Beefalo Riding - Let's talk about it

[AnonymousKoala]

Alright its not a secret that Beefalo Riding has a lot of flaws. 

It's a lot of effort/time for 100% damage resistance(but the hp of a beefalo), less damage than the Dark Sword, and slower than a player with a cane.

So how will it be made good? You could take any of these 3 frontiers and see how they can work at lategame/summer/you got the point when you got time to actually domesticate a beef entirely.

 

Damage Resistance: 100% damage resistance is nice(great too thanks to lag and delay, etc.) but it's a beefalo's hp and its less comfortable than attacking as a player. Have some saddle or something that acts as armor for the beefalo/ups its hp while worn, and tanking on a beefalo becomes better and worth it for that at least.

Damage: Why use a beefalo for damage when you can get a hambat/dark sword for less effort and use it faster and better than the beef? To fix this, the beefalos' damage could at least be upped while domesticated, maybe even more than a dark sword(not too much more though).

Speed : This might be the easiest to implement. Make domesticated beefalo faster. Coffee is amazing, overcharging is amazing, everything that gives you a speed up is great. Up the Beef speed to something at least close to overcharge/any good speed, and the effort will be more or less worth it for essentially discount coffee.

(Do note if I'm wrong about anything I'm sorry, this is mostly what I've seen and heard, if anyone has some incredibly different thing to tell me about this, feel free to)

[An Artifact]

You overlooked the most important factor though: Domesticated beefs look cute as hell.

 

But in all seriousness, yeah, the beefs need some form of buff to be actually worthwhile. It's such a cool concept, it would be a shame if it wasn't realized to its full potential.

[Sivdun]

41 minutes ago, AnonymousKoala said:

Damage: Why use a beefalo for damage when you can get a hambat/dark sword for less effort and use it faster and better than the beef? To fix this, the beefalos' damage could at least be upped while domesticated, maybe even more than a dark sword(not too much more though).

Hold on here. When you play as Wendy or Wes you deal less dmg with all weapons. Even with Hambat you deal 45 dmg or something like that, with Ornery Beefalo and War Saddle you deal 66 or 51 (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure). So everytime I play with these characters I prefer this set because of buff damage that you will never have with characters themselves.

[AnonymousKoala]

4 minutes ago, Erec said:

Hold on here. When you play as Wendy or Wes you deal less dmg with all weapons. Even with Hambat you deal 45 dmg or something like that, with Ornery Beefalo and War Saddle you deal 66 or 51 (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure). So everytime I play with these characters I prefer this set because of buff damage that you will never have with characters themselves.

That's a fair point. But we need a reason for it to be useful to characters other than wendy and wes too

[JohaneBrote]

I never really understood why you don't get the speed bonus from roads when riding your beefalo, makes no sense to me to be honest.

[The Letter W]

maybe we could make add ons for their horns and/or hooves that would up the damage, or could function as different tools even? so their base damage wouldn't change, but if you craft more things for them it could outdo any of your other tools. 

as for speed? craft a carrot on a stick and attach it to the saddle. beefalo forever chases the carrot and you get speed boost. tbh they should be faster than a walking cane though

[GiddyGuy]

11 minutes ago, The Letter W said:

 tbh they should be faster than a walking cane though

Preach it sista...praise it!

11 minutes ago, The Letter W said:

 tbh they should be faster than a walking cane though

Preach it sista...praise it!

[Faintly Macabre]

I really feel like either people aren't actually trying beefalo riding out and are complaining based on theory, or else they're just expecting too much. Beefalo riding is great. I love my domesticated beefalo.

First and foremost, I really don't feel like the time and twig investment are that big a deal anymore now that salt lick is in place. Twigs are not that hard to come by and most people will be planting dozens of saplings in their base in fairly short order. And if you do it right, without a brush it takes about 20 days to domesticate a beefalo, which makes it an excellent activity for Winter (although make sure you have a beefalo hat for when Winter ends, because beefalo not fully domesticated do go into heat) when there's not a ton of other stuff going on.

Personally, I love using the beefalo as armor, for a lot of reasons. First, because it regenerates on its own, even if at a somewhat slow pace. Fun fact: this regeneration doesn't stop during combat. Second, I absolutely, positively can't stand my character itself getting hit. This is a holdover from single player mode, where as a controller player I was very, very used to fighting even the nastiest mobs in my bearger vest and tam or whatever else because it was trivial to kill virtually any enemy in the game without being hit even once. The transition to online play where this isn't practical or advisable has been a little traumatic, and I love the beefalo for sort-of kind-of giving that back to me. Third, it's essentially a suit of armor that can be mended: once you have the appropriate things in place, it's trivial to produce dragonpies and butter muffins in fairly large quantities, and these give your beefalo 160 and 80 HP respectively when fed to them.

As for damage, as Erec points out, an ornery beefalo is a huge boon to Wendy and Wes, and as a Wendy main this is great, but I liked it even when the damage modifier still applied. An ornery beefalo with a war saddle is basically an unlimited-use dark sword with no sanity drain. Further benefits include being able to hold a torch or a lantern while fighting, which is great at night, and having a speed increase in battle that doesn't require slipping a walking cane in and out of your hands to benefit from. No more nightmare fuel farming, no more living log hunting, etc. If I had to choose any one beefalo application, its damage dealing would be the one almost every time.

As for speed, I will make a concession: I think beefalo should benefit from speed-increasing terrain, and don't really understand the logic behind why it wouldn't. Having said that, I think beefalo speed is generally fine, too. A non-pudgy beefalo wearing a glossamer saddle is basically like having a road everywhere and a walking cane to go with it. Docile beefalo with the glossamer saddle run like a bat out of hell. There are ways to move faster, but I think that reflects more poorly on them than it does beefalo domestication; in particular, the amount of increased speed WX gets from overcharge is ludicrous, and don't even get me started on coffee.

[DarkXero]

I domesticated beefalo. The default beefalo sucks. The pudgy one sucks too. The fast one can't use roads, wormholes, or go with you to caves. The only one barely worth it is the ornery one that has more damage.

But then again, I don't have to feed and care about my dark swords, I just use them as I see fit. Or just craft ham bats. All you need is have some pig houses near, some spider dens near, and toss some monster meat around.

2 hours ago, TheHalcyonOne said:

I really feel like either people aren't actually trying beefalo riding out and are complaining based on theory, or else they're just expecting too much. Beefalo riding is great. I love my domesticated beefalo.

Definitely, few people tame and ride beefalo.

Or maybe people tried taming a beefalo, overfed it, and thought that when it changed to pudgy tendency then it was domesticated. Then they still got bucked off and got frustrated with it, because there was no way that you could infer that you needed 20 days to get such a wimpy companion.

Or maybe people tamed a beefalo once, then it untamed because they didn't spend all eternity with it, and they gave up.

Or maybe people gave up when they got their beefalo untamed when other people hit it.

Or maybe people gave up because getting a log suit and a spear is better than taking care of a chore for two and a half hours.

Or maybe people have already easy methods to deal with stuff.

2 hours ago, TheHalcyonOne said:

First, because it regenerates on its own, even if at a somewhat slow pace. Fun fact: this regeneration doesn't stop during combat. Second, I absolutely, positively can't stand my character itself getting hit. This is a holdover from single player mode, where as a controller player I was very, very used to fighting even the nastiest mobs in my bearger vest and tam or whatever else because it was trivial to kill virtually any enemy in the game without being hit even once. The transition to online play where this isn't practical or advisable has been a little traumatic, and I love the beefalo for sort-of kind-of giving that back to me. Third, it's essentially a suit of armor that can be mended: once you have the appropriate things in place, it's trivial to produce dragonpies and butter muffins in fairly large quantities, and these give your beefalo 160 and 80 HP respectively when fed to them.

Pointless. Heal yourself or make more armor.

2 hours ago, TheHalcyonOne said:

As for damage, as Erec points out, an ornery beefalo is a huge boon to Wendy and Wes, and as a Wendy main this is great, but I liked it even when the damage modifier still applied. An ornery beefalo with a war saddle is basically an unlimited-use dark sword with no sanity drain. Further benefits include being able to hold a torch or a lantern while fighting, which is great at night, and having a speed increase in battle that doesn't require slipping a walking cane in and out of your hands to benefit from. No more nightmare fuel farming, no more living log hunting, etc. If I had to choose any one beefalo application, its damage dealing would be the one almost every time.

Make more weapons. Drop the lantern.

If you use a glossamer saddle on ornery beefalo, you lack in damage. If you use a war saddle, you lack in speed.

If you use a glossamer saddle on rider beefalo, you lack in speed. If you use a war saddle, you lack in damage.

You either have one or the other, not both of them.

Many experienced players can quickswitch a cane and a dark sword in combat without issue, getting a war saddle and a glossamer saddle all in one. You know, like in all of the 1000 hours of playing Don't Starve singleplayer. It was never an issue.

Nightmare fuel farming and living log hunting is easy in DST. When you get multiple people chopping around, you are bound to get some serious treeguards after a while. Team up with Woodies and Maxwells. And you can even cheese it to get tons of fuel and logs. Or just make ham bats.

And I only have to do it whenever I want. I can even craft a ham bat and just deal with it.

But the beefalo? I have to take care of it. Put salt licks for it. The beefalo doesn't exist for me. I exist for the beefalo.

And definitely, this isn't for "just the beefalo". Go ask about taming in the ARK: Survival Evolved reddit. Ask them what do they think about official taming rates. They suck. People there prefer going to servers with 5x speed. They hate wasting time on dinosaurs that will get blown up in offline raids, or they hate having to dedicate hours and hours of time to it because they can't spend 8 hours in front of a pc. And all of this for gigantic dinosaurs that have three times more damage than you, ten times more health than you, and twenty times your size and speed.

Dinosaurs are actually useful. They are fun. Raptors are extremely fast. Triceratops and Stegosaurus can pummel most enemies and harvest a lot of resources for you. You can even fly on Pteranodons, reach the highest places with resources. You can even swim to the depths of the ocean. And yet people there agree that taming is the weakest part of the gameplay. How would they respond if I told them that if they didn't login on a server once per day to take care of the livestock then their dinosaurs are going to untame and go away?

Here, beefalo are armor (and armor that doesn't even protect against ranged projectiles, so you still need to gear up for McTusk and clockwork bishops). But you are either playing in a 1000 ping server and your experience sucks anyways, or you don't really need such amount of armor in the first place. Equip a log suit and go for it.

And even then, you have to be selective to find out what real gimmicks you can do with the beefalo. Because you can't be pinned while riding a beefalo. But the ewecus can outrun you, and you can't use a goddamn ice staff while riding the beefalo. So you have to corner the ewecus at the same time you get hit once and you hit the ewecus twice. If your beefalo isn't ornery, maybe it will buck you off because you take too long, maybe it will die before the ewecus dies. When you could just hire two pigs with meat and perfectly deal with the ewecus.

So maybe, JUST MAYBE, maybe there's a chance beefalo riding isn't that all great?

If somebody asks me, "what are you missing if beefalo riding isn't in single player?", what do I say?

You know what, I should tell them that they shouldn't care about beefalo. Because it's all in the twiggy trees.

Pic related, it's me when somebody tells me there's an update about beefalo.

[Faintly Macabre]

5 hours ago, DarkXero said:

So maybe, JUST MAYBE, maybe there's a chance beefalo riding isn't that all great?

Or maybe you're just expecting too much, and have extremely arbitrary opinions on what is or isn't useful. Almost all of your arguments seem to boil down to "but you could do this instead." All of your insteads take time and effort too, however trivial you consider them. Math could probably be done to determine at what point your time spent domesticating an ornery beefalo and your time spent farming nightmare fuel, living logs, logs, and grass even out, and I'd be willing to bet it happens a lot sooner than you expect. Salt lick is an absurdly negligible time investment; 4 nitre and 2 boards is 15 days of not having to worry about a damned thing.

Beefalo are not a permanent, invariable upgrade to everything you do. Sorry? I don't know why you think this expectation is reasonable, but sure, if not being an improvement to every single aspect of your gameplay without having to make any choices or do some work makes a new feature garbage, then I guess beefalo taming sucks.

It's not like there's no problems at all with beefalo -- you actually pointed some out, like other players being able to piss on your effort -- but I addressed what the OP addressed.

P.S.:

5 hours ago, DarkXero said:

But you are either playing in a 1000 ping server and your experience sucks anyways, or you don't really need such amount of armor in the first place. Equip a log suit and go for it.

Just because I don't agree with your assessment doesn't make me a noob, you pompous ass.

[Mario384]

My personal opinion on the topic is simple; Beefalo riding is pointless as-is.  Why would I spend my resources and time caring for something I don't need when I could just equip a walking cane and accomplish exactly what the Beefalo taming was supposed to let me do?  Honestly, the huge issue I have is that you have to dump so many resources into it that you could've used somewhere else.  The Salt Lick is a redeeming factor, though you still have to make sure nothing else gets to it or they'll decay it much faster.

[AnonymousKoala]

On 24.6.2016 at 4:43 PM, Mario384 said:

My personal opinion on the topic is simple; Beefalo riding is pointless as-is.  Why would I spend my resources and time caring for something I don't need when I could just equip a walking cane and accomplish exactly what the Beefalo taming was supposed to let me do?  Honestly, the huge issue I have is that you have to dump so many resources into it that you could've used somewhere else.  The Salt Lick is a redeeming factor, though you still have to make sure nothing else gets to it or they'll decay it much faster.

Exactly.

TBH Making beefalos just really fast moving while domesticated would already make them worth it. 

[Footman Crouch]

Dunno about you but I wanna ride the gecko more. 

[AnonymousKoala]

38 minutes ago, DarithD said:

Dunno about you but I wanna ride the gecko more. 

First let's make what we can ride on useful, before we think what else can we ride on

[Footman Crouch]

10 minutes ago, AnonymousKoala said:

First let's make what we can ride on useful, before we think what else can we ride on

Ah,i'm sorry 

i haven't try the beefalo yet but rather than buffing, maybe they should change how tame beefalo can be useful in some situation.

[AnonymousKoala]

4 minutes ago, DarithD said:

Ah,i'm sorry 

i haven't try the beefalo yet but rather than buffing, maybe they should change how tame beefalo can be useful in some situation.

That is called buffing.

 

[thesamon]

You can easily outrun mating beefs by using a road since they themselves doesn't benefit from it. 

So why would they be able to with a huge-ass wooden saddle and a person on their back aswell?

[Mario384]

23 minutes ago, thesamon said:

You can easily outrun mating beefs by using a road since they themselves doesn't benefit from it. 

So why would they be able to with a huge-ass wooden saddle and a person on their back aswell?

Because love and motivation between the rider and beefalo allow them to bend the rules of physics.

[graycrayon]

I feel like if Beefalo riding doesn't receive a major buff then it'll just become a status symbol more than anything. An alternate way for players to say, "I have so much surplus that I can afford to waste time and resources into taming Beefalo purely for the aesthetic of it", which isn't the worst thing in the world.

In theory you really don't need to build a Mega Base™ to survive to 2k days or whatever, but you do it anyway because it's nice for display and without the additional challenge the game would become boring. If something similar happened with Beefalo domestication I wouldn't be surprised and I wouldn't particularly care either. It is what it is.