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Don't Starve Together >  Workshop > Angelica's Workshop > Whiskey, the Fleet Admiral > Discussions
Whiskey, the Fleet Admiral
Description Discussions3 Comments101 Change Notes
Angelica  [developer] 10 Jan @ 6:47am
Skill Tree Thoughts and Lessons Learned
I'm sharing these thoughts to encourage people to do similar and share their perspective and experiences with Whiskey.

Some dev thoughts on the state of Whiskey:
- Whiskey's early/mid game is uninteresting unless you are sailing. A Skill Tree is obviously the best way to address this but currently outside of scope.
- Having so many recipes that use ocean resources made Whiskey need constant trips to the ocean to maintain her crafts, while this is interesting, it could certainly be refined.
- Driftwood is very tiring to collect and competes with oar costs. I've added a new Driftwood recipe to experiment with this, but in the future this will be related to her skill tree.
- In my infinite wisdom I did not realize War Banner can be reused by hammering and relocating, but I enjoy this approach.
- Crushing Depth was originally designed like a Skill but it has since become iconic, in the future, the extra durability and damage from the swords will become a Skill instead.
- Whiskey's identity seems most interesting when taking calculated risks and I wish to reinforce that.
- Whiskey can be used as a swap character for her Medals and Banner and I wish to change that, but limitations are not fun, I need to convince people that Whiskey is worth playing.
- Right now she sits comfortably as a lone sailor, but playing around other players ends up harming you and making you run low on hats and weapons rather than encompassing the leader strategist fantasy that she was supposed to fulfill.
- I'm currently unhappy with some medals, purple medal is a wonderfully balanced and fun item, but blue and yellow have been uninteresting in feedback, I'd love to know people's thoughts on all medals, but to me it seems that having a major theme is much better than having strong buffs, turns out glow, speed and regen aren't mechanically engaging to approach, figures.

What I plan to do in the future (not soon):
- Add a new Medal Mold recipe to replace the Amulet requirement in medal recipes, allowing me to make more medals based on precious items like the Geode Fruit or Dreadstone, instead of limiting medals to 1 amulet and 1 boss.
- Rework "medal upgrades" and instead design modded medals to be unique to their respective mods, rather than making Admiral's Absolution even harder to craft.
- Rework of her perks exclusive to Island Adventures, it's become clear players adore using Whiskey for IA, and I wish to offer proper interactions with that mod, rather than mild patches.
- Rework Navygator to also function like a Lantern. Currently this item is too specific to use and refuel, rather than an essential navigation tool.
- Give Pearl an unique Shell Oar that can be bought for bottles, offering a middle ground between normal oars and very rare ones like Battle Paddle and Malbatross Bill.
- Add a Skill Tree that will interact with the following ideas below:
- A rifle, a new ranged tool that will require a skill to unlock and use. It will shoot Ice and apply Wetness to enemies hit. This will branch into other skills that also interact with wetness and make it a reliable ranged weapon.
- A shield that all survivors can use made of Barnacles that applies Bleed when attacking and blocking. Bleed will slow enemies and deal damage over time similar to Shipwrecked's Poison.
- A whip anchor that directly interacts with Whiskey's unique relationship with the shadows and guilt.
- A medal box to store away medals and also disable them without the need of a backpack.
Last edited by Angelica; 10 Jan @ 7:22am
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Showing 1-3 of 3 comments
letsalllovelain 10 Jan @ 5:46pm 
Whiskey is definitely a character that I see as being way more fun alone at sea than on land, teaming up with others. You touched on a lot of the reasons for it but I feel like a major part of it, which ties into the swap character issue, is the fact that her team abilities are entirely automatic and require no input on the Whiskey player's part. I feel like the best way to make her teamwork abilities fun, and the best way to achieve that "leader strategist fantasy", is to make it so she actually has to do things to activate those effects.

One idea is to make it so instead of Morale giving a constant buff to allies, make it so it applies a short vulnerability debuff, like Abigail does, whenever Whiskey attacks the enemy. Said debuff wouldn't work with Whiskey's attacks so that way it's purely a support thing, and her current morale value would change the strength of it. And then maybe if you replaced her sanity drain around players with a stacking melee damage reduction like Wes + an increased weapon durability drain rate, you'd end up with a situation where Whiskey would be discouraged from just spamming attack, and everyone would hopefully try to co-ordinate their attacks. This would also do away with her harming herself when being around others, while still providing her with a penalty that requires a different style of gameplay.

Another idea is to make it so medals have a reduced effect normally, and only activate their full effects when Whiskey uses an item, sorta like TF2 Soldier's Buff Banner but it applies a different effect on each character depending on what medal they're holding. Then you could tie the activation of that to a short cooldown or some gauge that refills with damage dealt and you'd wind up with another sorta attack coordination situation. Maybe the buff length is dependent on the medal itself, that way you can have battle oriented medals with short buff lengths so Whiskey will have to activate it multiple times in a boss battle, and then utility medals only need to be activated once a day.

These ideas don't really mesh together super well so I don't think you should do both of them without some adjustments, and even by themselves I don't think that they're perfect but maybe they'd help get her into that spot you'd like, or hopefully they'll at least inspire you to come up with better ideas.

Your future plans sound interesting, I don't really have anything else to say about them. Good work on Whiskey so far, I wish you the best of luck on making her even better!
#1
Angelica  [developer] 11 Jan @ 12:03pm 
Thank you very much for feedback, you bring up a lot of very good points and ideas.

I can see a type of "Mark" that Whiskey can apply to only 1 enemy at a time, rewarding people for coordinating with whiskey but useless to herself otherwise. this "Mark" could be empowered by morale and medals that these allies hold.

I could also test if disabling Morale whenever whiskey gets hit could work as a way to push everyone into working with her, but obviously this needs much thought, specially if this design contradicts the red medal's design for example.
#2
letsalllovelain 14 Jan @ 2:29pm 
Yeah, the "Mark" sounds like it could work. Maybe you could even have some medals or something that consume the Mark to do something else, I dunno.

I'd be hesitant about punishing the player, and everyone else with them, for getting hit though. It's a tad difficult to work with others to prevent one person from getting hit, It might make the Whiskey player feel awful, like they're letting everyone down if they mess up and get hit, so they just sit back as much as they can. Then again, maybe feeling awful for letting everyone down might be in character lel.
#3
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