instakill moves (i.e. CC phase 2) at least have telegraphs for their attacks.

I wouldn't have a problem with cannons destroying grass rafts if there was any way to react to it, but right now there isn't.

Here's the full fight. This was done before the orange gem buff so it'd be a little different in current patch.

Spoiler

[arubaro]

I like them doing a lot of damage but they do too much. Just a little tone down would be ideal

Curious how people that usually want a relaxed experience defends one shots in a boss fight

[Primalflower]

46 minutes ago, arubaro said:

Curious how people that usually want a relaxed experience defends one shots in a boss fight

its not a one shot unless you come into it with literally a grass raft and there are ways around it even still X_X like i would totally 100% be on board with a post just campaigning to get a small dfly event-sized boat into an eventless game or something but i disagree with the notion of the grass raft in particular

i dont think its that hot of a take friends

[Lovens]

Towers re-emerging should be absolutely telegraphed. They could use geyser bubbles for it which would be very consistent with the message both old and new CK fight gives via this status effect. "Keeping your boat in this position will be punished, you need to react and move it away ASAP". I think it's fair for it to destroy the grass raft entirely if you don't react to the warning in time though. The big difference between grass suit vs crystal clops and this scenario is that with enough skill you can beat it hitless and your grass suit will stay intact. You just have to react to telegraphed attacks accordingly and move out of the way. Here you can't even move preemptively. Seeing ice break cannot be used as a telegraph since it indicates that towers are about to re-emerge, not where they are going to appear. Reacting to it by moving your boat before you see towers spawn changes nothing - you might as well get unlucky and accidentally row it somewhere where a tower might spawn in a moment. My CK that got retrofitted into my old world also destroyed sea stacks around it, most of which I kept intact for 8k in-game years. This was the only thing I could use as a guide for visual indication "this is about the radius around CK where it's safe to have your boat". Without them I can't even move the boat out of the range where towers spawn because I can't reasonably estimate this range without towers present (if I destroyed them earlier). 

Another good potential fix would be to have towers always respawn in the same positions after CK determined how much he will spawn according to the gems used. Maybe make them leave an underground trace when destroyed, like salt formations now do. Maybe have an animation of little crabs re-building them instead of just instantly emerging from water like they do now. Any of that would make it possible for players to react and manage positioning their boats better,  which would result in a more fair fight. 

[abrocator]

It should absolutely be telegraphed, one-shot or not. This has to be an oversight.

They can even make the no-telegraph part one of the gem buffs if someone honestly thinks the current state is a good design.

Either that or introduce a dreadstone pancake which can take like four tower impalements (joke).