Orchard Assessor?

[dr3amf1nd3r]

Has anyone tried this? So curious what the drill upgrade actually does. Do your orbs fly faster when you're under the fruit effects? Does Reflect cooldown faster?

I get super frustrated at games, because I'm apparently still a child, so I'm not gonna mess with the new char until the UI meets with player approval, but the discussions still interest me.

Thanks!

[Rithrin]

Yes, I have. The drill upgrades give a small bonus to orb damage. The upgrades go from +0.15 damage to +0.35 to +0.75 or something like that. The numbers look small, but the Assessor's orbs only do a few points of damage until the third strength upgrade where they do 10 damage, so it's actually a pretty big buff from a percentage standpoint early on. Whether it's worth it is another question.

I did enjoy the speed boost from the fruit, though, but I'd still stick another gadget overall. Would love to hear other people's thoughts on this.

[Noodl]

Repellent is just too good to replace with the lesser gadgets.

[dr3amf1nd3r]

I know repellent is too good. Our options are: nerf repellent, buff the other gadgets, remove repellent from the game, or remove all gadgets but repellent from the game. I do not understand people who would vote for options 3 or 4.

Also Rithrin: thanks for the feedback!

[The Squirmy Wormies]

Originally posted by Rithrin:

Yes, I have. The drill upgrades give a small bonus to orb damage. The upgrades go from +0.15 damage to +0.35 to +0.75 or something like that. The numbers look small, but the Assessor's orbs only do a few points of damage until the third strength upgrade where they do 10 damage, so it's actually a pretty big buff from a percentage standpoint early on. Whether it's worth it is another question.

I thought the orchard buff was a multiplier, so 0.75 = 1.75x base damage?

[Rithrin]

Originally posted by The Squirmy Wormies:

I thought the orchard buff was a multiplier, so 0.75 = 1.75x base damage?

I'm not going to say there's no possibility that I'm wrong, but the wording did not suggest it was multiplicative. It could also just be poorly worded. I certainly didn't feel like it was giving me a 75% bonus to mining strength. That would probably be a little ridiculous considering the fruit buff can last longer than a whole cycle when overcharged.

On the Engineer it increases your mining speed, which is kind of a multiplicative buff to your strength in a roundabout way.

In game, the description of the upgrade has not changed for the Assessor, it still says "Increase the fruits mining boost, letting you mine faster", but the actual text on the upgrades are as follows:
- first upgrade: 2 Iron 1 Water "Mining Strength Buff: +0.15"
- second upgrade: 4 Iron 2 Water "Mining Strength Buff: +0.15"
- third upgrade: 6 Iron 4 Water "Mining Strength Buff: +0.20"

So in total you get +0.50 "Mining Strength Buff". The Assessor's stats don't list "Mining Strength" anywhere, you just have "Sphere Base Damage 1" and "Sphere Damage transcending Rock Hardness 6%" when starting a new game.

I assume "Mining Strength Buff: +0.50" would apply to your "Sphere Base Damage". If you upgrade Sphere Damage once, you go to "Sphere Base Damage 2", the second upgrade takes you to 4, and the third to 10. So a maxed fruit would put you at 1.5, 2.5, and 10.5 respectively. Going from 1 to 1.5 damage is huge, from 2 to 2.5 is also a good boost, but going from 10 to 10.5 seems lackluster.

But hey, I don't actually know how the game systems calculate assessor orb damage and rock hardness, really. The whole "transcends Rock Hardness" thing may actually be what receives the bonus, so it could go from 6% to 6.5%. If you're mining a rock that has 200 hp, 0.5% would be +10 damage total, which would be huge even compared to the final strength upgrade of 20. But is "Rock Hardness" the total HP of a rock? Or is the hardness just a modifier like the dense rock vs the dirt patches? How many HPs does a typical block have? I have no idea lol.

Maybe the dev would be nice enough to clarify :)

[Noodl]

Originally posted by dr3amf1nd3r:

I know repellent is too good. Our options are: nerf repellent, buff the other gadgets, remove repellent from the game, or remove all gadgets but repellent from the game. I do not understand people who would vote for options 3 or 4.

Also Rithrin: thanks for the feedback!

Buffing the others could be interesting. I honestly really like where repellent is and I don't want a lesser version of it, I think that just removes fun which is kind of the opposite of what you should do with a video game. But buffing orchard (and shield) would be awesome. Would love to see a better version of Orchard, though I haven't played with it enough to know exactly what that would be. I've been too spoiled by repellent to even give it a bigger chance. Only used it twice, and both times I felt it was...meh.

[PixelDemise]

Originally posted by Rithrin:

Originally posted by The Squirmy Wormies:

I thought the orchard buff was a multiplier, so 0.75 = 1.75x base damage?

I'm not going to say there's no possibility that I'm wrong, but the wording did not suggest it was multiplicative. It could also just be poorly worded. I certainly didn't feel like it was giving me a 75% bonus to mining strength. That would probably be a little ridiculous considering the fruit buff can last longer than a whole cycle when overcharged.

I can't speak to how it works with the manual mining, completely forgot to test it out on that, but I did some tests and it does indeed work multiplicatively with the Assessor's orbs. At different points during a run, I just counted how many bounces were needed to break blocks, and the numbers always reflected roughly that number.

If a block required 8 hits to break, when I had the .6 boost from the fruit, it would now take 5. If it required 11 hits, it would now only need 6. When I got the full .8 upgrade, blocks that would take 3 broke in 2, and blocks that took 10 broke in 5.

I'm unsure on how exactly it works numerically for the damage amount though, but if it works like I think it does, I think it's why you've felt like it isn't actually giving you such a large increase.

Like for example using much easier and neater numbers than in-game, a block with 100 HP, and you have 33 orb damage, that means the block takes 4 hits to break, but that 4th hit only actually removes that literal last HP since 3 hits does 99/100 damage. Grab the fruit when it's .4, and it increases your damage to 46, meaning it's 3 hits to break the block, when you get the fruit to .6, and it increases your power to 53, making the block now take 2 hits to destroy. But then upgrade the fruit to .8, and now your power is 59, meaning despite the upgrade, the block still takes 2 hits.

There are certain thresholds for damage dealt per orb hit where you need exponentially more and more of an increase to see a constant upgrade. In that example, once you get past 50 damage per orb, going from .2 to .4 lowered the hits by 1 since you got over the 33 damage threshold, but once you hit .6, you were over the 50 damage threshold and so any buff amount that doesn't bring your damage to at least 100 won't make the block break any faster.

The Engineer doesn't care as much, since he's mining in melee range, but since orbs need to bounce around, it means that one extra hit needed can take multiple seconds as it goes off and bounces back.

And that's without even factoring in that Rock Hardness thing. A max upgrade compression mining does only 1.2 damage, but ignores 90% of the hardness amount. I couldn't even figure out how to begin testing Compression mining's DPS, especially given that it would imply that this Hardness value is 99% of the reason rocks get harder to break, and that even the deepest rocks are within double digit HP numbers.

But regardless, very roughly, the fruit is multiplicative with the amount of orb hits needed to break a rock. Take the un-fruited number of hits, multiply it by 1.X, X being whatever your fruit buff amount is, and that's how many orb hits are needed while buffed up.