Any ideas on how to dispatch the new worm boss without aging 5 years because of how long it takes?

[Primalflower]

Love the new worm boss, because how couldn't you? But without animation cancelling, it kind of takes forever to kill.

Great Depths Worm has 5000 HP, and without animation cancelling, you can get around 3-5 hits on it each time you bait it to stand still by dropping an item. What this means is with a 34 damage weapon, you would need to perform the bait and switch protocol between 30 and 50 times. With a 51 damage this drops to 20 to 33 times, and finally, 15 to 25 times with a 68 damage weapon.

I would be more forgiving of this demand of endurance, consistent execution, and just plain time, if this worm was a boss you had to seek out, but this is something that not only seeks you out, but seeks you out multiple times a year. With hound waves (or, for the sake of the argument, regular Depth Worm waves), not only does it materially simply take less time to deal with them yourself, but there are also things you can do to significantly speed up the process.

In my testing, Tooth Traps appear to be readily ignored by the gargantuan beast.

Spoiler

I have also attempted the obvious, just feeding it gunpowder, but it appears to down stacks of the stuff no worse for the wear, and at the point, the time spent preparing the gunpowder is already like, a whole awful lot. Besides these two ideas, there is one remaining idea: Sacrifice. A very unique and endearing quality of the giant worm is that it will swallow not only players, but hunchback mobs whole as well, and will spend a fairly significant amount of time just sitting there as it digests. This conjures the idea of becoming host to a plethora of pigmen, bunnymen, or even merms, that can promptly be systematically fed into the monster to give the player time to land some precious few hits in, like a lovecraftian, Machiavellian version of tooth traps. .....However, the worm boss will readily destroy structures and thereby houses of mobs if it chomps through them. This is especially difficult to avoid given how bunnymen run away screaming if they're too injured and how pigmen and merms will naturally allow the enemy to gain distance on them due to their kiting behavior. So as cool as the idea sounds, it's not really viable long term.

This leaves me with a somewhat succinct conclusion. I think it's a bit foolhardy to request for the sandworm guy to not destroy structures, so I think the sacrificial strategy will remain a last resort for players caught with their pants down whom are willing to plow through some bunnymen to save their hide. So then I pivot to gunpowder. it doesn't sound so bad to have to manufacture some of the stuff and keep a supply of it somewhere in the caves in a manner not dissimilar to tooth traps. So maybe just make it more effective against the great depths worm and call it a day? So you don't have to spend an entire stack of the stuff every handful of days. The pugalisk was deathly susceptible to gunpowder too, maybe it just runs in worm-like mobs in the constant. This idea would pair somewhat well with how post rift caves now have tons of nitre to mine, but nitre salt licks are so last year.

[chirsg]

Use wigfrid.I first tried the boss without knowing about the mechanic where it gets paralyzed if it is eating an opponent. 

[Ohan]

Roughly 50% of a brightshade staff and enlightened crown with 2-3 banana shakes kills it easy 

[Primalflower]

9 minutes ago, Ohan said:

Roughly 50% of a brightshade staff and enlightened crown with 2-3 banana shakes kills it easy 

any non-post rift ideas? I'm not seeing anything saying the worm is post rift exclusive, just that its supposed to spawn later on in depth worm waves like varglets

most people don't really get around to that point of progression until hundreds of days in

[ADM]

One thing I seem to have noticed (not sure if it’s an exact science) but if you walked over the point where the head will emerge then step away the worm seem to make a short stop which leaves time to attack without the need of anything getting eaten, and it can repeat that at each it emerge. I completely defeated one that way and it felt pretty safe and quick doing it.

[Mike23Ua]

I’m going to guess you attack it’s big ugly head or it’s big ugly tail, but never try to attack it’s armored Spikey body.

This also makes me worried Klei May update Brightshades so only the flower or tail of the flower are safe to attack.. but if they do I’ll just have to learn to git gud.

[Primalflower]

Just now, Mike23Ua said:

I’m going to guess you attack it’s big ugly head or it’s big ugly tail, but never try to attack it’s armored Spikey body.

The way it works is that the entire body, tail to head, is spiked. You will get hurt if you touch any portion of it while it is moving, including the tail or head. You will not take damage if the worm is stationary, so you have to get it to stay still. You can get the worm to stay still primarily by making it pop out of the ground (as signified by cracks in the ground) directly on top of an item, wherein it will chomp the item and sit there chewing for a split second. It can eat players or hunchbacks and it will spend a significantly longer time standing still, as the player/mob travels through the worm and out the backend, low health in the players case and as poop in the mobs case.

There are intricacies to the worm's behavior that will allow for different, smaller attack windows as ADM has pointed out, but judging by the behavior exhibited by the devs in the Klei stream, I think making it stay still by having it gnaw on stuff is the "intended" way to get hits in.

[Maxil20]

I’m impressed I don’t see a specific strategy talked about, given it’s by far the easiest and doesn’t take any setup to do: just run away from the boss.

The boss doesn’t stick around in the world. Once ~30 seconds or so elapses when it is unloaded, it just despawns. Considering there’s no real reason to fight the boss at the moment (unless you are really desprate for normal gems/thule I suppose?), there isn’t any reason to not do this over slowly whittling down the boss.

It bothers me a bit admittedly, because this boss is a nightmare to base builders (obvious base destruction and the fact there is no consistency unlike bearger/deerclops aside, this boss can eat practically any item you throw at it in an AOE when it surfaces, I had a friend lose things like their shadow beefalo bell because the worm just gulped it), but arguably easier then dealing with worm waves as a normal player.

It makes me sad because I genuinely love the boss concepts and how it works, but it being something that both has a lot of destructive gimmicks, is difficult to whittle down, and comes after you makes me lose any and all intrigue for the boss.  

[Primalflower]

11 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

The boss doesn’t stick around in the world. Once ~30 seconds or so elapses when it is unloaded, it just despawns.

That's crazy. I would never expect this given I'm really certain depth worms and hounds both stay indefinitely if you leave them alone, I remember when I was much younger I would pretty consistently get killed by a hound or two left at a wormhole.

Do you think this aspect is going to... stay? The impression I'm left with this (with the knowledge that it has a prefab name of Worm_Boss) is that at one point the worm really was considered a boss, and this is perhaps a feature left from this stage of development?

Additionally, I agree it's pretty weird that the worm just flatout deletes all of the things it eats, I was pretty surprised when the brightshade sword didn't come out the other end or anything. At the same time, I kind of feel like it would be lame if items just came out the other end like it was normal? Maybe rift equipment & other unstackables could come out at 0% where possible.

[grm9]

1 hour ago, Primalflower said:

without animation cancelling

that's nonsensical to bring up considering that anim cancelling only allows you to attack around 14% faster so like 1 more hit

1 hour ago, Primalflower said:

the worm boss will readily destroy structures and thereby houses of mobs if it chomps through them

make a lot of homeless merm guards through merm king ig

[Maxil20]

18 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

Do you think this aspect is going to... stay? The impression I'm left with this (with the knowledge that it has a prefab name of Worm_Boss) is that at one point the worm really was considered a boss, and this is perhaps a feature left from this stage of development?

I'm not sure, admittedly. It does support general despawn code, but as you mentioned it could be from back when it was considered a boss. I feel it could go either way, though admittedly I do feel some way of them despawning is fairly important, at least with multiplayer 
 

18 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

I remember when I was much younger I would pretty consistently get killed by a hound or two left at a wormhole.

I do admittedly relate to that for worms in particular. There's quite a few times where I left the worms alive to "handle them later" and then ended up getting quite a rude bite for doing so a couple dozen days later.
 

18 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

Additionally, I agree it's pretty weird that the worm just flatout deletes all of the things it eats, I was pretty surprised when the brightshade sword didn't come out the other end or anything. At the same time, I kind of feel like it would be lame if items just came out the other end like it was normal? Maybe rift equipment & other unstackables could come out at 0% where possible.

I would say the following:

-I personally wish it had a small-ish "inventory" to hold some things it eats, similar to normal depth worms/lureplants. It slowly digests items it eats (just like lureplants), and if it reaches a cap of items, the excess items are then voided. This means that if you do kill it when it does spawn, you can salvage most of the items used to fight it back, and running away would penalize you by eating the lost items, but not actually doing things like recovering health.

-In addition, having a small-ish whitelist of items that aren't irreplaceables/containers, but are spit out, would be quite nice. I mainly refer to the (shadow) beefalo bell with that, but also items like the umbralla and axe and a small set of boss drops/rift gear would be very nice. I do think the idea of also giving it rift gear for the "long" eating animation but breaking it could also be quite interesting.

I think overall it would certainly help make it feel better for these kind of encounters. I still don't think I would like it too much, but admittedly this is a personal gripe where I can't really see myself liking it unless it didn't do things like break structures (which doesn't really make sense to change for a giant burrowing worm....), or simply had a world option for disabling it if it wasn't something you preferred but still liked the normal waves (like how you can individually enable/disable fire/ice hounds from waves, but still can have hounds come to attack you).

[Mike23Ua]

I have several questions about the big worm mob, and since I can’t actually play in betas myself, I’m going to ask these questions in hopes that someone who is in beta and can test these things and suggest fair & reasonable changes for them BEFORE THE BETA IS OVER (that parts important cause Devs usually don’t revisit after beta ends)

My first question is a pretty immediate and obvious one:

If The Worm eats everything you bait it into eating then does it take damage from eating Sharp Objects? (spears, Pirate Cutlass, Dark swords, etc)

My Next Question:

Can you force it to eat bee mines and take damage over time from the billions of angry bees now in its Tummy?

Lastly does it get Weaker/Strong during Acid Rains like normal depth worms do?

[Cruvimaster]

It's a dangerous boss, but very fun. His loot needs to be improved due to the difficulty. Some characters make the fight easier, like Willow, Wolfgang, Wigfrid, Wanda, Maxwell...

[00petar00]

I didn't even know that it despawns but this needs to stay for multiplayer or it needs a big nerf and at the same time better loot as currently If they don't despawn players can just leave them on endless servers and when you go to caves you'll run into 5-10 because there's no incentive for players to not be "selfish" and leave them when they only get punished for fighting them.

[IAmAFurrz]

2 hours ago, Cruvimaster said:

It's a dangerous boss, but very fun. His loot needs to be improved due to the difficulty. Some characters make the fight easier, like Willow, Wolfgang, Wigfrid, Wanda, Maxwell...

i think if you give it better food it will chew for longer? also i find it weird that it doesnt make a single noise when it dies, as well as its roar being so incredibly quiet

[Cruvimaster]

3 minutes ago, IAmAFurrz said:

i think if you give it better food it will chew for longer? also i find it weird that it doesnt make a single noise when it dies, as well as its roar being so incredibly quiet

I don't think so. In the tests I did here I didn't notice any difference.

I even think it's better to give him twigs because it's a resource that will always be with the player during the real fight.