#NerfWurt

[AndroidSpice536]

2 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Yeah it works for balance but it makes making a merm city (one of the things people like doing) redundant.

Im not sure

I was typing a response but it deleted itself.

Anyway, basically i stopped playing her because her skilltree's absurd power made the game less fun, while not adding what many Wurt players enjoyed most about Wurt: Building their merm city, which was very undercooked since you only needed to just spam merm houses but it was cool to work towards it. The merm combat was merly a fruit of your labour, and it was already dominant so buffing combat was extreme overkill. I have found there are many former Wurt mains who agree with this and stopped playing her because she makes the game feel "brainless" and too easy. Killing bosses with merms used to feel quite great when it wasnt always a clear win- still mind bendingly powerful and maybe could be better designed, but it at least you felt acomplishment and an earned power.

i have also met some of the most experienced players in megabase worlds too, and their opininon is that Wurt makes the game too easy too- you can just farm bosses so easy. They quit Wurt for this reasom.

i dont have any clear statistics besides observations, but it is quite possible that Wurt's balance and the lack of features that expand on what players enjoy with Wurt leaves her at the bottom. People dont always play characters just because they are op, they play them if they are fun. 

Making a character an easy mode character is not a good idea. She was always like this before, but it took much more effort, commitment, and resources.

This is a good point actually that i cant defend well. But still i believe it is overkill.

There isnt much else we can do without a Wurt rework which i dont thinj we can afford right now.

A reworked Wurt where she has 8 merms max, but she can buff them wouldnt even be too bad for me. Its more unique than webber, where your army is more personal.

Im actually not.

 

Ive shared my opinion of Wurt alot throughout the years, pre and post skilltree.

Yeah exactly. Most people will see a Wurt nerf and complain before trying.

This happenes alot.

Her upsides are the bigger problem.

I don’t believe that nerfing merms will make building a city less of a thing. If anything it will make the cities get bigger to account for the lack of damage. However, making it so she can have a city but only take out 5-8 at a time to battle would be beneficial. This way she can go get more if these all die, meaning there is still a need to make large amounts of merm huts simply for backup merms. Another thing that would help this would be to decrease merm respawn timer. This would make it so there is more weight to a merm death, not just use them as fodder. 

[Sacco]

35 minutes ago, dst_lover said:

And that is the point I went to grind more to feel that I deserve that power what made wurt skill tree boring is the fact that it’s remove all that grinding from her gameplay 

honestly, that's a fair point. I understand about that "rewarding part" of the grind.

[Jakepeng99]

1 hour ago, dst_lover said:

And that is the point I went to grind more to feel that I deserve that power what made wurt skill tree boring is the fact that it’s remove all that grinding from her gameplay 

Recruiting merms should be more expensive too. 1 kelp for 6 merms is way to cheap.

It should stay that way for regular merms, but guards should need something extra, like how guard pigs in hamlet need contracts.

Edited July 18, 2025 by Jakepeng99

[dst_lover]

8 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Recruiting merms should be more expensive too. 1 kelp for 6 merms is way to cheap.

It should stay that way for regular merms, but guards should need something extra, like how guard pigs in hamlet need contracts.

W take and with that you might also start building more houses for normal merms so you can collect things like wood and other things cheaper then guards but I think they will need to nerf their respawn time too because you can farm infinite food without any disadvantages by letting merms fight each other so even if they nerf their cost of recruiting them they need too also nerf their spawn rate so you can feel that they are actually costing something 

[00petar00]

Only character that can be nerfed is Wes, every other character should be buffed because that is what players want.

At first I thought that as sandbox game that DST is it would have characters to support as many playstyles as possible but once skill trees came out and were getting released every single one players asked for buffs.

If more players asked for hard mode characters like Wes we would get them but that isn't the case and everyone wants their main to be strong and only on forums do you see players asking for nerfs and survival mechanics because they have already put in hundreds of hours at the very least and easily thousands of hours in so they don't get challenged and they can request from devs for game to be more difficult but If we had voting in steam/game the results would be much more clear as to what players want.

Anyway, developers know what players want even with all the "hype" (below 50% of forum members advocating for this) so they have been focusing on casual gameplay and bosses over the years and there won't be any change because that is what players want.

 

DST can have challenges with bosses and mechanics but they can't happen without player input like seasonal ones, bosses that spawn near player or hounds. We already have enough of these survival challenges, that's why there was such a big focus on player choice with bosses and rift progression.

Edited July 19, 2025 by 00petar00

[cybers2001]

 

7 hours ago, 00petar00 said:

At first I thought that as sandbox game that DST is it would have characters to support as many playstyles as possible but once skill trees came out and were getting released every single one players asked for buffs.

It’s because Klei insists on bosses being core to progression now. It used to be that bosses just existed in the game, and if you wanted to kill them, you’d rally a group or switch to some combat specialists and go to town, but if you just wanted to experience of surviving through the seasons, this was entirely optional. Quite a few of the harder bosses are hardly necessary to fight at all, like you don’t *really* need shroom lights and jellybeans.  
  
Now you miss out on years of updates if you don’t fight bosses.

7 hours ago, 00petar00 said:

DST can have challenges with bosses and mechanics but they can't happen without player input like seasonal ones, bosses that spawn near player or hounds. We already have enough of these survival challenges, that's why there was such a big focus on player choice with bosses and rift progression.

To be honest, I think the idea of rifts being “hard mode” is a step in the right direction, but it straddles the line between hard and annoying, with just more mobs that keep getting in the way. Maybe hard mode could be more like famine mode, where you get less meat drops from mobs, or more diverse weather that isn’t simply negated with a single umbrallah 

Edited July 19, 2025 by cybers2001

[Brad Turner]

I disagree. Wurt should maintain her power.

[Jakepeng99]

32 minutes ago, Brad Turner said:

I disagree. Wurt should maintain her power.

I disagree

[Echsrick]

what if we dont nerf a characters only strenght?

[00petar00]

14 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

It’s because Klei insists on bosses being core to progression now. It used to be that bosses just existed in the game, and if you wanted to kill them, you’d rally a group or switch to some combat specialists and go to town, but if you just wanted to experience of surviving through the seasons, this was entirely optional. Quite a few of the harder bosses are hardly necessary to fight at all, like you don’t *really* need shroom lights and jellybeans.  
  
Now you miss out on years of updates if you don’t fight bosses.

I actually like boss updates because fighting bosses is quite fun and the biggest reason is that they are optional besides a few, so they don't affect players that don't want to deal with them like the usual survival mechanics that are present in a given season, area based survival challenges that are always there and survival challenges that are always there all over the world.

There's a limit to how many survival challenges can exist based on definition of survival challenges that players advocating them want so that is why I am defining them in the previous sentence like that. Let's say developers focused on adding such survival challenges, the game would lose majority of the players and it would become much more niche because such games almost always are, If all you can do is scramble every last bit of effort to survive and can't do anything you as player want to achieve it wouldn't be fun for most people.

15 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

To be honest, I think the idea of rifts being “hard mode” is a step in the right direction, but it straddles the line between hard and annoying, with just more mobs that keep getting in the way. Maybe hard mode could be more like famine mode, where you get less meat drops from mobs, or more diverse weather that isn’t simply negated with a single umbrallah 

Rifts aren't a good solution as the same argument you used against bosses can be applied here except that it isn't divided in small bits and optional but in a very large piece of optional content, rifts are years worth updates and you can either decide to tackle it or you are losing out on a lot. In comparison with bosses you can decide which ones you want to fight and besides rifts nothing in game really punishes you for progression like that.

[Jakepeng99]

8 hours ago, Echsrick said:

what if we dont nerf a characters only strenght?

What if we made Wurt’s merms have utility and new abilities than just do the same thing as normal but at broken levels. 

[Sacco]

10 hours ago, Echsrick said:

what if we dont nerf a characters only strenght?

Maybe because that strenght is TOO POWERFUL and can do almost everything…

[Mysterious box]

3 hours ago, Sacco said:

Maybe because that strenght is TOO POWERFUL and can do almost everything…

 

On 7/18/2025 at 12:30 PM, AndroidSpice536 said:

I don’t believe that nerfing merms will make building a city less of a thing. If anything it will make the cities get bigger to account for the lack of damage. However, making it so she can have a city but only take out 5-8 at a time to battle would be beneficial. This way she can go get more if these all die, meaning there is still a need to make large amounts of merm huts simply for backup merms. Another thing that would help this would be to decrease merm respawn timer. This would make it so there is more weight to a merm death, not just use them as fodder. 

The issue is then she kinda becomes not worth all the effort a nerf would require a reworking of a her design because of the inconveniences she places on the player that is overlooked because of how useful her overwhelming force is when setup. For example if you place a merm recruitment limit it heavily nerfs her resource gathering ability and her lowered combat power on top of not being able to cross shards with her merms would just make her a worse Maxwell in terms of followers. This is further highlighted by merm deaths in a boss fight if your merms die that's it they're done helping you for that fight but Maxwell will simply resummon his minions.

I'm not against the idea of nerfing Wurt but just nerfing Wurt is a recipe of just making her experience worse she needs better tools for managing her merms and having them better assist her and vice versa.

On 7/18/2025 at 4:09 AM, Milordo said:

YES PLEASE.

That buff is a crutch, a stupid "noob help", because Klei knows that instead of balancing the disaster of crockpot dishes bloating (the correct way), it was much better to slap a band-aid fix and call it a day. That design is bad and should absolutely removed. Why Wigfrid have all the cool great design core linked with "you can only eat meat" but Wurt no?

It really doesn't make sense. We have also today the new farming system to give you tons of giant vegetables and more plants introduced that grows on Winter (because we needed more buffs.....)

As an aside this isn't really a fair comparison meat dishes are the best foods in the game and the easiest to obtain at the same time and even then Wigfrid still cheats on her downside by being able to eat goodies meaning she really isn't missing out since while there are a few good dishes veg and fruit dishes are the game's worst dishes. Even farming isn't really that good for Wurt which is why many Wurts just stick to kelp, stone fruits, or berry bushes.

Edited July 20, 2025 by Mysterious box

[Echsrick]

6 hours ago, Sacco said:

Maybe because that strenght is TOO POWERFUL and can do almost everything…

ok....then we alsol need to nerf wendy, for her only strenght is ghost and that does almost everything

ok....then we alsol need to nerf wolfgang, for his only strenght is litteraly just strenght attack power that does almost everything

ok...then insert any character and there strenghts

[Jakepeng99]

58 minutes ago, Echsrick said:

ok....then we alsol need to nerf wendy, for her only strenght is ghost and that does almost everything

She isn’t op though. Yes she has relaxed combat against smaller enemies, but when the enemies are stronger than spiders you have to work together.

[IAmAFurrz]

On 7/18/2025 at 12:10 AM, cybers2001 said:

How about we don't nerf characters that are near the absolute bottom of the popularity list?

popularity doesnt dictate how interesting a character is, and how potent the merms are is the reason wurt is so boring. in my experience after winter 1 i struggle to stay awake playing her (if i went slower, itd be a whole year of setting up, and afterwards the same problem applies)

[00petar00]

We have characters that kept all the changes that buffed them like Maxwell because players want to play strong characters and I don't see a reason to nerf them because you can choose a weaker character or not play with someone that is using a strong character, so this is completely your choice.

Wurt requires setup and is quite bad until year 2 and gets seasonal temperature fishes and builds enough merms.

Why play Wurt when you can a lot of the cast is much stronger at the start? I can understand someone wanting to play Wurt in year 2 or 3 but it is usually much better for them to pick a stronger character for early game and swap to Wurt later.

I have always advocated for DST to have strong and weak characters because it is a sandbox game and players would get to decide how difficult they want it to be but the issue is that players decided that every single character needs a buff and everyone wants their main to be strong.So I have changed my stance on this, why should specific amount of players arguing for nerfs be the deciding factor when most prefer buffs? 

[Creatorofswamps]

It may seem trivial, but just choose different skills and don't create Merm Flort-ifications, and you'll have the same gameplay as before. You don't have to make everything absolute.

[Sacco]

16 hours ago, Echsrick said:

ok....then we alsol need to nerf wendy, for her only strenght is ghost and that does almost everything

ok....then we alsol need to nerf wolfgang, for his only strenght is litteraly just strenght attack power that does almost everything

ok...then insert any character and there strenghts

yes, ALMOST every character as pf now needs a nerf…

[POOH_LY]

3 hours ago, Sacco said:

yes, ALMOST every character as pf now needs a nerf…

Not sure if it's just me, but I like the fact that every character is strong in their own way, though. Before, the difference between "strong" characters (Wolfgang, Wx-78, and Wickerbottom) and average characters is just too much that a majority of players just miss out on a lot of content. But now that a lot of characters are pretty strong, I've seen a lot of people being able to beat bosses they've never beaten before. And Klei can just introduce new tougher enemies/bosses to the game. (I think they're already doing it. A lot of new mobs are so much more dangerous than what we have.)

[Sacco]

36 minutes ago, POOH_LY said:

Not sure if it's just me, but I like the fact that every character is strong in their own way, though. Before, the difference between "strong" characters (Wolfgang, Wx-78, and Wickerbottom) and average characters is just too much that a majority of players just miss out on a lot of content. But now that a lot of characters are pretty strong, I've seen a lot of people being able to beat bosses they've never beaten before. And Klei can just introduce new tougher enemies/bosses to the game. (I think they're already doing it. A lot of new mobs are so much more dangerous than what we have.)

Klei is not addinh any hard enemy… Nerfing OP characters and making the weaker ones better qould solve this issue.

[Echsrick]

On 7/20/2025 at 8:34 PM, Jakepeng99 said:

She isn’t op though. Yes she has relaxed combat against smaller enemies, but when the enemies are stronger than spiders you have to work together.

this a joke?

[cybers2001]

On 7/20/2025 at 12:16 PM, IAmAFurrz said:

popularity doesnt dictate how interesting a character is, and how potent the merms are is the reason wurt is so boring. in my experience after winter 1 i struggle to stay awake playing her (if i went slower, itd be a whole year of setting up, and afterwards the same problem applies)

So nerfing merms would increase her popularity? Yet Wendy is the most popular character by far, with a prevalent strat of hers being maximizing dps around beefalo + abigail.

On 7/20/2025 at 11:34 AM, Jakepeng99 said:

She isn’t op though. Yes she has relaxed combat against smaller enemies, but when the enemies are stronger than spiders you have to work together.

Her dps with beefalo + abigail rivals Wolfgang, wdym

[SilverSpoon]

1 hour ago, Echsrick said:

this a joke?

It's hard to notice, but actually Abigail has a secret internal parameter called "Health".

54 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

Her dps with beefalo + abigail rivals Wolfgang, wdym

Is that true? How do it?

Edited July 21, 2025 by SilverSpoon

[cybers2001]

6 minutes ago, SilverSpoon said:

Is that true? How do it?

Like so

Quote

So, TL;DR:

-War Saddle Ornery Beef Wendy does more damage than Wolfgang with a dark sword pre-rift (283.28 vs 272). (didn't factor the elixir from Pure Horror pre-rift from Nightmare Werepig)
-Nightmare Saddle Ornery Beef Wendy (NSOB) does more damage against non-planar entities post rift (324 vs 319.2).
-Post Rift Wendy NSOB does 248 physical damage + 76 planar damage
-Post Rift Wolfgang Maul+Cowl does 162.7 physical + 152 planar