About special equipment

[BB Marioni]

I have been playing Wormwood recently, and I just noticed/ realized one thing that I enjoy about him is that he has a character specific combat gear that incentivizes you to have a long term goal. I'm talking about the bramble shade and the brightshade sword perk.

 

When I was playing Woodie, I found his skills fu, but got bored easily coz I feel like I already have everything easily as he does not need any combat gear for his moose form, while he only needs to farm monster meat and you are basically good to go. I had zero reasons to make a bright smithy or shadow craft. This is also why I find some other characters more fun such as Wurt having certain gears that you can equip merm king to make him stronger, Maxwell needing tier 3 shadow gears to maximize shadow power, Wigfrid needing celestial champ to craft the full power spear, etc.

Another thing I liked about the Bramble shade is that it gives an older armor (the bramble husk) a purpose. And I find this a good idea since there are a lot of gears that we tend to ignore nowadays because there are better options already. For example, I almost never use night armor anymore since it is easy to get the repairable shadow armors or dreadstone armors. I believe it would actually be good for more characters to have a craft similar to wormwood's bramble shade. For example mixing a lighter + brightshade sword to make willow set enemies on fire while swinging the sword. Or wigfrid's shield + the eye of terror shield so the shield can be repaired with meat and maybe have a small aoe dmg. Or something like dark sword + alarm clock for wanda. Or night armor+ shadow cloak for maxwell to give 90% def on the shadow cloak, a scale mail with planar for willow, etc.

[Frosty_Mentos]

Yea Woody's alignment skills are kinda wack and progression doesn't really exist apart existing for a while and you basically get everything and biggest debuffs he has as transformations basically get to be null after you beat one of the end bosses.

He might not be very progression oriented character cause of his variety of forms but at least he's more stable to play as and more reliable cause of skill tree.

[readkey]

I think night armor is forgettable from the start because you lose sanity when you take hits, which is exactly the reason many people hate Walter for in the past.

[DegenerateFurry]

What I really don't get is why brambleshade armor doesn't get the "root enemies who attack you in place" perk that brightshade armor does. Why, exactly, does it not work for both? Why would we get a character-specific upgrade for an armor and a perk for the armor we're upgrading from, but not for the upgraded version? This seems like an oversight.

[Kacpert25]

1 hour ago, DegenerateFurry said:

What I really don't get is why brambleshade armor doesn't get the "root enemies who attack you in place" perk that brightshade armor does. Why, exactly, does it not work for both? Why would we get a character-specific upgrade for an armor and a perk for the armor we're upgrading from, but not for the upgraded version? This seems like an oversight.

I remember the developers saying that this wouldn't work with brambleshade armor so that Wormwood would have a purpose to use both the regular brightshade armor and the improved version.

[WilsonHiggs]

I dont like the game being filled wlth specal equipment.  The more the less special

1 hour ago, DegenerateFurry said:

What I really don't get is why brambleshade armor doesn't get the "root enemies who attack you in place" perk that brightshade armor does. Why, exactly, does it not work for both? Why would we get a character-specific upgrade for an armor and a perk for the armor we're upgrading from, but not for the upgraded version? This seems like an oversight.

Having choices and decision making while facing enemies 

[Maxil20]

9 hours ago, readkey said:

I think night armor is forgettable from the start because you lose sanity when you take hits, which is exactly the reason many people hate Walter for in the past.

Personally disagree, since the sanity reduction isn’t absurdly immense (at least not as much as dreadstone). The big issue for me has always been the durability. 525 durability is not a lot when it absorbs 95% of damage, and the cost is in that weird spot where it isn’t super expensive but also not the cheapest thing ever.

[Walrusst]

I feel like you should have a tightrope of characters who don't really rely on too much distinct gear versus characters who do. Since characters who use non-gear powers give a distinct feel.

I still would love for treeguard feller to give us a mechanic for polishing lucy with various materials to make her temporarily a weapon that's the dread of all plants for woodie, but honestly its just a small craving for a non-moose combat build so I can feel less driven to take the moose capstone every playthrough. This isn't me going against my statement that some characters should be power focused or equipment focused, its just that woodie would benefit from having options for both because the other wereforms get screwed over by how much power is placed on the moose.
Like she is not always the best weapon, she is mostly a tool still, but when the greenery starts acting up she is your go to tool. Plus the various forms of sharpened lucy are a relatively inexpensive means to deal with common threats.

[hyoton123]

52 minutes ago, Maxil20 said:

The  big issue for me has always been the durability.

Yeah, when ive tried using them before theyre really annoying to use. Relatively fragile, uses the shadow manip, hard to massproduce early,  no planar defense for post rift content so theyre kind of dead later except as a way to reduce enlightenment. 

[DegenerateFurry]

10 hours ago, Kacpert25 said:

I remember the developers saying that this wouldn't work with brambleshade armor so that Wormwood would have a purpose to use both the regular brightshade armor and the improved version.

That's kinda silly, though. It'd be like if they gave Wanda a perk that makes dark swords swing slightly faster "so that Wanda would have a reason to use both dark swords and her Alarming Clock", when the character-specific thing is basically meant as a straight upgrade. 

Walter has literally no reason to use an ice staff because freeze rounds are just better. By this logic, that's a problem, but nobody cares about that (except for wanting ice staffs to suck less, maybe).

[Well-met]

I have no idea why people upvote a call to add more character-locked items when its always been a bad, disliked idea.

If you want DST progression, ask klei to make insight reset to 0 each new world.

[DegenerateFurry]

17 minutes ago, Well-met said:

I have no idea why people upvote a call to add more character-locked items when its always been a bad, disliked idea.

If you want DST progression, ask klei to make insight reset to 0 each new world.

Not gonna happen, they've designed some perks to only be useful in the early-game. 

[HowlVoid]

Because of the random nature of the tentacles spawned by the brightshade sword, the dps can actually be LOWER than the thulecite club. 

This was tested a year ago, idk if anything has changed since then but I doubt it. 

I think a similar issue arose with Walter's brightshade rounds as they i initially followed the same spawn pattern. Not sure if this was changed for him.

The brightshade sword is great from planar stuff I think though. 

Either way, I'm not a fan of "circumstancial" weapon locked buffs. 

[Cheggf]

14 hours ago, readkey said:

I think night armor is forgettable from the start because you lose sanity when you take hits, which is exactly the reason many people hate Walter for in the past.

If you have 200 sanity and get hit by a 75 damage attack (e.g. deerclops, dragonfly, spider queen*, moose, klaus, etc) you need to get hit 23 times in a row without ever recovering your sanity in order for the night armor to cause you to drop down to the 15% threshold where crawling horrors can attack you. This would deal 86 damage to you through the night armor, 173 damage to you through something like thulecite armor, or 345 damage to you through something like a football helmet. And that's even ignoring that Maxwell & Wanda completely ignore its sanity penalty.

Night armor is great, I use it all the time. The only drawback of it is it has a little bit of a passive sanity drain so it's a little awkward to use in day to day life. 

[BB Marioni]

22 hours ago, Frosty_Mentos said:

Yea Woody's alignment skills are kinda wack and progression doesn't really exist apart existing for a while and you basically get everything and biggest debuffs he has as transformations basically get to be null after you beat one of the end bosses.

He might not be very progression oriented character cause of his variety of forms but at least he's more stable to play as and more reliable cause of skill tree.

For the type of game that DST is, I actually agree with Klei not resetting skill trees each world, as the skill trees seems to be meant as customizable perks rather than progression. unlocking skills suits more for RPG games where you just progress continuously. Progression in an open world survival game is more on the items that you collect and build, the longer you stay in a world, the more advanced your items will be, and the bigger and stronger your bases will also be.

 

20 hours ago, DegenerateFurry said:

What I really don't get is why brambleshade armor doesn't get the "root enemies who attack you in place" perk that brightshade armor does. Why, exactly, does it not work for both? Why would we get a character-specific upgrade for an armor and a perk for the armor we're upgrading from, but not for the upgraded version? This seems like an oversight.

At first I also thought of this. But then I kinda get it now after experiencing the items as there are instances where it would seem better to swap. for example, we had a world where a wormwood was fighting with a hound wave while in the middle of a herd of beefalos. The spikes triggered hit the beefalos, and all the beefalos went to attack wormwood. In this case, it would have been better to use the brightshade armor and root the hounds. This also happened while fighting worms in the middle of rock lobsters.

[DegenerateFurry]

22 minutes ago, BB Marioni said:

At first I also thought of this. But then I kinda get it now after experiencing the items as there are instances where it would seem better to swap. for example, we had a world where a wormwood was fighting with a hound wave while in the middle of a herd of beefalos. The spikes triggered hit the beefalos, and all the beefalos went to attack wormwood. In this case, it would have been better to use the brightshade armor and root the hounds. This also happened while fighting worms in the middle of rock lobsters.

The problem is that you should be kiting in any of those situations, and you shouldn't be tanking as Wormwood of all characters, especially when you're not getting anything out of it other than just rooting an enemy in place that's already staying basically still on top of you. If the rooting perk applied to both brightshade and brambleshade, you could still use brambleshade when you plan to fight among mobs, and if you get caught off-guard and just have brambleshade, you could do what you've been doing for your whole pre-rifts playthrough with your normal bramble husks and just get away from the mobs so your thorns don't aggro them. 

[BB Marioni]

2 hours ago, DegenerateFurry said:

The problem is that you should be kiting in any of those situations, and you shouldn't be tanking as Wormwood of all characters, especially when you're not getting anything out of it other than just rooting an enemy in place that's already staying basically still on top of you. If the rooting perk applied to both brightshade and brambleshade, you could still use brambleshade when you plan to fight among mobs, and if you get caught off-guard and just have brambleshade, you could do what you've been doing for your whole pre-rifts playthrough with your normal bramble husks and just get away from the mobs so your thorns don't aggro them. 

Different players have different playstyles. Firstly, the spikes still get triggered even without tanking if you have the skill tree ability that triggers it every 3 hits. Secondly, tanking is still an option in this game, not everyone is an elite player who loves showing off their dodge timing, that's what the healing items are for. Some players are just friends who got invited to play casually and do not have the necessary skill to dodge attacks. There are actually more casual players in this game than hardcore ones. In this example, I have casual friends who use beefalos as a safety net against hound waves as trying to dodge them just results in their death. 

 

Obviously there is the option to just switch to a non brightshade armor and that will still stop the spikes. But given the current situation, a brightshade armor would be the better option, which sort of gives it a use still.

[Wawchik]

10 hours ago, BB Marioni said:

Different players have different playstyles. Firstly, the spikes still get triggered even without tanking if you have the skill tree ability that triggers it every 3 hits. Secondly, tanking is still an option in this game, not everyone is an elite player who loves showing off their dodge timing, that's what the healing items are for. Some players are just friends who got invited to play casually and do not have the necessary skill to dodge attacks. There are actually more casual players in this game than hardcore ones. In this example, I have casual friends who use beefalos as a safety net against hound waves as trying to dodge them just results in their death. 

 

Obviously there is the option to just switch to a non brightshade armor and that will still stop the spikes. But given the current situation, a brightshade armor would be the better option, which sort of gives it a use still.

I don't think it was intended for newbies to use rift armour

[DegenerateFurry]

11 hours ago, BB Marioni said:

Different players have different playstyles. Firstly, the spikes still get triggered even without tanking if you have the skill tree ability that triggers it every 3 hits. Secondly, tanking is still an option in this game, not everyone is an elite player who loves showing off their dodge timing, that's what the healing items are for. Some players are just friends who got invited to play casually and do not have the necessary skill to dodge attacks. There are actually more casual players in this game than hardcore ones. In this example, I have casual friends who use beefalos as a safety net against hound waves as trying to dodge them just results in their death. 

 

Obviously there is the option to just switch to a non brightshade armor and that will still stop the spikes. But given the current situation, a brightshade armor would be the better option, which sort of gives it a use still.

I get what you're saying that not everyone's great at kiting. I just felt that it was safe to assume anyone who has endgame gear would be capable of kiting on a basic level and would thus be better off at least trying to do it instead of tanking as a character who struggles to heal himself. You're right about the three-hit perk, but that just gives us more of a reason to want to use brambleshade all the time.

But... do people who're terrible at kiting really beat Celestial Champion as Wormwood, unlock rifts, and then go on to kill brightshades and harvest pure brilliance from the rifts? I don't see how that's possible.

Or, are you talking only about players who get invited to a late-game world by a friend and get freely given endgame gear? They could still just use normal brightshade armor, is the thing. What I'm advocating for is giving brambleshade armor the rooting perk that brightshade armor gets, not giving brightshade armor thorns.

[Swiyss]

Ever since the beta on wormwood's skill tree I've been trying to convince people how important this is. Old items having reappearances with late game upgrades are a no-brainer and I don't know anyone who would disagree that the brambleshade armor was a perfect addition to the game. But unfortunately, this addition only affects 1 specific character item in the last branch of a skill tree.