Poll regarding Warly

[Mysterious box]

I guess the best way to put my thoughts on Warly is he's the chef the food character but his gameplay is centered around limiting your food options and priorizing the most effective dishes which feels contradictory to a chef character's design. You could make changes to further force diversity in his dishes but that just means leaning harder into bad design you should want to broaden your dish variety not just do it because the game said you have to.

[Anis5240]

4 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

the food character

in another world where the characters kinda suck ass at making good food, he might be a decent pick. But as it was, everyone can cook and when everyone can, no one will.

[Guille6785]

25 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

I guess the best way to put my thoughts on Warly is he's the chef the food character but his gameplay is centered around limiting your food options and priorizing the most effective dishes which feels contradictory to a chef character's design. You could make changes to further force diversity in his dishes but that just means leaning harder into bad design you should want to broaden your dish variety not just do it because the game said you have to.

It baffles me because shipwrecked had ALREADY solved this; the first time you ate a dish (no repeats) you got a boost in all stats (something like 33% more); the hunger boost broke even with his increased hunger drain, but the increased sanity and health were absolutely a boon that encouraged variety, idk why this had to be changed

[Jimothywastaken]

Warly's like fine

he isnt bad but since his food buffs mostly take too long to get or are out done by alternatives theres not really a reason to play him if your goal is to be effective

 

fun's a wholly different topic though and warly can be fun but i dont play him often

[Anis5240]

2 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

shipwrecked had ALREADY solved this

more importantly, he could eat raw and cooked food just fine, just with lesser effects. Waiting for the crockpot to cook is just idek man. Legit gotta ask Klei for why they did the change.

[Cheggf]

34 minutes ago, Jimothywastaken said:

Warly's like fine

he isnt bad but since his food buffs mostly take too long to get or are out done by alternatives theres not really a reason to play him if your goal is to be effective

 

fun's a wholly different topic though and warly can be fun but i dont play him often

This is a PvE game with no competitive elements, and a rather easy one at that. If every character was equally ""effective"" then that would be a bad thing. It's good that there's variety in efficacy, because PvE games generally have difficulty options. That can easily be given through character choice. 

[Dr. Safety]

I was, and still am, a supporter of him having harsher downsides than shipwrecked, since ideally, he would be the best support character in the game, while being the hardest to play as a tradeoff. 

Wolfgang and Wanda deal stupid amounts of damage with Warly buffs, which isn't bad if you consider that in order to achieve that damage, someone is playing as the character with these downsides. The fun that I get out of playing Warly was knowing that if I give spicy volt goat chaud froid to a Wolfgang, or honey spice to a Woodie, they will be able to decimate whatever task they are doing, thanks to my buffs making their upsides even greater.

I know I bring it up a lot with Warly, so I won't harp on it too much, but this design philosophy was before they added the celestial portal. Now you don't have to play as him to give characters that stupid damage. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't balance around this mechanic, which nerfed Warly's viability.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I vaguely remember hearing that the whole point of the planar mechanic was because there was way too much damage potential. You'd see all these youtube videos of 4 Wolfgangs melting bosses all buffed by Warly, or twitch streams of a solo Wolfgang dealing 6x damage by himself and making dragonfly no more difficult than a treeguard.

In all of those videos or streams, you would never see anyone actually playing Warly. They would all pick and swap Warly, giving Wolfgang the upsides of 2 characters, and ignoring the (comparatively) harsh downsides of Warly. And so of course it was busted and needed to be addressed. The way they addressed it was make it not rewarding to play as him at any stage of the game

[WilsonHiggs]

2 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

My issue is I like the idea of getting exotic ingredients but what I don't like is farming a personal problem perhaps but a common one I've also heard from people I've talked to.

Sad to hear that,  farming is really fun imo

 

2 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

As for him being the worst at eating the dishes if you take away the secondary powers specific dishes have what benefit does he gain from eating crockpot dishes except not dying?

Why he must have a benefit? Is his downside.

[Guille6785]

1 hour ago, Dr. Safety said:

I know I bring it up a lot with Warly, so I won't harp on it too much, but this design philosophy was before they added the celestial portal. Now you don't have to play as him to give characters that stupid damage. This wouldn't be a problem if they didn't balance around this mechanic, which nerfed Warly's viability.

the celestial portal was added before warly afaik

[Dr. Safety]

18 minutes ago, Guille6785 said:

the celestial portal was added before warly afaik

I just looked it up and you are right. Portal was added in Sept of 2018 and Warly in July of 2019. My mistake. With that in mind, it's more accurate to say that Warly's kit was not made with the celestial portal in mind, whether that be through the devs or through community suggestions that influenced it. His extreme upsides and extreme downsides shouldn't be able to be separated.

[Mysterious box]

1 hour ago, WilsonHiggs said:

Why he must have a benefit? Is his downside.

It feels strange to me that the crockpot character's only positive interaction with the crockpot comes from the powers he can get from a select few dishes and spices.

[Cheggf]

3 hours ago, Dr. Safety said:

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I vaguely remember hearing that the whole point of the planar mechanic was because there was way too much damage potential.

I don't think they've ever explicitly stated that's the reason, although due to the way it's implemented and what happens because of the implementation it seems to very heavily imply that's the reason. 

[Yaorin yon]

Warly is a chef with a delicate palate, and he should derive more benefits from his cuisine. Simply restricting others from gaining benefits from his dishes is an unhealthy correction. Additionally, he should be able to eat ingredients like during the DS period, even if the benefits are lower. He shouldn't starve himself just because he doesn't eat. This greatly impacts Warly's experience, making players even more reluctant to use him. Unlike others, Warly only faces penalties and no rewards for eating the same food, which can even affect his use of Nightberries. This is really bad.

 

In summary, I hope his dietary benefits are reverted to the DS stage. This means the first time he eats a type of dish, the benefits are higher than normal, but subsequent consumption yields lower benefits. He can eat ingredients, albeit with lower benefits. When he eats his own exclusive dishes, he should gain more benefits. These changes would encourage people to use him and foster a more positive attitude.

[Chewabacca]

I wish that he came with something that marked various items as edible (for crockpot use), because as it is, a lot of his special dishes don't encourage experimentation, they encourage going to the wiki. Having nightmare fuel or a volt goat horn in my inventory and seeing it marked with a little dot to represent the fact that you can make a meal with it would make it a thousand times more interesting to play around with recipes.

[WilsonHiggs]

22 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

It feels strange to me that the crockpot character's only positive interaction with the crockpot comes from the powers he can get from a select few dishes and spices.

Im fine with the downside, maybe should be more impactful to force players use more variety of food and certain dishes like meat stew should get their efficiency/stats revisited

But is true that he should have more variety of special dishes and the base time of certain food buffs make them not that worth compared to the ammount of time invested on them 

Also some base QoL like being able to spice stacks of food... is so painful to spice one at a time...

This skill tree is the one i fear the most. Warly and wormwood are my favorite characters... wormwood's skill tree didnt made him op neither removed his downside (but he has a lot of useless skill points..) but i fear warly will get the woodie's treatment.

I hope klei will learn from the awesome walter skill tree and bring fun stuff instead of trying to remove what make characters unique. Skill trees shouldn't be used to fix problems in designs and to reduce the impact of downsides but to expand on what they can bring

[Mysterious box]

2 minutes ago, WilsonHiggs said:

Im fine with the downside, maybe should be more impactful to force players use more variety of food and certain dishes like meat stew should get their efficiency/stats revisited

But is true that he should have more variety of special dishes and the base time of certain food buffs make them not that worth compared to the ammount of time invested on them 

Also some base QoL like being able to spice stacks of food... is so painful to spice one at a time...

This skill tree is the one i fear the most. Warly and wormwood are my favorite characters... wormwood's skill tree didnt made him op neither removed his downside (but he has a lot of useless skill points..) but i fear warly will get the woodie's treatment.

I hope klei will learn from the awesome walter skill tree and bring fun stuff instead of trying to remove what make characters unique. Skill trees shouldn't be used to fix problems in designs and to reduce the impact of downsides but to expand on what they can bring

I feel like if they make his current downside more impactful people will play him even less because it doesn't address why people cheese it in the first place it's like if Klei instead of fixing Walter slingshot they made it so melee attacks deal 50% less damage to make the slingshot do more damage by comparison. Warly's current design makes most people view the crockpot as a hinderance rather than something that adds to the character. If the cooking experience with Warly was more enjoyable and there was a good variety of dishes that are actually good that Warly could make without putting in so much extra effort while also giving good rewards people would naturally lean towards using variety rather than feeling the need to punish certain interacts to enforce artificial variety.

If nothing is done about his current crockpot interactions the best chance he probably has for becoming more popular would be a food rework or them leaning harder into dish buffs that use more readily available ingredients.

I mainly say this because his base concept is really fun it is really but the crap you gotta deal with before you get to fun stuff just turns most people off playing him. People value his dishes but most people don't value the experience that is playing Warly which is the main thing that needs to be addressed.

[Guille6785]

how about instead of a farming rerework or a crock pot rework Klei just fixes the character

[EatenCheetos]

Here’s my two cents. Warly has some fun gameplay, requiring you to learn and utilize crop combinations, which is always a fun time. It gives reward to more advanced interaction with the farming system and cooking system in order to get complex, but amazing dishes like Moqueca.

The problem is that he doesn’t have a good way of getting the crops he wants early game, so his utility is very limited. At best, it will likely be the first spring where you can really get some good farming going. I think he needs at least one of the following changes:

1. More early-game accessible dishes

2. Some way to get specific crop seeds

3. Some way of being efficient with ingredients, like maybe he can double a recipe to make 3 dishes

 

[WilsonHiggs]

2 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

I feel like if they make his current downside more impactful people will play him even less because it doesn't address why people cheese it in the first place it's like if Klei instead of fixing Walter slingshot they made it so melee attacks deal 50% less damage to make the slingshot do more damage by comparison. Warly's current design makes most people view the crockpot as a hinderance rather than something that adds to the character. If the cooking experience with Warly was more enjoyable and there was a good variety of dishes that are actually good that Warly could make without putting in so much extra effort while also giving good rewards people would naturally lean towards using variety rather than feeling the need to punish certain interacts to enforce artificial variety.

If nothing is done about his current crockpot interactions the best chance he probably has for becoming more popular would be a food rework or them leaning harder into dish buffs that use more readily available ingredients.

I mainly say this because his base concept is really fun it is really but the crap you gotta deal with before you get to fun stuff just turns most people off playing him. People value his dishes but most people don't value the experience that is playing Warly which is the main thing that needs to be addressed.

But his downside is a huge part of the fun playing him

2 hours ago, Guille6785 said:

how about instead of a farming rerework or a crock pot rework Klei just fixes the character

There is nothing to fix other than slight adjustments. Not every character needs to be strong right after spawning

[Mysterious box]

15 minutes ago, WilsonHiggs said:

But his downside is a huge part of the fun playing him

There is nothing to fix other than slight adjustments. Not every character needs to be strong right after spawning

I don't agree that his downside is fun but hey to each their own.

That being said Warly is already plenty powerful I just think the way he's designed is just actively unfun to commit to but hey if enough people enjoy him maybe he's just not for me.

[Maxil20]

I'm going to say upfront that I genuinely think Warly is a flawed character, and he's been that way since he was introduced to SW. DST did try to mitigate the issue, but he still leaves a lot to be desired. At least it was a step in the right direction at the time...?

While I do think he is flawed, I understand why people do like to pick him. He tries to push a different playstyle compared to others, attempts to punish common strats, and is a genuinely nicely written character (both in quotes, and the voice especially), which I know a lot of people like that kind of thing. I personally don't like Warly at all, but I can understand why others find his gimmicks and gameplay unique. If you are that type of person, more power to you! I just personally do wish he had a bit more incentive to stay as him that didn't inherently remove his main downsides. Dishes impacting him more (either with more stat effects/longer durations) and passive perks such as higher rare ingredient chances would go a long way to making him feel better inherently, especially long term.

One more thing, I see a lot of people harp on him being able to eat non crockpot food in DS, and I'll be honest when I say I never got that. Eating non-crockpot foods in DS was a laster-than-last resort option, It's really bad. To give one of my favorite examples, a full stack of honey normally keeps a character fed for 5 whole days. Warly, eating that same stack of honey without eating any prior, gets 95% of a single days worth of food, factoring in the fact he already gets a 30% penalty from eating it, loses an additional 70% from the 6th and onwards,and also the increased 33% hunger reduction in DS. Pretty much the only reason you would ever try to do it is to benefit from things like glow berries/rainbow jellyfish (in this case, that's fair enough as to why that would be desired).

[Guille6785]

39 minutes ago, WilsonHiggs said:

Not every character needs to be strong right after spawning

wild how I said nothing about making him stronger and you immediately assumed I was talking about letting him get his dishes from day 1

[Captain_Rage]

Anything but buffs and increased stats only at this point. Please, for the love of good game design. Warly is the only character left with something unique going for himself. I agree that the worst thing that could happen to DST is to normalize every character and make them equally powerful. A slightly boring but pronounced downside like he currently has is preferable over another character being able to defeat everything in the game without repercussions or having "skills" that negate said downside.

[Aester]

I like him a lot. Some say he relies on things like farming or horns or whatever (but I think that's because progression on other characters is too easy compared to this), but his versatility in everything makes up for it. Expensive and difficult? Yes. Is it worth it? Sure! He can do almost everything, but with setup and knowledge.

Solid in solo, solid in multiplayer. You can gather and fight, you can buff, just don't stand next to your pots all the time. Cook some buffed food and go do your thing. Idk it's just fun.

As for people who swapping chars... They underestimate the capabilities of a portable pot. A couple more weak and cheap recipes wouldn't hurt i think. Something like sea snacks.

[Cassielu]

Where is the "Celestial Portal" option in poll 4?