Praise the most powerful Walter！

[Beautiful butte]

After just two days of playing Walter, I’ve already become a *cheese master*—I’ve got a special "cheese" method for almost every boss. Even if I don’t cheese, the combo of *Ickies* + *Cursed Rounds* + *Enlightened Crown* can kite any boss to death. The quality of life is absolutely insane. Portable campfire + Woby’s built-in 120 insulation means you don’t even need a thermal stone in winter once you’ve got the *Beefalo Hat*. Slingshot for birds + portable drying racks = zero hunger issues in winter. And on top of that, no sanity drain in daily life! Late game, with the *Brightshade Helm*, you can casually explore in complete darkness without a care. Inventory management? Gone, thanks to Woby’s delivery ability. Every single skill point Walter has is a game-changer (and can be taken individually). You say one skill point is amazing, and someone else will argue another is even better. Honestly, the list of pros just never ends. Walter is straight-up GOATed.

[Gashzer]

The best thing about Walter is that yes all these cheeses exist but it's more effort/time consuming to do these cheese instead of fighting the bosses legit with the slingshot.

Slingshot is balanced by the fact you need to explore the entire constant to get the different ammo types and slingshot mods to pull off these cheeses. If you don't keep pushing forward as Walter you can run out of ammo quite quickly.

 

 

[kikia]

bosses' tears simulator

[Beautiful butte]

27 minutes ago, Gashzer said:

The best thing about Walter is that yes all these cheeses exist but it's more effort/time consuming to do these cheese instead of fighting the bosses legit with the slingshot.

Slingshot is balanced by the fact you need to explore the entire constant to get the different ammo types and slingshot mods to pull off these cheeses. If you don't keep pushing forward as Walter you can run out of ammo quite quickly.

 

 

The cost is so small that I'm happy for Walter，He is now without doubt one of the strongest characters

[Guille6785]

41 minutes ago, SilverSpoon said:

He's not Wendy so that's okay.

(Wendy can cheese all of these bosses too)

[Gashzer]

6 minutes ago, Beautiful butte said:

The cost is so small that I'm happy for Walter，He is now without doubt one of the strongest characters

Walter is if you are experienced. But if you can rush ruins or obtain the enlightened crown then cheesing is necessary for you. Like every character is OP now.

Brightshade staff/sword and wolfgangs double damage deletes every boss without the need for cheese.

2 minutes ago, Beautiful butte said:

I wonder what happened to Wendy and why her skill tree is so bad

Wendy's skilltree is great. Gestalt abigial with sisturn 3 and ghastly potion makes abigail extremely convenient to use for boss fights.

 

[Crimson Hollow]

Well woby delivery isnt that good now....

the thing about the slingshot is that u can choose to cheese or not to cheese, theres always something that suits your playstyle. Cheesing actually takes more time and resources as Gashzer mentioned, so I'd recommend fighting the bosses legit to see how engaging that can be.

And it is very weird to me to compare wendy with walter since they have such different playstyles. It's like comparing Wolfgang to Wurt, I don't think you can draw a lot of conclusions from them other than dps maybe.

 

[_mylilsunshine_]

the portable campfire can only heat up the thermal stone to 30 degree Celcius btw, which is one-third of what burning a tree can do for you. having to sit by the campfire all the time because you're holding on a lukewarm rock is not great considering you can hold a scorching stone for much longer. 30 degree is still fine since you may not freeze as often thanks to woby & clothes, but you still need to maintain temperature status so your stone won't lose durability, unless you use mods.

also on the point of brightshade helm, wouldn't enlightened crown do the same thing? unless you have no sanity?

i'm glad you're having fun with walter. once you're more comfortable with him, try fighting bosses cheeseless and see how much more resources/time you can save 

[Peasant]

This is what happens when you use ranged weapons to fight enemies designed around melee battle.

[loopuleasa]

It started with speed

Now I have become r a n g e

[CremeLover]

Yeah, Walter exacerbates an already existing problem in the game: most enemies, including bosses, have no counterplay to movement impairing/range attacks.

Maxwell already has this problem in an even worse way, since he can fully stop enemies from moving, but at least Maxwell needs to be at melee distance most of the time until you get the gloomerang at least.

The problem is not that Walter has very powerful ranged combat and can slow down enemies, but the game not being designed around it, making even the most mundane walter boss video feel like a cheese strat, because most enemies have no way of fighting back.

6 hours ago, Beautiful butte said:

Even if I don’t cheese, the combo of *Ickies* + *Cursed Rounds* + *Enlightened Crown* can kite any boss to death.

Correct me if I'm wrong but, I believe Icker Rounds and Cursed Rounds don't stack anymore

Cursed are not the Slowdown Rounds, ignore my comment.

[Crimson Hollow]

3 minutes ago, CremeLover said:

Icker Rounds and Cursed Rounds don't stack anymore

Icker rounds and Slowdown rounds are not stacking anymore. But the slowdown effect of icker rounds alone is sometimes not enough to make the shadow tentacles from cursed rounds actually hit, especially against fast enemies like dfly

[Steorra]

1 hour ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

the portable campfire can only heat up the thermal stone to 30 degree Celcius btw, which is one-third of what burning a tree can do for you

I've never heard about that the portable campfire wouls stop you to ignite a tree.

[_mylilsunshine_]

30 minutes ago, CremeLover said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but, I believe Icker Rounds and Cursed Rounds don't stack anymore

you're thinking about slow-down round (purple) and ickies stacking, which is not a thing anymore.

you're talking about cursed round (orange) that deals damage, which doesn't have an effect to stack.

what OP is saying is that slowing down a boss with ickies round and then shoot it with damage round is good

[CremeLover]

1 minute ago, _mylilsunshine_ said:

you're thinking about slow-down round (purple) and ickies stacking, which is not a thing anymore.

you're talking about cursed round (orange) that deals damage, which doesn't have an effect to stack.

what OP is saying is that slowing down a boss with ickies round and then shoot it with damage round is good

28 minutes ago, Crimson Hollow said:

Icker rounds and Slowdown rounds are not stacking anymore. But the slowdown effect of icker rounds alone is sometimes not enough to make the shadow tentacles from cursed rounds actually hit, especially against fast enemies like dfly

You are both correct, I should drink my coffee before I start posting, sorry for the confusion.

[WilsonHiggs]

Combat mechanics needs some work...

[Evelo]

I played walter for a bit and he is stupid powerful. Wasn't even cheesing, just kite enemies and use your slingshot. Then you have my friend who played walter, and keeps dying because he ran into a wall then got swarmed by splumonkeys. It is so easy to just keep moving as walter. Combine with a Beefalo that can be fed once in a while to ensure you stay mounted 100% of the time and you are invulnerable. Makes Wolfgang look weak in comparison.

[Walrusst]

The hardest part about all of this is any half fixes to all of this on walters end is going to backfire.
Aside from rethinking the range scaling (Where manual range is maybe a bit too high for the aggro algorithm to work) anything that tries to quantify his damage is going to fall into the same pit.

Since whether you are killing a boss with a 30 damage weapon or a 140 damage weapon, usually you are spending a lot more time preparing for an engagement and pathing than you are killing the things (Since even solo toadstool kills are typically relying on down feathers which you need a lot of.) We wouldn't hambat if sometimes the grind to make a pile of darkswords/glasscutters was sometimes painful with how much hp is in DST (And lets be real, you probably don't even think of glass cutter as an option if you lack a method of quickly near-teleporting to lunar island with six full stacks of wood. Walter is like all of your options being roughly glass cutter economy in resources used.)

Hugely expensive scrapshot builds are not the main issue, and the easiest way to iron out most of the walter cheese with this is largely just handling obstacles better since 75% of these are big enemies seeing spaced walls as non-barriers, and giving more enemies the ability to jump short distances like to boats, as most people doing day 1 shadow pieces exploiting that they are the only shadow creature that can't just glide over the ocean as far as I know.

Sort of like how half our dragonfly strategies would need rethinking if the lavae could just swim over lava. Fixing these pathing quirks isn't 100% of all walter/cheese complaints getting solved, but if you target the things that are 90% of the quirks the number of things to complain about gets a lot smaller. Will there still be things we are bothered by? Yes. That's still largely a distraction from the biggest 90% of issues still being out in the wild and being an open question. Does walter exaggerate issues in pathfinding? Sure yes, but the burden is on the systems for this. The devs want ranged gameplay so its their job to support it. Its not appropriate for me to say don't be curious don't try new things.
(Speaking bosses hopping small gaps, small one tile turf gaps working like a boat hop would be incredible for everything.)

Walters times are great, but a lot of those are qualitative things from physically being fast and being able to play with day 1 world triggers that other characters rarely can (Aside from wortox and wolfgang with a higher degree of RNG and luck.)
Times aren't even the only balancing factor because part of what makes this a game is the prepwork/survival and what you do when things go wrong. Whether you love it, hate it, or think its irrelevant. For the bulk of players who pick up this game, the big combat integrity issues are likely going to be very different from what speedrunners present as their case.

[Well-met]

it's pretty impressive how literally every boss cheese involves walls or the ocean and klei hasn't lifted a finger about it in thousands of days

 

[Walrusst]

I assume it affects too few people to have been worth it.

Its kinda something a small subset of us have to force ourselves to do in order for it to happen in our worlds.

[Well-met]

1 minute ago, Walrusst said:

I assume it affects too few people to have been worth it previously.

almost every farm involves breaking AI with walls or statues since RoG in 2014.

it's great that klei fixed lureplant blocks but its so minimal compared to all the other abuse they seem to ignore.

[Kwaik]

Glad to see that Walter and Wendy got mega buffs 

 

Wortrox got a diaper on a stick 

[Walrusst]

To be fair the daiper lets you move a few rabbit hutches near some spider nests and just have permanent free darkswords in your inventory that genuinely make themselves at this point for the low cost of three paper weights in your inventory.

And even nice wortox has borderline infinite slurtle slime detonating with friendly fire detection when he teleports.
Like, you can have an army of pigmen pummeling a boss and your teleport bombs will only take out the hostiles.

He is such a cool and flexible character when you actually learn the quirks of him.

You can get like a permanent trickle of souls for free for half the year relocating the pig village to frog hell with just enough pigs that the frogs are never fully defeated but the pigs take sustainable casualties instead of going fully extinct or having time to eat stuff the pigskin that drops so you can genuinely just stand next to a wall segment for a minute or two and have 8 map wide teleports backed up in your soul jars.

If you want a character who can pummel nearly anything for almost zero upkeep with only two main resources to consider on any given day, wortox is a demigod.

[Evelo]

Remember when this game was difficult even if you have the knowledge?

[Walrusst]

14 minutes ago, Evelo said:

Remember when this game was difficult even if you have the knowledge?

We still had beehives and armor stacking back in the early days. One of these we've kept to the modern day while the other is nerfed/gone.

Its more that there was a window when the devs really wanted to make a boss that forced people to actually work together as a community effort, and so we had a window where the focus was making enemies which there were going to test our ability.

When that stopped working we got events like the forge where our resources were sandboxed to give us a challenge.

When those got too expensive to run we got to the current era where klei decided to work on things that make the game available to new players, and there hasn't really been more people playing than the last two years because of it.

Its less the game was always hard even for experts, more there was an era where the games prime directive was to appeal to expert players dead in the middle of its life cycle before we went so hardcore (easily beating bosses they deliberately put timers on to make solo kills impossible, and the effort got to expensive to keep servers up for some of these things) that the devs gave up on it.
Its still really hard for newbies, its just that experts likely transcend what the devs expect can be challenged long term.