Hyper Light Drifter (early Preview Build) No Survey No Password 2019
Tanja Freeze
I like the black guard the most because it is the most suited for exploring the most challenging environments (for me anyway) of the underground and dense forests and is also the most material efficient of all the classes while doing it. Metal is probably the most valuable, but costly, material to produce in the game and you never stop needing it. Metal needs ore to be mined from usually dangerous areas, the most infrastructure built (basic workshop, mines, and a lot more for iron and steel), charcoal or coal in large quantities, and requires active player participation in most of its processes. The black guard has the best traits with regard to the metal industry as black guards can mine faster, most of their weapons and armor last longer, and they are the most suited for the underground where most ores/minerals are mined. Mining faster is a nice bonus to minimize the time spent underground but a bigger advantage a Blackguard has is how efficient he is with metal weapons and armor. Black guards add 10% armor hp and since you can use nearly destroyed chainmail in the creation of full hp plate or scale mail, you get effectively 60 to 420 extra hp depending on the armors used/made (chain mail into scale or plate works best), which works out to quite a few more attacks blocked before breaking, especially with high end armors like plate mail which can knock the incoming damage down a lot.
As far as I am aware, tool durability is only decremented by the number of actions done or blocks/items affected (an exception is the heavy hit function in forging), so each attack with a sword/spear decrements its health by one. Since the Blackguard has a 20% damage buff he can reach some break points for some weapons and save metal with fewer hits.
Hyper Light Drifter (early preview build) no survey no password 2019
Download https://shoxet.com/2yMZvJ
***I made the following assumptions: Damage values are not rounded up nor is there damage variance or "crits", and drifters have no damage reduction nor armor (that I could find). If not in the in-game handbook, I used what the wiki said. I also have not tested these numbers as I am lazy.***
I did not include Gold, Silver, or meteoric iron due to their rarity and unlikeliness to be used as a weapon, but they have the same damage values as Bismuth Bronze and Steel respectively. You can find the numbers in the in-game handbook.
You can determine three things when looking at these graphs; that Blackguards can kill the weaker drifters faster than a commoner with tin bronze weapons, he can kill the three most dangerous drifters faster than a commoner with any melee weapon, and he since he kills with fewer hits the blackguard's weapons (the ones with reductions) will last longer in his hands than in a Commoner's.
The Hunter does not reach many breakpoints with spears with only a 10% boost. With most metal spears, he is no better at killing drifters than a commoner, but this is not to say that the hunter is bad, just overrated.
Since thrown spears do roughly 1.5 times as much damage as swords you might think that they would have an advantage in DPS and damage per metal invested against swords, but this is not true for common classes or Hunter thrown spears vs Blackguard swords. They do cost 1 hp per throw and do roughly twice the damage of a sword blow, but swords have roughly 2.25 times the durability of spears, so swords have a higher damage per metal investment ratio. For DPS, I found that I could swing a sword two times faster than accurately throw a spear at a nearby drifter, as I had to aim to get the throwing window small enough to ensure an accurate shot (though someone more experienced than me may be able to do better) which basically means spears did twice the damage but took twice as long per attack compared to swords, for roughly equal DPS (experience with each weapon will probably determine which is best for you).
While the percent reductions are not good for most of the drifters you will be facing, you have to remember that it is only the bow that loses durability, meaning only sticks and string are used (and easily replaced). Arrows can usually be recovered with good rates [edit: This is only true for missed shots which seem to never break. About a third of shots that hit a creature tend to break, which really cuts down their efficiency for a Hunter to around 8.5+1 drifters per ingot invested. A sword can easily reach over a 100 drifters per ingot invested for a Commoner] and they are also manufactured at 9 arrow heads per ingot and thus are a very metal efficient option [edit: They are the worst option I am aware of. Bows and arrows are "the best" only if number of slots and sustainability (no picking up ammo/spears) are a priority. They really need some love to be worthwhile.] (if rather bottle necked by low feather availability). Bows and arrows do have a bit less DPS than swords (less attack speed) and spears (less damage per shot) for any class though this is usually not an issue for ranged combat.
Given how easy it is to get food in the game I do not feel the extra hunger of a Blackguard is that bad, even with winters or in the early game. Once you get a farm going and a simple cellar food problems are more or less solved for a Blackguard (it is only wild foods that get the item drop rate malus). If you spend your time huddling in a dirt shelter at night panning then you may run out of food, but I usually keep exploring at night to get a jump on the limited time you have until winter comes anyway (great time to pan then).
Thank you for the excellent post detailing the virtues of a Blackguard. It was very well written and thought out. And you're right, the Blackguard is an amazing class... for a very specific playstyle. However, for the vast majority of players the Blackguard simply doesn't suit their playstyle and what they want out of the game.
according to the lore within the game (at least from what I can make out) the major mobs you are fighting (Drifters) are actual people who have gotten sick through some disease which has mutated them. This may bother people when they realize they are actually killing other humans (or whatever this game calls them, but they're the same species as the player) within the game and will be put off from it. I know I am. Especially when I read lore and journals within the game talking about the potential to reverse and cure these people/drifters. Kinda makes you sick to realize you're killing these people and carving up their dead bodies with a knife to 'harvest' them like an animal, doesn't it? No wonder this is billed as some bizarre-twisted-horror-story-of-a-civilization-game. It's pretty messed up when you allow yourself to think about it.
So combat for the sake of combat might not appeal to a lot of people. Also, unless you go deep underground, the only hostile mobs you will find on or near the surface are relatively easy to kill, making the Blackguard class a situationally useful class.
As far as exploration goes, a Blackguard only excels at exploration deep underground. But what is the point of going deep underground? There's ores, gemstones, etc., but those can all be found using a pro pick and mining your own veins closer to the surface, without all of the risk of exploring a cave system. And the mining bonus is rather superfluous. As a commoner, finding and mining a single vein of iron has set me up with enough iron for the rest of the game. I'm already deep in the iron age and still have over 2 stacks of iron bloom ready to be hammered out when needed. All without the risk of plumbing the depths of a Drifter and mechanical infested cave system. You can potentially find ruins or translocators, but I have found those far more often near the surface. Exploring deep cave systems is extremely dangerous with little reward or profit that can't be done through easier and safer means, and is only a very minor part of the gameplay that VS has to offer.
Most people play VS for other reasons than combat or exploring deep caves. And so, while the Blackguard is indeed a very fine fighter class, it is only really ever a one trick pony that will appeal to gamers with a very specific playstyle, such as yourself. As borne out by the poll, only about 6-7% of the respondents view the Blackguard as the best or their favorite class to play. Which means 93-94% of the respondents feel a different class better suits their playstyle.
I dunno about playstyles, none of these are really that exclusive that you couldn't make the most of any of them and I have not seen any strategies built around one class. It would seem that people just pick commoner when playing solo because they do not feel any pressure to excel in any one thing or they do not want to deal with a malus.
Blackguard just deals with the hardest part of the game the best in my opinion and he gets the best efficiency out of metal, which while easy to procure, takes the most time to gather and process of any industry. Since Blackguard needs less metal overall compared to the other classes, s/he has more time to do whatever. If you want to build big impressive structures in survival you will probably be spending a lot of time underground getting materials to make it and blackguard is great for that. The extra health makes surviving in forests a lot easier (can you really spot wolves in dense cover before they notice you?) which will be useful no matter what you are doing. Blackguard can excel at a lot of tasks and do fine in the others.
As far as combat goes, it isn't exactly interesting or exciting. And the mobs don't exactly drop anything useful, so there is no incentive to go out of your way to hunt them. Furthermore, (Spoiler alert!)
That is not entirely true, but close. You can use the temporal gears drifters drop to cut delivery trips in half, you can use the flax they drop in the early game to make yourself some bags for more inventory space, and as for the spoiler, well...
I like to think I am putting them out of their misery, or that they are no longer in there. There may have been hope for a cure but that died with their civilization (I can only remember them saying nothing they did would stop the corruption, let alone reverse it, and we certainly cannot do anything about it) Cutting them up is probably gross, but so is dressing an animal, and they would seem more like a golem now than flesh and bone (never seem to find those in them, but you find it in their lairs/ruins.)
b1e95dc632