What's Wrong With Stronger Characters Exactly?

[YouKnowWho142]

Firstly, I want to look at the game the way it is now, not necessarily what you want it to be. DST is a survival game, yes, but right now there has been a large focus on combat, and whether you agree with that direction or not is not related to my discussion.

There's been more and more balance discourse lately. Consistently, I see how people talk about how the game is too easy and that skill trees are making characters way too strong. However, I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I think back to how most bosses functioned before the skill tree, and to put it simply most characters played the exact same against bosses. You were expected to get weather panes for fuelweaver or toadstool, or a frankly boring 30 minute pan flute strategy against bee queen. It killed my motivation to play a lot of characters, since their upsides and downsides would not be so relevant for most of the content in the game..

DST is inherently not a balanced game. From a survival aspect, stone fruit, kelp, and later bananas have had a devastating impact on DST, making food an immediate non issue the moment you access it which can be as soon as the first 5-10 days. From the combat aspect, we have characters like Wurt and even something as simple as gunpowder. Thinking back to the aforementioned examples, it makes you realize that the only real bottleneck for bosses is the amount of resources you gather. Of course when you get several stacks of healing items, armor, weapons, and supportive items like weather panes or pan flutes most bosses will become easy.

The big impact that stronger characters have is that you no longer have to commit to the intense grind that otherwise almost every character would have to do. Instead, every character has their own unique solutions to different problem. Let's look at a boss like bee queen, for example. She is notoriously an intense resource sink especially for a solo player, as you cannot kite her and her minions are extremely overcentralizing. It requires a lot of patience, armor, healing, and resources, making the fight often take an extremely long time where mistakes can be overly punishing. 25-30 minute fights are not difficulty, it's tedium, and any fight longer than 15 minutes or so isn't particularly exciting or fun. Now, many characters have unique solutions to make this less necessary. Yes, the previous strategies still work, but now a wendy is able to use Abigail, or Wolfgang can use his dumbbells. Wurt can use merms, Walter can shoot her, Winona has her catapults, Wormwood can use bramble husks, Willow has her spells, Woodie has his moose, Maxwell can imprison, Wortox can use decoys and soul pierce, or Wigfrid has her shield or elding spear. Every character has their own unique solutions to every problem while also providing fights that are expressive, engaging, and most importantly far less resource intensive than the all character solutions.

On the topic of character expression, that's one of the biggest highlights to these characters for me. I have never felt more motivated to play new characters than when characters got skill trees that gave them unique ways to play in combat. Even when I would enjoy characters before, I would dread playing them knowing I'd have to use the same tactics to kill every boss knowing that what makes them special is either inconvenient or impactical to use in a combat setting. Now, in modern DST, characters have never been more different from each other, and for replayability that is a great thing. I can finally ensure each character I play is entirely different from one another, not just in the way they survive like before but also how they fight and interact with mobs.

The biggest problem to me about the stronger characters is how they scale in multiplayer. The moment you have more than 2 or 3 people against a boss they kind of die just really quickly. That was an issue that always existed though well before skill trees, only made worse by their existence. That's a core issue with how combat works. From a singleplayer or duo perspective, I honestly think the amount of character expression that exists now is great and makes me strongly consider every character in a way I never did before.

I don't like everything about skill trees. I think their execution is inherently flawed, and I do think for a few characters in particular it does make them far too strong. However, I'd rather have them be too strong but offer something completely new and different than have them do very little and just be boring. Not every character will be for everyone, and that's okay, since as long as those options exist there will be something for most people and that is what I appreciate so much about it.

Edited March 12 by YouKnowWho142

[Jakepeng99]

My problem is there are characters who are op but still fun, and characters who are op which makes them unfun.

Main examples are Maxwell and Wurt.

Maxwell is op with extremely good resource gathering, free sainity, portable storage, fantastic combat potential and amazing utility, which scales to extreme forms in multiplayer with his cage and stuff. His op upsides still take some skill and stuff, its harder than it looks. It still feels fun and rewarding unless you are spamming cage and duelists for a zero difficulty boss kill. Hes one of my favourite characters even if i think he could be rebalanced. Its stuff like Wickerbooks and beefalo that push him over. He should be worse at manual labour which works with his upsides.

As for Wurt, after the not-that-hard initial setup, you just win the game. 6 kelp befriends 36 merms which is enough to sweep almost any boss to the point its basically a mob farm. Yeah there are ways to sweep bosses with cheese and stuff, but this is just using a characters upsides in a normal way. Before her skilltree she could already dominate many bosses, or at least put a huge dent in them before finishing them off. But her skilltree mass buffed her combat abilities and didnt focus on much else, just making playing her feel like cheating for me. Doesnt feel fun or rewarding since there is no upkeep or skill involved.

 

Wolfgang also feels sorta similar for me in a different way, i dont find him that interesting he is just someone i switch to make a boss easier sometimes. Its flat double damage with no practical drawback. For Wanda Ig i just dont like her gameplay. She would be more interesting if she didnt have the alarming clock, but her shadow buff was even stronger so she would have to get up close with the darksword. Cant give an indepth opinion since i have not played her as much as Wurt (my most played character) and Maxwell.

Also in general there is alot of instances of unbalanced things i would find more fun if they were better balanced like Woodie's Weremoose lacking progression, and his other wereform skills sucking.

Edited March 12 by Jakepeng99

[DegenerateFurry]

There's not really anything wrong with strong characters if you ask me. Like you said, the problem's when you start doing the multiplayer aspect of this multiplayer game: it just makes the game too easy. An easy fix for that is making boss fights scale based on the players present. 

[YouKnowWho142]

24 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

There's not really anything wrong with strong characters if you ask me. Like you said, the problem's when you start doing the multiplayer aspect of this multiplayer game: it just makes the game too easy. An easy fix for that is making boss fights scale based on the players present. 

its definitely more of an inherent issue with the game rather than specifically a problem with characters getting stronger, i agree that some scaling or at least an option for it would fix a lot of it. I think they're somewhat afraid to do it since that implies that every player in the server is involved in whatever boss fight is going on which isnt always the case

39 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

My problem is there are characters who are op but still fun, and characters who are op which makes them unfun.

Main examples are Maxwell and Wurt.

Maxwell is op with extremely good resource gathering, free sainity, portable storage, fantastic combat potential and amazing utility, which scales to extreme forms in multiplayer with his cage and stuff. His op upsides still take some skill and stuff, its harder than it looks. It still feels fun and rewarding unless you are spamming cage and duelists for a zero difficulty boss kill. Hes one of my favourite characters even if i think he could be rebalanced. Its stuff like Wickerbooks and beefalo that push him over. He should be worse at manual labour which works with his upsides.

As for Wurt, after the not-that-hard initial setup, you just win the game. 6 kelp befriends 36 merms which is enough to sweep almost any boss to the point its basically a mob farm. Yeah there are ways to sweep bosses with cheese and stuff, but this is just using a characters upsides in a normal way. Before her skilltree she could already dominate many bosses, or at least put a huge dent in them before finishing them off. But her skilltree mass buffed her combat abilities and didnt focus on much else, just making playing her feel like cheating for me. Doesnt feel fun or rewarding since there is no upkeep or skill involved.

 

Wolfgang also feels sorta similar for me in a different way, i dont find him that interesting he is just someone i switch to make a boss easier sometimes. Its flat double damage with no practical drawback. For Wanda Ig i just dont like her gameplay. She would be more interesting if she didnt have the alarming clock, but her shadow buff was even stronger so she would have to get up close with the darksword. Cant give an indepth opinion since i have not played her as much as Wurt (my most played character) and Maxwell.

Also in general there is alot of instances of unbalanced things i would find more fun if they were better balanced like Woodie's Weremoose lacking progression, and his other wereform skills sucking.

i agree with wurt, though i don't really spam imprison so i cant say the same for maxwell. I don't like saying "oh, you just gotta self limit if a character is too strong!" but these two in particular you kind of have to. It's the reason why I only let myself play the character i start with (no celestial portal) or in a case like, say, terraria, i choose one class and have to stick with it from start to finish. I actually asked for a mod made for me to reduce the number of merms wurt can recruit to like 8, and that made her a lot more fun to me since her gameplay now revolved around supporting merms with armor and healing instead of letting them sweep everything. I think from a balance perspective wurt is absolutely the worst case, and an extreme outlier in the point i was trying to make. She should not have been given as many strong tools as she was, and i hope theyre not planning to do the same thing to webber.

[Gashzer]

DST is an inherently grindy game and anyway to remove some of the grind is great.

I personally love the skilltrees, even the "bad" skilltrees like wolfgangs have a place because we expect differences between each character we pick.

Wolfgang is a simple strong character with a simple direct skilltree, however wolfgang has no real combat gimmick, hes just a stronger wilson so you cant depend on spells or tricks or followers (well he does have coaching whistle but its so so since you cant attack as wolfgang and use it at same time). But thats great because i dont want wolfgang to behave like wurt or behave like wanda, every character should have different ranges of complexities and thankfully the skilltrees are reflecting that.

[Jakepeng99]

54 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

agree with wurt, though i don't really spam imprison so i cant say the same for maxwell. I don't like saying "oh, you just gotta self limit if a character is too strong!" but these two in particular you kind of have to. It's the reason why I only let myself play the character i start with (no celestial portal) or in a case like, say, terraria, i choose one class and have to stick with it from start to finish

Tbh for Maxwell I sometimes forget I can use Shadow Prison.

Id say if he didn’t have Shadow Prison, Wickerbooks, or his hat, I’d still consider him one of the best characters. Only thing that balances him from being Wurt level is that you can’t use all these spells in quick succession so it ends up just being more options. You would need to resume on shadow puppets, respawn the cage/shadow trap, while avoiding damage (which is why he is broken in multiplayer since he can do this without needing to avoid anything, or beefalo which makes it way easier).

 

54 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

everything. I think from a balance perspective wurt is absolutely the worst case, and an extreme outlier in the point i was trying to make. She should not have been given as many strong tools as she was, and i hope theyre not planning to do the same thing to webber.

Tell me about it. I have been doing the occasional post begging Klei not to do the same for Webber, and just pretend Wurt doesnt exists because if they try one-up her or make Webber as powerful, it would be sad. I begged them to not do it for Wurt too back in the day and focus on utility instead of combat, but they ended up doing it and what I thought would happen if they did that ended up happening once her tree settled in. (Ironically her affinities seem to be inspired by my Skilltree’s affinities, my shadow affinity was based on making merms revive temporarily after death, and lunar affinity gave them damage reflection).

Wurt is so Op she should be ignored completely when balancing other characters or we will get extreme powercreep and get a second no skill boring follower character. (TBF Webbers spiders are balanced poorly too. He relies too much on nurses, and spitters outclass every other spider)

Thing is with Webber, spiders are combat minions. They would need to add some more utility, and add more options instead of direct buffs.

Tbh there should be a follower rework. IMO there should be a follower cap of like 30, but different followers take up different number of slots. (Normal spiders take 1, pigmen and bunnymen take 2, Merms take 2.5, ect). They can add ways to increase this cap with stuff like armour or items. (Or Yk maybe skilltrees)

Abigail and other similar followers will be excluded.

Edited March 12 by Jakepeng99

[aidancode]

1 hour ago, Jakepeng99 said:

My problem is there are characters who are op but still fun, and characters who are op which makes them unfun.

Building off this point, I want to specify that for me personally the difference between op and fun and op and unfun is the amount of active effort that needs to go into becoming op.

Maxwell? Combat is fun in singleplayer, but boring in multiplayer due to lack of effort needed to put in to win. Exploration is fine, since there's a balance to be found between spamming servants constantly and rarely using them except for thick forests and such.

Wanda? Fun concept, fun support watches, alarming clock trivializes some situations but is also cool as a tool. I think it would be fun old Wanda's damage modifier was increased to 2x, but the alarming clock's damage was reduced from 82ish to 68. This would make the alarming clock a little lower DPS, but would greatly increase dark sword DPS. This might be overpowered, making Wanda better with a dark sword without notably nerfing the alarming clock. I don't know. It at the very least would incentivize Wanda to be old more, which for intermediate players is quite a fun challenge.

Wurt? Day to day survival is incredibly braindead, but the slow grind to build up merm houses is engaging enough. Combat is incredibly boring.

Walter? Day to day survival isn't trivial, but is certainly easier. It is easier in interesting ways, though, so I give it some credit. Combat upgrades follow a totally unique upgrade tree, but you can circumvent most boss attacks which makes combat with Walter kinda boring. I think some bosses, like fuelweaver and crab king, can still be interesting due to limited space. Walter definitely makes them easier but very much not free.

Wortox? Makes gameplay a lot easier, and if you aggressively fill your soul jars becomes very dull, but other than that, encourages fairly active gameplay. Probably the biggest success as far as all the overpowered characters go. I think I'm going to try to do a playthrough with Wortox where I don't use soul jars, since I think they're the only major detractor from this character's fun.

[DegenerateFurry]

56 minutes ago, YouKnowWho142 said:

its definitely more of an inherent issue with the game rather than specifically a problem with characters getting stronger, i agree that some scaling or at least an option for it would fix a lot of it. I think they're somewhat afraid to do it since that implies that every player in the server is involved in whatever boss fight is going on which isnt always the case

Thing is, they don't have to assume player count equals fight participants. They can just have the boss's max HP scale by how many players are present nearby when it turns aggro or is first attacked. Yeah, you could cheese that by having six Wolfgangs wait outside of that range while a lone player goes in to aggro the boss, but who cares?

[Gashzer]

5 minutes ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Thing is, they don't have to assume player count equals fight participants. They can just have the boss's max HP scale by how many players are present nearby when it turns aggro or is first attacked. Yeah, you could cheese that by having six Wolfgangs wait outside of that range while a lone player goes in to aggro the boss, but who cares?

I think the solution to that is if more people join the fight from the start the boss loot drops also scale with the number of players as well as the mentioned max HP scaling.

[DegenerateFurry]

Just now, Gashzer said:

I think the solution to that is if more people join the fight from the start the boss loot drops also scale with the number of players as well as the mentioned max HP scaling.

Yeah, that's quite a good solution and it's what Terraria does (at least on Expert or Master Mode). 

Edited March 12 by DegenerateFurry

[Gashzer]

Just now, DegenerateFurry said:

Yeah, that's quite a good solution and it's what Terraria does. 

I think the idea of creating "misery" version of bosses could also work that require an ingame mechanic to activate.

Toadstool needs a volatile canary to transform into misery, maybe if bee queen's hive is exploded open with gunpowder she loses her bottom "hive" bit losing the the ability to spawn grumbles but becomes this super speedy hit and run solo boss that kites you really well with flying dive bomb and honey spit attacks?

Misery bee queen could be epic! Even if from the explosion she just becomes this charcoaled enraged bee queen with bigger hp and spawns more charcoal skinned grumbles.

[Mike23Ua]

Don’t Starve Together when it is played ALONE is a frustratingly hard game that the developers either do not care to fix, or don’t know how to fix… or are too lazy to put in the extra effort to fix.

Either Way the game has two outcomes: Alone it’s frustratingly difficult to the point that I’ve personally given up on trying to enjoy or do much of anything in the game due to #1 enemies with enormous pools of health intended to be fought with a “group” and #2 large swarms of enemies which are also intended to be dealt by a group.One only needs to be attacked by a singular pirate raid with a crew of 4 or more monkey on board to understand its NOT FUN playing solo.

Skill Trees and “Powerful” characters help to lessen this significantly.. such as for example: Bernie with skill point investment.

But that leads us to dilemma #2 The game can be TOO EASY when played with in a group.. those same skill trees that make the game just barely more playable for solo players, now “Break” Multiplayer, to the point that major bosses are destroyed in a matter of seconds.

[Radicaljoe]

1 hour ago, DegenerateFurry said:

Thing is, they don't have to assume player count equals fight participants. They can just have the boss's max HP scale by how many players are present nearby when it turns aggro or is first attacked. Yeah, you could cheese that by having six Wolfgangs wait outside of that range while a lone player goes in to aggro the boss, but who cares?

If I recall, I think Warbot or Scion has a mechanic like this? I could be wrong, but I remember someone saying that they get damage reduction based on the amount of unique players that hit it, similar to how Maxwell's prison timer works.

[Cuernito.]

Cause this is a forum and people like to complain about everything, its not a mystery at all, there is nothing wrong with characters being op or strong in my opinion, this is not a great pvp game, it is a survival game. And remember that klei has the final word so even if few people complain about a character being boring or op or whatever klei is not gonna make a big change into the game based on just some random people opinions.

3 hours ago, DegenerateFurry said:

There's not really anything wrong with strong characters if you ask me. Like you said, the problem's when you start doing the multiplayer aspect of this multiplayer game: it just makes the game too easy. An easy fix for that is making boss fights scale based on the players present. 

Yeah this should be the easy way to fix how easy the game feels when you play with multiple people that know what they are doing.

Hope klei some day add more transaltions to other idioms cause right now the game only has english and chinese(a mod), i dont understand why klei never do this, like that could help the game to grow in other parts of the world.

 

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, NekoSoulx said:

Cause this is a forum and people like to complain about everything

The only person complaining about everything is you. Every time I see you in a thread you're doing what you're doing here, where you just complain about other people instead of actually discussing anything. 

[Nikki Darks]

My only issue with "op" characters is if they start replacing the niche or gimmick of other characters. If that doesn't happen, then Idc.

[DegenerateFurry]

2 hours ago, Gashzer said:

I think the idea of creating "misery" version of bosses could also work that require an ingame mechanic to activate.

Toadstool needs a volatile canary to transform into misery, maybe if bee queen's hive is exploded open with gunpowder she loses her bottom "hive" bit losing the the ability to spawn grumbles but becomes this super speedy hit and run solo boss that kites you really well with flying dive bomb and honey spit attacks?

Misery bee queen could be epic! Even if from the explosion she just becomes this charcoaled enraged bee queen with bigger hp and spawns more charcoal skinned grumbles.

And then there could be a less-misery Fuelweaver alternative, perhaps. Maybe you'd need to create something that restrains his abilities somehow, like a shackle? Maybe it'd require something lunar-related to make? 

1 minute ago, Cheggf said:

The only person complaining about everything is you. Every time I see you in a thread you're doing what you're doing here, where you just complain about other people instead of actually discussing anything. 

Nah, Neko's right, this forum is 70% complaining, 10% arguing, 5% useful feedback for Klei and good ideas, 5% jokes and memes, 5% actual discussion and speculation, and 5% "when's the next update" threads. 

Just now, Nikki Darks said:

My only issue with "op" characters is if they start replacing the niche or gimmick of other characters. If that doesn't happen, then Idc.

Honestly a fair criticism. The best example of this has to be Maxwell replacing Wicker. 

Edited March 13 by DegenerateFurry

[YouKnowWho142]

51 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

The only person complaining about everything is you. Every time I see you in a thread you're doing what you're doing here, where you just complain about other people instead of actually discussing anything. 

You say that like I haven’t seen you be one of the most consistently toxic and rude members on the forum. Not so fun to call people out, is it?

Now please keep it on topic. I don’t care about other threads. Otherwise, keep your attitude out of this one.

Edited March 13 by YouKnowWho142

[Maxil20]

3 hours ago, Radicaljoe said:

If I recall, I think Warbot or Scion has a mechanic like this? I could be wrong, but I remember someone saying that they get damage reduction based on the amount of unique players that hit it, similar to how Maxwell's prison timer works.

It does have a damage based mechanic, but it's not direct damage reduction. Warbot/Scion specifically get reduced attack delay based on various damage thresholds reached. Warbot for instance goes from 3.5 second attack delays if the final damage output is below 225 DPS, and drops all the way to 2 seconds if it goes above 375 DPS. Scion has something similar, though not nearly as extreme (likely to avoid making a battle where team coordination is extremely important even more so).

It's a neat way to add difficulty/chaos to a fight of multiple players without flatly making it suboptimal to bring along extra players from diminished damage returns.

[gaymime]

while i certainly have opinions about player aggregates in relation to ease-of-play when it comes to characters i cannot, even for a moment, argue that stronger characters make the game "less fun" for the majority of the playerbase. outside of the forums(which disproportionately contain people who generally play little or not at all while still holding mains & secondaries) there is a very strong correlation between the characters with the easiest time progressing through the game and the characters getting picked the most in servers

 

i think that as long as the game is still standing steady there is no problem. metrics say dst is still thriving so stronger characters can't be all bad

[Seero]

6 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Don’t Starve Together when it is played ALONE is a frustratingly hard game that the developers either do not care to fix, or don’t know how to fix… or are too lazy to put in the extra effort to fix.

i know it's kind of rude to say this during a discussion but, git gud. 

[DegenerateFurry]

25 minutes ago, Seero said:

i know it's kind of rude to say this during a discussion but, git gud. 

Not only is it a bad attitude, you're ignoring that Mike23Ua has a point. Some parts of the game (Fuelweaver, Toadstool, Bee Queen, old Crab King, etc) genuinely are set up with the assumption that you'll have more than one player present. This isn't fair to the massive chunk of players who mainly play solo, nor is it good game design, and it wouldn't be hard to fix, but here we are. It forces us to do the jobs of several players at once in some cases. Skill trees and strong characters can even the playing field a bit for a solo player. Like, yeah, it's possible to counter this stuff, but it often takes an unreasonable amount of time, resources, or both to do solo unless you're playing a character who's specifically very good at it, like doing Bee Queen as Wendy.

Also, quick question, do you anim cancel when you fight bosses? 

Edited March 13 by DegenerateFurry