Why everyone seems to panic over an unbalanced character?

[WenericMember]

10 minutes ago, gaymime said:

except we are not talking about making her stronger than wilson. people want her to be the strongest character. they want her to be wolfgang because they want to be wolfgang without looking like wolfgang and without giving up abigail

I don't disagree, but you've gone too far down the opposite extreme.

57 minutes ago, gaymime said:

last week everything about her said "wendy is not a fighter. use another way"

Wendy is a fighter. The absolute strongest in 1 on 1 combat? No, but she's still better than normal at peak performance, making your post not a middleground, it's an opposite extreme.

[Siren11]

17 minutes ago, gaymime said:

except we are not talking about making her stronger than wilson. people want her to be the strongest character. they want her to be wolfgang because they want to be wolfgang without looking like wolfgang and without giving up abigail

Wendy is very popular so there is a lot of variety in what people want from her skill tree. There’s also often a language barrier on here, so it can be hard to tell what people really mean sometimes. I’ve seen more Wendy mains asking for the first version of her shroud to be nerfed bc it was too strong than Wendy mains asking for her to be as strong as Wolfgang (which again, might be a bit of a mistranslation).

Wendy is already a fighter.

[gaymime]

1 minute ago, WenericMember said:

I don't disagree, but you've gone too far down the opposite extreme.

Wendy is a fighter. The absolute strongest in 1 on 1 combat? No, but your post isn't a middleground, it's an opposite extreme.

-shrugs- maybe it is extreme but i have seen so many posts expressing this desire that i am unable to see it any other way.

wendy can fight. that does not make her a fighter. several characters can fight but they are not designed for direct face-to-face combat. she is (loosely) designed around the warlock class. she is designed to use minions and spells as her optimal strategy. you can facetank with a warlock but they are not designed with that in mind. you can facetank with wendy but that is not her strong-suit and is a mismatch for her skillset

1 minute ago, Siren11 said:

Wendy is very popular so there is a lot of variety in what people want from her skill tree. There’s also often a language barrier on here, so it can be hard to tell what people really mean sometimes. I’ve seen more Wendy mains asking for the first version of her shroud to be nerfed bc it was too strong than Wendy mains asking for her to be as strong Wolfgang (which again, might be a bit of a mistranslation).

Wendy is already a fighter.

it can be hard to tell which is why i often avoid conversations about character changes. i am only so invested in this one to the point of engaging because she IS the most popular character and i have seen developers fall under the pressure of fans who did not care about the character's lore as long as their mechanical abilities suited a preferred game-play style(which unfortunately seems to be primarily boss-fight oriented as of late). i don't want wendy to be the place where klei breaks from the narrative they have been working on so fully that it is guaranteed the rest of the characters will be changed to go into this direction as well. i am worried about the future.

[Fufuji]

25 minutes ago, gaymime said:

if klei only hears people telling them that this very popular character needs to be a strong fighter like wolfgang or wanda then klei might just change this character to be a strong fighter. if klei changes a character that is not a fighter into a fighter then it is reasonable to expect they will throw away other character's lore to make them fighters too.

They won't. No one knows Wendy better than Klei, and no one investigates forumites' will more than Klei.

[WenericMember]

4 minutes ago, Fufuji said:

They won't. No one knows Wendy better than Klei, and no one investigates forumites' will more than Klei.

I mean they did launch Wendy's skill tree in it's original state...

[Siren11]

11 minutes ago, gaymime said:

wendy can fight. that does not make her a fighter. several characters can fight but they are not designed for direct face-to-face combat. she is (loosely) designed around the warlock class. she is designed to use minions and spells as her optimal strategy. you can facetank with a warlock but they are not designed with that in mind. you can facetank with wendy but that is not her strong-suit and is a mismatch for her skillset

Did you mean like fighter class? Tbh I think “fighter = able to facetank” isn’t the best way to think about DST’s combat system. Wolfgang, Wigfrid, and Woodie may be the best at it, but any character can facetank if they really want. Willow, Wendy, and Wanda are examples of combat characters who aren’t based around tanking, but that doesn’t mean they’re not fighters.

Wendy’s combat style has always been about positioning yourself and managing Abigail. It feels very clever and satisfying to pull off. Her skill set still seems to be based around this and there was backlash against the original shroud, which was cool but also unbalanced (made Wendy too tanky and didn’t fit with her combat style) and didn’t really fit with her character design either.

[gaymime]

2 minutes ago, Fufuji said:

They won't. No one knows Wendy better than Klei, and no one investigates forumites' will more than Klei.

i hope that is true but klei also made notable changes to wortox in a way that feels like he is becoming more of a fighter character than a healer character and i do not know how they would keep wendy's character intact while changing her gameplay to be more suitable for how she is played by the majority. wortox and his character seems to be changing from what he was established to be with klei making his skills more fight-focused and from where i am looking it is happening with her as well

thankyou for having a conversation with me about this even though we did not end up agreeing. i appreciate you hearing me out. i hope that no matter how this ends up going the game will be better for the most people possible

 

2 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

Did you mean like fighter class? Tbh I think “fighter = able to facetank” isn’t the best way to think about DST’s combat system. Wolfgang, Wigfrid, and Woodie may be the best at it, but any character can facetank if they really want. Willow, Wendy, and Wanda are examples of combat characters who aren’t based around tanking, but that doesn’t mean they’re not fighters.

Wendy’s combat style has always been about positioning yourself and managing Abigail. It feels very clever and satisfying to pull off. Her skill set still seems to be based around this and there was backlash against the original shroud, which was cool but also unbalanced (made Wendy too tanky and didn’t fit with her combat style) and didn’t really fit with her character design either.

fighter = barbarian class. the "hit thing until dead" class. when i say fighter i don't mean "can attack and survive" i specifically am talking about raw-number attacking points.; something that aids specifically and directly in melee-style "hit thing until dead". it is a pretty rubbish way to think about dst but i habitually watch people play and you will see this mindset as a very prevalent one(also here in the forums it is very common to see people argue and fuss about raw-number damage as the most important part of what makes characters "the best". it is rubbish but it is highly context-relevant to look at it this way

 

you are correct that her optimal(and nicest-feeling) gameplay is to find the best spot for herself and for abby and work from that position in tandem(commonly as a substitution for direct combat). her class style is actually my favourite one in games and has been something i have been invested in since i was a teenager playing the original diablo

[WenericMember]

I hate the term "fighter" as a class name. it's too generic.

 

20 minutes ago, Fitzee said:

 

And I hope they either improve the Team Spirit branch in some way or add something new (maybe something akin to my suggestion) to make said appealing playstyle more viable, or at least more approachable. 

It's probably the biggest thing holding the tree back right now. Enhancing control over abigail to contrast Bernie having better raw stats is a great way to contrast the two summons. The problem right now is those skills are to cumbersome to use in combat and too low reward over Wendy's basic control method.

[Evelo]

20 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

She is so op it feels unawarding to play

Kind of funny too because I hate merms for that very reason. I love the amphibious tree because it allows a solo wurt experience that isn't just "vegetarian wilson". But merms have always been able to trivialize the game so the skill set for her didn't do much in my mind's eye.

[ZeRoboButler]

I saw wendy as a character with perks that aid with hordes, suffers less from sanity drain from the dark and could be very strong if she rides a beefalo (plus the old, "annihilator of beequeen bit"). 

I'm not sure I understand what people are asking for when they say they want wendy to be stronger, Ideally a character is engaging and interesting in some way that changes gameplay meaningfully. Most of the time it's a goal, like equipment to buff your minions, songs to buff yourself/allies, or a library of spell books to interact with the world quicker, so on and so forth...

The question is really, how to make wendy more enjoyable to play, in a way that isn't just... well lazy to be honest. Abby getting changes to her damage and resistances was a given, but more should be done for wendy herself rather then just abby I think. The graves and some of the flower conversion stuff... well those are not the best now but im sure there is more that could be done there.

(I don't even want to acknowledge the angry player ghost perk, that is just... so weird lol. ideally the player isn't meant to bank on dyeing in a survival game lol.)

It makes some sense that wendy is a sad traumatized child due to her sister being "living impaired" and would understandably be obsessed with what she may have considered her best friend and only sibling. However, I should like to think that this would mean that wendy would be doing more with her sister on a regular basis, and not just fighting.

Hopefully when they work out that haunting mechanic and some of the grave mechanics they are cooking up, something interesting can be presented rather then gameplay boiling down to, riling up abby by telling her "that frog/bee/butterfly/spider/chimp said you look dumb" and she proceeds to wipe them from the face of the earth like the world's most outraged bedsheet.    

[WenericMember]

1 hour ago, ZeRoboButler said:

I saw wendy as a character with perks that aid with hordes, suffers less from sanity drain from the dark and could be very strong if she rides a beefalo (plus the old, "annihilator of beequeen bit"). 

I'm not sure I understand what people are asking for when they say they want wendy to be stronger, Ideally a character is engaging and interesting in some way that changes gameplay meaningfully. Most of the time it's a goal, like equipment to buff your minions, songs to buff yourself/allies, or a library of spell books to interact with the world quicker, so on and so forth...

The question is really, how to make wendy more enjoyable to play, in a way that isn't just... well lazy to be honest. Abby getting changes to her damage and resistances was a given, but more should be done for wendy herself rather then just abby I think. The graves and some of the flower conversion stuff... well those are not the best now but im sure there is more that could be done there.

(I don't even want to acknowledge the angry player ghost perk, that is just... so weird lol. ideally the player isn't meant to bank on dyeing in a survival game lol.)

It makes some sense that wendy is a sad traumatized child due to her sister being "living impaired" and would understandably be obsessed with what she may have considered her best friend and only sibling. However, I should like to think that this would mean that wendy would be doing more with her sister on a regular basis, and not just fighting.

Hopefully when they work out that haunting mechanic and some of the grave mechanics they are cooking up, something interesting can be presented rather then gameplay boiling down to, riling up abby by telling her "that frog/bee/butterfly/spider/chimp said you look dumb" and she proceeds to wipe them from the face of the earth like the world's most outraged bedsheet.    

For me at least, Wendy has two main drawbacks relative to other characters (pre-skill tree), while she's not ultimately weak at fighting bosses compared to other characters, doing so is a completely unreasonably jump in difficulty compared to normal survivors, where you have to kite with two characters at once (one of which is pretty difficult to control) instead of most other survivors only having to kite with one. While I don't want her her maximum potential to be stronger, I want it to be more accessible, and the best way to reach that point not be "Play Wendy, learn to kite with other survivors, switch back to Wendy and learn to kite with abigail."

The other issue with Wendy is while she has a competitive power level amongst survivors, she absolutely has completely dated utility compared to other survivors. Even wolfgang, who is often reduced to "Damage Number go BRRRRRRRRRR" in character discussions, has access to a variety of interesting perks, like full speed while carrying heavy objects, being unencumbered by speed penalty items like the Piggyback, Insulation, Crits, Rowing Effectiveness, Dumbells, and his whistle. Base Wendy has none of that.

There's a few other issues that varying amounts have been done to fix either - Pipspooks being grindy (rewards fixed, still rng dependant), Potions being imbalanced (Theres little reason to use anything other than the healing potions), etc.

Thankfully as of the dev post, there's been at least moves towards fixing these two grievances, with the updated flower shroud and haunt perks being steps in the right direction, as are the Dark Petals (Dark petals could use 1-2 more crafts, either by Wendy or Global) and Team Spirit skills (Making them more usable in combat). 

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but while Wendy is a strong character, she's never felt like an especially well rounded character. I don't know if that fits what people mean by "stronger" but that's what it means for me. Increased strength through diversity, not brute numbers like wolfgang.

[yuntunhemudu]

2 hours ago, WenericMember said:

For me at least, Wendy has two main drawbacks relative to other characters (pre-skill tree), while she's not ultimately weak at fighting bosses compared to other characters, doing so is a completely unreasonably jump in difficulty compared to normal survivors, where you have to kite with two characters at once (one of which is pretty difficult to control) instead of most other survivors only having to kite with one. While I don't want her her maximum potential to be stronger, I want it to be more accessible, and the best way to reach that point not be "Play Wendy, learn to kite with other survivors, switch back to Wendy and learn to kite with abigail."

The other issue with Wendy is while she has a competitive power level amongst survivors, she absolutely has completely dated utility compared to other survivors. Even wolfgang, who is often reduced to "Damage Number go BRRRRRRRRRR" in character discussions, has access to a variety of interesting perks, like full speed while carrying heavy objects, being unencumbered by speed penalty items like the Piggyback, Insulation, Crits, Rowing Effectiveness, Dumbells, and his whistle. Base Wendy has none of that.

There's a few other issues that varying amounts have been done to fix either - Pipspooks being grindy (rewards fixed, still rng dependant), Potions being imbalanced (Theres little reason to use anything other than the healing potions), etc.

Thankfully as of the dev post, there's been at least moves towards fixing these two grievances, with the updated flower shroud and haunt perks being steps in the right direction, as are the Dark Petals (Dark petals could use 1-2 more crafts, either by Wendy or Global) and Team Spirit skills (Making them more usable in combat). 

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but while Wendy is a strong character, she's never felt like an especially well rounded character. I don't know if that fits what people mean by "stronger" but that's what it means for me. Increased strength through diversity, not brute numbers like wolfgang.

Fair and wise

[marely]

On 11/24/2024 at 5:24 PM, Jakepeng99 said:

They did it to Wurt, and it messed her up. She is so op it feels unawarding to play, because the merms are buffed so much despite already being so powerful. The merms are basically free to recruit, only a one time investment. If they were to buff Abigail or something to the point of being broken or unbalanced, the cool balance of maintaining both Wendy and Abigail would fail.

The problem is that Wurt's strength even before having a skill tree already far exceeds other characters. Who in the Eternal Lands can withstand 50 merms? What if it's 100? For Wurt, accumulating merm houses is just wasted time, because as long as you have enough merms, you can always defeat whatever boss you want.

Wurt is hard to compare with other characters. Her skill tree being too strong doesn't have much impact because in multiplayer, due to lag, Wurt is rarely seen in action; she is almost like a lone wolf character.

[halibut cannon]

On 11/24/2024 at 5:33 PM, arubaro said:

Because makes the game boring...atleast for the players that enjoy playing videogames

I think a useless character also makes the game boring....

can't you see that Willow Winona Wigfrid even the deadly brightshade can kill spiders or frogs much faster than Wendy?  

Wendy is already USELESS, But this skilltree cant give any help

[Echsrick]

what if we lower wendys health to be equal to wickerbotoms?

[ALCRD]

21 minutes ago, Echsrick said:

what if we lower wendys health to be equal to wickerbotoms?

Or equal to Maxwell's

No reason for a petite little girl to be physically stronger than an adult man 

 

[Dingle]

3 hours ago, halibut cannon said:

I think a useless character also makes the game boring....

can't you see that Willow Winona Wigfrid even the deadly brightshade can kill spiders or frogs much faster than Wendy?  

Wendy is already USELESS, But this skilltree cant give any help

How does Wigfrid kill frogs faster than Wendy?

[Echsrick]

3 hours ago, halibut cannon said:

I think a useless character also makes the game boring....

can't you see that Willow Winona Wigfrid even the deadly brightshade can kill spiders or frogs much faster than Wendy?  

Wendy is already USELESS, But this skilltree cant give any help

wait since when is wendy slower on killing a hoarde of spiders and frogs and anything small then wigfrid? or winona? or willow? all they need is gettin more things goin first while wendy can spawn in and start killing day 1

[Mike23Ua]

In an Ideal Gaming world if all characters are unbalanced then no character is unbalanced.

What this means is that before we ever got reworks or skill trees, some certain characters were performing exceptionally better than others, Wolfgang in particular being able to simply eat whatever and BAM dude has all of his perks with his only downside being needing to eat to maintain it.

When Wolfgang got his rework he was admit-ably hit with a few nerfs to knock him down a peg or two (moving his might to needing to maintain a workout, separating his movement speed and super strength into two separate categories, giving him actual real downsides that actual matter like faster sanity lost when not around “friends”

WX78 got the same Treatment- He could simply munch gears before the rework and bam access to all his abilities at once, his rework deprecated his abilities into Circuits forcing the player to choose which ones they wanted installed at any given time AND they gave him a more meaningful Downside by making rain actual hurt his health.

And the more characters that were brought up to par with Wolfgang, the less and less we had this “Unbalanced” even today characters are attempting to catch up to Wolfgang with Willow getting crazy perks etc…

But when you compare reworked+skill tree Wolfgang & Skill tree Willow alongside the likes of yet to be reworked Wendy (I can’t play beta version so I can’t discuss that in detail)

Suddenly Wendy stops being this OP god-tier character and instead falls in line with  or even below the line of all the others.

Like I said, when everyone’s Unbalanced, No One is Unbalanced.

Ironically that’s how you find perfect balance. So long as the REST of the game catches up to these new perks and skills the characters are getting.