Experience of Clearing Ruins with Lunar Abigail And Why Losing AoE is a Significant Penalty

[Yifei_]

Summary: Losing AoE is a significant penalty. Using Lunar Abigail instead of Normal Abigail to clear ruins is a substantial nerf with almost no buffs. It also destroys the unique characteristics and fun of Wendy's ruins-clearing, making her playstyle more similar to Wilson or Wes.

The design concept of having different strengths for Lunar and Normal is not problematic in itself. However, the current situation is that Lunar Abigail has too few pros and too many cons, which is the design issue at hand. My entire post (whether it's this analysis of the ruins or the previous boss battle analysis) aims to demonstrate this point. When facing the boss, Lunar Abigail's pros are not well-reflected. Ruins is a very challenging and rich combat scenario. As a skill that is supposed to provide new combat gameplay, she not only fails to offer pros but is almost entirely cons when facing the ruins.

Suggestions for improvments: I hope that this skill can be further adjusted so that Lunar Abigail's pros can make me more willing to deal with her cons, or that there are ways for players to compensate for her cons through their own operations. This would make the skill more interesting.

Analysis:

The biggest nerf: Losing AoE, unable to quickly kill groups of splumonkeys. Killing splumonkeys significantly enhances Wendy's ruins clearing and is one of her unique features. Choosing Lunar Abigail means the following advantages will be lost:

1. Wendy has only a 0.75 multiplier against shadow creatures, making it harder for her to collect nightmare fuel compared to other characters. Shadow splumonkeys compensate for this. Choosing Lunar Abigail makes me collect nightmare fuel like Wes.
2. Continuously obtaining fresh bananas and morsels from splumonkeys ensures a stable food supply even after the initial blue mushrooms spoil, allowing for prolonged battles.
3. Making banana shakes with bananas, combined with Wendy's slower sanity loss, allows for better sanity management.
4. Making meatballs with morsels, combined with tents, ensures stable hunger and health.
5. Choosing to kill splumonkeys in bulk during the nightmare phase of the nightmare cycle while avoiding large groups of nightmare creatures gives Wendy a unique ruins-clearing rhythm.

Other nerfs:

1. Unable to break the invisibility of rictus. Normal Abigail's AoE can easily break its invisibility, while Lunar Abigail requires the same methods as Wilson.
2. Unable to quickly kill big tentacles, reducing map exploration and teleportation efficiency.

Performance in boss fights: Almost no improvement, with higher instability than Normal Abigail.

1. Against Ancient Guardian, Lunar Abigail stays in place (or 1-second stun) after attacking, making it harder to adjust her position, requiring additional use of the Team Spirits' Attack At command. Normal Abigail only needs a bottle of Vigor Mortis to easily defeat Ancient Guardian without relying on the Attack At command.
2. Against Nightmare Werepig, adjusting the relative positions of Wendy, Lunar Abigail, and Nightmare Werepig is more difficult than with Normal Abigail, and Nightmare Werepig's aggro is more likely to shift to Lunar Abigail. However, Lunar Abigail's slightly higher output makes the overall difference with Normal Abigail not significant.

Performance against clockwork creatures:

1. Two bishops: Lunar Abigail's single-target output is higher, making the already easy task of dealing with two bishops even easier. This advantage is not significant as Normal Abigail can also handle two bishops excellently.
2. One bishop and two rooks: Lunar Abigail faces slightly less survival pressure against rooks than Normal Abigail, but there is still a chance of being quickly killed by the rooks' high damage, as I experienced once while clearing a five-statue area. Even if Lunar Abigail survives better than Normal Abigail, I still recommend not taking risks and unsummoning Abigail to handle it alone.

Details of clearing ruins:

Spoiler

I used a mod to make Lunar Abigail available on the first day for easier testing. In the world settings, the cave's rifts were set to be activated from the start. The world size was set to small, with other settings unchanged.
Skill point allocation:

Ruins terrain:

Final loot:

[SpookyXy]

Gestalt Abby is meant to be worse than regular Abby at dealing with multiple enemies, her niche is for fighting bosses. You don't have to use it for every situation, they made it easier to swap between lunar and regular or you can get shadow instead.

[Yifei_]

1 minute ago, SpookyXy said:

Gestalt Abby is meant to be worse than regular Abby at dealing with multiple enemies, her niche is for fighting bosses. You don't have to use it for every situation, they made it easier to swap between lunar and regular or you can get shadow instead.

“Her niche is for fighting bosses"

I have a section specifically analyzing the performance in the boss battle, and you'd better read it before commenting. Moreover, Lunar Abigail's performance in the boss battle is not as good as that of Normal Abigail, which I have already discussed in my previous posts. You can read them if you are interested.

When facing the boss, Lunar Abigail also has issues. She provides too little room for player operation. During the boss battle, you can basically ignore her presence, which deprives Wendy of her unique gaming experience and makes her play more like Wilson. This is the core reason why I criticize the Lunar Sisterhood.

 

[SpookyXy]

11 minutes ago, Yifei_ said:

“Her niche is for fighting bosses"

I have a section specifically analyzing the performance in the boss battle, and you'd better read it before commenting. Moreover, Lunar Abigail's performance in the boss battle is not as good as that of Normal Abigail, which I have already discussed in my previous posts. You can read them if you are interested.

When facing the boss, Lunar Abigail also has issues. She provides too little room for player operation. During the boss battle, you can basically ignore her presence, which deprives Wendy of her unique gaming experience and makes her play more like Wilson. This is the core reason why I criticize the Lunar Sisterhood.

 

I was responding to this post and the info it contains, I didn't realize this was a continuation of another post. I still think Lunar Abby is a mode with pros and cons that the player can decide when they want to use. This post also does not include what improvements you want for Abby to receive.

[Steorra]

38 minutes ago, SpookyXy said:

Gestalt Abby is meant to be worse than regular Abby at dealing with multiple enemies,

1. the problem is she is be worse than regular at some bosses fights due to her position change & bad aggro attraction by the dashing  i.e. the toad, the nightmare werepig

2. the ruin is more like a scenario to deal with single clockwork but not a scenario to deal with monkey horde. I have no idea why Lunar Abby already lost her AoE ability but being worse in the ruin.

 

[Yifei_]

1 hour ago, SpookyXy said:

I still think Lunar Abby is a mode with pros and cons that the player can decide when they want to use.

Thank you for pointing that out. I agree with you, but I might not have made it clear in my post. I will revise the main post to make this point more explicit.

The design concept of having different strengths for Lunar and Normal is not problematic in itself. However, the current situation is that Lunar Abigail has too few pros and too many cons, which is the design issue at hand. My entire post (whether it's this analysis of the ruins or the previous boss battle analysis) aims to demonstrate this point. When facing the boss, Lunar Abigail's pros are not well-reflected. Ruins is a very challenging and rich combat scenario. As a skill that is supposed to provide new combat gameplay, she not only fails to offer pros but is almost entirely cons when facing the ruins.

I hope that this skill can be further adjusted so that Lunar Abigail's pros can make me more willing to deal with her cons, or that there are ways for players to compensate for her cons through their own operations. This would make the skill more interesting. At present, I choose this skill only to face CC III. As soon as I finish fighting CC III, I switch back to Normal Abigail. Currently, the use of Lunar Abigail is too limited.

[FluffyBun]

Lunar Abigail should just have Maxwell's Worker's threat avoidance when she is not going to attack

Maybe an improved one which biases sidestepping (charging rooks, pig, etc can be approximated into three threat spheres in front of it)

 

[Yifei_]

1 hour ago, FluffyBun said:

Lunar Abigail should just have Maxwell's Worker's threat avoidance when she is not going to attack

Maybe an improved one which biases sidestepping (charging rooks, pig, etc can be approximated into three threat spheres in front of it)

From a practicality standpoint, perhaps this would indeed be better. However, I am also concerned that such a design might reduce player interaction with Lunar Abigail. In other words, I could completely ignore her and just focus on my own actions. I would still prefer if the developers could give me some control that is unique to Lunar Abigail, allowing Wendy and Lunar Abigail to have better coordination.

[Debruh]

5 minutes ago, Yifei_ said:

From a practicality standpoint, perhaps this would indeed be better. However, I am also concerned that such a design might reduce player interaction with Lunar Abigail. In other words, I could completely ignore her and just focus on my own actions. I would still prefer if the developers could give me some control that is unique to Lunar Abigail, allowing Wendy and Lunar Abigail to have better coordination.

Sadly, this is her intended playerstyle

(Also because I had no idea what aloof meant exactly, so here's the google definition for anyone like me

[Yifei_]

5 minutes ago, Debruh said:

Sadly, this is her intended playerstyle

(Also because I had no idea what aloof meant exactly, so here's the google definition for anyone like me

Thank you very much for the patch note screenshot and word explanation (the forum might be a good place to practice English)!

The phrase "too strong" has come up again; perhaps that version of Lunar Abigail was indeed "strong." I didn't test it out at that time. I really don't want to see this word again...

I feel that the recent hotfix removing the Attack At command for Lunar Abigail was also due to this reason. It seems the designers are telling me, "You better not worry about Lunar Abigail's survival and output, and I won't let you either." However, this contradicts Wendy's playstyle to some extent: it disrupts the coordination between Wendy and Abigail. This leads to an awkward situation for the skill: if Lunar Abigail is too strong, she can solo many bosses, but if she's too weak, her practicality is poor. The ideal skill tree should create a new action logic and method for Abigail and provide players with a unique ability to control Lunar Abigail. If players don't control Lunar Abigail, she won't be able to solo many bosses, but if players control her properly, they can make up for Lunar Abigail's shortcomings and create exciting combinations in boss battles.

If anyone wants to review this patch note, they can visit this link:

 

[YouKnowWho142]

Gestalt Abigail seems like a real nightmare to balance. We’ve already seen her solo bosses and be basically unusable during the span of the beta, and it really seems problematic to find a balance with her.

My quick idea (which is likely quite flawed) to reintroduce the synergy between Wendy and abi while letting gestalt abi be a strong single target attacker is for gestalt Abigail’s damage to increase based on how much damage Wendy has dealt to the target before Abigail’s next attack (sort of like a vex for Abigail, in some way). That way, Wendy can participate in the fight and deal damage that’ll also power up Abigail, taking advantage of the long pauses between gestalt abi’s attacks by increasing the damage of her next hit against that same target, whichll apply abi’s vex and buff Wendy. That way, gestalt Abigail can’t completely solo threats like she could in her strongest iteration while also having high damage if working together with Wendy (as it should be), while again allowing “aloof” players to not have to directly manage Abigail as much 

Again just a quick thought, I’m open to critique

[Steorra]

7 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

Gestalt Abigail seems like a real nightmare to balance. We’ve already seen her solo bosses and be basically unusable during the span of the beta, and it really seems problematic to find a balance with her.

My quick idea (which is likely quite flawed) to reintroduce the synergy between Wendy and abi while letting gestalt abi be a strong single target attacker is for gestalt Abigail’s damage to increase based on how much damage Wendy has dealt to the target before Abigail’s next attack (sort of like a vex for Abigail, in some way). That way, Wendy can participate in the fight and deal damage that’ll also power up Abigail, taking advantage of the long pauses between gestalt abi’s attacks by increasing the damage of her next hit against that same target, whichll apply abi’s vex and buff Wendy. That way, gestalt Abigail can’t completely solo threats like she could in her strongest iteration while also having high damage if working together with Wendy (as it should be), while again allowing “aloof” players to not have to directly manage Abigail as much 

Again just a quick thought, I’m open to critique

many voices has suggested similar thing. 

but the changes of Lubby applied is just seems like only paradox. the original design of Lubby seems trying to make her being "no worry" to her survivability but laterly devs think this is "too strong" then nerf Lubby to make her need manage again. the attack style of Lubby seems "strong single target attack" but it give no better perform than normal Abby. And the completely no AoE feature of Lubby makes the target management always be messed once you have to face multiple targets.

[FluffyBun]

27 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

Gestalt Abigail seems like a real nightmare to balance. We’ve already seen her solo bosses and be basically unusable during the span of the beta, and it really seems problematic to find a balance with her.

My quick idea (which is likely quite flawed) to reintroduce the synergy between Wendy and abi while letting gestalt abi be a strong single target attacker is for gestalt Abigail’s damage to increase based on how much damage Wendy has dealt to the target before Abigail’s next attack (sort of like a vex for Abigail, in some way). That way, Wendy can participate in the fight and deal damage that’ll also power up Abigail, taking advantage of the long pauses between gestalt abi’s attacks by increasing the damage of her next hit against that same target, whichll apply abi’s vex and buff Wendy. That way, gestalt Abigail can’t completely solo threats like she could in her strongest iteration while also having high damage if working together with Wendy (as it should be), while again allowing “aloof” players to not have to directly manage Abigail as much 

Again just a quick thought, I’m open to critique

Just give gestalt abi some utility, since gestalt abi is basically a statstick that is thoroughly uninteresting

[YouKnowWho142]

5 minutes ago, FluffyBun said:

Just give gestalt abi some utility, since gestalt abi is basically a statstick that is thoroughly uninteresting

It depends on what mean by utility. You can make the statstick argument with normal/shadow abi too, Wendy is inherently a combat character, so I think it’s fine that both lunar and shadow form have specializations in combat in different ways

[FluffyBun]

Shadow Abi and normal abi allows Wendy to interact with combat in a new way (abi aoe) at the cost of having to interact with combat in a new way (abi positional manipulation)

Lunar Abi is just boring. It's like Wilson with +dmg. If I wanted to play a character who deals big number damage I will play wolfgang.

Maybe Lunar Abi should be able to chop Toad trees, or hit shadow creatures, or double-cast some items like brightshade bombs, brightshade staff, etc. or save on panflute durability by making Wendy's panflute usage instead command Abigail to put surrounding enemies to sleep, etc. Wendy's approach to combat was always about "solving" a component of a fight and "creating" a new problem to be solved.

[YouKnowWho142]

1 minute ago, FluffyBun said:

Shadow Abi and normal abi allows Wendy to interact with combat in a new way (abi aoe) at the cost of having to interact with combat in a new way (abi positional manipulation)

Lunar Abi is just boring. It's like Wilson with +dmg. If I wanted to play a character who deals big number damage I will play wolfgang.

Maybe Lunar Abi should be able to chop Toad trees, or hit shadow creatures, or double-cast some items like brightshade bombs, brightshade staff, etc. or save on panflute durability by making Wendy's panflute usage instead command Abigail to put surrounding enemies to sleep, etc. Wendy's approach to combat was always about "solving" a component of a fight and "creating" a new problem to be solved.

aoe is not rare anymore at all and certainly not unique to Wendy. 

The argument of Wilson +dmg just does not work since that applies to every character in the game, it's very reductive and ignores playstyle choices that characters might present (by your logic maxwell's duelists are useless since they just do single target damage?).

Lunar Abigail can work with Wendy, but it needs the right direction which Klei has not quite gotten there yet. The fact that they made Gestalt Abi easier to swap also implies that they encourage you to use whichever one you need more for any situation. It doesn't make any reasonable sense for a gestalt version of abigail to be used for utility.

[DVGMedia]

5 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

It depends on what mean by utility. You can make the statstick argument with normal/shadow abi too, Wendy is inherently a combat character, so I think it’s fine that both lunar and shadow form have specializations in combat in different ways

Ive always kind of thought lunar should have been the more defensive while shadow would be more offensive.
I kind of always look at willows affinities when discusing what should be good for abby.
Willows lunar and shadow both do basically the same damage to single targets but they both do it differently But they don't take away the core of the character of willow.
Lunar abby and shadow abby should have been similar. They shouldn't take away the core of abby. But they should play with it in different ways.

I always thought lunar abby should be more like a grazer where her attack aura is replaced with a slow field that provides buffs to the players inside of it while slowing enemies.  So it incentivized more close together play.

While shadow abby was more ravenous and kind of unpredictable gaining more power the more death around her.
 

[FluffyBun]

Just now, YouKnowWho142 said:

aoe is not rare anymore at all and certainly not unique to Wendy. 

The argument of Wilson +dmg just does not work since that applies to every character in the game, it's very reductive and ignores playstyle choices that characters might present (by your logic maxwell's duelists are useless since they just do single target damage?).

Lunar Abigail can work with Wendy, but it needs the right direction which Klei has not quite gotten there yet. The fact that they made Gestalt Abi easier to swap also implies that they encourage you to use whichever one you need more for any situation. It doesn't make any reasonable sense for a gestalt version of abigail to be used for utility.

Maxwell is a cage-based combatant. His combat utility comes from duelists being pseudo-ranged and his cage, in tandem. Maxwell would be far more boring if he did not have his cage spell. His duelists exist to enable the full potential of his cage.

[YouKnowWho142]

2 minutes ago, DVGMedia said:

Ive always kind of thought lunar should have been the more defensive while shadow would be more offensive.
I kind of always look at willows affinities when discusing what should be good for abby.
Willows lunar and shadow both do basically the same damage to single targets but they both do it differently But they don't take away the core of the character of willow.
Lunar abby and shadow abby should have been similar. They shouldn't take away the core of abby. But they should play with it in different ways.

I always thought lunar abby should be more like a grazer where her attack aura is replaced with a slow field that provides buffs to the players inside of it while slowing enemies.  So it incentivized more close together play.

While shadow abby was more ravenous and kind of unpredictable gaining more power the more death around her.
 

I think this makes more sense if you want Gestalt Abigail to have a utility role

Though

I get what you're saying about Willow's shadow and lunar affinities, but they still encourage a similar idea to Wendy's current affinities (that being one is noticeably better against single target and the other is notably better with aoe) even if they indeed do roughly the same damage (just as in the case for lunar and shadow affinities for Wendy currently)

[DVGMedia]

1 minute ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

I think this makes more sense if you want Gestalt Abigail to have a utility role

Though

I get what you're saying about Willow's shadow and lunar affinities, but they still encourage a similar idea to Wendy's current affinities (that being one is noticeably better against single target and the other is notably better with aoe) even if they indeed do roughly the same damage (just as in the case for lunar and shadow affinities for Wendy currently)

But like the single target one really is no better than the shadow at single target.
just because it takes away agency from the player.  Which is the goal of lunar it makes abby not supposed to require maintenance but she ends up requiring much more than regular abby.

[YouKnowWho142]

3 minutes ago, DVGMedia said:

But like the single target one really is no better than the shadow at single target.
just because it takes away agency from the player.  Which is the goal of lunar it makes abby not supposed to require maintenance but she ends up requiring much more than regular abby.

Just from a dps standpoint, lunar flame takes longer to deal damage and has a longer cooldown, and you cant attack while the lunar flames are being cast, so it doesn't seem very encouraged to use lunar flames solely for single target dps

And again, I think Gestalt Abigail is very flawed, and never disagreed with that aspect. I just think that if they want her to go completely down the low maintenance single target route then it still needs a lot of improvement, which is the general sentiment anyways. Making it easier to switch on/off Gestalt Abigail doesn't necessarily fix the issue but only makes it more clear how niche she is to begin with, which i also agree with

[Yifei_]

4 hours ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

My quick idea (which is likely quite flawed) to reintroduce the synergy between Wendy and abi while letting gestalt abi be a strong single target attacker is for gestalt Abigail’s damage to increase based on how much damage Wendy has dealt to the target before Abigail’s next attack (sort of like a vex for Abigail, in some way). That way, Wendy can participate in the fight and deal damage that’ll also power up Abigail, taking advantage of the long pauses between gestalt abi’s attacks by increasing the damage of her next hit against that same target, whichll apply abi’s vex and buff Wendy. That way, gestalt Abigail can’t completely solo threats like she could in her strongest iteration while also having high damage if working together with Wendy (as it should be), while again allowing “aloof” players to not have to directly manage Abigail as much 

I think this idea is pretty good. If I remember correctly, Maxwell's Shadow Duelist has a similar mechanism. When Maxwell joins the battle, the attack attributes of the Shadow Duelist will significantly increase. If the Lunar Abigail also has a similar mechanism, it could encourage players to actively participate in the battle as well.

I didn't find this table on the English Wiki, so I used the machine translation from the Chinese Wiki: https://dontstarve.huijiwiki.com/wiki/暗影傀儡#暗影角斗士