I did some fun redesigns on the discord last night and I wanna share them.
Ik people will be confused so two things, Boxten is a conductor and no, Looey is not dead. That is not Looey.
Everyone that I have seen giving “criticism” and “feedback” is just so miserably annoying in doing so, it’s to the point where they’re essentially just bitching about like a certain CyberHaptic.
I understand that Dandy’s World is not in a great spot, that’s a completely valid point. I understand that we haven’t gotten much to fix that issue, ALSO a valid point.
But do we genuinely have to become some twitter hivemind and start saying dumb shit like “QWEL IS GONNA GET PRAISED LIKE A GOD FOR THIS 2 MACHINE UPDATE WHEN REALLY ITS GONNA KILL THIS DUMB FUCK GAME WAHHHH” or “I’m done playing Dandy’s World, acknowledge me…🥺🥺🥺”
Since we have devolved into people just whining into the ether, here’s some actual criticism.
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The Toon Balancing
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Ever since the Yatta update I’d argue (but you could make a case for before then), the idea of meta toons came into existence. Toons that make the game so optimal that there is no reason to play anyone else.
I feel like this was the downfall of many toons that had promise and cool concepts (Scraps, RnD, Tisha). After this update we’ve gotten toons with less of a more fun and interesting playstyle, and more of an optimal playstyle with stats and abilities so good that make playing anything else feel awful.
Take Gourdy for example. His stats are what’s called Min-Maxed. That’s when something is built in a way that it gives you the best results with least cost. He has the best extraction out of any toon (tied with Soulvester) and has great movement speed. Though it comes at the cost of having low stealth and stamina, despite this, that cost is not as dire or as much of a challenge as it should be. He also has one of the best support abilities, Sugar Rush, which essentially gives a team wide speed buff when the Floor Starts and Ends, just for existing.
He’s built in a way that makes doing machines quickly, getting between machines quickly, and getting to the elevator quickly. Keep that in mind.
Now take Scraps for example, notorious for being considered the worst toon (besides Shrimpo). She definitely has a cool concept and ability. It’s just that her stats hold her back. She has mediocre extraction (2 star skill check and 3 start extraction speed), below average speed (2 stars), and a large amount of stamina (5 stars). Despite her “strongest” stat being stamina, it’s actually what holds her back from being a fun and good toon. Stamina is by far one of the worst stats in Dandy’s World, because of how good movement speed is, so it’s unfortunate when it’s a character’s main stat because it takes away potential to have strength that matters (movement speed and extraction speed/skill check).
Scraps is built in a way where you are doing machines slowly, you are moving slowly, and is held back by a stat that doesn’t help as much as other ones.
This leads to what I think is one of the crux of Dandy’s World’s Balancing issue…
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The Stat System
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The stat system in Dandy’s World is sadly unbalanced. The obvious offender here is Stamina, as it’s not an important or relevant stat compared to Movement Speed. You don’t need stamina if you just move faster than everything. Lots of toons would be better with an overhaul of certain stats like Stamina.
There is currently less of a punishment for a person having lower stamina than there is a person having lower speed. So what if we made it so that there is a challenge caused by having a lower stamina pool?
This is something that I’m sure many of you have thought before but here’s what I think. I believe that the amount of stars you have also determines how fast your stamina regenerates. Currently the universal stamina drain is 10/s and the regen is 2.4/s (except for Astro), and the exhaustion window prevents you from sprinting until you have 10 stamina.
I believe that the regeneration should be better the more stars you have, but to have the exhaustion window be increased as well to balance it out.
Here’s how I’d scale stamina regeneration between all 5 stars: 1/2/3/4/5 every second. And here’s my scaling for the exhaustion threshold: 6/11/18/26/35 (or if you wanna get technical) 5/5.5/6/6.5/7 seconds until you can sprint again.
This would provide challenges to character like Yatta, Gourdy, and Flyte to incentivize smart playing rather than the usual brain off gameplay these toons can enable, mean while giving a bit more viability to high stamina toons while not making it too strong.
Another thing that could potentially be a healthy change is to tie the movement speed with stamina to make them work together more. My idea is to have movement speed also decide your stamina drain, now I know that the stamina drain can already be fast so I won’t tweak it to be too much higher than it is, this to mainly benefit lower speed toons like Scraps, Vee, and Ginger.
Here is my idea on how it stamina drain would scale with each star in movement speed: 7.5/8.5/9.5/10.5/11.5 per second. Now this change isn’t going to make a large difference for higher speed toons but it will definitely feel game changing for lower speed toons and vastly improve quality of life.
Now I think the other stats are balanced in a way where they don’t need many changes as of now, and I really do like the stealth system. But this is getting long so I’ll end this here.
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