How do you Maxwell?

[StarvedKasad]

Hello everyone!I'd like to ask some help and tips regarding Maxwell.Lately I haven't been doing well with Maxwell.I usually die too fast from hound attacks,or am unable to help allies fight off giants. I tried to learn how to improve from other Maxwell players (which are usually rare) but they are even worse than me,which is disheartening and also  dissapointing. 

So my strategy is as follows: When hounds come I try to kill them with spear puppets . Doesn't go well as they die in 3 hits and if there are more than 2 hounds the shadow dies immediately,so I use hambat/football helmet which is dangerous as Maxwell suffers from low health,allies are still required to defeat big waves of hounds. I then tried to use boomerangs to help allies (as I can cut an insane amount of wood with puppets I can also plant numerous trees and burn them for charcoal) but due to delay and/or lag I end up hurting myself more than I hurt the giant

I tried to use log suit and/or helmet but Maxwell is too fragile to fight even with log suit.Spiders are literally nightmare fuel as they kill spear puppets too easily and I am too fragile to kill them,so I resort to traps which is a slow and painful process.

 

Toothtraps are of course always welcome but it takes teeth to make teeth (get it? )  .Before making 100 of those you are vulnerable to both hounds and giants.

 

So hw do you come with killing things in the game with maxwell and staying alive?Night armour is of course viable due to high sanity regen ,but I feel like it's too hard to find (and requires shadow manipulator which is usually happens after winter in the game and it's all thanks to spiders I can't gather silk and make nightmare fuel from evil flowers).

So in short:
-How do you kill stuff without dying (mostly spiders,hounds and giants).

-No seriously,how do you do it?

-What is your secret for playing an amazing Maxwell (you don't have to tell me but I'll send the others to do it for me )

-How do you cope with his low health?Do you prefer to constantly wear armor instead of backpack ? If so,which one?

-How do you speed up your nightmare fuel production (bees come to mind).

-Which puppets do you prefer.

[NeddoFreddo]

What I do as Maxwell is kite, which is waiting for the enemy to attack, then after the animation has finished, going in and whacking them until they attack again. The amount of times you can hit an enemy before they hit back depends on what the enemy is. For hounds I'm pretty sure it's 2 hits, then run.

My fav shadow puppet/s are the logger and the digger. First the logger because it literally chops every tree in sight, making farming wood easier than even Woodie/Werebeaver. And the digger because it makes digging up all the logger's leftover tree stumps easier.

[Donke60]

yeah NeddoFreddo makes a lot of good points you also want to always fight with your puppets and lure enemies in small numbers cause thats maxwell strength. Just practice kiting and let the shadow puppets carry the agro for big fights always have healing items and you should be fine.

[Faintly Macabre]

Setting up camp in pig villages is a great way to deal with hound waves until you can get a decent trap field going, though you have to be wary of red hounds and have something ready to put out the fires they light when killed.

[DarkXero]

1 hour ago, StarvedKasad said:

-How do you kill stuff without dying (mostly spiders,hounds and giants).

For spiders, you git gud kiting them, really.

But if you don't want to, craft traps. You can make three traps and lure each triggered spider wave to them.

When you are going to smack the den, make sure you are alone (or more warriors will exit for the emergency state, be wary), and also drop the traps around the den, the warrior/s will get caught in them. Easy and painless.

For hounds, you just run. Really. They are that dumb. They will die to whatever else they reaggro, eventually.

But if you want to kill them, you can drop some pig houses / bunny hutches to deal with them in any phase of the day.

The usual beginner strategy is just living near beefalo, and running next to them when hounds come.

For giants, whatever strategy you want to pull.

Old school kiting. Tanking with armor plus healing. Luring them to treeguards. Getting some friends to smack them. Dropping tooth traps.

If you are absolutely terribad at dodging hits, you can even tame a beefalo (yes, I'm serious) with ornery tendency, so you can freely tank hits, no armor needed. You don't really need to kill any of the giants (lure the deerclops out of base and let him roam away, bearger will just make his own path to wonderland, the Goose and the dragonfly stay confined), so you can take your sweet time.

But really, whatever everybody has been doing since forever.

2 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

-What is your secret for playing an amazing Maxwell

To me, there's no secret.

Having a free tam means you don't need to pick up cactus, or make tents, or prepare/improvise whatever you may need in emergency sanity issues.

This means you have a lot more time and resources that you can allocate to do something else.

Like staying in the caves indefinitely. Or just setting up dens (with pig houses / bunny hutches) for fast food.

If you go insane, you smack some shadow creatures for fuel and then you wait to become sane again.

Also the insanity noises are not as noisy (so YOU don't go insane when Maxwell is insane because he has his shadows out).

2 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

-How do you cope with his low health?Do you prefer to constantly wear armor instead of backpack ? If so,which one?

I don't get hit. You can even have both armor and backpack and swap them in a single key stroke.

Really, the key is having some area awareness.

I only use armor instead of backpack, if I'm running into a situation where it's possible I'm hit (like closing in into a McTusk).

If I'm exploring the ruins and I see everything is lighting up, then the armor stays on, I'm not going to be sniped by a bishop, a worm, or a splumonkey. If you insist on having the backpack, since you don't need a tam, you can equip a football helmet, a thulecite crown, or a wigfridge helmet. You may go slower but you are going to be safer.

Any armor is good, except for marble armor (unless you are going to engage until something dies, no backing off).

2 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

-How do you speed up your nightmare fuel production (bees come to mind).

Well, by not consuming all that fuel to make extremely situational shadows.

If you have a Wickerbottom, make books (birds and sleep), read them, kill birds, krampus, and nightmares.

Morsels, sacks and fuel for everybody.

Also, a nightmare amulet. More shadows will spawn with people nearby. You can go nuts killing shadows.

If alone, the usual. Make yourself insane during the night, standing on the darkness. Smack shadows. Or go to the ruins, kill shadows and splumonkeys on the nightmare phase. Also chances are those monkeys will get pissed at depth worms, and then get killed. So all you really need to do is enter and grab that fuel.

2 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

-Which puppets do you prefer.

None. More often than not, they suck. They drain my sanity and make me set ambient noise to 0.

The logger chops very fast and well, and the digger digs those stumps and graves.

But I don't really need more than 2000 logs, and the number of graves is finite.

Maybe I will pull a logger out on a mushtree field, I guess. But I don't want all those mushrooms either.

The duelist straight up sucks, there's always a chance they die, even if you tank monsters yourself (the monster goes to hit you, duelist hits it, aggro switches on the last moment, shadow gets hit and instagibbed).

If you really want some really kickass shadows, install

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=741879530

by @rezecib.

The duelists there are the best thing ever. They are better at fighting than your average player, seriously.

It also has a torch carrier, and a porter (so you can give it your stuff, and you wear armor instead of a backpack).

[AnonymousKoala]

4 hours ago, StarvedKasad said:

 

So in short:
-How do you kill stuff without dying (mostly spiders,hounds and giants).

-No seriously,how do you do it?

-What is your secret for playing an amazing Maxwell (you don't have to tell me but I'll send the others to do it for me )

-How do you cope with his low health?Do you prefer to constantly wear armor instead of backpack ? If so,which one?

-How do you speed up your nightmare fuel production (bees come to mind).

-Which puppets do you prefer.

Kite for hounds and giants, for hounds specifically I occasionally use tooth traps because of lag, and my keyboard being a bit unresponsive at times, and spiders I just don't take on in groups.

 

The secret is that Maxwell is discount wicker that stacks with Wicker for a stage 2 Wicker. He can read the books without Wicker suffering the sanity loss, which he can regain quicker, as well as use to farm nightmare fuel easily with the way the insanity thersholds work. Once you understand that this is what DST Maxwell offers, you got the character. 

 

You wear armor and carry healing. My preferred healing is Healing Salves, weapon is Ham Bat or Dark Sword(even better for maxwell with his ease at farming nightmare fuel), and armor is log suit, although i can see night armour working too.

 

You know how the sanity thersholds work, correct? Lock yourself at the lowest amount of sanity max you can. Then push yourself to insanity, kill nightmares. You then regain the lost sanity, repeat until you want to stop.

 

The Duelists' ai is better than singleplayer but they're not too great in fighting anything thats capable, the miner is great although that with the only respawning boulders being moon rock ones, they're only useful until you cleared out all the thulecite statues, stalagmites, boulders, etc., The digger and the logger are mainly to pretty much replace woodie in wood production/early grave digging in masses without giving up much sanity.

[Arlesienne]

Traps, darts, good armour. With his sanity regeneration, you can even get acquainted with magical gear as sanity drops should be negligible. I can play Maxwell without problems this way. The boomerang is too weak for me to bother... in conjuction with having to catch it.

What I use with any character for the satisfaction combined with effects is poisoning. Many mobs eat anything on the ground. You can use raw red caps and raw monster meat to kill gobblers, hounds, even beargers. So as Max, when you hear howling, you drop your poisonous food on the ground and hide in a bushhat. Then hounds are weaker or not outright dead after a while. Oh, and use other mobs to fight for you! With no lag, Max can steal loot from the swamp as well as any.

[t1morino88eex]

8 hours ago, DarkXero said:

If you really want some really kickass shadows, install

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=741879530

by @rezecib

@rezecib do you by any change have a separate mod only for the maxwell shadow puppets rework?

[rezecib]

@t1morino88eex Nope.

[StarvedKasad]

Thanks for the info guys.I really appreciate it.Though I did manage to find a way to gather spiders without killing myself (just wait till they scream once,follow you away from the nest,then you proceed slaugh---killing them).

I'm inclined to use rezecib's mode for better puppets,but I feel like it's going to ruin my experience of the game (though it is already ruined because I can't enjoy it solo).

[Tainted-Petals]

I actually rarely use the puppets unless I've a surplus of fuel!  First thing I always do is locate beefalo, lure them to my camp and set them a distance away that's safe for me during mating season, but close enough that I can run around them during hound attacks because the hounds always seem to attack during mating season. 

Which takes care of the hounds completely.

For giants, the bearger is easy enough, stock up on food or honey or just toss a mandrake at it.  Then it'll leave you alone.  For Deerclops, they can be a bit harder to deal with.  Though I have successfully kept a bearger asleep once until the deerclops came and let those two duke it out (bearger won surprisingly)

For spiders, I just set up a ring of traps, lure the spiders out, run around their nest until all of them are in traps.  Wash, rinse repeat.

Basically, to successfully play Maxwell without relying too heavily on puppets, you need to get really creative.  For fuel, I just go crazy haunting regular flowers when I die so I can start a farm of evil flower petals.  Otherwise it can get really tedious (tedious in that I clear cut forest for Tree guards, kite them and reap up the fuel from that)

[Arlesienne]

1 hour ago, Tainted-Petals said:

I actually rarely use the puppets unless I've a surplus of fuel!  First thing I always do is locate beefalo, lure them to my camp and set them a distance away that's safe for me during mating season, but close enough that I can run around them during hound attacks because the hounds always seem to attack during mating season. 

Which takes care of the hounds completely.

For giants, the bearger is easy enough, stock up on food or honey or just toss a mandrake at it.  Then it'll leave you alone.  For Deerclops, they can be a bit harder to deal with.  Though I have successfully kept a bearger asleep once until the deerclops came and let those two duke it out (bearger won surprisingly)

For spiders, I just set up a ring of traps, lure the spiders out, run around their nest until all of them are in traps.  Wash, rinse repeat.

Basically, to successfully play Maxwell without relying too heavily on puppets, you need to get really creative.  For fuel, I just go crazy haunting regular flowers when I die so I can start a farm of evil flower petals.  Otherwise it can get really tedious (tedious in that I clear cut forest for Tree guards, kite them and reap up the fuel from that)

Ditto. The bearger wins because of its yawning skill, by the way.

[ShadowDuelist]

4 hours ago, Tainted-Petals said:

I actually rarely use the puppets unless I've a surplus of fuel!  First thing I always do is locate beefalo, lure them to my camp and set them a distance away that's safe for me during mating season, but close enough that I can run around them during hound attacks because the hounds always seem to attack during mating season. 

Which takes care of the hounds completely.

For giants, the bearger is easy enough, stock up on food or honey or just toss a mandrake at it.  Then it'll leave you alone.  For Deerclops, they can be a bit harder to deal with.  Though I have successfully kept a bearger asleep once until the deerclops came and let those two duke it out (bearger won surprisingly)

For spiders, I just set up a ring of traps, lure the spiders out, run around their nest until all of them are in traps.  Wash, rinse repeat.

Basically, to successfully play Maxwell without relying too heavily on puppets, you need to get really creative.  For fuel, I just go crazy haunting regular flowers when I die so I can start a farm of evil flower petals.  Otherwise it can get really tedious (tedious in that I clear cut forest for Tree guards, kite them and reap up the fuel from that)

I think to play Maxwell you need to sort of roleplay what I think a Maxwell-like character would do, so in a sense, you need to be dapper and douchey: let the minions do his work, let his teammates do the fighting.

If he can get there and add a few coward hits while a wolfgang is tanking, then he will, but other than that, avoid direct conflict at all times. And if all else fails, hide and use traps/enviroment/magic.

PS: Duelists are crying out loud to get beefed, they currently die to everything.

[Tainted-Petals]

I think I'm different in that I don't play other servers. I only play with my spouse (who only plays Wilson and dies more often than I do. It's pretty funny actually!)

So that's why I've developed such a strategy