Genuine Question to Klei: What is the point of planar?

[Masked Koopa]

Alright so I know Klei has somewhat of a rule of being hands-off when it comes to discussing developer intent and all that, but I legitimately want to know what the purpose of planar is.

When planar first came out, it was a bit of a divisive topic, but the mechanic seemed to at least have some pretty relevant implications. Pure Brilliance was pretty difficult to get a lot of and planar gear wasn't repairable so having enough planar gear to deal with planar enemies was reasonably time-intensive and at least somewhat of a challenge between the Brightshades and avoiding the goopy guys while mining Pure Brilliance.

Planar also massively nerfed spamming minions by cutting down the damage they were capable of dealing, as well as making high damage multipliers significantly less rewarding. It also just generally toned-down a lot of character-specific combat advantages and disadvantages by making Wes and Wendy deal relatively more than before and nerfing things like Weremoose, Abigail, Bernie, Merms, Spiders, Bramble Traps/Husks, etc.

Possible Reasons, and why they are undermined right now:

Based on this and my best guess, I narrowed down the possible intent to solving one or more of these problems:

1.  Klei thinks high damage multipliers and/or minion spam is too strong for current combat and want your next phase of combat to nerf doing this.
2.  Klei want to force players to collect new resources to make gear that can keep up with planar so you can add new challenges you have to deal with to move up in the "planar world" (Brightshades and Pure Brillance mining).
3.  Klei want to force players to use different gear than the gear they use in pre-rifts, forcing them out of their cozy Ham Bats and Dark Swords and into more wacky and out-there weapons.
4. Klei wants to reduce the combat ability gap between characters in general, and make them use the same sort of gear/weapon/damage sources.

 

I has always assumed that at least one of these must be the reason, yet between the changes to the existing rifts content and the addition of more skill trees, none of these hold true anymore!

1. Wolfgang has already been given all of his damage back when using planar weapons, in addition to an extra 30% against one of the two sides (which is also all the planar enemies).
   Wurt has been given the tools to make minion spam just as, if not more effective than before.
   Based on these two already being arguably the best "damage multiplier user" and "minion spammer", it is not unfair to assume that Webber and Warly will receive similar treatment given they are already considered to be generally worse.
2. Any resource cost the new materials might have once had are effectively null and void with rifts gear now being indestructable (i.e not breakable like Dreadstone/Eye gear) as well as ludicrously cheap to maintain via repair kits.
   We can also mass-farm Pure Brilliance with Wicker to a degree where the material may as well be free, and Klei hasn't really made any efforts to prevent us fully automating Brightshade kills via magma pools, so Brightshade gear is extra-especially cheap.
3. This one was already completely undermined by giving us the Brightshade sword which is effectively a copy of every pre-rift weapon ever but with some planar stats. It'd have been one thing if it was a basic starting planar weapon that gets outclassed by the zany but difficult to use alternatives, but so far it has kept pace with the Howlizter, Scythe and Dark Boomerang just fine.
4. As mentioned Wolfgang and Wurt's character-specific traits have been planar-fied, but we've also seen Wormwood, Winona, Woodie, etc all get their combat stuff planar-fied.

Before you get angry at me pointing these things out:

Now before anyone gets upset at me for seemingly complaining about character-specific perks being brought up to speed, or for implying that magma pool husk farming or pure brilliance farming is OP, or for one of the other things I noted above: My goal here is not to complain about those changes. Or any of those changes in particular.

The problem I am seeing here is that all of these changes were made as a collective. As in, after having made all of those changes, I feel like we've just gone in a circle. Seriously: what does planar even do at this point? It feels like every possible reason Klei could have had to add planar back then has since been completely undermined if it ever had a basis in the first place. We go through all these hoops only to end up in a situation where we're "forced" to use rifts gear as though we wouldn't use it anyway.  A FB helm but it is cheaper to use, protects from nightmares more, boosts your sword's damage, has more durability, is repairable, and protects you from sand and moonstorms. A cheaper, more durable and repairable hammer that doubles as a more durable pickaxe. I could keep going but I feel like the point is clear.

The only possible reasons I can think of:
Ok so given the reasons I listed before aren't really valid anymore, I tried to scrape together what little things have remained consistent since planar came out.

1.  Access to 90% or more damage reduction armour isn't there for planar.
2.  Stacking Wolfgang alongside spicy Goat Jelly is slightly weaker vs planar enemies.
3.  Using minion spam as non-minion based characters remains ineffective.
4. Wendy and Wes's negative damage multipliers matter a little less with planar gear.

The problem with these is that most of of them don't do anywhere near enough to justify planar existing.

1.  This one I can at least somewhat understand, but for one Woodie's Weremoose is and always has been entirely unaffected by planar in terms of his 90% damage reduction, and even if the primary goal of planar were to make the player be in greater danger, that wouldn't justify making the player use planar damage, it'd only justify enemies having it.
2.  This one is just really specific and shouldn't be enough reason to add a system as convoluted as planar. Seriously Klei, I get ya'll might be a little traumatised over accidentally giving Wolf 6x damage, but there's better ways to go about changing that than this.
3.  This has never been the meta in the first place for non-Wurt/non-Webber players who are "allowed" to use minion spam anyway. People use bunnies against BQ because they don't wanna deal with BQ, not because they use bunnies on every boss fight.
4. Given Wes is a joke character that'd specifically be Wendy, which once again - one character doing x thing is a bad reason to add planar.

Please just tell us what planar is actually meant to do:

Look, I get it, okay? People complaining about planar has become something like white noise on the forums at this point, but at least back when the mechanic was new a lot of the potential impacts of planar were intact. At this point it feels like once the skill trees are done we'll have gone in a complete circle. The main impact of planar right now is that it disproportionately affects characters who don't have a skill tree yet but do have combat perks, like Wanda or Wendy. I want to know what the actual purpose is of keeping planar, because I worry that at this point ya'll have made so many concessions to your vision to cater to us that you've ship-of-theseus'd yourself back to the status quo.

Planar is really complicated to understand, not least because the concept of "planar defense" has two completely different meanings based on whether it's from armour or built-in. If a system this complicated is meant to remain in the game, and we are expected to give feedback on planar mechanics like the ones on the new skill trees, I'd at the very least like to know what planar is even there for.

[Echsrick]

what i realy hate and dont understand why planar defense? just to make the good old stuff arbitary bad against planar stuff? i mean with planar weapon there pretty much is no point in using not planar weapon, even if it does as much damage as the old darksword, only reason to use planar stuff is for farming...more planar stuff....wich is.....why at that point?

[Captain_Rage]

It makes the new tier of monsters that the players unlock a more streamlined next level of difficulty and relatively more dangerous. If you unleash and fight Deadly Brightshades then using a premium armor from the previous tier will still keep them dangerous. Contrary, if you use protection from the new tier(rift gear) it bestows decent protection against the new threats without nullifying every danger from the previous tier (which would happen if weapon and armor stats were simply increased linearly as some sort of utterly lame way to increase difficulty).

[arubaro]

To dont stack x2 damage multiplier from characters with the voltgoat jelly...instead of simply changing how damage buffs are applied or how the voltgat jelly buff works. Oh! And to give room for new *tiers* of weapons because we all know that sandbox needs 3747382 tiers of gear to make us ditch previous ones. Making new armors without doing 99,90% armor protection-->99.95%, etc instead of adding armors with different effects while they add enemies with true damage or blood/poison mechanics...

Atleast the weapons powercreep isnt as bad as in the 99% of sandbox games

[Masked Koopa]

45 minutes ago, Captain_Rage said:

It makes the new tier of monsters that the players unlock a more streamlined next level of difficulty and relatively more dangerous. If you unleash and fight Deadly Brightshades then using a premium armor from the previous tier will still keep them dangerous. Contrary, if you use protection from the new tier(rift gear) it bestows decent protection against the new threats without nullifying every danger from the previous tier (which would happen if weapon and armor stats were simply increased linearly as some sort of utterly lame way to increase difficulty).

I mean as I said in the post that really only justifies the existence of enemies using Planar attacks. It doesn't do a whole lot to justify planar defense both on players and on enemies, outside of making your first Brightshade encounter slightly more dangerous than the second. Which it'd be anyway since after your first encounter you'll also better understand its mechanics.

[Primalflower]

to my understanding the idea behind planar beyond branching off from dark swords and football helmets was just that they didn't want new content and weaponry to totally steamroll older content. I think the vision for this is still pretty clear,

a brightshade sword is more effective than previous weaponry at the new mobs with planar defense, but it's only going to do a little bit more than a dark sword against mobs that don't engage with planar. The shadow reaper has its own caveat that you can only really do much damage with it if you get off a 'combo' and in its pure base state it's considerably worse than a dark sword.

I don't think this is a super hard and fast rule, and they're not shy about giving us pretty powerful tools, (BS staff, shadow reaper reaping ability, and now the shadow war axe) but to me the intent is fairly clear. They're trying to curb the sort of terraria effect of as you continue on through the ranks of the game, previous enemies become essentially 1-taps.

[Captain_Rage]

In other games, for example in Core Keeper, there is a very linear power creep when it comes to gear and monsters. The developers eventually added the ability to upgrade gear to the same level as the end-game gear you find, given enough resources of varying degree of rarity. This approach kind of works as a way normalize every piece of gear as the player progresses if they desire but it honestly doesn't feel entirely satisfying. Without the upgrade mechanic every piece of gear became obsolete extremely fast (well, it's a slightly different type of game but still overlaps with DST in many regards).

[Masked Koopa]

14 hours ago, Primalflower said:

to my understanding the idea behind planar beyond branching off from dark swords and football helmets was just that they didn't want new content and weaponry to totally steamroll older content. I think the vision for this is still pretty clear,

a brightshade sword is more effective than previous weaponry at the new mobs with planar defense, but it's only going to do a little bit more than a dark sword against mobs that don't engage with planar. The shadow reaper has its own caveat that you can only really do much damage with it if you get off a 'combo' and in its pure base state it's considerably worse than a dark sword.

I don't think this is a super hard and fast rule, and they're not shy about giving us pretty powerful tools, (BS staff, shadow reaper reaping ability, and now the shadow war axe) but to me the intent is fairly clear. They're trying to curb the sort of terraria effect of as you continue on through the ranks of the game, previous enemies become essentially 1-taps.

I understand the idea of wanting to give players "next tier" gear, but what I don't understand is why the next tier gear isn't really substantially different nor difficult to obtain.

As in, Brightshade gear isn't hard to obtain at all and once you do maintaining it is trivial. Like I said in the post, even if planar didn't exist at all, the Rift gear would still be probably the best gear in the game due to the combination of superb durability, good power level, and very very very cheap and practical maintainability.

Back when Brightshade gear first came out, it was pretty difficult to use the gear on a regular basis as you had to cough up the upfront cost every time, meaning you'd have to weigh up whether or not it was worth using your gear on anything that wasn't planar related. It made the planar gear requirement of planar enemies feel like a legitimate extra consideration in terms of material cost.

But now I'm already using a Brightshade sword or a Howlizter as my main weapon, and a Brightshade Helm or body armour for my armour. Because why wouldn't I? So the idea of "this enemy has planar stats" isn't making me compromise on my gear like it might have done had planar gear remained at least somewhat costly to use.

And I wanna be clear that this isn't me complaining about the gear being maintainable or anything - I really enjoy having maintainable and repairable gear, it's just that it feels like a major part of what was justifying planar is gone.

[abrocator]

Reminder that FW is still the hardest boss in the game and didn't introduce any such over-complicated, redundant, sell-you-the-solution-in-three-updates, modern game design "don't get better at beating early enemies"... mechanics.

The game has also given us mostly side-grades for many years. For people who are weirdly concerned with spiders being easy to kill in a day 500+ world.

There are reasons for it. But no good ones.

[Primalflower]

1 hour ago, Masked Koopa said:

Back when Brightshade gear first came out, it was pretty difficult to use the gear on a regular basis as you had to cough up the upfront cost every time, meaning you'd have to weigh up whether or not it was worth using your gear on anything that wasn't planar related. It made the planar gear requirement of planar enemies feel like a legitimate extra consideration in terms of material cost.

I think somewhat unfortunately, this is an aspect of the game that does not play nice with the different resource spread that comes with Singleplayer/Multiplayer. I remember during the period before repair kits had me just kind of barely breaking even on my brightshade husk supply all on my own, and i don't remember using the brightshade staff basically at all, much less brightshade bombs, and i also remember sticking to glass cutters for anything that wasn't planar. The resource drain was enough for me, as a single player, to have to kind of ration any of the new stuff out and not really do much with it all, so you can imagine how much it sucked for multiplayer. As it stands right now, the flow of rift materials is still kind of stretching it even right now on a populated server with active players.

A sort of half-related addendum to my just spoken train of thought: God, can you ****ing imagine if brightshade spawns scaled with players? The forums would be on fire before the patch even went out. Would be crazy!

[Masked Koopa]

33 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

I think somewhat unfortunately, this is an aspect of the game that does not play nice with the different resource spread that comes with Singleplayer/Multiplayer. I remember during the period before repair kits had me just kind of barely breaking even on my brightshade husk supply all on my own, and i don't remember using the brightshade staff basically at all, much less brightshade bombs, and i also remember sticking to glass cutters for anything that wasn't planar. The resource drain was enough for me, as a single player, to have to kind of ration any of the new stuff out and not really do much with it all, so you can imagine how much it sucked for multiplayer. As it stands right now, the flow of rift materials is still kind of stretching it even right now on a populated server with active players.

(I realised I have a lot to say on this so I figured id at least add some headings to split up my reply and make it at least a bit more readable)

Brightshade farming right now:
Well Brightshades are their own can of worms due to the whole Magma Pool autofarm. The farm isn't a bug as it doesn't use any mechanics that don't make some degree of in-game sense (i.e it isn't your character walking over a chasm and it isn't trapping a giant monster on the hitbox of a plant or a mole or something). And Klei at this point definitely knows it exists and hasn't done anything to curb it, so it's kind of hard to gauge whether or not it's fair to use it to judge the sort of production rates you can get.

You could absolutely try to argue that doing this setup is gatekeeping the intended experience somewhat, but the reality is that if my friends and I don't do this, all of our wild plants will get infected with Brightshades, as we don't actually use infectable plants in our base - Gekkos and Gators supply grass and twigs more efficiently even when not taking Brightshades into account, and Winbots have only made them better as they can now be fully automated with 0 risk of lag.

Pure Brilliance farming right now:
On the other hand Pure Brilliance is absolutely and completely bananas to farm without any sort of unintended interaction. You can just press M2 on a bunch of books as Wicker near a Lightning Rod and then hold M1 as Wilson for a while and you can amass literal thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Pure Brilliance in an incredibly short timespan. In my opinion it might be among the easiest things to farm in the entire game, as resources like Logs and Grass require you to plant Pinecones, or fertilise Grass Tufts and wait for Eyeplants to spawn.

In most cases id call having to do a character switch a somewhat unfair comparison, but given Pure Brilliance is a post-rifts material getting the Celesial Portal up and running isn't a big ask - you already have access to the Altars and the Lunar orb for the portal kit, as well as plenty of Moonrocks via the Lunar Island, CC's drops, the Archives, etc. You are going to have everything you need purely as a side effect of doing the questline.

My perspective the availability early on and right now:
Between those two, the current state of affairs has my 3 player long-term world with 9999+ Brightshade Husks and Pure Brilliance as well as about 500 or so repair kits sitting in our storage. Granted one of us is using Maxwell and they are not using Brightshade gear, but my other friend and I are using Brightshade for literally everything we can - armour, tools, weapons, etc.

On the shadow side, all three of us use the Umbralla over any other rain protection since it's just generally better than the Eyebrella, and our Maxwell uses the Shadow Reaper and Shadow chestplate as their main weapon/armour. And we still have an excess of shadow gear despite barely ever bothering to kill Ink Blights. Still, shadow gear does feel like it is in a much more reasonable position, and obtaining the materials does require us to engage with the shadow rifts at least semi-regularly. I think if Lunar Rifts had a similar state of balance I probably wouldn't even have made this post.

I can definitely relate to your early experience with Brightshade gear though - we were almost always short of it when the first update came out, and we resorted to using Green Gems to duplicate a few times just so everyone could have a copy of all the gear to play around with. Using the staff was prohibitively expensive and I generally just used Merm Guards to kill Brightshades so we could accumulate Husks in any meaningful way.

What I think would need to happen to remedy the current situation:

I think to me Lunar/Brightshade is definitely the bigger culprit in terms of Planar gear scarcity, but there are two massive problems with even starting to try to remedy the situation.

Brightshade Husks
One of the two is, as you have already pointed out - people hate Brightshades. And not without good reason, might I add. While the Ink Blights have garnered near universal praise as a fight, the Brightshades are seen by most players as less of a challenge and more of an annoyance Klei forces upon them. I think Klei has made it pretty obvious that they as game designers are entirely unequipped to even begin to tackle such a problem, not least because the starting premise of Brightshades was actively wrong. Klei seem to think that people beating Celestial Champion will have trouble surviving if they can't use Berry Bushes, Grass Tufts, Saplings, or Farm plants. Which is just... . It's not as though we have them infecting Banana Bushes, Kelp Stalks, Fig Vines, Monkeytails, Stonefruit bushes, Lureplants, etc. You know, the plants players capable of killing CC actually use as sources of food/resources. It remains to be seen how they intend to handle Lunar Gekkos, but I sincerely doubt those will be a source of husks or related to Brightshades so they are besides the point.

Given that hatred, it seems unlikely to me that Klei is going to remedy the Magma Pool farm now that people have gotten used to it existing. Which puts the whole thing in a bit of an awkward situation. Not fixing the Magma Pool exploit makes Husks plentiful and obtainable AFK, but fixing it wouldn't make players happy to go Husk Harvesting like they are with Ink Blights. To truly remedy this, Klei would have to make Brightshades something people want to fight, fix the Magma Pool exploit, and make them optional rather than invasive so players aren't constantly amassing more husks by keeping their base Brightshade-free. And the first of those is already a pretty big ask, let alone all three.

Pure Brilliance

Pure Brilliance, on the other hand is sitting in an arguably even more problematic situation. While Brightshades have the issues I outlined, a theoretical "Brightshades good edition" would probably justify removing the Magma pool thing, and reign in the supply of Husks to require at least the occasional battle with them. That's already a big ask, but Pure Brilliance is in the situation of having a lot of forums users vehemently in favour of the current availability level, as was shown back when End is Nigh farming was added. Pure Brilliance has gone from being at least somewhat valuable to essentially having no value at all. There's no reason to not use the Wicker farm beyond not having Wilson's skill unlocked - it's not like other character-swap strategies that require you to switch to the character frequently - one batch can easily leave your entire server set for life.

I suspect the reason people are so in favour of it is a combination of not wanting to repeatedly deal with mining Pure Brilliance, and people being happy TEIN has actual usefulness after the removal of WX's overcharge. But the current state of affairs is arguably even worse than with Husks, as Husks at the very least only represent the "baseline" planar tools - Pure Brilliance seems to be the cost for Lunar Allignments on skill trees. But not only is Pure Brilliance more amassable than literal Poop, the skill trees also seem to be tripping over themselves to make the Pure Brilliance cost as meaningless as humanly possible, with some of them straight-up not even requiring it at all like Willow or Woodie.

I don't see any good way out of this either, as forums users seem to be aggressively in favour of the current strategy's yields, as well as very much against introducing PB costs to existing trees or increasing the PB costs of those that do.

I think if I were Klei choosing to ignore community opinion, I'd raise the yields from mining Ryftstals, as well as make them passively regenerate while the rift is open to allow players to farm more Brilliance. Or maybe flat-out make Ryftstals unbreakable and simply make them drop Pure Brilliance after X swings, similar to the End Table. As for nerfing TEIN, I would probably leave the charged Moonglass farming as-is, and simply replace Wilson's allignment skills, since the Shadow Side is a bit meh anyway. That way people can still use it to farm Moonglass for decorational purposes, and charged glass for CC re-fights, while Wilson can get some better skills.

[Maxil20]

30 minutes ago, Masked Koopa said:

Snip

Maybe I’m being unobservent or something, but I don’t really see the issue with being able to “mass produce” brightshade items like this, especially when the biggest reason the most popular items/armor people used before rifts (dark swords, football helms, ham bats, etc.) were because they were mass produceable. I had a moonstone setup I used to farm werepigs hambat materials, and wold unironically set me for over 1000 days for every use.

I do agree the brightshade farm is silly, but I honestly feel the easiest solution is just to make it so husks burn. The plants already have their loot turn to ash when they are killed by fire damage, so I don’t see it being a serious change to make the husks burn as well. I mainly use the setup because my world would get oversaturated by brightshades, so losing the farm doesn't’ mean much to me provided that aspect is maintained.

[Masked Koopa]

53 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

Maybe I’m being unobservent or something, but I don’t really see the issue with being able to “mass produce” brightshade items like this, especially when the biggest reason the most popular items/armor people used before rifts (dark swords, football helms, ham bats, etc.) were because they were mass produceable. I had a moonstone setup I used to farm werepigs hambat materials, and wold unironically set me for over 1000 days for every use.

It's less that there is an inherent issue in being able to mass-produce them, and moreso than in being able to mass-produce them a large amount of the justification for Planar is undermined by making the use of Planar gear not a sacrifice on the player's part. When the mechanic was originally introduced, using Planar gear meant a baseline of effort on the player's part in terms of being able to use it sustainably. Brightshade gear was kind of meh compared to the other options available, almost entirely because of the resource cost.

We have since then had a bevvy of buffs to the stats and sustainability to the gear making it not only generally better than most other gear but also cheaper to use. At this point planar isn't a mechanic that justifies using otherwise somewhat underwhelming gear, it's a mechanic that encourages you to use the gear you're already using anyway (i.e reundant).

And like I said - I LIKE Brightshade being convinient to use and cheap, but the reasons I like it are entirely disconnected from Planar, which was supposed to be the primary selling point of the gear. My observations in that reply are moreso my take on what would be required to make the resource cost at least somewhat of a sacrifice so that "oh no you have to use planar gear for this fight!" isn't a complete redundancy.

For me personally id be fine with Klei just getting rid of most planar and instead just focusing on enemies having damage piercing capabilities - whether that be keeping planar on enemy attacks or adding some sort of damage over time effect that deals similar damage to planar.

[SpookyXy]

6 hours ago, abrocator said:

Reminder that FW is still the hardest boss in the game and didn't introduce any such over-complicated, redundant, sell-you-the-solution-in-three-updates, modern game design "don't get better at beating early enemies"... mechanics.

The game has also given us mostly side-grades for many years. For people who are weirdly concerned with spiders being easy to kill in a day 500+ world.

There are reasons for it. But no good ones.

FW is the hardest boss in the game because he's loaded with so much BS. Heals himself, traps you in cages, mind controls you if you're insane, massive insanity aura, invincible barrier etc. It's a lot to juggle solo and while it fits FW as the first final boss, I don't think anyone want's him to be the standard for all future enemy design.

[W0l0l0]

Kinda agree.

I feel like we might have entered a cycle where:

things are too hard -> buff characters -> game is now too easy -> nerfing isn't allowed so arbitrary mechanic to make it harder -> game is now too hard again

[grm9]

Just now, SpookyXy said:

I don't think anyone want's him to be the standard for all future enemy design

i do

[SpookyXy]

1 minute ago, grm9 said:

i do

I don't think most people want that.

[grm9]

7 minutes ago, SpookyXy said:

I don't think most people want that

a lot of people think that figuring a strat out for and fighting FW's fun though

[SpookyXy]

3 minutes ago, grm9 said:

a lot of people think that FW's a good boss though

I agree. I think his design fits him as a final boss, just that it would be too much for regular post rifts enemies and even most bosses shouldn't be as demanding a fight as Fuelweaver.

[Evelo]

I just think of it as a way for DST to have a Terraria equivalent to "Hardmode" which is just post "Final Boss 1" (Wall of Flesh). It is still a work in progress. Which sucks because this is a live service game and Klei is going for an expansion level of content that is being drip fed over years. I don't think it is a good idea to do it as such but it's their game.

Imo go radio silent for like 3 years then BAM new stuff "From Beyond!" all finished and ready. Sure no updates for 3 years but I think moving away from live service is a good idea (if possible). However considering Klei isn't adding any gameplay based DLC to the game so they don't have to screw with cross compatibility with game versions based on who owns or doesn't own the DLC (or future DLCs) which I know is a hassle for devs based on my experience working on AoE2. (Lots of testing for if player X can play with player Y who owns abc DLC but not de but X owns cde but not ab).

So why planar? I believe Klei has ambitions and are restricted behind their current financial structure with regard to DST.

[cybers2001]

Planar allows for normal weapons to be less effective against planar enemies while also keeping planar weapons from being more effective against normal enemies.

[Mr Giggio]

12 hours ago, SpookyXy said:

I don't think anyone want's him to be the standard for all future enemy design

I do

Fights are a challange and one of the few bosses that can offer that after a while is FW. That is how to succeed being a boss. People just lazy or want a easy mode in a game which one of the main points is to be unforgiving since the beggining. SINCE. THE. BEGGINING.

[Masked Koopa]

6 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

Planar allows for normal weapons to be less effective against planar enemies while also keeping planar weapons from being more effective against normal enemies.

The question I am posing in the post is what the benefit of making normal weapons less effective against planar even is. It doesn't encourage us to use new weapons types as we get a weapon that works the exact same as every other weapon pre rifts (brightshade sword), and it doesn't encourage us to use gear we might otherwise not use - as Brightshade gear is already better than most if not all of the pre-rifts gear even when you ignore planar completely.

[cybers2001]

2 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

The question I am posing in the post is what the benefit of making normal weapons less effective against planar even is. It doesn't encourage us to use new weapons types as we get a weapon that works the exact same as every other weapon pre rifts (brightshade sword), and it doesn't encourage us to use gear we might otherwise not use - as Brightshade gear is already better than most if not all of the pre-rifts gear even when you ignore planar completely.

I don’t think Klei is encouraging us to still use normal weapons post-rift, they’re just ensuring that pre-rift bosses don’t fall off too hard in the transition.

With the whole “pick a side” theme they started this arc with, I presume they want us to commit to all void or all brightshade gear to use everywhere.

 

[Primalflower]

On 8/27/2024 at 1:39 PM, Masked Koopa said:

Klei seem to think that people beating Celestial Champion will have trouble surviving if they can't use Berry Bushes, Grass Tufts, Saplings, or Farm plants. Which is just... .

I think you're unconsciously inventing purposes for the mechanics in discussion that were never in the question and then sort of being surprised when those purposes are stupid.