An Idea to Rework How Bosses Take Damage

[Lisgen]

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about how boss fights scale with player count and wanted to share an idea for a potential rework.

The Core Issue

Currently, as more players join a boss fight, the damage dealt to the boss increases linearly. This causes the fight time to shrink proportionally, and the actual difficulty can drop exponentially. In some ways, this doesn't feel like a very robust system, as stacking players can trivialize what should be a major challenge.

While other games, like Terraria, scale boss health directly with the number of players, that might not be the best solution for DST's design.

The Proposal: Burst Damage Adaptation

What if bosses gained temporary damage resistance based on the amount of burst damage they receive in a short window? This would be conceptually similar to the Planar Damage Resistance we already have in the game. Given that the Dragonfly already has a mechanic where it becomes stunned after taking a certain amount of damage in a set time, the underlying tech for this should be feasible to implement.

How it could work (Example):

Let's use the damage from a single attack by Wilson (68) as a baseline.

• If a boss takes damage within a short period, it could gain a temporary buff that reduces incoming damage.68 * n

• The more burst damage it takes (the higher 'n' is), the stronger the temporary damage reduction would be. (This is just a conceptual example; the actual numbers would need careful balancing.)

Potential Benefits:

1. Narrows the Gap Between Solo & Group Fights: This would make the fight duration for solo players much closer to that of large groups. This, in turn, would allow the base HP of giants to be balanced more effectively. Bosses like the Dragonfly, Bee Queen, and especially the Toadstool could have their health significantly lowered, greatly improving the solo player experience without making them too easy for groups.

2. A Potential Replacement for Planar Resistance: The current Planar Resistance mechanic can sometimes feel a bit restrictive on combat strategies. A dynamic system like this could potentially replace it, creating more engaging fights. I haven't fully thought out how to unify this, but it's an interesting possibility.

Special Note for Warly:

To ensure Warly's role remains powerful, damage from sources like Volt Goat Chaud-Froid could be treated as a separate, independent multiplier that isn't affected by this damage reduction.

This is just a high-level idea I wanted to put out there for discussion. The specific values and tuning would obviously require a lot of calculation and testing by the professionals.

What do you all think?

[kroban]

I agree with this idea, I think it would be nice to atleast have this as a toggable option on the world config, or maybe make this happen post-rift. Many bosses become pretty easy to beat if you are not soloing them and post-rift when theres like 3 players using Glommerang almost all bosses are a walk in the park

[Hungry French]

It just has to increase or decrease the hp of the bosses, or even decrease in some cases.  Klei is very easy to do this.

 

[Swiyss]

5 hours ago, Lisgen said:

Bosses like the Dragonfly, Bee Queen, and especially the Toadstool could have their health significantly lowered

Not significally, but slightly. Reducing the health of Toadstool when his only gimmick is that he is supposed to have high health is not that great imo. Also, Klei already added a damage reduction on bosses like the Scrappy Werepig and the Nightmare variant, and it worked. For me the health could maybe even stay the same, or just be slightly lowered, like from 27.500 to 23.000 for these raid bosses + added armor, except Toadstool.

[Picklesaurus]

I like the idea as long as they also add bosses hp multipliers in the server options so that I can still play with the current solo bosses hp values and increase - or lower - them past it if I fell like it when making a multiplayer or solo world.

Boss HP server options multiplier values: x0,75 | x1,0 |  x1,5 | x2,0 | x2,5 | x3,0
(For more  options it would preferably be a slider instead of static values)

Edited September 2, 2025 by Picklesaurus

[Bumber64]

21 hours ago, astareus said:

Reducing the health of Toadstool when his only gimmick is that he is supposed to have high health is not that great imo.

His gimmick is that he's basically unstoppable if the spore trees are present. The high health just makes the fight a slog beyond dealing with the trees.

Also he causes food to perish, which you need to control sanity. (For health, bandages are an option.) So you're encouraged to keep supplies in nearby containers instead.

[Terser]

13 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

which you need to control sanity

toad only has an insanity aura when spawning trees, so if you're chopping trees when he's summoning them instead of hugging him, only caves sanity drain will be relevant, and caves sanity drain alone needs more than 4 days to drive a wilson insane, in my experience pretty much no one uses sanity food for toad

22 hours ago, astareus said:

Klei already added a damage reduction on bosses like the Scrappy Werepig and the Nightmare variant, and it worked

scrappy has 20% absorption (that gets pierced by planar), nightmare doesn't have any absorption

[Hungry French]

On 02.09.2025 at 21:38, astareus said:

Не сильно, но немного. Уменьшать запас здоровья Поганки, когда его единственный козырь в том, что у него якобы высокий запас здоровья, не очень хорошая идея, на мой взгляд. Кроме того, Klei уже добавила снижение урона для таких боссов, как Грязная свинья-оборотень и кошмарный вариант, и это сработало. На мой взгляд, запас здоровья мог бы остаться прежним или просто немного уменьшиться, например с 27 500 до 23 000 для этих рейдовых боссов + дополнительная броня, кроме Поганки.

Such reductions do not make sense. Even 10,000 hp will feel like a good boss fight...Even if the stuns are working. ( Not 10, but at least 3 seconds )

The whole point is that the battle should be perfect in terms of the variety and duration of the music. Shark Boi, Eye of Terror is a great example of an almost perfect boss fight for solo.  Antlion is a great example of a bad boss for solo (a fight lasts even less than her music). 
Toad is a great example of a bad boss fight, because a fight can last 20-40+ repetitive soundtrack. 
Although the ideal combination of music for a toad is 3-4 repetitions. That is, 135-180 seconds of interesting combat.,

According to my calculations, this is about 10.000 or 12.000 hp. 
Although I tested more with the DS + shadow sword combat system for 50 damage on Wilson.

The same Dragon Fly will be a long boss with any hp due to the presence of lavae. And it's painful to look at Wall's tactics...

Edited September 3, 2025 by Hungry French