Proposed changes to some characters (by me)

[Sacco]

Hi, as some of you might know, i'm a fan of balance used as a method to create new gameplay strategies, therefore making the game more unique and engaging.

Here there are a couple of proposed changes to some characters i think are needed:

MAXWELL:

1) Give the shadow prison spell a cooldown (15 seconds), so you can't immobilize bosses anymore, making the gameplay experience as Maxwell more dynamic and less of a press two buttons to spawn some duelists.

2) Make the player lose 5 hp when spawning warriors.

This would open two methods of playing the game.

The first, and safer is to just watch them fight, but this implies that his shadows are gonna die, therefore you'll lose a ton of health throughout the fight.

The second, more dangerous but theoratically more rewarding is to engage combat alongside you warriors.

This would be very rewarding to skill players, but harder to pull off, cause you risk to take damage and die.

WANDA:

1) Reduce her effective hp to 120.

If you don't know, Wanda effectively has 150 hp currently

With this change Wanda is now knocked down while in her old stage easier (30 hp instead of 37.5 effective hp), this would increase the risk/reward factor.

2) Reduce her speed by a small percent when old (10?).

With this change people will be using old Wanda just to fight, and they won't stick with the old stage for most of the game.

WOLFGANG:

1) Make him lose mightiness on hit, just this.

It was a cool downside and not even that broken.

I recreated it with a mod and i find it pretty ok as a downside, to compensate i increased mightiness gained from hitting bosses to 1.5 (from 1).

This would make Wolfgang a bit different than wigfrid, the most famous tank.

Wolf would encourage a kiting method, which is riskier and harder to pull off but can pay off a lot due to his high damage.

WURT:

1) Make it impossible to make any veggie food with non veggie ingredients.

As simple as that.

2) Make every plant not grow in winter.

Yes, these two changes would effect other characters, but i think they are very two needed changes for the game.

WOODIE:

1) Tone down weremoose, making him lose 0.5 wereness per combo attack or reduce his combo damage to 119 alongside a regen nerf to 1 hp every 4 seconds, but make werebeaver mastery have a larger range with higher work and goose mastery halve the wereness penalty and make it more predictable, giving the player the ability to go to already discovered parts of the map.

 

And that's pretty much it.

Share in the comments your opinions.

Spoiler

How do i remove this?

 

[Just Ragnar]

Making every plant not grow in winter would be absurd. That's like, "no mobs drop meat in winter", you're forcing them to stockpile for the entire season. Farm plants would need a total overhaul and would be negatively affected, they're already bad enough, and if you get stone fruit and kelp before winter, you deserve to survive.

[ShadowDuelist]

1 hour ago, Sacco said:

1) Give the shadow prison spell a cooldown (15 seconds), so you can't immobilize bosses anymore, making the gameplay experience as Maxwell more dynamic and less of a press two buttons to spawn some duelists.

The shadow prison always should have had a cooldown, so even though I play a lot of Maxwell and it would definitely take some time to adapt to this change, deep inside I know it is fair, specially when comparing him to any other character. I wouldn’t be so hard on the cooldown time though, maybe extend the time you can keep bosses trapped while hitting them a bit, but then add a good 3-4 seconds until you can cast it again. With regular mobs it can remain with perma-trapping if you choose so.

Also Maxwell should unlock his stronger skills by doing something, like starting off spawn with workers and shadow sneak only, and you unlock the shadow prison at a pseudoscience and the duelists at a shadow manipulator.

With the above changes more nerfs are not necesary, these changes alone would put maxwell at about the same tier as everyone else.

1 hour ago, Sacco said:

Make the player lose 5 hp when spawning warriors.

This Wouldn’t make Maxwell more engaging, only grindier, and most people would just not use the duelists again at all. Absolute no from me on this one.

About Wanda, I don’t see a point to make old wanda slower. it would make her a pain to use to fight and people will just play as middle aged wanda, or stop playing Wanda altogether. Same with reducing her hp even more, she’s already at one or two hits from death when old and her hp is constantly draining too.
I don’t think nerfing Wanda would do any good to her or the gameplay, as a matter of fact I’d improve her younger form to have more uses instead.

Wolfgang losing mightyness on hit made him horrible to play as TBH, I get that some people enjoyed that, but it’s best left as a mod, it made some fights (like bee queen) an absolute nightmare. Wolfgang is the most boring character design wise, and I agree that he could use some change but I am really not sure what at this point. I’d leave him be to be honest he is not that popular anyway, except for speedruns.

Woodie doesn’t need nerfs, he needs late game buffs. He’s very good early game, then he becomes average (at best) post rifts. Also the beaver and the goose capstone perks definitely need to be buffed/changed so they are viable, other than for griefing (in the beaver’s case)

[ShadowDuelist]

9 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

  Reveal hidden contents

click the eye next to the emoticons genius.

 

how about we just have each dualist have a ~20s cooldown when they die?

The thing is that I don’t think the duelists are a problem, they are pretty bad without improving your gear and they may take a while to be decent. Also maxwell is meant to be a summoner, making his fighting summons bad, grindy or slow again would just make him horrible to play as.

People perceives maxwell as being stupidly broken because of all the combos he can do with his stronger perk, which is the shadow prison. Tuning that down will make Maxwell a lot more normal. Tuning anything else down will just cripple him

[Sacco]

1 hour ago, Just Ragnar said:

Making every plant not grow in winter would be absurd. That's like, "no mobs drop meat in winter", you're forcing them to stockpile for the entire season. Farm plants would need a total overhaul and would be negatively affected, they're already bad enough, and if you get stone fruit and kelp before winter, you deserve to survive.

In original ds nothing could grow in winter and it was not a problem.

It won't be in dst either imo

[Cats_On_Fire]

1 hour ago, SSneaky said:

imo it should be hunger.

both will easily be counters with some food prep.

they can still grow in winter, just make them grow like 2-4x slower.

also wurt juist needs merms nerfed.

yeah.

just nerf merms.

I just propose we cap merms at 100 hp. They will be fine

[Cats_On_Fire]

52 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

just make their hp be similar to pigmen by default.

Nah we bust the knee caps. It's nerf or nothing

[Jakepeng99]

Maxwell should get lung disease or something as a downside since he smokes.

[hyoton123]

Mobs near old wanda should be blurry and uninteractable unless she wears (moon) glasses.

[dst_lover]

5 hours ago, Sacco said:

MAXWELL:

1) Give the shadow prison spell a cooldown (15 seconds), so you can't immobilize bosses anymore, making the gameplay experience as Maxwell more dynamic and less of a press two buttons to spawn some duelists.

2) Make the player lose 5 hp when spawning warriors.

This would open two methods of playing the game.

The first, and safer is to just watch them fight, but this implies that his shadows are gonna die, therefore you'll lose a ton of health throughout the fight.

The second, more dangerous but theoratically more rewarding is to engage combat alongside you warriors.

This would be very rewarding to skill players, but harder to pull off, cause you risk to take damage and die.

WANDA:

1) Reduce her effective hp to 120.

If you don't know, Wanda effectively has 150 hp currently

With this change Wanda is now knocked down while in her old stage easier (30 hp instead of 37.5 effective hp), this would increase the risk/reward factor.

2) Reduce her speed by a small percent when old (10?).

With this change people will be using old Wanda just to fight, and they won't stick with the old stage for most of the game.

WOLFGANG:

1) Make him lose mightiness on hit, just this.

It was a cool downside and not even that broken.

I recreated it with a mod and i find it pretty ok as a downside, to compensate i increased mightiness gained from hitting bosses to 1.5 (from 1).

This would make Wolfgang a bit different than wigfrid, the most famous tank.

Wolf would encourage a kiting method, which is riskier and harder to pull off but can pay off a lot due to his high damage.

WURT:

1) Make it impossible to make any veggie food with non veggie ingredients.

As simple as that.

2) Make every plant not grow in winter.

Yes, these two changes would effect other characters, but i think they are very two needed changes for the game.

 

Everybody in this list need more nerfs then this + wurt nerfs are literally like nerfing every one with him to just nerf him 

nerf his shadow affinity to not be free and his Mudslinger need to be less strong and more expensive and nerf his crown and marble affinity with a nice nerf to all types of merms + if you are very nice you can make wurt hunger drain 33% faster for more challenges 

1 hour ago, SSneaky said:

just make their hp be similar to pigmen by default.

Their damage need more nerfs then their hp u don’t mind if their damge is lower but they keep their hp or nerf it a little bit

[Sacco]

1 minute ago, dst_lover said:

Everybody in this list need more nerfs then this + wurt nerfs are literally like nerfing every one with him to just nerf him 

nerf his shadow affinity to not be free and his Mudslinger need to be less strong and more expensive and nerf his crown and marble affinity with a nice nerf to all types of merms + if you are very nice you can make wurt hunger drain 33% faster for more challenges 

yea wurt requires more.

I just wrote some changes i found more interesting than just stat changes.

[Evelo]

The wolfgang one could use a little more since he gains mightyness when attacking so taking damage and losing mightyness only for it to go back up isn't much.

I like the Wanda and Maxy stuff.

I think Woodie needs a real downside again. His downside in Solo DS is if you chop too many trees you transform. Bring that back. It's inconvenient and something you have to play around. While transforming isn't much of a downside anymore since you keep your inventory now, at least you can't be an (almost) objectively better Wilson.

Beefalos need a nerf imo too. Beefalo shouldn't trigger character unique stuff (ie Abby's damage boost, Wormwood's Bramble Husk won't work, etc) Hopefully this would actually cause players to suffer their character's unique downsides so they can benefit from their upsides.

Willow also needs a nerf, kind of. More of a redo. Bake in some of her skill tree stuffs baseline then have the skills alter the effects or increase the power of the effects.

Just really hoping we can tone it down with the powercreep, get new actually difficult and dangerous things that requires the level of powercreep we are getting, or start nerfing to reverse course of this powercreepage.

[Quadratordo]

4 hours ago, Just Ragnar said:

Making every plant not grow in winter would be absurd. That's like, "no mobs drop meat in winter", you're forcing them to stockpile for the entire season. Farm plants would need a total overhaul and would be negatively affected, they're already bad enough, and if you get stone fruit and kelp before winter, you deserve to survive.

This statement here really puts into perspective just how much both the game itself and the mentality of its players have changed over the years. Not trying to make a point, just... it makes that reality sink in. On a sidenote, farm plants are bad? Huh? RWYS made farming extremely effective, if anything.

Anyways, you'd think that folks who want to scale back characters' power really wish to nerf them to the point of uselessness, the way the community at large reacts to the faintest whiff of such a suggestion... which is made all the weirder by how conservative Klei has been when handing out (very rare) nerfs. Problem is, the ''don't nerf X, buff everything else instead'' never has been a good idea; talk about moving a mountain to avoid knocking over a rock. 

 

 

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

Here there are a couple of proposed changes to some characters i think are needed:

MAXWELL:

1) Give the shadow prison spell a cooldown (15 seconds), so you can't immobilize bosses anymore, making the gameplay experience as Maxwell more dynamic and less of a press two buttons to spawn some duelists.

2) Make the player lose 5 hp when spawning warriors.

A cooldown on shadow prison would indeed make Maxwell a tad more engaging than just sitting on a beef and locking a victim/boss/same in place, and occasionally re-summon your duelists; sounds good to me.

HP loss upon summoning duelists? Reminds me somewhat of how it worked pre-rework. However, Maxwell is already plenty busy micromanagement-wise, and adding more to the pile would just make it annoying. 

 

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

WANDA:

1) Reduce her effective hp to 120.

If you don't know, Wanda effectively has 150 hp currently

With this change Wanda is now knocked down while in her old stage easier (30 hp instead of 37.5 effective hp), this would increase the risk/reward factor.

2) Reduce her speed by a small percent when old (10?).

With this change people will be using old Wanda just to fight, and they won't stick with the old stage for most of the game.

For point 1, I'd say that it'd be more appropriate to put a cap on the amount of (non-planar) damage reduction she gets, perhaps to 85% or so. This'd make her effective (armored) health exactly 250 when turning old, which is a very reasonable amount to have (as opposed to the current 750 effective health that a night armor affords her against physical attackers) considering her health loss over time and comparatively awkward healing.

Point 2 makes sense, logically speaking, but the crafting speed debuff alone makes one not want to stick with old Wanda all the time anyways, and making dodging more awkward than you'd do with base speed doesn't sit well with me. It would make sense, again, but I don't like the idea.

I never played Wolfgang much, so take this with a grain of salt,but I'd say that making an effort to make him even more different than Wigfrid would be a good idea.

As for Woodie, a minor Wereness loss is no concern at all, given how trivial Idols are to make in the first place. That being said, I'd love for the Weregoose mastery to be more controllable; you already sacrifice your only mastery perk, might as well make it worth it.

[dst_lover]

16 minutes ago, Evelo said:

Beefalos need a nerf imo too. Beefalo shouldn't trigger character unique stuff (ie Abby's damage boost, Wormwood's Bramble Husk won't work, etc) Hopefully this would actually cause players to suffer their character's unique downsides so they can benefit from their upsides.

Just really hoping we can tone it down with the powercreep, get new actually difficult and dangerous things that requires the level of powercreep we are getting, or start nerfing to reverse course of this powercreepage.

1 this is actually a very nice and cool idea but the only problem is with Maxwell being able to summon his warriors while is in beefalo and have all his perks and the perks of the beefalo

[Cuernito.]

why people in this forum always want to nerf to the ground all characters but wes lmao

[Mysterious box]

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

2) Make the player lose 5 hp when spawning warriors.

This is just not a good change and this is coming from someone who dislikes how overpowered he is.

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

1) Reduce her effective hp to 120.

If you don't know, Wanda effectively has 150 hp currently

With this change Wanda is now knocked down while in her old stage easier (30 hp instead of 37.5 effective hp), this would increase the risk/reward factor.

2) Reduce her speed by a small percent when old (10?).

With this change people will be using old Wanda just to fight, and they won't stick with the old stage for most of the game.

This makes me feel like you don't know what the downsides of old age already are.

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

1) Give the shadow prison spell a cooldown (15 seconds), so you can't immobilize bosses anymore, making the gameplay experience as Maxwell more dynamic and less of a press two buttons to spawn some duelists.

This does feel like a reasonable nerf.

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

WOLFGANG:

1) Make him lose mightiness on hit, just this.

It was a cool downside and not even that broken.

I recreated it with a mod and i find it pretty ok as a downside, to compensate i increased mightiness gained from hitting bosses to 1.5 (from 1).

This would make Wolfgang a bit different than wigfrid, the most famous tank.

Wolf would encourage a kiting method, which is riskier and harder to pull off but can pay off a lot due to his high damage.

I don't play him enough to offer input.

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

WURT:

1) Make it impossible to make any veggie food with non veggie ingredients.

As simple as that.

2) Make every plant not grow in winter.

Yes, these two changes would effect other characters, but i think they are very two needed changes for the game.

Number 1 is more or less already a thing since they added bunny stew and omelets

Number 2 seems too harsh but I do think it'd be fine if it extended to banana bushes, farms, and figs

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

WOODIE:

1) Tone down weremoose, making him lose 0.5 wereness per combo attack or reduce his combo damage to 119 alongside a regen nerf to 1 hp every 4 seconds, but make werebeaver mastery have a larger range with higher work and goose mastery halve the wereness penalty and make it more predictable, giving the player the ability to go to already discovered parts of the map.

This just seems completely unnecessary you already can't use healing foods and deal with him being locked into his form change animation with no armor when turning back adding this on top of it will just make the weremoose form unusable. This is also on top of his were meter forcing you to be more aggressive in fights than you normally would.

[dst_lover]

16 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

This is just not a good change and this is coming from someone who dislikes how overpowered he is.

This makes me feel like you don't know what the downsides of old age already are.

This does feel like a reasonable nerf.

I don't play him enough to offer input.

Number 1 is more or less already a thing since they added bunny stew and omelets

Number 2 seems too harsh but I do think it'd be fine if it extended to banana bushes, farms, and figs

This just seems completely unnecessary you already can't use healing foods and deal with him being locked into his form change animation with no armor when turning back adding this on top of it will just make the weremoose form unusable. This is also on top of his were meter forcing you to be more aggressive in fights than you normally would.

1 it’s actually pretty good because it will make the player force to fight by himself in some situation so you will have to face against your real downsides more like your 75 hp

2 everybody know but the downside of her old age is not that much 

 3 I agree but you have to explain so other will understand you batter 

the reason why I agree with you that this downside doesn’t affect his real downside of being a coward that is why I suggest to make it so he take more damage if he is in low sanity and deal less damage too and the other problem is that it will be very annoying to transform from other forms 

4 it’s actually the most downside that is actually doesn’t affect wurt when I play wurt I don’t even farm and only craft crockpot for jellybeans because most crockpot dishes are literally scam and farm is just a waste of time for wurt to me at least and what he need is to nerf his shadow affinity with his other skills and merms and making his hunger drain more not things like that 

5 I agree with you because this is not the type of change I think woodie need

[Wormboi]

48 minutes ago, NekoSoulx said:

why people in this forum always want to nerf to the ground all characters but wes lmao

I saw one dude suggest a buff for Wes...

[Mysterious box]

2 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

2 everybody know but the downside of her old age is not that much

• 0.5x damage with non-Shadow weapons
• 0.75x Hammer efficiency.
• Cannot carry heavy objects such as Chess Pieces.
• Craft or build takes an additional 80 frames (+0.34 seconds).

This is on top of her being close to death and unable to heal outside of her ageless watches it just seems excessive to add more downsides on top of that.

7 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

4 it’s actually the most downside that is actually doesn’t affect wurt when I play wurt I don’t even farm and only craft crockpot for jellybeans because most crockpot dishes are literally scam and farm is just a waste of time for wurt to me at least and what he need is to nerf his shadow affinity with his other skills and merms and making his hunger drain more not things like that 

Her no meat downside is impactful for the average player but not so much for those who are used to Wurt

As for her shadow affinity I honestly don't use it so I'm kinda whatever on it.

I don't get the point of increasing Wurt's hunger drain though.

[dst_lover]

1 minute ago, Mysterious box said:

• 0.5x damage with non-Shadow weapons
• 0.75x Hammer efficiency.
• Cannot carry heavy objects such as Chess Pieces.
• Craft or build takes an additional 80 frames (+0.34 seconds).

This is on top of her being close to death and unable to heal outside of her ageless watches it just seems excessive to add more downsides on top of that.

Her no meat downside is impactful for the average player but not so much for those who are used to Wurt

As for her shadow affinity I honestly don't use it so I'm kinda whatever on it.

I don't get the point of increasing Wurt's hunger drain though.

1 And? She have her weapon in day 2-12 depending in how good you are and hammer really? 
and are you an your mind carrying heavy objects without beefalo ? 
just craft them before 

2 you have more range and you don’t need to be old to fight 

3 if you are a wurt player and doesn’t know how to build your merm king you are literally wasting your time but if you do your king can literally give you infinite food

4 ask any wurt player what is the strongest skill in his skill tree to know how op this is and why its the most thing that need a nerf right now 

5 not only increases her hunger drain I went to nerf the amount of kelp and seeds the merm king give you with the respawn time of merms because food is literally nothing when you have your king

[Ridley]

1 hour ago, NekoSoulx said:

why people in this forum always want to nerf to the ground all characters but wes lmao

Probably spurred by some clickbait youtube video calling everything OP again. No nuance for how long it takes to be anywhere near as good as the person in the video. If anything pre-rifts changes from how it was a decade ago, then it can only be the beginning of the end.

[Mysterious box]

8 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

1 And? She have her weapon in day 2-12 depending in how good you are and hammer really? 
and are you an your mind carrying heavy objects without beefalo ? 
just craft them before 

2 you have more range and you don’t need to be old to fight 

The only relevant one was crafting speed as it can come up in dangerous situation I listed the rest of them just to explain what her downsides were. 

As for your second point once again not being old means you're being out damaged by other combat based characters aside from Wolfgang

8 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

3 if you are a wurt player and doesn’t know how to build your merm king you are literally wasting your time but if you do your king can literally give you infinite food

4 ask any wurt player what is the strongest skill in his skill tree to know how op this is and why its the most thing that need a nerf right now 

5 not only increases her hunger drain I went to nerf the amount of kelp and seeds the merm king give you with the respawn time of merms because food is literally nothing when you have your king

Wurt's skill tree is definitely overpowered but that's also because Wurt at base is overpowered before you even add a skill point her design forces her to be as that's the end goal of her grind.

As for the king I don't really get what you are talking about are you saying you try to live off only giving him fish tributes? Because if so that's extremely inefficient.

[Jakepeng99]

18 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

• 0.5x damage with non-Shadow weapons
• 0.75x Hammer efficiency.
• Cannot carry heavy objects such as Chess Pieces.
• Craft or build takes an additional 80 frames (+0.34 seconds).

This is on top of her being close to death and unable to heal outside of her ageless watches it just seems excessive to add more downsides on top of that.

None of those downsides matter really. None of them every happen, especially in combat.

Its only annoying in really specific scenarios, like hammering in the ruins as old age.

[Mysterious box]

Just now, Jakepeng99 said:

None of those downsides matter really. None of them every happen, especially in combat.

Its only annoying in really specific scenarios, like hammering in the ruins as old age.

Sure to the experienced player but to the average player they tend to craft armor in combat and those extra frames can be fatal.

[dst_lover]

27 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

The only relevant one was crafting speed as it can come up in dangerous situation I listed the rest of them just to explain what her downsides were. 

As for your second point once again not being old means you're being out damaged by other combat based characters aside from Wolfgang

Wurt's skill tree is definitely overpowered but that's also because Wurt at base is overpowered before you even add a skill point her design forces her to be as that's the end goal of her grind.

As for the king I don't really get what you are talking about are you saying you try to live off only giving him fish tributes? Because if so that's extremely inefficient.

1 if this is her biggest downside this is literally nothing compared to characters that have worse then her 

2 she deals more damage then half of the characters 

3 and this is why I said nerf both wurt and his skill tree 

4 this is the best why to get both food and spots if you went to speed run a 60 or 80 merm houses you have to live like that

24 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

Sure to the experienced player but to the average player they tend to craft armor in combat and those extra frames can be fatal.

Craft it before 

Not to mention why is old Wanda have lower damage and slower hammering speed but not slower with mining or chopping or other things ?

30 minutes ago, Ridley said:

Probably spurred by some clickbait youtube video calling everything OP again. No nuance for how long it takes to be anywhere near as good as the person in the video. If anything pre-rifts changes from how it was a decade ago, then it can only be the beginning of the end.

You are just wrong 

I am not lying to myself when I say the game is easier now and its not that I am just become batter at the game because wurt literally with his shadow affinity make it so every merm twice as strong with infinite loyalty for free and with his shadow Mudslinger and how cheap it’s in for what it gives you and with other passive and extra perks in his skill tree in top of his perivos powers wurt literally becomes more powerful then before and the game becomes more easy then before