Maxwell spear puppets.Good or ok?

[StarvedKasad]

Hello guys,

 

My favourite character is maxwell.So far I've grasped the basic ways of playing him,which is always wearing armor and having at least 2 shadow clones.If you want to farm more nightmare fuel you lower your sanity.
But when I want to farm a few spider nests,I have to destroy my previous clones and create 2 spear puppets. What I did realise is even though I was strong enough to stand a lot of hits from spider (like 10 or so)but the spear puppet die almost instantly. What is their purpose?Why do they cost so much if they do so little?
Thanks for your time.

[AnonymousKoala]

"Always wearing armor" Just always carry armor. Not wear armor. Works in singleplayer, shouldn't be different in DST. 

That's the only thing I have to say though. Didn't play too much with DST Maxwell, sorry, but I wanted to give this one tip. 

[unitato]

They went a bit overkill with the maxwell nerf, i reckon. But the spear puppets are not too bad, they have the pigs fighting ai (i think) and can take a few hits. Not sure why yours didnt. However, they dont do much damage so i normally just make 1 axe 1 shovel or 2 miners. 

[Maslak]

Well, Maxwell is more like resource guy - mining, chopping. Fighting isn't his strong side. I never make warrior puppets, they are a waste of fuel imo. If you are playing alone you can try recruiting some pigs, oyu can even give them helmets.

[StarvedKasad]

1 hour ago, 772911_1452795010 said:

They went a bit overkill with the maxwell nerf, i reckon. But the spear puppets are not too bad, they have the pigs fighting ai (i think) and can take a few hits. Not sure why yours didnt. However, they dont do much damage so i normally just make 1 axe 1 shovel or 2 miners. 

They literally die in 6 (?) hits from spiders.You basically cannot farm spiders with puppets,you need traps.

1 hour ago, Maslak said:

Well, Maxwell is more like resource guy - mining, chopping. Fighting isn't his strong side. I never make warrior puppets, they are a waste of fuel imo. If you are playing alone you can try recruiting some pigs, oyu can even give them helmets.

Exactly,the thing is,if you use 2 of his spear minions,you can't use a harvester minion because you are constantly left with 20 sanity which means constant nightmares and is actually the fastest way of farming nightmare fuel albeit more dangerous.

 

1 hour ago, AnonymousKoala said:

"Always wearing armor" Just always carry armor. Not wear armor. Works in singleplayer, shouldn't be different in DST. 

That's the only thing I have to say though. Didn't play too much with DST Maxwell, sorry, but I wanted to give this one tip. 

I always wear armor because you never know when that meteor or dart may come flying at you and kill you before you can react.He's too much of a glass cannon to not wear armor imo which is what balances him because he harvests way too fast.

 

But being incompotent of killing spiders?Yes,he is unless he wears double armor

[AnonymousKoala]

2 minutes ago, StarvedKasad said:

They literally die in 6 (?) hits from spiders.You basically cannot farm spiders with puppets,you need traps.

Exactly,the thing is,if you use 2 of his spear minions,you can't use a harvester minion because you are constantly left with 20 sanity which means constant nightmares and is actually the fastest way of farming nightmare fuel albeit more dangerous.

 

I always wear armor because you never know when that meteor or dart may come flying at you and kill you before you can react.He's too much of a glass cannon to not wear armor imo which is what balances him because he harvests way too fast.

 

But being incompotent of killing spiders?Yes,he is unles he wears double armor

In PVP yeah always wear armor.

Really just wear armor in rocky biomes or wherever you know meteor showers tend to happen/whenevr fighting something. 

[StarvedKasad]

18 minutes ago, AnonymousKoala said:

In PVP yeah always wear armor.

Really just wear armor in rocky biomes or wherever you know meteor showers tend to happen/whenevr fighting something. 

I wanted to ask,I read in a reddit post that maxwell's puppets gain whatever armor he's wearing the moment he cast them and I tested this on DST.It doesn't seem to work.Does it work on single player?If so,why isn't this working on DST.

And perhaps,the minions could wear armor like pigs,but it would still be part of their body,aka dark.

[AnonymousKoala]

17 minutes ago, StarvedKasad said:

I wanted to ask,I read in a reddit post that maxwell's puppets gain whatever armor he's wearing the moment he cast them and I tested this on DST.It doesn't seem to work.Does it work on single player?If so,why isn't this working on DST.

And perhaps,the minions could wear armor like pigs,but it would still be part of their body,aka dark.

Nope doesn't work on singleplayer. If it did, people wouldn't abandon the puppets so quickly in singleplayer.

[Tumalu]

The shadow duelists die way too fast to be worth almost anything in combat vs. most creatures. They actually work fairly well on hounds because of kiting, unless you try to take on an endgame level hound wave by yourself, but that's about it. If you have your team of friends with you they might be alright for dealing extra damage whilst the monster damage is spread out over like 6 targets, but otherwise... they just fall over and die against anything that's not too easy to just fight by yourself.

Maxwell is pretty much just for harvesting and free sanity regen (at which point you might consider playing Woodie anyway who has both those things, if you'd rather deal with the curse than Maxwell's low HP and reliance on nightmare fuel; pick your poison). The shadow duelists aren't to be entirely written off, but they don't make up for his low max hp at all; he's not a good fighter. He's passable with night armor, as long as you're not trying to fight bearger, but that's just him managing to keep up with the rest of the character's ability to fight.

[or1239]

Considering that puppets only cost nightmare fuel and sanity cap at DST I would say yes, since they are super disposable.

We can improve on them however, we can't give them HP but we could give us more control over them.

If we got to control them better and kite/coordinate an attack they would become much more viable in combat, such as command them to go attack alone or when to stop attacking all while controlling their movement with the mouse when you want to manually kite, they can keep the default pigman Ai when not controlled and of course keep their low hp.

I mean individual puppet types only do one thing and excel at it, they are already better then the original "all in one puppet " we got in single player so spear puppets really seem like the exception to the rest of the puppets thanks to their Ai and aggro.

[AnonymousKoala]

16 minutes ago, or1239 said:

Considering that puppets only cost nightmare fuel and sanity cap at DST I would say yes, since they are super disposable.

We can improve on them however, we can't give them HP but we could give us more control over them.

If we got to control them better and kite/coordinate an attack they would become much more viable in combat, such as command them to go attack alone or when to stop attacking all while controlling their movement with the mouse when you want to manually kite, they can keep the default pigman Ai when not controlled and of course keep their low hp.

I mean individual puppet types only do one thing and excel at it, they are already better then the original "all in one puppet " we got in single player so spear puppets really seem like the exception to the rest of the puppets thanks to their Ai and aggro.

Imagine if they also moved alongside you if you already hit something. Thus you have Maxwell dealing damage + the duelists at once, and dodging at once.

[spiderdian]

When I pick Maxwell, it's not for fighting, but to help with resources.

The spear guys are more like an way of aggro-ing mobs that run from you like the koelephant, which also fits in the resource category.

The only nerf I've seem was the sanity boost, and it's even more than acceptable, negating night sanity drain and other aura sources

 

Maxwell overall isn't mean't for Hunting/Fighting. If you stop and think, this is exactly why he's called The Puppet Master, because his low health makes him need other players to advance

[or1239]

24 minutes ago, spiderdian said:

When I pick Maxwell, it's not for fighting, but to help with resources.

The spear guys are more like an way of aggro-ing mobs that run from you like the koelephant, which also fits in the resource category.

The only nerf I've seem was the sanity boost, and it's even more than acceptable, negating night sanity drain and other aura sources

 

Maxwell overall isn't mean't for Hunting/Fighting. If you stop and think, this is exactly why he's called The Puppet Master, because his low health makes him need other players to advance

As much as it is true that Maxwell as a character excels at resource gathering, don't you think each character should also be able to stand on its own? saying maxwell  "needs other player to advance" is a bit exaggerated, its true that spear puppets aren't that fantastic but they still certainly help.

Beside if he got the right gear and a few spear puppets and fuel, don't you think he would make a great fighter? 

[Mday]

TBH I don't think maxwell is that bad of a fighter. Put aside the 50% HP, he deals the same damage as wilson/willow/wicker/woodie. I have no problem killing any mobs using maxwell.

I only cast the duelist for when I need to stay insane. Why use 2 nightmare fuel to summon a duelist when you can just hair a pig with monster meat, or a bunnyman with carrot and etc.

[AnonymousKoala]

18 minutes ago, Mday said:

TBH I don't think maxwell is that bad of a fighter. Put aside the 50% HP, he deals the same damage as wilson/willow/wicker/woodie. I have no problem killing any mobs using maxwell.

I only cast the duelist for when I need to stay insane. Why use 2 nightmare fuel to summon a duelist when you can just hair a pig with monster meat, or a bunnyman with carrot and etc.

I know you meant hire, but "hair a pig" is suddenly my new favorite term for making a pig become a Werepig.

[StarvedKasad]

I honestly just want to see his puppets not dying instantly on spiders.You can kill spiders with them,but when they enter the web they both are instagibbed by spiders.I think,and try not to take my head for this,spider web should not slow down puppets.I'm going to try a few more things on a sandbox server,then see if they also aggro spiders when I don't order them to.

[Axehilt]

31 minutes ago, or1239 said:

As much as it is true that Maxwell as a character excels at resource gathering, don't you think each character should also be able to stand on its own? saying maxwell  "needs other player to advance" is a bit exaggerated, its true that spear puppets aren't that fantastic but they still certainly help.

Beside if he got the right gear and a few spear puppets and fuel, don't you think he would make a great fighter? 

Definitely agree characters should feel balanced in overall worth.

Though your "stand on his own" comment makes me think of the potential of a more hardcore game mode in DST where you're actually not able to survive on your own.  It'd involve an awful lot of balance work though and only really be appropriate to high-level play, so probably not worth implementing, but it might go a little like this:

• You'd probably queue into a fresh server as a group of players.
• Every action earns XP.  XP is spent on specialization talent trees.  Talents are extremely powerful (75% fewer chops to chop down a tree, 2x the wood from trees, wood stacks twice as much, planted trees grow back twice as fast).
• Buying a talent in one tree increases the costs of talents in other trees. This means specialization isn't enforced, but would be tuned so that you get about twice as many talents if you specialize.
• Everything is dramatically harder or slower.  One example being that you can chop down that tree in 75% fewer chops, but the default chops it takes to chop down a tree started 50% higher than regular DST.  This applies to most everything.

Although I guess thinking through how this would actually play out, it wouldn't work.   It's very interesting to walk to go out for fire wood to a nearby forest and then be faced with a tough decision between the trees, spiders, and rocks you found there.  It's a decision because gathering any of those requires some time and provides good value to you (though they won't all provide exactly the same value.)  But if you're a specialized woodcutter in my proposed system, the relative values would be dramatically imbalanced: you can gather a bazillion wood, or a tiny handful of those other resources.  And that becomes the entirety of your game session: just chopping wood instead of being faced with interesting decision.  Boring. Oh well, bad idea.

But the intent behind the idea -- having players actually rely on each other more and feel like teamwork is unusually beneficial -- still sounds like a great goal to pursue for DST.

[Maslak]

This guy is everywhere!

[thesamon]

As a maxwell player I haven't really used the shadows tbh, apart from chopping down forests for treeguards and NF farming. 
And If you got kiting down, you can easily make it on your own without them

[Bahlsen]

The duelists make a surprisingly good work in the ruins by killing monkeys. I thought they'd get annihilated but you take the aggro of shadow monkeys and they do the rest, easy food to explore the hard part of the ruins and/or don't want to go all the way back to the surface if you've settled near the ruins.

 

I haven't tried against the frogs but I feel they could do wonders too, I make 30 frog legs with Wolfgang in one day (one shot with the hambat), I'd be glad to be able to do this with another character. We should experiment with every mobs and animals I'm sure the duelists have a lot of potential. But yeah sadly they're not that good against spiders.

[Axehilt]

57 minutes ago, Maslak said:

This guy is everywhere!

Well he used to be.  But nowadays Maxwell is a mere mortal like all the other characters.

[Maslak]

3 hours ago, Bahlsen said:

We should experiment with every mobs and animals I'm sure the duelists have a lot of potential. But yeah sadly they're not that good against spiders.

I think they are pretty good against lureplant! Of course the one planted on man-made turf.

[DarkXero]

Shadow duelists need support to not get killed. This means that you have to get the last hit in during combat, so the enemy will try to go after you instead of your shadows. So unless the enemy is one lone spider that dies pretty fast, this results in you tanking hits, or your kiting pattern gets screwed if shadows unsync their attacks for whatever reason, which ends up with you tanking hits. And you don't want to tank hits, with that 75 hp you get.

You see this if you play with 4 other people going in and out in a uncoordinated fashion: somebody's getting hit.

I would rather save the fuel, make dark swords, and deal with the enemy myself.

 

Stats:

SHADOWWAXWELL_SPEED = 6
SHADOWWAXWELL_DAMAGE = 40
SHADOWWAXWELL_LIFE = 75
SHADOWWAXWELL_ATTACK_PERIOD = 2
SHADOWWAXWELL_HEALTH_REGEN = 15
SHADOWWAXWELL_HEALTH_REGEN_PERIOD = 2
SHADOWWAXWELL_TARGET_DIST = 10

 

[StarvedKasad]

People don't pick maxwell anymore as they used to.Too hard for new players,too paperish for most things. Giants? How do you even fight giants without night armor?Or try to kite them with the huge delay.

[GiddyGuy]

4 minutes ago, StarvedKasad said:

Or try to kite them with the huge delay.

I am a very skilled kiter with huge delay.