Dart and Weather pain mechanics change suggestion

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

I'm pretty frustrated about the mechanics of ranged weapons that hinder them unusable or if simply put, melee weapons are nearly always better to use because of how grinding it is to gather resources for and unreliable ranged weapons generally are.

Thinking some bit about it, it might be that being able to make more of them due to recipe being nerfed or the amount you craft for the same amount being buffed, could result in melee weapons becoming obsolete and darts being the thing to use nearly at all times. So, after some thinking, here's my suggestions for darts:

Have the darts have a very high chance of being dropped on the ground when fired by a player, with a lower chance of them being used up.

This would mean that the darts don't need all the grinding gone through as often, whilst at the same time, melee weapons would still stay convenient in a sense that with darts, you would need to pick up all the ones that dropped on the ground. This might also make the Lazy Forager more useful, although I think it would need more durability and/or be possible to be refueled via nightmare fuel or something else relatively cheap late/mid-game so that this could be a reliable technique.

As a result, less reed crafting, melee weapons stay relatively optimal, but darts are always a decent combat variant. Or, mix and match.

As for Weather Pain, just increase its durability to say 30 and make it possible to refuel via down feathers (3 uses per feather), because the only good and reliable use for it right now is during toadstool fight and may be sometimes when you're screwed during a hound attack and you can try and use it as a last resort.

I really hope that some changes will be made to at least these two types of ranged weapons, because melee pretty much all the time becomes pretty boring after a while.

[Sinister_Fang]

2 hours ago, EuedeAdodooedoe said:

simply put, melee weapons are nearly always better to use because of how grinding it is to gather resources for and unreliable ranged weapons generally are.

Yeah, that's kinda the point. Ranged weapons are meant to be costly and/or awkward to use because they keep you out of harms way. If you could always attack from a distance then there's going to be very little danger when fighting anything except bishops and MacTusks.

Besides, blow darts and electric darts really aren't that expensive. Unless you're using Wickerbottom or Maxwell, you likely won't have much of a use for reeds. Take a trip to a swamp and you'll likely walk out with at least 40 reeds. That's enough to make a stack of darts. For blow darts the most expensive part of them is likely going to be the azure feathers simply due to them only being available during the winter. Hounds teeth usually pile up after a while so they're usually not in short supply except maybe for the first year. And they deal 100 damage (that's more then a dark sword) at a safe distance. The cost seems fair to me. And for electric darts, the cost also seems reasonable (assuming the wiki is correct and their damage is 90 vs dry targets). Saffron feathers are available all year round as well as gold.

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

14 hours ago, Sinister_Fang said:

Yeah, that's kinda the point. Ranged weapons are meant to be costly and/or awkward to use because they keep you out of harms way. If you could always attack from a distance then there's going to be very little danger when fighting anything except bishops and MacTusks.

Besides, blow darts and electric darts really aren't that expensive. Unless you're using Wickerbottom or Maxwell, you likely won't have much of a use for reeds. Take a trip to a swamp and you'll likely walk out with at least 40 reeds. That's enough to make a stack of darts. For blow darts the most expensive part of them is likely going to be the azure feathers simply due to them only being available during the winter. Hounds teeth usually pile up after a while so they're usually not in short supply except maybe for the first year. And they deal 100 damage (that's more then a dark sword) at a safe distance. The cost seems fair to me. And for electric darts, the cost also seems reasonable (assuming the wiki is correct and their damage is 90 vs dry targets). Saffron feathers are available all year round as well as gold.

20 darts is 20 uses. It's not so much about the damage they deal as much as it is about their durab and their cost.

I thought a bit more about it and perhaps, if darts simply dropped or had a chance to drop from the mob you've attacked with darts once the mob dies (e.g. Goose Goose. Lets say you use a stack of darts on her and the rest is melee. You get your 20 darts back, or perhaps 18 or 19 of them, so you don't have to keep crafting them, but you would need to pick them all back up after the fight).

I understand them being slightly inferior to melee weapons in other aspects than range because they can remove a lot of the challenge in the game and can make melee weapons obsolete if that were the case. This is why I'm trying to ask for devs to change them in some way that would keep melee weapons something you would use, perhaps 50% of the time at minimum, whilst keeping ranged weapons a go-to option with a little grind (not as much as right now) or something that can be used between about 20% - 50% of the time for combat for variation and making combat a bit more fun.

[Ecu]

I figured I would chime in on this as I agree that ranged weapons do not feel very useful.  After you've played through a few years and are established, then sure the resource cost isn't too big of a deal, however, nothing is too big of a deal then really.  I find that when sitting down for a session of DST, it is rather uncommon to even get all the way through summer and as such well over half of the items in the game get used.  In fact, in my recent few runs I've done, I've never seen people used ranged weapons beyond the boomerang (for hunting birds).

I've been on a hiatus from the game for a bit (recently came back to playing it), but prior to such I was actually working on a mod that rebalanced darts much in a similar fashion to how @EuedeAdodooedoe suggests.  Instead of darts being a single-use item, I separated darts and the blowgun.  Blowgun had infinite durability, but had to be reloaded.  It only held a single dart at once, limiting how quickly you could fire darts.  Darts themselves would land on the ground by their target and have to be picked up and reloaded to be reused.

I have considered picking this back up and reworking it via new thoughts and ideas.  I think the idea of reloading ranged weapons to fire them, really slows down ranged combat and helps to remove the strong benefit of staying out of range.  If I was to redesign these, I think the basic darts would be low damage, on par with the boomerang.  I think I'd have more advanced/enchanted darts that would have an additional effect that only applies once, leaving basic darts rather than the advanced dart to pick back up.

So yeah, I support the idea of a ranged weapon overhaul.  I think the reloading mechanic should help to keep melee preferable, while still allowing ranged to be beneficial when used right.  Hope this helps.