Lock Fetch & Dig Behind Big Woby

[Chewabacca]

A huge part of Walter’s appeal is that he comes with a free mount. Well, not quite free: Woby costs 3 monster meat to “activate”, and has to be fed about 1 piece of fresh monster meat per day to keep her in her rideable form at her top speed. But nevertheless, her mount form is an extremely important part of Walter’s playstyle. 

The thing is, though, that she has to compete with beefalo, who can be fed pretty much anything, give a large HP buffer, and can be used as melee weapons.

I’m aware that the devs want Woby and beefalo to have their own niches, and I’m not arguing for Woby to become just like a beefalo in order to compete. That would make Walter’s playstyle less interesting, not more.

What I am arguing is that the skill tree should not give any further incentives for the character who comes with a mount to pretty much ignore her in favor of acting like any other character and taming a beefalo. As it stands, the players who will benefit most from the dig & fetch skills are the ones who will do that. Because of both the form restrictions and the training system, you will get the most value out of dig & fetch by keeping Woby in her small form from an extended period of time. Meanwhile, players who try to maintain  Woby’s hunger will not be able to make a whole lot of use out of those perks because even when she does shrink down, she won’t be trained well in them. 

It is also a major problem that the small Woby skills require so little engagement to train. Fetch at least means you might be organizing Woby’s inventory so that she has common ground items to pick up, but Dig is literally trained just by letting Woby do her thing. Outside of setting up her training board and selecting the “dig” and “fetch” options, you never need to pay attention to her. You are in fact rewarded for completely ignoring your dog in the form of shorter cooldowns between loot rolls. In contrast, the Big Woby skills all require at least some player input, even if it’s just sitting on her. Again, Woby goes back to her small form after 2.5 days if not fed any fresh monster meat in between (stale or spoiled monster meat is less effective, meaning that players need to continuously restock their supply) and needs 1/day to keep at full speed the whole day. So that’s a minimum of 19 pieces of fresh monster meat just to train the agility skill to max, plus a lot of time sitting on her. Both Support and Bravery can be trained in less time, but still need the player to do something to train them. This is as it should be, because requiring players to put effort in in order to get the most out of their character is good. 

Instead of the current system, both “small Woby” skills should only be accessible to Big Woby, and they should require some input from the player to train/use. Even something as small as an option to right-click and dig that shows up after a cooldown would be better than what we have now.

I’ve said in another thread that Walter shouldn’t be completely locked out of beefalo taming, and I stand by that, but neither should the game incentivize him to tame a beefalo even further than it already does. It’s like him and melee: does he have a penalty to melee combat (if he doesn’t get hit)? No, that would be kind of obnoxious. Does that mean there should be any skills that reward him in some way for throwing away his slingshot? No, if you want to play this character by ignoring his kit that’s on you. The same should go for Woby.

[Dyzrespect]

I share your exact fear about Woby's badges current design, as it stands it is just a mistake to invest in Big Woby badges. So long as you know how to craft a beefalo saddle, it is objectively a waste of time, and worse, of insight points, to use Woby as a mount. Sure, it is convenient to have a mount on day 1, but you can already do that with Beefalo, and even though they're annoying for a while and buck you off, in the long run they are far more convenient than Woby, as you won't need to feed them, they're basically invincible with 1000 health, rollbacks, and the new gloom bell thingy, and are just a better mount all around, maybe besides being very very slightly slower than a maxed out agility 2 Woby now. Plus as you said you basically disable the small Woby skills if you invest in big Woby, so doubly bad.

I think if tuned properly, her downsides of not taking damage for you, lacking a melee attack, and needing food can be overpowered with strong enough badges, but like, let's just be real, she needs to be better than a beefalo or nobody is going to invest in big Woby. Now in my opinion she should get some sort of mounted perk that greatly helps Walter specifically over a normal beefalo, like extra slingshot damage while mounted or the ability to shoot and move. Anyways that's besides your point, but I think if that issue doesn't change people are ONLY going to take the small Woby traits, but either way the traits should not force you to choose between big or small Woby imo.

Back on subject though I think they're really missing an opportunity here for a character with a dog as a pet, kind of like how underwhelming Houndmaster ended up being in Dead by Daylight recently (where the dog ending up being a glorified point and shoot skillshot). People LOVE dogs and being able to interact with or pet dogs is a mandatory feature in all games that have them now, and yet pretty much all you can do with Woby is pet her and use her as a movespeed buff. Walter should have some sort of whistle or way to directly interact with Woby, throwing items for her to fetch to train, or commanding her directly to collect items, maybe even gather grass or twigs from nodes, something, to bring life to the boy-and-his-dog theme, while also making training a satisfying investment and pay off as opposed to an annoying wait until the skill is maxed and works properly.

[Crimson Hollow]

2 hours ago, Dyzrespect said:

she should get some sort of mounted perk that greatly helps Walter specifically over a normal beefalo, like extra slingshot damage while mounted or the ability to shoot and move.

That's a nice idea, and maybe being able to jump across small gaps or bark deaggro/panic or stuff. I've mentioned this in several threads: She needs unique perks that only she can do, not those that puts her in direct comparison with beefalo. 

[Chewabacca]

1 hour ago, Dyzrespect said:

I share your exact fear about Woby's badges current design, as it stands it is just a mistake to invest in Big Woby badges. So long as you know how to craft a beefalo saddle, it is objectively a waste of time, and worse, of insight points, to use Woby as a mount. Sure, it is convenient to have a mount on day 1, but you can already do that with Beefalo, and even though they're annoying for a while and buck you off, in the long run they are far more convenient than Woby, as you won't need to feed them, they're basically invincible with 1000 health, rollbacks, and the new gloom bell thingy, and are just a better mount all around, maybe besides being very very slightly slower than a maxed out agility 2 Woby now. Plus as you said you basically disable the small Woby skills if you invest in big Woby, so doubly bad.

I think if tuned properly, her downsides of not taking damage for you, lacking a melee attack, and needing food can be overpowered with strong enough badges, but like, let's just be real, she needs to be better than a beefalo or nobody is going to invest in big Woby. Now in my opinion she should get some sort of mounted perk that greatly helps Walter specifically over a normal beefalo, like extra slingshot damage while mounted or the ability to shoot and move. Anyways that's besides your point, but I think if that issue doesn't change people are ONLY going to take the small Woby traits, but either way the traits should not force you to choose between big or small Woby imo.

Back on subject though I think they're really missing an opportunity here for a character with a dog as a pet, kind of like how underwhelming Houndmaster ended up being in Dead by Daylight recently (where the dog ending up being a glorified point and shoot skillshot). People LOVE dogs and being able to interact with or pet dogs is a mandatory feature in all games that have them now, and yet pretty much all you can do with Woby is pet her and use her as a movespeed buff. Walter should have some sort of whistle or way to directly interact with Woby, throwing items for her to fetch to train, or commanding her directly to collect items, maybe even gather grass or twigs from nodes, something, to bring life to the boy-and-his-dog theme, while also making training a satisfying investment and pay off as opposed to an annoying wait until the skill is maxed and works properly.

Maybe this is over-optimistic of me, but I think if you make Big Woby's utility perks good enough, people won't want to go through the extra hassle of training a beefalo for combat. Especially if her speed gets buffed even just a little bit more. People get attached to being fast very easily, look how much love walking canes get. If they had to ride Woby for a while to train her in one of her other valued badges, I think they'd be more reluctant to hop on a beefalo.

I am very biased but I don't really want whatever new badges Woby gets to be combat-centric. For one thing, that would mean that they might have to adjust the damage of his ammo so that it wouldn't be overpowered if he got a bonus from Woby. It also feels a bit too much like an RPG thing for me. I would prefer if they leaned into Walter's scout side: let him hide in Woby's fur, use Woby to track landmarks or animals, swim on her, that sort of thing. Not saying that your idea wouldn't definitely work to draw people away from beefalo, though.

I really like your point about how people would love it if they got to bond with Woby. Yeah, minigames would be way more fun to train Woby with than what we have now.

[Dyzrespect]

8 hours ago, Chewabacca said:

I am very biased but I don't really want whatever new badges Woby gets to be combat-centric. For one thing, that would mean that they might have to adjust the damage of his ammo so that it wouldn't be overpowered if he got a bonus from Woby.

As it is Walter's dps is still really not astounding, some QoL of being able to just fully kite (by shooting and moving) or a little extra damage which is functionally the same thing, wouldn't push him over the edge. I don't see many other ways of making Big Woby preferable over a beefalo in any situation, other than just making her better than a beefalo, which I'm not sure is better than just giving Walter a personal offensive reason to use her (beefalo helps with melee, woby helps with ranged). 

[Chewabacca]

11 hours ago, Dyzrespect said:

As it is Walter's dps is still really not astounding, some QoL of being able to just fully kite (by shooting and moving) or a little extra damage which is functionally the same thing, wouldn't push him over the edge. I don't see many other ways of making Big Woby preferable over a beefalo in any situation, other than just making her better than a beefalo, which I'm not sure is better than just giving Walter a personal offensive reason to use her (beefalo helps with melee, woby helps with ranged). 

I'm not convinced that the only incentives players respond to are combat ones. I think that if Klei made players have to ride Woby in order to access some useful perks, regardless of whether they're combat or non-combat, that would discourage players from putting the extra effort into taming a beefalo, and force of habit would reinforce that. And even so, as it stands, if all a player cares about is fighting bosses Woby is already a better option than beefalo except for areas where getting monster meat is harder (Ancient Guardian (though there are always the depth dwellers in the maze), ocean bosses) or bosses where Woby's damage threshold can't be mitigated by armor (Bee Queen), because she won't buck you unpredictably even before you put 20 days of training into her and she's already faster than all beefalo except for saddled riders even without any agility training. Without perks that reward the player for not using Woby as a mount, the only thing beefalo are more useful for are their large HP buffer, and that's really only useful as a crutch, because with ranged combat + armor, Walter should not be getting hit all that often.

If Woby is generally a useful enough mount, most players are not going to try and train a beefalo solely for the Bee Queen fight. And if they do: hey, spending 20 days focusing on beefalo taming is a fair enough price to pay in my book. The ocean content I'm more concerned about. Even though I know most people don't bring beefalo to ocean fights, it does feel weird to me that Woby's only real use at sea is as a second Chester, which is why I think one of her perks should let her swim.

Also, I don't really like the way the tree so far has made Walter a ranged combat character and only that. To be clear, I don't think it's a bad idea to improve his slingshot, I just don't like when it overshadows everything else about him. I would much prefer for his role as a scout to get touched on more, and for Woby to get some interesting perks that don't inherently relate to combat.

This has nothing to do with your comment but before I forget: Klei, if you're listening, please remove steel wool from Woby's loot table. That just encourages players to go for a beefalo even harder.

Anyways, let's see what happens with the update today or Monday before going any further.