I've recently been getting back into DST after a hiatus, and I have to say, The Forge is an excellent event for bringing old players back. Yet, I've also been reminded of a thread I made a long time ago, which you can read here to perhaps get an idea of what this post is going to be:
Basically, the beaver isn't fun to play as. I believe this comes down to three main reasons:
- Nightmares swarm you after two minutes on full sanity, and bar you from using the swiss-multitool aspect of the Beaver.
- The beaver has 0 self-sustainability; if he gets hurt, nothing can heal him, even teammates with proper supplies.
- The beaver isn't useful to Woodie or his team. It's outclassed in every aspect of it's kit by much simpler alternatives. (Maxwell, mostly.)
Unfortunately, the beaver hasn't been touched since they changed him to have grass-level armor and semi-waterproofness, and it seems strange what once was a major aspect of Woodie was pushed into the back of the minds of everyone. DS beaver was fun to play, but certainly needed to be toned down for release in DST. However, DST beaver is useless and not fun to play as, which certainly should not be where a character stands in a game where fun is a priority. So, I think the fix is simple, remedy the three issues above, and perhaps we could actually make the beaver worthwhile, because where he stands right now, he just isn't. There were some good ideas in the old thread, and Rezecib came out with his rebalance mod since then which makes the beaver more interesting as well, so we have a well of ideas to use, along with whatever can come of this thread. Changes I suggest after extensive playtime as the beaver:
- No insanity drain. Literally remove this and Beaver becomes much more fun off the bat. It's not that Nightmare creatures are hard to fight, it's that they're too annoying and disallow you from getting anything done, not to mention that in winter werebeaver vision + snow = barely visible Shadow Creatures.
- Let him regen a bit of health in Beaver form from eating wood items, perhaps a percent of gains in the beaverness bar?
- Improve his use as multiool somehow. Make it worse than Maxwell with his clones, but in turn it's more accessible.
Basically, all I want is if the good folks at Klei have some time between Forge and the next event, I think this is worth looking at. Not to mention the other characters who still need tweaking (Willow), but please, consider revisiting the beaver mechanic and actually making it fun to use. I'd also like to see if the current opinion still supports this, so I've put three question up top to mull over should you want to answer them, it'd help. But for my opinion, I feel that Klei needs to make the beaver great again, after such a large fall from grace.