Burning Bernie and Willow's stagnant playstyle

[Mysterious box]

1 minute ago, Nikki Darks said:

You could shrink him down, but... If you keep him around as BERNIE! instead of carrying him, he will continuously heal which results in him repairing his own durability!

If you help him fight shadows while he is BERNIE! he effectively repairs more durability than he loses!

I'm aware but it's not like you go out of your way to get sewing kits either way like hounds deliver their teeth to you and spiders are just something you naturally get loot for anyway.

[Catuna_]

On 5/11/2026 at 5:43 PM, Nikki Darks said:

Does he farm mobs and shadows a lot faster and more efficiently with the skill? Yes, of course.

I mean, sure he kills them faster. But again, you lose out on a lot to where I really do not think this is very worth. You can just go to the ruins and blast lunar flames while they're bunched up on Bernie to get a lot of nightmare fuel anyway. 

3 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Lunar flame requires manual input and farming of embers on the regular, even then it might not kill all of the 8 nightmare creatures that are attacking you from nightmare lights. Burning bernie kitted out with the right skills (speed 2 and health regen 2) all you need is light him on fire with a cheap 1 cast flame or a lighter for free. 

Lunar flames will consistently kill most of them and put the others in a range where they acn be finished off with any weapon, or you can just wait for bernie to kill them. This is much faster than waiting for each one to chunk Bernie individually and results in him taking much less damage than he otherwise would (I'll come back to this later). Manual input isn't really a big argument since you are already lighting Bernie on fire and that's an input, moving your cursor is not a big ask (maybe it is on console, haven't played console DST before).  

3 hours ago, Gashzer said:

I can tell the willow noobs when they say the bernie speed skills are the least useful bernie skills when in fact are the most useful for having bernie out and self-repairing 24/7 as an upgraded abigail. If you need to make sewing kits for bernie then you are a noob willow. The speed 2 skill allows bernie to avoid the crawling horror that permanently chases him and allowing him to keep up with you on an battle saddle ornery beef.

Coming back to that earlier point, you're putting a lot of strain on Bernie which would make this more valuable sure. But lunar or shadow Willow don't really need to. Let's take your scenario of 8 nightmare creatures and let's be generous and assume that they're all crawling horrors, Bernie would take somewhere around 15 damage per bite from planar entity protection with each one needing to bite him 6 times to die meaning he'd take around 720 damage. That would take 6 minutes to heal fully, which is a pretty decent amount of time.

With lunar flames, he would take much less damage since you'd be casting it as they're going to swarm him meaning that you do not actually need to just have him permanently out, you can just calm him and go on with your day. And honestly, what's one fifth of a sewing kit anyway? It's absurdly cheap to the point that I really did not need to care about maximizing one Bernie when I could just repair him and have several other bernies just because I had the beard hair and I don't need revives. It's not really like Wendy where Abigail's death is impactful (lvl 3 -> 1) and healing her needs a little set up.

That aside, I don't see why you'd need accelerant 2? Accelerant 1 gives him a 15% speed boost which puts him at 12.65 speed when sprinting which is faster than glossamer rider (12.4) and thus faster than an ornery on a basic (9.8) or even battle saddle (9.1). A crawling horror has a speed of 3 which literally means that you can outrun him with no Bernie speed perks on foot, your example does not work. You'd only need the second perk for riders.

3 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Functionally lunar flame/combustion are far inferior to burning bernie for hordes outside of boss fights, inside of boss fights burning bernie kills nightmare creatures faster, resulting in burning bernie lasting longer during boss fights making using night armour/dreadstone armour/dark swords more viable for an insane willow to use during boss fights while also farming nightmare fuel for more darkswords/night armour, killing 2 birds with 1 stone.

Uh, this would be true if lunar and shadow fire Willow didn't just melt bosses very quickly. Burning Bernie is much slower by default because you do not have access to your usual quick high damage options. The damage is also not consistent as Klaus takes more damage since he swipes twice while Dragonfly attacks quite slow. Bernie will also get ignored by later phases of Bee Queen, will cause Nightmare Werepig to never actually get tired and kneel and is decently tricky to use for Fuelweaver (and slower) than spell affinity Willow. Nightmares will do 15/24 damage to Bernie and he restores 2/s so it's really never a big deal how long he lasts, especially when sewing kits bring him back to 100% for a single use. If I'm wrong and you can get times that are similar to or beat Ameslarii's I'd be very happy to take a look.

1 hour ago, Gashzer said:

Whats considered a horde?

10 shadow splumonkeys? 2 nightmare creatures? 3 dangling spiders?

I might not want to waste 4 embers to lunar flame 3 dangling spiders but burning bernie is 100% free to use in absolutely every low-tier mob fight whether it be 3 dangling spiders or 20 shadow splumonkeys. Hence you get much greater use out of burning bernie for all situations than you do with fire spells. With speed and health regen skills you dont even need to make a sewing kit or waste time picking bernie up, big bernie will passively heal. Saving inventory slots and time.

I actually think its mad posts like this exist. All it does is highlight that even players with 5000+ hours in DST have no idea what they are on about.

It's really just a matter of picking your fights, I have no reason to fight 3 depth dwellers since they drop nothing desirable than if I were to just walk around a spider quarry or a spider infested forest and blast regular spiders instead. 4/5 embers to cast combustion/lunar flames in an isolated example is not a big deal, I can get stacks of embers easily from killer bee biomes very fast. It's only when you want to spam these spells frequently where it could be a problem but this only happens if you're setting up sanity stations with fireball which only costs 2 per cast or if you're doing boss fights which naturally requires prep anyway for a better faster result than Bernie.

Please be respectful and don't be condescending like this, we're just discussing how we play the game in different ways and what could be better. There's no reason for you to send that last sentence.

Edited May 12 by Catuna_

[Arepantera]

It has always felt to me like burning bernie was the weaker "ultimate perk", so that willow players that haven't beaten cc nor fw can use something that feels special, then they van move on to the obviously better alignment fire magic skills. 
It feels like it is intentional for the burning bernie path to be the weaker of the two, it doesn't seem like it's meantr to compete, 
Still, it should probably do something extra, get a buff that makes it do something interesting, I find burning bernie kinda boring and slow to play with.