Prevent Gestalt Abigail from soloing Bosses: Damage Staling?

[Hijynks]

This is mainly a response to some of the Beta videos I've been seeing from YouTubers like Ameslarii, NDaang and, of course, Lardee. Between them, these three have demonstrated Gestalt Abigail's power to solo kill just about every major boss in the game, often with minimal damage contribution from Wendy herself.

As Lardee put it in his Bee Queen video on his Clips channel, "yeah this is really dumb."
So what to do about it?

DVG suggests reworking Lunar Abigail entirely, but I like the idea of having a single-target damage option Abigail at the cost of giving up the AoE safety blanket, and I want to make it work. We just need to make sure we still encourage Wendy herself to get in on the action, rather than make Abigail do everything. The Vex mechanic clearly encourages her to tagteam, not delegate, so let's lean into that idea.

So my suggestion is a little bit off the cuff, I don't know how well it would work in practice or how easy or difficult it would be to implement and balance, but:
Make Gestalt Abigail's damage against a single target "stale" over time the longer she fights alone without any help from Wendy.
So when Abi starts attacking a mob, her first one or two attacks would deal their full damage (400, 440, 500, whatever, based on your potions, time of day etc). But from the (let's say) third attack onwards, if Wendy is not also attacking that target, Abigail's attacks will deal progressively less damage. This stacking debuff against that target starts at a (let's say) 20% reduction and scales up to 80% or 90% reduction (after any other modifiers), to the point where if you want Abigail to fight that boss alone, you'll be there all week - assuming she survives that long. You could probably give Wendy a dialogue line somewhere in here prompting you to join in the fight. 

However, when Wendy does attack the same target, she prevents this debuff from building up and also makes existing stacks steadily decay. This sisterly partnership is a two-way street, after all. It should probably take more than just one attack from Wendy to remove the debuff entirely, we don't want to have the player just whack the boss once with a fishing rod and immediately bring Abi back to full damage output, that would be too easy. So maybe remove one stack per hit or per 2 hits, and/or make Wendy deal a minimum amount of damage per stack removed. The idea here is to make sure Wendy is contributing meaningfully to the fight and risking her own bacon too, not just doing the bare minimum to technically meet a quota - but to still reward her with respectable damage output as long as she's pulling her weight.

Against most normal mobs, this wouldn't make much difference. Tallbirds, Pigs, Clockwork Pieces, Tentacles etc. would die in 2 or 3 hits regardless. But once you start dealing with mobs with health pools in the thousands, it'll start to add up pretty quickly and really drag out a fight if you're too lazy to get involved.

Running the numbers very haphazardly in Excel (assuming 400 damage per hit normally, and assuming a 20% reduction per hit starting from the third, up to a max of 80% reduction):
G.Abi would currently take roughly 9 hits to kill a large Treeguard (3750HP) on her own. With this staling system in place, she would instead take 16.
Against Deerclops (6000HP), it would go from 15 hits up to 29.
Against Ancient Guardian (10,000HP), from 25 up to 51 (ish, I didn't account for alignment here).

I'm curious to hear what you guys think about this idea. Would this actually help solve any problems? 

[Yifei_]

Bro, the damage of 400 was reduced a long time ago. If I remember correctly, when I tested it on December 13 last year, the damage was 100-150-250. At the same time, the AI and survivability of Gestalt Abigail were weakened a long time ago.

[Bumber64]

She just needed to be capable of being hit often enough if Wendy didn't ever take aggro. Instead, gestalt Abi got nerfed too hard, while shadow Abi now gets to benefit from player tag (sisturn+lune blossom) survivability in addition to high DPS and AoE. Gestalt doesn't have a role if shadow doesn't struggle on certain bosses.

I'm pretty sure shadow Abi can just solo ink blight trio, which is in line with what got gestalt nerfed to begin with. (Due to planar damage resistance, not player tag.) Not sure gestalt has that capability, because it's insufficiently aggressive.

[aidankocherhans]

Some have complained that gestalt Abigail feels to distant and disconnected from Wendy compared to normal, so something along this line would help alleviate that issue

[DVGMedia]

gestalt Is always going to be bad since what it solves is a farcry of something good.

Its mechainic is inherently bad because there is no real good way to make it not be able to solo things without just gutting it completely.
right now she does 350  originally that can go up to 500
But during that time she also had invincibility frames while she attacked. That there was removed and she was also given a 1 second rest period that basically lets her get hit. if no player is there to take aggro off of her.

So klei did fix the solo gestalt abby capabilites. but like whats left isn't even a partner.
She is about as consistent in the fight as the celestial crown without sanity sources.

what sucks right now is that  her low hp run away actually is so detrimental towards her that even if you have her in a safe health range with the sisturn buff and healing. She will stay away from the fight and not do anything. so you basically have an abby that has 150 less hp that can do single target burst.

Thing is gestalt abby can be fixed if it was just a command instead of the entire lunar affinity.

i feel the affinities should do roughly the same thing. but in different ways.
Which is why im going with changing gestalt abby into a support ward that buffs the players around her with planar doing like 5 or 10 planar bonus.
While having a slowing field kind of like the grazers abilities.

That would be better cause then it buffs planar offense/defense instead.
while shadow buffs up standard offense which ends up equaling about the same thanks to planar entity protection  and the way planar weapons work.

but it would also make abigail more survivable vs how the strange ai gestalt abby has now. 

This also would tie into the sisturn rework too where i want the sisturn to give abby an extra level  multiplying her health and light radius.

It would make lunar abby more tanky since she would have a 25% reduction in damage while in defense mode.
The defense mode abby still requires players to go in though in order to get decent dps. Not as much as shadow but still  more in the planar

While shadow having more innate damage wouldn't have that protection only the bonus health.
 

[Hijynks]

6 hours ago, DVGMedia said:

Its mechainic is inherently bad because there is no real good way to make it not be able to solo things without just gutting it completely. 

That's... what I was trying to go for with this suggestion. Is this not what you meant? Does this not achieve that?

[DVGMedia]

22 minutes ago, Hijynks said:

That's... what I was trying to go for with this suggestion. Is this not what you meant? Does this not achieve that?

well yeah but then its just not worth taking.  Since the other does it better.  Usually each affinity has their niche however this one its like why even go lunar Its more of a handicap than anything. Would be much better off if you could swap gestalt when you want instead of it being tied to the moon phases

 

[Hijynks]

I mean yes, I agree with you that tying the transformation to the moon cycle is unnecessarily limiting. Swapping at will would be  a welcome improvement. Heck, if you still need to build a Moon Dial to do it, that would be fine. 

I guess my broader point is I don't think Gestalt Abi is a fundamentally broken or irredeemable concept. It needs tweaks, particularly in the numbers department, but not to be entirely scrapped and replaced with something completely different. You're free to disagree, of course.