Do we really need a combat overhaul? What are your opinions on it?

[Teh Pizza Lady]

19 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

The general minimum equipment level for the Resonance Archive is tier 2

I disagree. Because there are two sawblades to encounter and both can pretty much shred your armor if it's only tier 2. I would recommend tier 3 if you're playing any class that doesn't have extra HP or melee damage. But you're also kind of proving my point that the sawblade is an armor check of sorts. That's what mini-bosses are for, to determine if you pass the minimum requirements for the upcoming major boss fight.

19 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think this really only works for wildlife. If it applies to enemies in general, then Hunter can easily outclass everyone else since they already have very strong bonuses compared to their weaknesses, and killing targets at range is a lot safer than trying to deal with them in melee.

Yes you said what I was thinking and didn't say out loud.

19 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

It kind of depends at which point in the game's life you refer to. When I first started playing, you could cheese the boss by getting catapulted into one of the alcoves and then shooting at it from safety or otherwise using the spot as a place to heal. Or just...leave the boss area and continue into the library, get the quest things, and then leave. Invisible walls were later added to stop the cheese.

Then you had the healing changes that were introduced in...1.21 or 1.20, I don't remember exactly which. But healing went from something instantly applied, to something that took time to both apply and take effect. Armor changed from preventing a certain percentage of healing, to simply increasing the amount of time it took to apply a bandage, making it possible to actually heal while wearing plate armor. Initially, the mechanic was tuned so that spending more than a second in the air would cancel the healing attempt, which in turn made the Archive boss much more difficult since it can launch the player into the air(with relative frequency, depending on the player actions). As a result though, the "airborne penalty" was later removed in order to make the fight less punishing.

Overall, it's a fairly tough fight, but the design is pretty solid in my opinion. I think my main complaint about it, aside from invisible walls not being particularly immersive(iron bars or glass would be better), is that the music for the fight is very cool, but the fight itself doesn't last long enough to really enjoy it. The second boss fight in the story doesn't have this problem, since the mechanics of that fight make it quite a long fight indeed, so the player can fully enjoy the epic music that goes with the fight rather than burning through the boss and only getting to hear the first minute of it. So while I don't think the first boss really needs an entire rework, I wouldn't mind seeing some adjustments to make the fight a little longer, so that the music has more impact.

The degree of worseness is relative and I didn't say how it was worse, just that it was. Everything you mentioned, in my opinion, are markers of the boss fight being worse in the sense that it wasn't very enjoyable. It's still a very helterskelter kind of fight, you're doing a lot of running around and avoiding getting hit. The 2nd boss fight is much tamer by comparison, you're just on edge the whole time because there's only a narrow window of time during which you can actually SEE the 2nd boss to know how it's attacking and if you need to get the heck out of dodge. I would consider the 2nd fight to be a better fight in the sense that the fight mechanics actually give a solo player a chance breathe mentally, see what's going on and figure out the patterns and adjust before they're dead. I say that because I've tried the 1st boss fight in the RA as my favorite hunter class and it was a tough fight. I barely felt like my arrows did anything and I couldn't just run in and collect them without getting hit. Melee attacks also hit like wet noodles, needing extra hits to do anything and my added movement speed didn't help much once things started to get out of control. That extra 5HP and melee damage goes a LONG way in a fight like that.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

My recommendation would be to allow the player to create some kind of specialized structure, or at least a specialized block, which can be "charged" with a temporal gear to create a permanent respawn point which can be temporarily overridden by a temporal gear or a duplicate structure elsewhere, but will still act as the fallback spawn point until it is broken by the player. In conjunction with a starting temporal gear amulet this gives a player the opportunity to spawn in, run far away from spawn, permanently set up shop in a new location, and play normally from there without needing to worry about what happens the 21st time they get munched by a bear. 

Isn't that redundant though, since temporal gears can be set to infinite respawns? They don't need to build a structure; all they need to do is select the hypothetical option to spawn with a temporal amulet, set respawns to infinite, and then just turn the amulet into a gear when they're ready to pick out their base location.

Though incidentally, this sort of solution does create the problem of the player potentially wandering much further away from the story locations and thus having much further to travel later, which may prove frustrating depending on the player. It could also do the opposite--the player stumbles across certain locations very early, and thus skips entire chunks of the story as a result. The Resonance Archive is quite impressive, but it's just not going to hit the same if the player completes it after the events of Chapter Two.

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

This structure should be relatively small, buildable without metal tools, and look nice. Perhaps some sort of cobblestone shrine, which once charged gets a faint glow and some pleasant chiseled details. 

In Homo Sapiens, that structure might work without a special charge, or would be charged with something mundane but relatively expensive like a gold ingot. 

Maybe. It kind of solves the problem for Homo Sapiens. But I don't think it's a solution to some of the player complaints about the spawn rules, since gold ingots are difficult to acquire. Gold is rare, and is going to require bronze to mine, which means that the player is going to be well into the game before they unlock the ability to reset their spawn. With lore content enabled, a temporal gear is still going to be faster.

[LadyWYT]

25 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I disagree. Because there are two sawblades to encounter and both can pretty much shred your armor if it's only tier 2. I would recommend tier 3 if you're playing any class that doesn't have extra HP or melee damage. But you're also kind of proving my point that the sawblade is an armor check of sorts. That's what mini-bosses are for, to determine if you pass the minimum requirements for the upcoming major boss fight.

Ah. See when I think of "armor check", I tend to think of...well, I dunno. Enemies built specifically to punch through armor or otherwise shred its durability, moreso than actually hurt the player. But I guess it works. If you have basic skills and tier 3 or better armor, you should be able to face-tank the thing and win. You'll still need to heal afterwards, but the fight will be manageable. If your skills are higher, then you can get away with lower quality equipment, because you'll be able to dodge some of the attacks and take less damage.

I really need my coffee to kick in though.

30 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

It's still a very helterskelter kind of fight, you're doing a lot of running around and avoiding getting hit. The 2nd boss fight is much tamer by comparison, you're just on edge the whole time because there's only a narrow window of time during which you can actually SEE the 2nd boss to know how it's attacking and if you need to get the heck out of dodge.

Incidentally, "helter-skelter" is how the second boss fight was at launch, drastically moreso than the first boss. I do miss it in some ways, since it felt authentic to how a fight of that kind should actually unfold, but I can definitely see why the devs opted to change it as they did.

 

31 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

I say that because I've tried the 1st boss fight in the RA as my favorite hunter class and it was a tough fight. I barely felt like my arrows did anything and I couldn't just run in and collect them without getting hit. Melee attacks also hit like wet noodles, needing extra hits to do anything and my added movement speed didn't help much once things started to get out of control.

In fairness, the RA boss is a fight that doesn't favor Hunters at all. It's a claustrophobic arena, and better to stay in melee distance to keep the boss from slamming the ground quite as much. The second boss fight of the story does the opposite--it's primarily a ranged battle with little opportunity for melee attacks, so Hunter is the strongest pick and Blackguard one of the weaker picks.

I'm not sure how I would go about improving the RA boss fight though. Perhaps make the boulder toss a little slower and much easier to dodge, with the tradeoff of the attack being unblockable with a shield and doing a little more damage. What can block the boulder toss though, is the pillars, albeit for a limited time since they will get destroyed if they get hit by enough boulders. The ground slam could possibly be changed to just interrupt the player's movement by forcing them to stumble/stagger, rooting them in place for a second instead of sling-shotting them around the arena. The debris that's knocked loose from the ceiling can act as "chip damage", in that it's not very much damage itself, but it's a tiny bit that adds up over time and can't really be blocked. And of course, the more pillars that have been destroyed by the boulder tosses, the more damage the falling debris can cause since the ceiling is more unstable and larger chunks are falling. I think these changes might smooth out the fight a little more and give the player more options on how to proceed, with the threat level increasing as the fight goes on, keeping the quality of pushing the player into a "kill or be killed" desperation at the very end of the fight.

[Stralgaez]

33 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Though incidentally, this sort of solution does create the problem of the player potentially wandering much further away from the story locations and thus having much further to travel later, which may prove frustrating depending on the player. It could also do the opposite--the player stumbles across certain locations very early, and thus skips entire chunks of the story as a result. The Resonance Archive is quite impressive, but it's just not going to hit the same if the player completes it after the events of Chapter Two.

I'd say that's fine because they'll wander either way until they find their perfect spot to settle down (if the Temporal Stability isn't ruining it for them), or take a gamble and zap themselves thousands of blocks away by the use of a teleporter for a change of scenery. If they are determined to reach the Resonance Archive because it interests them, they will make the trek regardless and prepare accordingly.

 

For everyone else, they just want to build their little world of their own wherever want to and get lost in the chiseling.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

32 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Ah. See when I think of "armor check", I tend to think of...well, I dunno. Enemies built specifically to punch through armor or otherwise shred its durability, moreso than actually hurt the player. But I guess it works. If you have basic skills and tier 3 or better armor, you should be able to face-tank the thing and win. You'll still need to heal afterwards, but the fight will be manageable. If your skills are higher, then you can get away with lower quality equipment, because you'll be able to dodge some of the attacks and take less damage.

I really need my coffee to kick in though.

Incidentally, "helter-skelter" is how the second boss fight was at launch, drastically moreso than the first boss. I do miss it in some ways, since it felt authentic to how a fight of that kind should actually unfold, but I can definitely see why the devs opted to change it as they did.

 

In fairness, the RA boss is a fight that doesn't favor Hunters at all. It's a claustrophobic arena, and better to stay in melee distance to keep the boss from slamming the ground quite as much. The second boss fight of the story does the opposite--it's primarily a ranged battle with little opportunity for melee attacks, so Hunter is the strongest pick and Blackguard one of the weaker picks.

I'm not sure how I would go about improving the RA boss fight though. Perhaps make the boulder toss a little slower and much easier to dodge, with the tradeoff of the attack being unblockable with a shield and doing a little more damage. What can block the boulder toss though, is the pillars, albeit for a limited time since they will get destroyed if they get hit by enough boulders. The ground slam could possibly be changed to just interrupt the player's movement by forcing them to stumble/stagger, rooting them in place for a second instead of sling-shotting them around the arena. The debris that's knocked loose from the ceiling can act as "chip damage", in that it's not very much damage itself, but it's a tiny bit that adds up over time and can't really be blocked. And of course, the more pillars that have been destroyed by the boulder tosses, the more damage the falling debris can cause since the ceiling is more unstable and larger chunks are falling. I think these changes might smooth out the fight a little more and give the player more options on how to proceed, with the threat level increasing as the fight goes on, keeping the quality of pushing the player into a "kill or be killed" desperation at the very end of the fight.

@VS devs Please look at this LOL

[LadyWYT]

28 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

@VS devs Please look at this LOL

I wrote it into its own separate suggestion so it doesn't get buried in this thread.

[MKMoose]

On 8/23/2026 at 4:44 PM, LadyWYT said:

On 8/23/2026 at 1:45 PM, MKMoose said:

Do keep in mind that while you can change the despawn timer, you can't change the fundamental problem of items disappearing forever semi-arbitrarily - even a one hour timer is clearly not a guarantee that the items will be safe. [...]

Hence why there's a "keep inventory" option available. [...]

That's an overcorrection, though. "Keep inventory" does keep the items safe, but also removes the primary reason for the runback. It can turn dying into the optimal, quick way of returning back home from a trip, unless another death punishment is added.

 

3 hours ago, williams_482 said:

In Homo Sapiens, that structure might work without a special charge, or would be charged with something mundane but relatively expensive like a gold ingot.

A religious shrine which takes offerings of food, blood and riches (or whatever selection is deemed most appropriate) seems like it could be a perfect fit for Homo Sapiens. I like this general idea a lot.

On the whole, by the way, arguably the main benefit of such a structure or block would just be the quality of life.

• The current charge level would be easily visible.
• The respawn location would be a nice and immersive thing you can see in the world instead of a hidden value remembered by the game.
• It could be charged beyond the capacity of a single gear, which would be especially convenient when playing with a low number of respawns per gear.
• It could be used simultaneously by multiple players.
• It may also be more intuitive to allow the player to keep multiple returning points charged and respawn in the nearest one. Multiplayer concerns could make it less straightforward.

 

On 8/22/2026 at 3:33 AM, LadyWYT said:

The best solution, in my opinion, is simply to let the player have the option to spawn with a temporal gear in their inventory. That way they get one free spawn reset so they can set their spawn wherever they wish to build their base, as soon as they find a good location.

Frankly, I like this less and less the more I think about it. If it's just an optional toggle then that's fine, but to me it just feels like a bandaid to a more fundamental issue.

When you think about two options:

• respawn the player in an arbitrary location near world spawn,
• try to respawn the player near where they likely want to be,

then I just see very little reason to intentionally select the first one. The only thing I can think of is that the world spawn is a more consistent and predictable location which may sometimes help players find their bearings or find each other in multiplayer, but I'm not sure that the drawbacks are worth it. The length of the resulting runback is unlimited which can end up disproportionately punishing, and it discourages early-game travel in favor of just settling near world spawn.

Simply giving the player a temporal gear doesn't fundamentally change anything about the base respawn mechanic.

• In the best case scenario, it makes the world spawn quite literally irrelevant for the purposes of respawning - nearly as irrelevant as cheap respawning that uses something other than temporal gears could make it.
• In the worst case scenario, it ends up much more frustrating than the current mechanics, because when the player expects that they can set their own spawn point once they find a great place to settle, then it is only more frustrating when that expectation is unmet if the player happens to die before using the gear. And no, making the gear into an amulet doesn't help if the player still has to either run back to their lost items, or start from scratch which they could also do on a new world.

 

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Though incidentally, this sort of solution does create the problem of the player potentially wandering much further away from the story locations and thus having much further to travel later, which may prove frustrating depending on the player. It could also do the opposite--the player stumbles across certain locations very early, and thus skips entire chunks of the story as a result. The Resonance Archive is quite impressive, but it's just not going to hit the same if the player completes it after the events of Chapter Two.

I feel like this is a problem which you can't properly solve with respawn mechanics, just because it's a problem which isn't really caused by respawn mechanics, or arguably not even related to them at all. It's more so caused by the fundamental incompatibility between one-of-a-kind story locations and a practically-infinite procedurally-generated world.

One potential idea is to adjust how the story quest starts. Somewhat spitballing here, to be clear.

• A treasure hunter could initially send the player to some kind of relatively small ruin, which would spawn much like standard ruins unrelated to the main story. They could have ~10k distance between them at default settings, so that travelling to the nearest one is similar to travelling to the RA. They should be relatively inconspicuous and difficult to find accidentally. They should also be notable enough to justify having a bunch of Jonas tech or temporal shenanigans there - possibly part of some kind of translocator network.
• The ruin could have a special translocator in it, or a temporal anomaly, or something of the sort. Through this translocator or whatnot, the player would travel more or less directly to the RA, or at least to world spawn (though if something like this is introduced, then the RA alongside other story locations could technically be moved to a near-arbitrary location instead of being generated relative to world spawn).
• Naturally, some way back would be necessary - and that is frankly a much bigger challenge to design, because it needs some way to return the player to where they came from.
  • Turning the RA into a hub-location of sorts or creating one from scratch could be interesting, but could also be argued to be pretty overpowered due to the direct translocator links at arbitrary distances, which may have to be limited by only allowing players to only return to the entrance which they last entered.
  • A much simpler option could lie in creating a one-time portal back to where the player came from which only that player can use.

Extracting the idea for a translocator network into its own thing, it could make sense to actually create ruins of a translocator hub near (possibly under) the world spawn, which could also somewhat justify why the player spawns there.

Related ideas include adding player-craftable stuff, possibly crafted from components obtained from that small ruin. Either translocators (for which the world spawn could function as a valid target), or something akin to the terminus teleporter and base return teleporter which can take the player to and from world spawn in some way.

You might notice that all of these ideas involve teleportation or similar methods of fast transportation, and I would be genuinely interested to hear any reasonable solution to the problem which doesn't involve that.

Edited August 24 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

That's an overcorrection, though. "Keep inventory" does keep the items safe, but also removes the primary reason for the runback. It can turn dying into the optimal, quick way of returning back home from a trip, unless another death punishment is added.

It can, yes. By my point is that if the problem is the fear of losing one's stuff, the game already provides a solution that is guaranteed to work.

 

4 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

Frankly, I like this less and less the more I think about it. If it's just an optional toggle then that's fine, but to me it just feels like a bandaid to a more fundamental issue.

My reasoning behind that kind of solution is that, as far as I can tell, the general primary complaint behind current respawn mechanics is that temporal gears aren't something easily available at the start of a game and need to be earned, which in turn means that the player is going to have issues if they want to wander far away from spawn to find the "perfect" base location. So giving them the option to start with a temporal gear makes the most sense to me, since it allows that kind of player to set their initial spawn at their base, while still requiring them to participate in the overall spawn system by earning more gears should they wish to change that spawn. If they don't set change the respawns to infinite, then they also need to be careful not to die too many times before they can acquire another temporal gear, since that means they can get kicked back to the world spawn. As for making the item a temporal amulet, this ensures that the player does not lose the item before they can use it, since worn items are retained on death.

Now if the player just wants an easy respawn mechanic like what Minecraft and many, many other games have? No, the above isn't a solution, and I would argue this kind of feature doesn't belong in vanilla VS since it's not designed to be the kind of game that gives the player an easy out to everything(Tyron's comments on spawn mechanics suggest as much). The above also isn't a solution to Homo Sapiens either, since lore content doesn't exist in this mode, but as I said before, I'm not sure how to solve the Homo Sapiens problem without wrecking the balance of the game modes that VS is actually developed around.

12 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I feel like this is a problem which you can't properly solve with respawn mechanics, just because it's a problem which isn't really caused by respawn mechanics, or arguably not even related to them at all. It's more so caused by the fundamental incompatibility between one-of-a-kind story locations and a practically-infinite procedurally-generated world.

One potential idea is to adjust how the story quest starts. Somewhat spitballing here, to be clear.

• A treasure hunter could initially send the player to some kind of relatively small ruin, which would spawn much like standard ruins unrelated to the main story. They could have ~10k distance between them at default settings, so that travelling to the nearest one is similar to travelling to the RA. They should be relatively inconspicuous and difficult to find accidentally. They should also be notable enough to justify having a bunch of Jonas tech or temporal shenanigans there - possibly part of some kind of translocator network.
• The ruin could have a special translocator in it, or a temporal anomaly, or something of the sort. Through this translocator or whatnot, the player would travel more or less directly to the RA, or at least to world spawn (though if something like this is introduced, then the RA alongside other story locations could technically be moved to a near-arbitrary location instead of being generated relative to world spawn).
• Naturally, some way back would be necessary - and that is frankly a much bigger challenge to design, because it needs some way to return the player to where they came from.
  • Turning the RA into a hub-location of sorts or creating one from scratch could be interesting, but could also be argued to be pretty overpowered due to the direct translocator links at arbitrary distances, which may have to be limited by only allowing players to only return to the entrance which they last entered.
  • A much simpler option could lie in creating a one-time portal back to where the player came from which only that player can use.

Eh...it kind of works, but I think it just sets the stage for the player expecting every story location to be convenient to travel to, and getting upset when that isn't the case. Similar to the question of "why couldn't the hobbits just fly the eagles to Mordor". There are several reasons that it can't really happen, but the most obvious reason at the end of the day is...there wouldn't be a story if it were just that easy.

Overall, I think it's just adding more complexity to the game in a fashion that's not really needed. I agree more with @Stralgaez's opinions on the issue, in that yeah, it's kind of a problem, but not one that's particularly fixable due to the how the game world itself is designed. Thus I'd be more in favor of just allowing the player to potentially wander off and create problems for themselves later, though not at the expense of giving them a cheap, convenient way to change their spawn whenever they wish(outside of the existing console commands to do so).

[PhotriusPyrelus]

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

That's an overcorrection, though. "Keep inventory" does keep the items safe, but also removes the primary reason for the runback. It can turn dying into the optimal, quick way of returning back home from a trip, unless another death punishment is added.

I *really* wish they'd fold the Player Corpse mod into vanilla at the very least as an option.  Being configurable to optionally only drop stuff that is in your inventory rather than equipped or in a hotbar would also be nice.

Needing a second or third set of gear to go retrieve a bad death is annoying and probably the part I hate most about games that make you drop *everything* on death.  Second-most in this game, because all your stuff de-spawning before you can even get back is even worse.  ¬_¬

[Teh Pizza Lady]

16 hours ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Second-most in this game, because all your stuff de-spawning before you can even get back is even worse.  ¬_¬

It has been mentioned before but a Terminus Teleporter does solve this issue as does resetting your spawn point with a temporal gear if you're going to be out and about from your base. It's not that VS doesn't allow you to set your spawn point it's just that it doesn't allow it until you have a temporal gear which is more fitting with the game's actual lore.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

3 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

It has been mentioned before but a Terminus Teleporter does solve this issue as does resetting your spawn point with a temporal gear if you're going to be out and about from your base. It's not that VS doesn't allow you to set your spawn point it's just that it doesn't allow it until you have a temporal gear which is more fitting with the game's actual lore.

Cool story, bro.  You may as well tell me "you should've had steel equipment, then you wouldn't have died in the first place."

Edited August 25 by PhotriusPyrelus

[Teh Pizza Lady]

17 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

Cool story, bro.  You may as well tell me "you should've had steel equipment, then you wouldn't have died in the first place."

That's not what I meant and you can either back off with that tone or change it, please. We're trying to have a civil discussion here, no need to get pissy about it.

Your complaint was all your stuff despawning before you get back. I just mentioned two ways that you can get back before your stuff despawns.

1. Get back instantly
2. Have a different spawn point if you're going to be so far from base that you can't get back in time.

I've gotten several temporal gears before getting steel equipment anyway so your poorly worded cut at me is a moot point anyway.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

30 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

you can either back off with that tone or change it, please.

And *you* can stop tone policing or block me. I literally don't care which.
 

31 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Your complaint was all your stuff despawning before you get back. I just mentioned two ways that you can get back before your stuff despawns.

1. Get back instantly
2. Have a different spawn point if you're going to be so far from base that you can't get back in time.

And both of those suggestions are equivalent to telling me to just have steel equipment, because I don't have either one.

Those 'solutions' are band-aids on a bullet wound when we have the technology (as far back as *DIABLO TWO*) to completely avoid even the slimmest possibility of your gear despawning by dropping it in a container than *doesn't* despawn.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

23 minutes ago, PhotriusPyrelus said:

And *you* can stop tone policing or block me. I literally don't care which.
 

And both of those suggestions are equivalent to telling me to just have steel equipment, because I don't have either one.

Those 'solutions' are band-aids on a bullet wound when we have the technology (as far back as *DIABLO TWO*) to completely avoid even the slimmest possibility of your gear despawning by dropping it in a container than *doesn't* despawn.

There is a 3rd option but that's between me and someone else. The point is you're not going to get anyone to listen to you if you come out the gate attacking.

And I'm sorry you don't have temporal gears, try looking harder? They're pretty common as far as rare loot goes, you just need to loot rotbeasts and pan bony soil. Those are by far the most common ways for me to get them.

You can also just use the keep inventory game rule and avoid this entire pointless confrontation that you started, btw.

[LadyWYT]

8 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

keep inventory game rule

Which guarantees that you get your stuff back, instead of it glitching out, getting camped by hostiles, or appearing somewhere practically unobtainable...all of which are issues still present with gravestone/corpse mechanics and why I don't consider those very good solutions if the potential of losing stuff is the problem.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

18 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Which guarantees that you get your stuff back, instead of it glitching out, getting camped by hostiles, or appearing somewhere practically unobtainable...all of which are issues still present with gravestone/corpse mechanics and why I don't consider those very good solutions if the potential of losing stuff is the problem.

I do like the idea of the corpse mechanic, but as you said, it doesn't really solve the whole issue of what caused your death in the first place? Fall in a deep hole? you're gonna need to go down there safely to get your stuff or it's as good as lost anyway. Same thing if it's at the bottom of the ocean or whatever (I still need to build an underwater base...for science), you will have a hard time getting your stuff and if you died to a lack of oxygen, then you won't be getting your stuff without some considerable effort. At least with all your items popping out with your bags, they will float to the surface instead of sinking to the bottom.

[MKMoose]

56 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Which guarantees that you get your stuff back, instead of it glitching out, getting camped by hostiles, or appearing somewhere practically unobtainable...all of which are issues still present with gravestone/corpse mechanics and why I don't consider those very good solutions if the potential of losing stuff is the problem.

The fact that a solution doesn't somehow also fix entirely unrelated problems or that it doesn't remove a potential challenge which doesn't need removing doesn't make it a bad solution. Why would you even want it to achieve anything of that sort?

Similarly, a solution having some potential problems is not particularly relevant when those problems are entirely conditional on its implementation being poorly designed or buggy.

Player corpses have one primary purpose, and they achieve that purpose flawlessly.

 

32 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

At least with all your items popping out with your bags, they will float to the surface instead of sinking to the bottom.

Most items will not float, including bags with whatever is inside them - that depends on their density. And even if items did float, I see no reason why a corpse shouldn't float to the surface as well.

Edited August 25 by MKMoose
Remove redundant arguments.

[williams_482]

The corpse mechanic fills a very desirable niche between the two options available in the vanilla game. Without mods, you can either: 

1. Drop all stuff on death. You must race back to where you died within 10 minutes or you lose everything. There are plenty of circumstances where making it back fast enough is difficult or impossible, leading to extremely frustrating scenarios of fighting your way back to the original death location only to find your valuable stuff is all gone.

2. Keep inventory on death. Dying is totally harmless, and actually a great way to get back home with all your stuff faster. 

Both of these suck if you want death to be a punishing disruption, but don't want to be forced into a desperate, time-boxed scramble to recover all you were carrying or lose it forever. The corpse mechanic means you have to return to the place you previously died and deal with whatever challenges you left behind, but it means you have time to do so properly, even if you died a very long ways from home or very deep underground. Death is disruptive and recovering your stuff is difficult, but it is never lost forever unless you decide or your own accord that returning to pick it up is not viable. 

I think it should be obvious why many people prefer this to the two vanilla death options.

[Andael]

2 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Which guarantees that you get your stuff back, instead of it glitching out, getting camped by hostiles, or appearing somewhere practically unobtainable...all of which are issues still present with gravestone/corpse mechanics and why I don't consider those very good solutions if the potential of losing stuff is the problem.

Gameplay-wise, the difference between despawn and "difficult to reach" is enormous.

Getting back to difficult-to-reach gear can be part of the epic of your adventure. Having things despawn before you get there is insulting and frustrating. Such an arbitrary quirk of implementation, leading to metagaming whether the relevant chunk is loaded to have the countdown active... and bum-rushing the gear rather than preparing for a recovery operation.

If your gear is valuable and in a tough location, I'd much rather have the opportunity to recover it by leveraging game-mechanics and playing the game; adding to my Story.

[Edit: oops, I replied before getting to williams_882's comment -- so I now look like I'm just restating the same thing, like a dum-dum -- but instead, please take this as reinforcement of the same sentiment.]

Edited August 25 by Andael
I didn't read all comments before replying

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

The corpse mechanic means you have to return to the place you previously died and deal with whatever challenges you left behind, but it means you have time to do so properly, even if you died a very long ways from home or very deep underground. Death is disruptive and recovering your stuff is difficult, but it is never lost forever unless you decide or your own accord that returning to pick it up is not viable. 

Why not just give the player the option for dropped items to never despawn? Or if we still want to let them earn that kind of power, without requiring them to be in the late game, simply allow them to apply a temporal gear to a bag so that said bag will not despawn if dropped, or just give the player the option to keep the hotbar but not anything else. I'm still not particularly a fan of these options, but they feel like a better way to handle such without resorting to corpses and gravestones.

Gravestones seem very contrived to me since...well, that would mean someone had to bury you, and there's not exactly "someone" around in most cases. Likewise, a permanent corpse(because it's not disappearing if you don't pick it up) has some messy lore implications--it makes more sense to me that the body disappears as soon as the player respawns, since it's both a little spookier and doesn't result in ridiculous mounds of corpses piling up. Both options also easily open up a griefing opportunity in multiplayer, which doesn't seem particularly advisable either.

Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons the terminus teleporter is a thing. It takes a lot to acquire, sure, but it's a major milestone similar to getting your first pickaxe or figuring out how to acquire and work iron. Once you have one, you can teleport back to your last point of death, which skips the "death run" entirely and should allow you to instantly retrieve at least most of your stuff. Having one of these devices also means that you no longer need to worry about changing your spawn point on adventures, which is a rather major earned privilege. Personally, I'm not really a fan of undermining that kind of earned reward, and I can't really think of other games/mods that even allow this kind of convenience outside of console commands.

5 minutes ago, Andael said:

Getting back to difficult-to-reach gear can be part of the epic of your adventure. Having things despawn before you get there is insulting and frustrating.

Sure, but it can also be insulting and frustrating to have your "grave" in a spot that you just cannot reach, or have it get camped by monsters. Valheim, in my experience, is rather notorious for this(and way worse than VS since you don't keep armor on death or have a way outside of the console to teleport back to point of death). I can think of at least one spot in VS where such a scenario can happen rather easily.

[Andael]

12 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Sure, but it can also be insulting and frustrating to have your "grave" in a spot that you just cannot reach, or have it get camped by monsters.

Well, at least I had agency in getting it in that bad spot, so I don't feel insulted -- unlike the implementation-quirk of 'despawn'. And, again, I'd much rather have the opportunity to recover the gear with some extra effort rather than knowing a timer will make it impractical or frustrating to try to beat the timer -- with the consequence of failure being full loss of that gear.

On the gravestone issue -- I'd be perfectly happy having the gear drop as it does. I think it often gets included in these arguments because one of the concerns leveled against not despawning is the "heavy resource drain" of persisting these items in the world (which is nonsense, but a gravestone is one easy way to reduce the miniscule burden).

 

[LadyWYT]

2 minutes ago, Andael said:

Well, at least I had agency in getting it in that bad spot, so I don't feel insulted -- unlike the implementation-quirk of 'despawn'. And, again, I'd much rather have the opportunity to recover the gear with some extra effort rather than knowing a timer will make it impractical or frustrating to try to beat the timer -- with the consequence of failure being full loss of that gear.

Which is fair, but I'm not sure that all players asking for the function share the same sentiment. It also doesn't really fit with the "earned convenience" design behind the current death and respawn mechanics, hence why I suggested the bit about allowing the player to have some sort of bag upgrade to make it not despawn on death, since most items will be stored in bags. Or simply allowing a setting so that items held in the hotbar are retained on death--that should allow the player to keep most of the really important stuff, so they can more easily retrieve the dropped items or just simply not worry about it if they didn't drop anything particularly valuable.

 

7 minutes ago, Andael said:

On the gravestone issue -- I'd be perfectly happy having the gear drop as it does. I think it often gets included in these arguments because one of the concerns leveled against not despawning is the "heavy resource drain" of persisting these items in the world (which is nonsense, but a gravestone is one easy way to reduce the miniscule burden).

In a singleplayer world it's probably not a big deal unless the player's PC is on the weaker end. On multiplayer servers it's more of a concern, because you have more players who are potentially racking up a lot of deaths. It's also why the griefing is an issue--a troll dying over and over and over again could easily litter an area with garbage that someone will have to clean up, which may be difficult to do if no one aside from the items' owner or admins is allowed to interact with the "grave".

Overall, if it has to be a thing, I think "keeping the hotbar only" is the preferable solution. It's less messy and still offers the player some respite without being too convenient.

[williams_482]

4 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Why not just give the player the option for dropped items to never despawn? Or if we still want to let them earn that kind of power, without requiring them to be in the late game, simply allow them to apply a temporal gear to a bag so that said bag will not despawn if dropped, or just give the player the option to keep the hotbar but not anything else. I'm still not particularly a fan of these options, but they feel like a better way to handle such without resorting to corpses and gravestones.

That option exists, but there are serious side effects. Leaving items hanging around forever is liable to result in significant lag. 

Skin the corpse/grave/whatever as you please: it could be a bag, a pile, a glowing teal orb, an oversized drifter in candystriped pajamas who does the macarena when you get close, anything. I'm sure the devs can come up with something that they can apply a reasonable lore explanation to. 

[IAmMoss]

While not to the extent of the mod, definitely. imo as of now, any armor below iron is useless. As high level temporal monsters spawn often, and basically ignore lower level armors. tho i would like the implementation of a more complicated armor system (like combat overhaul lol) the mechanics of player damage and attacking/ defending is fine. i do think bows are underpowered and certain fauna are too strong.

[LadyWYT]

4 hours ago, IAmMoss said:

imo as of now, any armor below iron is useless.

Depends on your settings. On Standard difficulty, this is certainly not the case. Tier 2 armors are the minimum requirement for the Resonance Archive, and can easily keep the player alive through the first temporal storms as long as they don't try to face-tank everything and take respites to heal. Gambeson is perhaps the best armor for exploring the surface, since it offers very good protection for very little drawback. Tier 1 armors aren't as protective as tier 2, however, they will definitely help keep you alive against the first tougher enemies you'll encounter, and they're also cheap, which makes them a decent first armor option until you can get something better. Tier 0 even has its use, since its main purpose is to allow you to survive one extra hit from surface-level threats that you otherwise would die to.