If you play alone, do you play with the Health Scaling mod?

[Ridley]

I don't play with mods because I want to see the state of the game as it is designed. I fully understand modding the game for your own enjoyment though. I also don't use the rollback since I want to experience what living with the mistakes/bad rng feels like.

Dragonfly isn't a good example of the health scaling because it is was redesigned to be a raid boss. More generic enemies, like clockwork bishops getting a 3x health buff, are a better example of the multiplayer health scaling. Over the years it has mattered less with changes to characters and new options, but it's created a normalcy that people are highly resistant to see changed.

As for the difficulty of the raid bosses for solo players, well, they were designed for encouraging the multiplayer aspect of DST to contrast it with DS. By adding swarms of minions or obstacles, it discourages solo play. I've always disliked this because solo play is the only realistic way I can play most of time.

Now, I am fully aware why some people like the raid bosses as they are. Tough challenge, lots of ways to demonstrate skill, and then there's always the fear of your favorite part of the game being gone forever. Other players would never get to experience the same satisfaction that you achieved and would never see the game you love in the same way. I don't want raid boss enthusiasts to be disappointed. It's just that I see and experience so much that is wrong with these bosses while believing Klei is capable of doing something make us all happy.

• Boss loot is designed for one player every few seasons but this game is multiplayer.
• Raid bosses are designed for multiplayer but just melt against teams (it's lame that the boss is only "good" when fighting solo in this multiplayer game).
• The time and resources it takes to learn these bosses is so unreal that people are just looking up strats and rollingback till they can handle it.
• In a similar vein of looking up strats, some of these bosses have very unintuitive mechanics. Bee Queen's scream thaws frozen bees? Toadstool bounces gunpowder away while summoning trees? Dragonfly apparently summons more larvae sooner if you don't kill the last one yourself? 
• Boss difficulty is sometimes forgiven by some players as long as exploits are available, like FuelWeaver Lureplants or Toadstool voidwalking, but shouldn't this sentiment be indicative that something else is wrong?
• And back to the beginning, why design bosses meant to discourage solo play when solo play isn't always a choice but maybe a circumstance?

[Mike23Ua]

5 hours ago, Mr Giggio said:

The way the bosses are right now even solo u take from 3 min for regular giants 8 mins to raid bosses 5 min to FW and it can take less if u nail the healing phase and shield rounds, 10-12 for CC and max to 16 min  for misery toad. Solo. 

 

That’s only if you’re really good at the game, don’t make ANY Mistakes, and Don’t have to rollback 10-20 times when things go wrong.

Rollbacks Literally = Time of your life wasted accomplishing Nothing.

For comparison sake there’s a RogueLite called Trinity Fusion, on Easy & Normal Difficulties you can get hit as many times as you want and take your time exploring levels, On Hardcore you can only get hit 5 times and it’s game over, and enemies will get stronger than you the longer you stay in a level. You want the Definition of “Git Gud?” Show me you can beat THAT game on Hardcore difficulty, it has the challenging bosses you crave, and screwing up 5 times means going back to the beginning.

That said- the new giant worm if it eats you, leaves you at dangerously low health, but it didn’t need 27,500 hp to be a threat..

If Klei wants to make ALL bosses punch like getting hit by a diesel truck like that, but lowering their overall health so it doesn’t take as long to fight- I’d be all for a change like that.

[arubaro]

8 hours ago, Evelo said:

well I know that, but that is over millions of years not 1 year or less.

In natural circumstances, idk how much it would take if you warm and cool it with higher and cooler temperatures than the found in nature 

Anyways, necessary game logic. They need a downside, infinity durability would make players stay way longer protected since you wont need to warm or cool down until you freeze/overheat instead of doing it before reaching the neutral state plus cloth items require repairs.

The only upside clothing has vs thermal stones is that you need to manage your temperature less often

Edit. If we are up for realism them lets bring back DS thermal stones which heat up in summer and cool down in winter instead of staying neutral

[SapoLover]

Dst is done for solo imo. From 3 and onwards, fights become boring. 2 is like the best scenario, but it becomes boring again with "combat-selfish" characters like Winona, Wurt, Maxwell and Webber (like, let me do something)

[cropo]

On 8/27/2024 at 1:47 PM, Gashzer said:

Yeah using the old toadstool is not a fair justification for why old DST bosses are this tanky. Because if you take all the new bosses on board, most of them don't have anywhere near any of the old boss hp pools so currently klei definitely know that hp grind bosses are not fun for the majority of players hence why they aren't releasing super tanky bosses anymore.

So going on recent updates for evidence (which is the best evidence to use to gauge what klei plans for DST) high hp bosses seem to be a thing of the past and maybe older bosses need updated to fit the current direction of the game.

Klei has always been adding updates to counter strategies they've seen forming since the game was in beta. When DST first came out, players kept killing each other so they made ghosts drain sanity to punish players, and back then changed it so that if 3 people died the server was considered done and regenerated. 
"You know if we play with() Or whatever with developers and without this mechanic he'd just hoard the food- but now it's like, here have some food please don't die because their well being is also your well being."
Players then started joining servers and dying on purpose 3 times, Klei responded "It's justified because Co-op matters, and if Co-op matters then it's griefable."

They were so dedicated to Co-op that they nerfed Willow's entire identity and is the reason she became a non-fire character for a long time. Eventually they added the Ewecus to hunts, who could trap a single player in a pile of goop on its own leaving them vulnerable to damage if someone couldn't help them.
"it requires multiple people to take it down, you simply can't do it on your own."

Then they released Dragonfly some time later, clearly designed with multiple people. Dragonfly is easy today, but back then players weren't so crazy at kiting and managing their inventory, Klei didn't anticipate this level of skill displayed by players as evidence by the fact they thought Ewecus would be impossible to beat solo.
During a New Reign, they release the Metheus puzzle, an off-site puzzle that required another person to help you to get its reward,

They then released Toadstool. In yet another Rhymes with play, this quote was given about Toadstool:
"Yeah so it's gonna be a- dragonfly- tier, and beyond boss. IT's gonna be hard. I mean, he's not intended for someone to try and solo"
A reasonable person in good faith can see that Toadstool was built with the intention to stop any solo-tactic they could think of from working. Again, you need to remember that Klei often fails to anticipate the determination of players,  Toadstool spams stomps and turns near-invincible with all of its trees out. A player could not reasonable chop these trees down by themselves, and could not rely on minions to DPS him or chop trees because Toadstool was all AOE. None of the Dragonfly tactics would work on this boss.

At this point, JoeSchmoe, a youtuber famous for ridiculous speedruns managed to kill Toadstool by day 13 with Wolfgang 5 days after Toadstools release by breaking his AI so that Toadstool was stuck trying to walk back to his spawn point and wouldn't attack his bunnymen. Seeing that they made an obnoxious boss who couldn't even do its job of forcing players to co-op against it, they reworked it so that it wouldn't lose 5x defense when charging but also reduced it's health and increase its armor so players at least couldn't ignore the trees.

 

When making the ancient fuelweaver, they learned that HP sponging a boss doesn't thwart solo players or speedrunners. So instead they designed him to require players to do multiple things at once. If he had a shield that required a player to run around breaking shadow pillars, but at the same time had a group of bugs that healed him if no one would focus on it and even had a short cooldown...surely you would need at least 2 people to fight him right?

So after players continued to bash their head against their wall to circumvent playing with friends on all of their bosses, they add the Forge. A mode that absolutely, most definitely, positively requires multiple players to beat. Only to have players sit and afk the entire time to farm EXP for free skins.


I don't know how anyone in good faith can look at Klei's track record, dating all the way back to the beta for this game and see their continued attempts to thwart strategies and methods of play they don't agree with, see the design of their bosses during ANR and their clear mechanics that prevent more and more single-player tactics, and then decide that Klei did not in fact make them to discourage solo players but rather as this insurmountable epic challenge that tests a players skill level.  They were designed to be unfair for a single player, it's just that Klei always fails to anticipate just how far players can go to circumvent these counters, and when the rifts were first introduced Klei said they decided to switch to more solo-friendly content. I'm almost positive they used "solo-friendly" exactly to describe their update direction on one of the earlier rift updates.

Klei most definitely made ANR bosses to thwart solo play, or to at least seriously discourage it. Taking a look at their track record is all the evidence one needs to come to that conclusion. The fact that they can be beaten solo regardless is in spite of their efforts, not because of them.

[Echsrick]

yes simply because i have not the energy to deal with things alone with a 1X damage character, in random puplic servers i litteraly wont do any bosse unless others are there to do them aswell, unless its deerclops or treeguard because those are solo able easy enought, and most likely there will be others anyways

[Milordo]

On 8/27/2024 at 9:27 PM, Guille6785 said:

This is a myth, while the major bosses from ANR were obviously made with the expectation that most people would fight them in a group they were absolutely designed while making sure they were accessible for single players as well (hence toadstool getting reworked only 5 days after coming out because the developers ultimately didn't like the direction they took with the fight); the large health pools are especially fair when you consider that as a single player you don't have to share any of the loot

Oh this is cool and new information to me. Can I find some statement of it from Klei through some twitch live or you're deducing it from patch notes? I'm curious.

On 8/28/2024 at 12:15 AM, Evelo said:

 The only thing that I use which dramatically changes game balance is Fast Picker (It halfs the time required to gather from say, a twig) 

yoooooooo me toooo, only for lag reasons when in group. Alone, I use as everyone else, the don't starve alone.

On 8/28/2024 at 6:56 AM, Ridley said:

I don't play with mods because I want to see the state of the game as it is designed. I fully understand modding the game for your own enjoyment though. I also don't use the rollback since I want to experience what living with the mistakes/bad rng feels like.

I think I like you a lot.

[BezKa]

Nah. Even if all bosses had twice the health. As a player, I'm a masochist and I love grinding, misery toadstool is legit a joy for me

[Evelo]

On 8/28/2024 at 12:14 AM, arubaro said:

If we are up for realism them lets bring back DS thermal stones which heat up in summer and cool down in winter instead of staying neutral

10/10 comment. I'd love that.

[HeroSoda]

I've not used that mod specifically, but I have others that adjust enemy health and damage. I have alot of mods for all the annoying things the game settings don't let me change, like infinite durability. This may come as a shock considering the name of the game is Don't Starve Together, but I'm not actually here to play a survival game. I'm here to hang out and explore the world and because I find the lore interesting. The survival mechanics of the game and lengthy overly-difficult-for-solo boss fights are a hindrance to those goals, so I mod them out. I mod survival mechanics out of any game I play that has them. 

[Cheggf]

On 8/27/2024 at 3:15 AM, dontbob said:

The bosses in DST are designed to be fought by multiple people, so the devs have scaled their health accordingly.

That's not true. Their health is way too low if you fight them with multiple people. Every boss other than Toadstool & Bee Queen crumple over and die instantly if you fight them with more than 1 or maybe 2 players.

[Bumber64]

16 hours ago, Cheggf said:

That's not true. Their health is way too low if you fight them with multiple people. Every boss other than Toadstool & Bee Queen crumple over and die instantly if you fight them with more than 1 or maybe 2 players.

I'd assume this depends on the characters and equipment.

How quickly do giants die in DS? Like if you did Wolfgang+hambat on bearger or deercops, with the skill of a DST solo player. (Did Wolfgang have access to the same damage multiplier?)

[arubaro]

5 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

I'd assume this depends on the characters and equipment.

How quickly do giants die in DS? Like if you did Wolfgang+hambat on bearger or deercops, with the skill of a DST solo player. (Did Wolfgang have access to the same damage multiplier?)

Is true even with spears and wilsons

Giants in ds were ridiculous, you could tank with a hambat for few seconds and win. Armor stack and last longer. Wolfgang made no sense since could kill in less than 20 or 30 hits most bosses

[Bumber64]

4 minutes ago, arubaro said:

Giants in ds were ridiculous, you could tank with a hambat for few seconds and win.

Sounds like Klei had low expectations of the player to begin with.

[Cheggf]

42 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

I'd assume this depends on the characters and equipment.

How quickly do giants die in DS? Like if you did Wolfgang+hambat on bearger or deercops, with the skill of a DST solo player. (Did Wolfgang have access to the same damage multiplier?)

The "giants" in Don't Starve are pushovers. A common complaint of Don't Starve is that the so-called "bosses" don't feel at all like bosses and everything dies way too quickly. Even without doing anything special you can literally kill Deerclops in 6 or 7 seconds in DSA by just holding F as Wolfgang. That's it. That's not a boss fight. In DST the boss fights are good & fun if you don't exceed 2.0x damage. The more you exceed 2.0x damage the worse the fights become. A single player as any character is good, including heavy hitters like Maxwell & Wolfgang, but pairing them with even Wes makes the fights over a bit on the fast side. If you have 2 combat characters or 3+ characters the fights are over before they even get started. 

[Echsrick]

18 hours ago, Cheggf said:

That's not true. Their health is way too low if you fight them with multiple people. Every boss other than Toadstool & Bee Queen crumple over and die instantly if you fight them with more than 1 or maybe 2 players.

maybe its too low for people that know what they are doin, throw 3 + people against fuelweaver that dont know what to do and it will be more normal health for them

[Jorvalt]

On 8/27/2024 at 3:15 AM, dontbob said:

The bosses in DST are designed to be fought by multiple people, so the devs have scaled their health accordingly. I know Dragonfly got a 10x health buff when they added it to DST. But their health doesn't change in accordance to how many players are fighting it.

So, do you fight the bosses in their vanilla state when you're playing alone, or do you prefer to use a mod to balance things out?

I've been playing with the Don't Starve Alone mod and I've found that the boss experience is much more manageable now. Although, ever since I did, Deerclops and Antlion feel like a joke...

Yes. I'd rather not have to bring like 5 weapons and football helmets to every fight and take like 5 whole minutes of wailing on them to deal with the damage sponge bosses. Toadstool is also hell, and misery toadstool is worse than hell.

As for what others are saying about bosses being significantly easier with a certain number of players, the mod I use will actually scale boss health up vs. vanilla past a certain point.

[Cheggf]

2 hours ago, Echsrick said:

maybe its too low for people that know what they are doin, throw 3 + people against fuelweaver that dont know what to do and it will be more normal health for them

The bosses are not balanced around the success of a horde of people who sprint directly into the boss and hold F until they die. 

[Echsrick]

1 hour ago, Cheggf said:

The bosses are not balanced around the success of a horde of people who sprint directly into the boss and hold F until they die. 

yep, there balanced around play around and find out, and so because they dont know better it dont matter if theres 1 or 4 players, it only helps being more then 1 so they can do more damage when they can, because they may not be the best super OP boss rush killers day 5 or what ever unlike what many want to belive most players are that can solo everything

[arubaro]

12 hours ago, Echsrick said:

yep, there balanced around play around and find out, and so because they dont know better it dont matter if theres 1 or 4 players, it only helps being more then 1 so they can do more damage when they can, because they may not be the best super OP boss rush killers day 5 or what ever unlike what many want to belive most players are that can solo everything

Darkness damage isnt balanced because there might be people who dont know about torches

What a non sense

16 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

Sounds like Klei had low expectations of the player to begin with.

Klei's biggest flaw is balance and not only for the ds franchise...

[Echsrick]

3 hours ago, arubaro said:

Darkness damage isnt balanced because there might be people who dont know about torches

What a non sense

 

thats called a strawman, good job!