@@hollowknightenjoyer Terraria renders slightly _more_ than it normally shows! I assume it's a consistent size, no matter your resolution/zoom level, you can actually see how far it renders by using the "Better Zoom" mod!
also when i recently fought against them, i naturally did the running between the legs option, and never saw the arms to hit me. i also think the slowness is a decent mechanic as it can prevent new players from using gorilla (don’t know how to spell it) warfare tactics but should only be used one they are between far away and near
another massive grievance i have with this boss is just how repetetive it is. a boss with THIS much HP should not just be 3 attacks that loop within the span of ~6 seconds. i feel like if they change this boss they have to also do something about his ice attacks and expand his moveset a bit to make the fight more fun in general. that, and also giving more reason to get the loot from this boss. its as you say, there's almost nothing that's really worth getting from this boss unless you're gunning for it early on, and even then it usually gets outclassed by most weapons by the time you defeat Eater/Brain or Skeletron. only really eyebone is useful, and it's just quality of life at the end of the day.
They should've just gone with Don't Starve Together's HP value for Deerclops, with 4k on classic, ~5-6k on expert, and ~7-8k on master. That puts it a bit above Queen Bee and firmly pre-skeletron, which is really when Deerclops should be fought since the drops are pretty much useless post-skeletron. Shoutout to when Deerclops was first added and the HP scaling was bugged to use normal enemy HP scaling, so it had 14k on expert and 21k on master.
"how repetitive it is" you're comparing her with which bosses exactly to say that? she's one of the most unique bosses, and it's not like the other pre-hm bosses (and even some hm ones) have more than 3 attacks anyways, meanwhile, Deerclops is the only boss that changes her attacks based on the player's position, if the latter is far or above her head. "a boss with this much HP should not be just 3 attacks that loops within the span of ~6 seconds" her HP is reasonable and you can still beat her pretty fast, if you can't, it's either skill issue or you are skipping proggression so you can't complain about how long the fight is, remember that she's SUPPOSED to be fought after skeletron so she must have the stats of a boss of that level of proggression (even though she can be fought in the very early game because she doesn't despawn). her HP pool is high also because heat potion makes her dmg negligible and you could face-tank and DPS check her way more easily if she had a lower HP pool, she also only has 10 defense balancing out even more her high HP pool. and how is she "looping 3 attacks" any different from other pre-hm bosses? "expand his moveset" that is already the biggest in pre-hm and even among some hm bosses? -unique mechanic of beign invulnerable at a certain distance -snowball attack if player is far -3 hit attack with ice spikes if player is close -shadow hands if the player is above her head -constant shadow hands on expert+. "only really eyebone is usefull and it's really just quality of life in the end of the day" why are you disregarding QoL items? if anything eyebone is MORE valuable than weapons dropped from the bosses you mentioned because if you are opting to use it you can stick with it for the rest of your gameplay, even post-ml, because it won't get outclassed by another item that is the same with higher numbers.
It's not even clear that you're supposed to go beyween it's legs. Up until this video I had no idea that you could just walk under it without getting hit.
Yeah, I've been playing for years and had a rough time the first time beating Deerclops. All enemies deal contact damage, with the telegraph being their sprite. Only exception I can think of is Moon Lord, but in his case, the active/damaging parts are eyes and lasers. Also, flattening an arena in the snow biome isn't something i think to do every playthrough.
Yeah, as a non DS player I had no idea either so the fight went on like 5x longer than it should have cause I was spacing to avoid damage the only way I knew how to and making it invincible. I didn't really like it.
Deerclops goes one of two ways: 1. God please kill me now why the fuck won't it die already this is getting ridiculous. 2. Alright here we go time to fight and it's dead. No in-between.
This just makes me think about how the Eye of Cthulu was implemented in dst. Deerclops got fucked up in Terraria, meanwhile the Eye and to a lesser extent the Twins of Terror are fairly designed in dst.
Got a Steam deck, decided to try out terraria again after almost a decade. First boss I meet, by accident, deerclops. At first I grew incredibly frustrated at (what I thought was) my inability to use the steam deck controls properly. Because, obviously, if this boss is the first one I meet, it's gotta be pretty weak and it's just me being a noob, right? Well, I found out he does not respawn, so I thought, hey, lets use this boss to learn the controls properly. I did, killed him, and still felt like an utter noob for taking so long with him. Imagine my surprise when I eventually summoned the eye, and turns out no! It was the deerclops that was the bastard.
@@juandavidacunapinzon740 I've always felt like it's supposed to be some kind of power scaling thing, like the boss they got from terraria are the eyes, which are some of the easiest bosses. Terraria universe is just built different
@@juandavidacunapinzon740hey his expert mode drop that gives you your own shadow hands is actually pretty good early game. Gives good defense for less tanky builds
@@varun3771 That feels a bit harsh, since I can see some value in it, especially looking at the wiki for a reminder on what it does and how it happens. It's like the spore sac from Plantera, or the volatile gelatin from Queen Slime, yes there are better options for weapons against bosses and such, but I'd say it could be a decent choice if you don't have many good options. The wiki even says it can be good for events like the Tier 1 Old One's Army, or for menial tasks like fishing where the player is left defenseless and has to depend on their minions / accessories for support.
Literally every single boss except Moon Lord has contact damage over pretty much their entire bodies, there's nothing that would suggest that you would be able to walk under Deerclops without taking damage
With Moonlord, the main indication is just that he's so massive it would be nearly impossible to not contact his sprite while fighting. Deerclops does not have this property.
What I really like about your idea of giving it a death ray is that, in a weird way, it actually turns deerclops into a training fight for the real moon lord at the end of the game. There's no other boss that uses a sweeping ray like that, and the stakes are so incredibly high by the time you get to moon lord (fuck up too much and you have to do the pillars again... That is WAY more punishing than the usual "wait until night/grind new spawn items" because the pillars are an *ordeal.* ) that it's brutal to try and actually *learn* how the final boss works. If deerclops has it, by very nature of not despawning it has the *lowest* stakes of any boss, so it's oddly perfect to stick something like that on. A player has all the time in the world to figure out how that works and how to dodge it with worse equipment, so come the end of the game, it's a movement and even a telegraph they've got some experience with already. Is it weird to use a crossover boss for that? I mean yeah, but Terraria's just a weird game. Just look at how sentry summoner basically only exists because of DD2 lol. I think that is a *phenomenal* idea that sticks true to the source material *and* serves a function in the grand overarching game design. I'm not sure if that's what you were thinking when you came up with the idea but I wholeheartedly support it on those grounds alone.
Gonna use this as a chance to complain Sentry summoner used to be very fun, mainly because when using the DD2 ranged sentries, they would immediately fire, giving summoner a fun too use attack option before whips Now they have to wait a lil, completely removing that option. Tbh I think all sentries should have that effect, firing immediately upon spawning and allowing for an interesting way of attacking as summoner
Most of the attacks proposed are actually in infernum deerclops. Down to the lazer, darkness, and hand only attacks, all while keeping the same three stage ice wall attacks. It's quite a fun boss. (Also, I took to doing jumping loops over deerclops one side ice walls because it's easier to deal with the grouped hands than the random ones.)
2:48 I like how he just sounds so calm at first when he talks about the Moonlord's projectiles Then delivers such a frustrating tone right as he's about to mention Deerclop's projectiles
Why does the deerclops even use shadow hands? It's not really shadow-aligned in DST, and there's no other mention of Charlie being around. It would have made more sense to give it a single laser blast like the Winter's Feast event
It’s likely because(along with deerclops himself) the shadow hands are one of the most recognizable aspects of DST. A core aspect of the game that appears relatively early.
I think it honestly would have been better if deer clops gave you a sanity debuff that slowly increases as time goes on (reduced by eating food) if it gets over a certain amount, slow moving shadow creatures spawn off screen and make their way to the fight, they shouldn't have much hp, needing you to focus them for maybe 1-2 seconds for them to die and if the sanity debuff reaches max terror beaks spawn which are faster and require a bit more focus to kill them. (THIS IS IF THEY WANTED A SANITY MEHCANIC WITH SHADOW CREATURES AT ALL I DON'T THINK DEERCLOPS AS IT IS INGAME CURRENTLY SHOULD HAVE THIS MECHANIC)
The deathray idea is actually already implemented in the modded difficulty Eternity Mode from Fargo’s Souls Mod. In that mod, the “1,2,3” rhythm is kept throughout the entire fight but it has subtle changes that start being implemented as its health gets lower - one of these is a deathray that sweeps the side of him you’re on right after the 3rd attack, forcing you to react quickly and jump over him before it hits you. It’s definitely better than the shadow hands in vanilla (The shadow hands in eternity mode are actually pretty redundant. they just grab you and force you to mash your WASD keys to escape but deerclops doesnt attack for a couple of seconds while this happens, so theres no cheap hits. he can appear either side of you after doing this so you do have to react to where he comes from but it doesn’t really interact with the shadow hand attack, but the shadow hands being kind of useless is more fun than them being unfair) Deerclops isn’t even close to the most fun boss in eternity mode, but it’s certainly a step up from telefrags.
And then the shadow hands come back in Masochist Mode (a Fargo's difficulty harder than Eternity) and only prove the point of this video further - that shadow hands suck and contribute nothing to a well designed fight. (Not a slight against Masochist, though, since it is an intentionally kinda stupid difficulty and the fact that readding a vanilla mechanic can ruin some fights is definitely worth showcasing in a difficulty like that)
The main reason why I hated deerclops is because it punishes you for not being a melee brawler or a tank. I prefer summoner/ranger, and this is the only boss in the game that out right forces you to stay in melee range for the entire fight. It's a really poor design for a sandbox game. Imagine if the eye of cthulu did the same thing. The don't starve crossover gear is also the weakest stuff in the game conceptially, with only the expert drop being worth anything at all...
This actually isint as big of an issue as you think. A boss forcing you into melee distance isint a bad thing when 1 the boss doesnt really have a way to deal with far away opponents or flying ones and 2 given the fact the majority of mage and ranged weapons dont get worse at close range at all and in the case of summoner you actually want to be that close to bosses anyway to get whip hits in. Deerclops doesnt actually do much damage even with summoner gear. He can be tanked pretty easily even without full warding. If anything the worst thing about the fight outside of the hands is the fact he can inflict frozen. No boss should be able to inflict a debuff that stops you from playing the game
@@NotSnak The problem with forcing the other classes into melee range is a massive problem. The defence differences between the best prehardmode summoner and the best melee brawler is 15 vs 25 (no defence reforges). I don't know if you play in the harder difficulties, but in master difficulty, defence is 1:1 with damage (in classic it's 1:0.5, meaning your defence is half as effective), which means that the best summoner build would be taking 10 more damage per attack in this boss fight. Summoners are meant to have agile builds that focus more on dodging than tanking, but forcing you into melee range with a boss that has undodgable attacks (shadow hands) isn't fair. In master, deerclops does 60 damage on melee and shadow hands, and does 78 on ice spikes. That means that a summoner with 15 defence is taking 45 damage per hit, with many of those hits being unavoidable. Compare that to the melee tanker taking 35 and you can see why it's a design flaw to put a squishy class in melee range.
@@Handles_AreStupid i play on master exclusively sometimes FtW. Defense really isint an issue. Again summoner actively wants to be close to bosses to get summon tag damage and in the case of deerclops thats fine because his attacks are fairly tankable even on Ftw and GFB. Setting up a heart lantern campfire and some potions + having some warding or a worm scarf. Or endurance and warmth potions. Flinx coat + platinum pants and helmet make deerclops's damage trivial as long as you arent getting hit constantly. If you only get hit by the hands here or there then its fine. Still poorly designed but having to get close to the boss is not an issue even for the weakest class defensively
@@Handles_AreStupid yes but it is in your best intrest to stay close to bosses. Whip damage contributes a fair bit to summoners high damage. Additionally most whips have on additional hit effects that last only 1 to 2 seconds such as the speed bonuses. you're encouraged to stay close and do alot of damage with then
Completely agree. Deerclops was one of the hardest bosses to beat in my master mode no hit journey. The poor telegraphing and immediate spawning of the hand’s hit boxes, racked up so many attempts.
@@coin4898 I'm pretty sure challenges aren't exactly supposed to be easy or a goal of the game Sure, some games present challenges but for sandbox games it literally doesn't make sense to give the player a challenge at least not one you can't overcome by just improving slightly, getting lucky, or getting better gear anyway point is that's why it's a challenge saying "the game isn't about not getting hit" is like telling someone water isn't about having flavor Of course it's not, but why not add some flavor mix, bc, you know, you can
deeclops' difficulty spike in expert/master pretty much gives players 2 options: cheese the fight with minecarts/projectiles or wait until you are essentially pre-mech boss where fighting him makes all his drops redundant other than the eyebone.
Idk, to me the boss is okay to beat in the middle of prehardmode. I would argue that the boss becomes too easy after queen bee and skeletron, because pretty much all you have to do is not get beat up by the ice spikes and not go far from the boss. I beat him with pre-skeletron gear by just jumping to his other side when he was about to do his ice attack
You can beat it as the first boss even on master mode if you set your spawn near the place where you fight it and keep dying and dying until you kill it
I've never died to deer clips, I usually fight it immediately after EoW and it just doesn't seem to do any damage. I didn't actually know about the legs hit box thing so I've just been dodging the swarm of shadow hands and facetanking the hits from the ice attack, with shadow armor and a worm scarf it's not a threat.
Even if deerclops is not a good boss he is still my favorite pre-hardmode boss because of its design and don't even get me started on his theme. One of the best boss themes in the game
as someone with hundreds of hours in both terraria and dst, i think they should also make it more clear how deerclops is meant to be fought. i mean, even after so long in both games, i had no clue that the intended strategy was to kite it like in dst until after my first couple fights with it
Yeah, you should always assume new players will be going in with zero prior knowledge, and deerclops does not to that. I always tried to go over it and got my ass clapped by shadow hands, so I always thought the fight was way to difficult for that stage of the game. But because it doesn't despawn on death I would repeatedly die, have to walk all the way back over to the snow biome, chip away a small amount of its health, and repeat
@@TheLifeLaVita There's a difference between figuring out when a boss is going a specific attack, and how to avoid that attack to begin with. Even once you memorize what attacks it's going to do and when, absolutely nothing about Deerclops says you should dodge them by *walking through the boss' sprite* , because the game has presumably ingrained on you at that point that all enemies deal contact damage, and you're unlikely to have any i-frames at that point.
@@Dinoman972 you talk like that's supposed to be a bad thing while it's a unique feature. It's not that hard to realize that you're so used to 10 years of no-deerclops that you are biased against it. New players have no problems. Deerclops is rare and absolutely not mandatory. You don't find its summon in chests like the eye. So drop the bias and let's avoid making up problems when there are none thank you
@@TheLifeLaVita I literally only started playing the game shortly after 1.4.4. came out. I'm by no means a Terraria expert, but I didn't have to die to Skeletron 100 times and memorize its entire attack pattern to figure out I should dodge its hands in general, and destroy them before the main body so it has less attacks overall. Because that's actually intuitive game design that builds on everything the game had taught me so far, and that's what made the fight fun. But absolutely nothing about it prepared me for a zombie-type enemy that punishes being anywhere except within its sprite, because that's the opposite of what every single other enemy in the game up until that point does. And I couldn't have possibly figured out I can move through its legs without looking it up online, as seems to be the case with multiple other people in this comment section. It's unique, yes, but not in a good way. And being optional is hardly an excuse for being simply not fun, especially when the player has so little control over when the boss is summoned. Imagine a more casual player is trying to make a nice build in the snow biome, then a blizzard appears and they have to fight this thing out of nowhere. I'm not sure how many other newer players share this sentiment, but it's bold to claim that not liking Deerclops is universally an old guard thing with no proof.
Deerclops needs to hit A LOT harder to incentivize people to kite it Also, the shadow hands are f-ing up the rhythm of the boss and thats a very serious issue when it relies on kiting and timing
A while back I did a true melee nohit, and deerclops was the first boss to truly make me suffer for no reason other than the shadow hands. A fight that would've otherwise been really fun turned into me staying very slightly in front of deerclops so I could move as little as possible to dodge him, because the more I moved, the more likely I would get hit by an unavoidable attack
Not only that, but as someone who has never played don't starve but have played terraria a ton, the boss is so different from all the others and yet there is no real way to know that you should stay that close to the boss so that he doesn't do the high damage ice rocks or whatever (there is the obvious indicator that you should stay close enough to damage him, but nothing suggests being even closer makes him not do that attack), AND there is absolutely nothing indicating the legs have no hitbox, I didn't even know that until watching this just now, since literally all other enemies in Terraria have a hitbox that looks like the exact size of their sprite.
I have been no hitting terraria bosses recently for fun, dear clops wasn't the hardest, but the most annoying because it just felt like the hands would sometimes be completely unavoidable
With a title like that, I was ready to get mad at this video when I clicked on it, but I found myself agreeing with everything you said! I haven't fought the boss on expert mode so I didn't know about the agony that is the shadow hands, but I'm glad to hear from somebody who likes the fight as much as I do. The rhythm of the "intended" fight is incredibly satisfying, and it feels very faithful to Deerclops's home game.
The main if not only reason I don’t usually fight deerclops until after hardmode in my master mode playthroughs because he has so much damn health. The best prehardmode weapons still take like 15 minutes. It just takes so long it’s really annoying
For some reason I remember this boss being easy to cheese if you just stood under it, was I just remembering it wrong? Either way good analysis of the problems with it
Deerclops has a blind spot in its hitboxes at its feet, where only the third hit of the combo and shadow hands can hit you. It's far from safe and you will die unless you have high defense or an obscenely strong whipstacking build that can outdps it, since that third hit freezes you (which cancels a grapple, which you probably use for knockback immunity to stay there), hits pretty hard, and the shadow hand RNG can still fuck you over.
I'm pretty sure the cheese method in question is the furniture + minecart method that avoids the ice spikes and fools any shadow hand that predictively aims, which you mentioned in passing in your cheese strats video. One other thing that could be changed with the Deerclops fight is there being some year-round obtainable freeze immunity, probably with Warmth Potion because it makes thematic sense. You can build up a lot of defense before the fight and it's enough to facetank most attacks, but the freeze effect makes it hard to return to safety if you get hit too many times.
The hands were what got me excited initially, I figured it was like Skeletron projectiles... At first you go ''What am I supposed to do?!'', then the very pattern itself makes it obvious when you stop to look at it, not with shadow hands. I think they are the key to making this fight a bit more varied, I wanna make quick calls on whether I can engage or, if a hand is starting to form with a generous telegraph, for example, dodge backwards instead. Then you avoid ranged attacks by closing back in, then get a guaranteed window within at least his next 3 attacks. Instead of ruining the cqc dodge loop, it breaks it up and makes it less repetitive. I also really like the idea of having them synced and then spawn at deterministic positions relative to deerclops, you see them spawn as you dodge past, then quickly decide how to move immediately upon passing him. But it would be nice to have a reason to back off a bit here and there, maybe one of the given hand spawns isn't about dodging quickly and instead about continuing to move away fast, still a quick call to make.
Yep, I went through the same woes when I tried nohitting Deerclops on release. I eventually stopped the dodge rhythm altogether and just hopped in place to avoid the ice spikes, giving me more reaction time if a shadow hand spawned. I complained about the randomness on the forums once, and it was acknowledged by a dev, but nothing was actually done about it. Sad.
7:13 If they don't wanna completely rework how they function they can have it spawn off screen and lunge from the sides at the player exactly with the rhythm of the attack, depending on health they also get a chance to come from above or below inflicting blackout on hit.
i really like your points here, and i also like the fix of having the shadow hands come from much further off screen and travel more slowly and less frequently so you have time to disentangle yourself from the close-quarters combat, dodge the hand, and then fall back into a rhythm. also while we're on the topic, why can't the radio thing be placed like a monolith? in every way except name, the radio thing is a monolith. i just want to be able to place a decorative radio thing, red!
Deerclops in don't starve: hahaha i destroy your base at night.new players fear me, but if you defeat me i will give you an amazing item to survive never ending rain and thunder strikes next season. Deerclops in terraria: i have shit attackpattern,small chance of spawning during rare weather condition,no summon item found unless crafted,good luck searching for flinx fur I give shit and forgotten items that are worse than used to defeat me.
So, something... interessting just happened. I had never fought this boss before nor knew how it'd spawn, so one night after defeating the Torch God and running around replacing torches, it was naturally a blizzard in the snow biome and this dude spawned and wrecked my stuff. Now maybe I should have just picked up my things (Mediumcore) and returned, but since it's health got lower and you could return after dying, I kept coming back, slowly whittling it away while dying more times than I had died before on that world. On the last life, I died while it had litterally 30 health left, and after a few seconds, it also died. Upon returning, it had not dropped anything. To say my disappointment was immeasurable and my day ruined is an understatement. (seriously, it does not drop anything if you are dead while it dies?)
Honestly im too dumb to realise the attacks have pattern, so i just assumed that the boss was weirdly annoyingly designed to counter the way u r supposed to beat him. And then every other cheese devs ould think of. Which made it a very weird raid boss for me and my friends
Huh, it never occurred to me that you're supposed to do this run-through-the-legs thing, since it makes the hands so hard to dodge. I always did the strat where you kite in one direction with a ranged weapon, like you showed at 4:00.
Good video essay. I think you touched on the reasons that Deerclops is unappealing better than anyone else has. I would add one thing though: the fact that Deerclops doesn't despawn when you die kind of ruins the fight, because it means no matter how good or bad you are you can just throw yourself at the boss over and over again until it runs out of health. There's a good reason other bosses despawn when they kill you, and encouraging players to beat the boss in such a boring and unintuitive way is not good design
Oh yes, isn't that fun? Did you know it can actually still continue to spawn naturally after you've beaten it, unlike every other boss? So, even if you've killed deer before, it can still spawn at night in the tundra. Hope you didn't like setting up home base there!
Some small insight about the scream attack: it only enters it if all checks for other phases failed. Additionally, it cannot start the animation(and therefore inflict the debuff) if any of these are true A. It is moving up or down (includes falling, but not teleporting or hoiking) B. 120 frames have not passed since it last finished an attack C. the target is immune to slowed (like wearing an ankh shield) D. Your distance to it in the X axis is less than 100 units, being equal to 6.25 tiles(16 units = 1 tile) Note about the distance on the X position: it's measured from the center of deerclops' hitbox to the closest point inside of your hitbox. Most of the time, this point is on the right edge of your hitbox if deerclops is to your right, and vice versa.
Ok, that's good to know. I spent a while summoning Deerclops and trying to get close enough to fight it without being slowed and like 80% of the time it would happen, I could never quite identify why it wouldn't happen sometimes but it was probably due to moving up or down.
@@sorbetcafe if you ever need to know something from the code, such as hitboxes or detailed mechanics, let me know! I like explaining this stuff. I say hitboxes because some projectiles have hitboxes that aren't accurately displayed by mods with hitbox visualizers(like some of EoL's projectiles)
I first encountered Deerclops when I was fishing for frozen crates. As a non-DS player, I had no clue what it was at all. I saw a boss healthbar appear and I'm like oh shit what the hell is going on. I didn't know how I was supposed to fight it, I jumped in the air to dodge its shards. I had good defense so I was able to tank shadow hands, but they were definitely annoying. I'm pretty sure the only real reason I won was because I had The Bee's Knees and the Bee Gun with good modifiers, and you can't really miss when the bees fly towards the enemy's hitbox anyways. I was well post-Skeletron at that point and was gearing up for the Wall, so I didn't really gain much except for a pet that lets me store inventory overflow and a REALLY annoying axe.
My personal gripe with Deerclops (and some other non-bosd enemies) is the debuff, the idea of being chilled making you slower makes sense, but it really doesn't play fun since A. It makes dodging considerably harder, and if you can't dodge, you can't easily get rid of the debuff B. The debuff is removed by a specific potion/accessory that you would only need for this fight (and a few specific enemies) and literally nothing else in the game (Correction: the debuff Deerclops applies is Slowed, not Chilled, meaning you can't remove the debuff without a hardmode accessory. Which is arguably worse than having to use a niche accessory/potion) The shadow hands exacerbate this issue as well, so actually maybe I only have a problem with it because of the hands
The boss doesn't inflict chilled, just Frozen and Slowed (which only lasts for a split second so it's almost comepletely ignorable). Not saying that makes it better though, because instead she inflicts slow, which you need a hardmode exclusive item to be immune to, and by that point almost none of Deerclops' drops are useful.
@@venomousslime6797 Nah, you just pointed out an incorrect part of my statement, and I'm acknowledging it and expressing my dislike for the fact that it's worse than I thought
If I could change one thing, I’d make these changes: Deerclop’s roar would have a reverse knockback effect on the semicircle above him which would drag you into his body, but he’d only roar if the player is above him but not out of range (aka: he’s still vulnerable). The Shadow Hands would work like Calamitas Clone’s projectile phase transition, where Deerclops goes invincible and keeps roaring to summon swarms of Shadow Hands to sweep the arena by either swooping into you or overhead. During Phase 2, each time Deerclops roars, he summons like 4-5 Shadow Hands which work like the phase transition where they swoop at you or overhead, but slower since Deerclops has other attacks now. It’s not very Don’t Starve-y, but it works for Terraria and would fit the rhythm mostly. The only issue I can see is if one of the Shadow Hands swoops into as you pass under Deerclops, since you can’t jump over the hand or you’d bump into Deerclops.
Ok but Deervlops isn't the worst designed boss, it is Queen Slime. Just projectile spam, minions spam that conributes to projectile spam, and her only actual attack is a slam that has the worst defined hitbox in the game.
Queen slime is my favorite pre plantera boss, the minions are a non issue, they are a game mechanic to force the player to not backtrack and instead keep running one direction. She always summons the minions behind her in both of her phases, so build a skybridge and hold A or D until you win. If queen slime feels like an annoying minion reliant bullet hell boss, then you just havent adapted to the boss's unique design
@@bombthing Unique scenario requirement =/= avoidance of bullshit. Sure, plenty of other bosses benefit from kiting or otherwise looping movement, but unless you take an large amount of time to clear the children, Queen Slime introduces too much unpredictable projectiles. If they were slower but still bounced, I find Queen Slime would be more tolerable, but as it is, I have to agree that she's just not fun at all.
yeah queen slime is indeed one of my least favorite bosses NOT BAD just not enjoyable, and without wing is a death sentence. rewards good, design simple, the fight? all over the place and the minions are not good sniper slime, spamming and flying, feels like your fighting an army in the worse way possible BUT STILL SHE'S FORGIVABLE SINSE SHE'S AN OPTIONAL BOSS NOT A REQUIREMENT
Fun fact: In the Fargo’s soul mod eternity mode, the deerclops DOES have a deathray attack in its final phase, likely in reference to the same thing you mentioned in this video
Sidenote: I hadn’t known that this was a legitimate reference to don’t starve, and I thought it was just a weird thing the Fargo devs came up with, so when you mentioned it in this video I was genuinely surprised.
or a rework to some of them, i feel like giving the player deerclops' ice attack is the most obvious way to go, as it's, simply put "fucking awesome" i'd say replace the dumbass shadow hands the bone helm has with it 😮👉 true melee support 👈😲
This was an extremely well written video essay. I hope relogic sees and implements this. They may have already though, I didn't enjoy fighting deerclops because of exactly what you mentioned and so never really bothered.
Queen Slime is pretty bad, but the main thing that's frustrating about Deerclops to me is that it could actually be good. The whole premise of the boss fight is undermined by a single attack, whereas Queen Slime is just all-around a mess of projectiles. Ruining something good is worse than being bad to begin with, imo.
Much agreed. Gotta hand it to snow armor though for the clutch- set bonus makes you immune to the frozen debuff that deerclops applies with the ice attack. It means losing 7 defense as compared to the gladiator armor as well as losing the knockback immunity, but I'll take it if it means not having WASD and my grapple disabled.
I actually like this boss. I didn't even knew you supposed to fight him from the bottom. I always would make row of platforms and shoot my minishark or whatever i had before defeating WoF. I found that its quite enjoyable to dodge his hands or this ice pieces from the ground. Its some good mix between dodging and actual terraria-like fight. First try i even didn't got slow debuff lol.
I remember when I first got back into Terraria after a long break. I encounter this beast early on, get destroyed repeatedly and think to myself, "am I really THAT rusty?!" Then I fight literally anything else early game and realize, no. This fight is just outta pocket.
In my opinion the shadow hand should spawn in top of deerclops, or the way that deerclops is atacking, like if deerclop is atacking to the right, the shadow hand will spawn from the right and move to the right (and stoping at front of deerclopses leg), and when he does the two way spike (the one at the end of the combo) one hand will spawn to the left and move to the right, and another one fromright to the left, but staying close to the ground, this could be giving the new player kinda of a hint on how to dodge deerclops attack and also discouraged player to just tank deerclops attack
Love this, thanks much. Been looking for ways to improve this boss, I feel much the same way -- you're supposed to dodge and use close-quarters combat, but it's just *so* counterintuitive compared to the entire rest of the game, and the fight itself doesn't feel like it does a good job of encouraging that. As stated, the drops are mediocre at best, and it sucks that you can randomly encounter this with only an ironskin potion and a shackle. The natural spawn doesn't *go away* either, so goodbye tundra bases literally forever. The CC effects the boss has are terrible to deal with as well. It's *designed* to give the player slow, permanently (in short it checks to see if current target has slow effect and, if not, applies it to all nearby players). The freeze effect in expert and master lasts as long as or longer than your s, so getting hit once could very well mean you're hit two or even three times. And of course, slow/chilled/frozen make it that much harder to dodge outright, which further incentivises the player to *stay the hell away* rather than get up close. There are people that swear by simply jumping over whenever boss does ice spikes attacks, but I genuinely can never get that to work, and I'm wondering now if part of that is due to the hands foobar-ing the entire interaction.
It should be like the light boss, that in the day its weak and only does the ice attacks and in the night it has the beam hands and more hp plus extinguishes nearby light sources.
This boss is utterly fucking ridiculous in Fargo's Eternity Mode. It disables the ability to stand on platforms and can freeze you, and because it attacks so fast, it can stunlock you to death.
it's true, queen slime is also really bad. but deerclops is on par i'd say. queen slime is at least easy to defeat once you learn that you just need to keep running in one direction from the boss to beat it, the slimes she spawns can't reach you that way. most of the fight is just bad because there's really only ONE way to fight it viably. deerclops is just constant hell with the RNG infused shadow hands and repetitive fight, though
I've fought it once, and on normal mode after skeletron, but before the wall. I didn't even bother building an arena. I just went to a spot in the tundra friendly to easy movement and spawned it in, and I defeated it, hardly using any healing potions. I'm not sure if I even had buffs on. It was SO EASY thanks to its immensely predictable attack pattern.
Got around to fighting this boss. Still hate it. The fact that the Shield's dash makes you bounce off and get hit feels counterintuitive to how you're intended to dodge its attacks. Shadow Hands also suck for every reason already said. My survivability did increase when fighting so there's that.
feel like making it so that the hands cant spawn within like a 4-5 player standing vertically radius of deerclops' legs would make it so that they still cut you off and hit you, but they dont hit you directly *into* him or one of his attacks that you were just trying to dodge edit: or if they made it so that before the hands gain a hitbox, they come in from very far away and then when they get close enough, they gain a hitbox (indicated by colour change or opacity change presentably) and dash at the player, this way the *are* still random, BUT you have PLENTY of time to react to them
About the deerclops deathray attack you proposed, Infernum (Calamity mod expansion that makes every boss harder)’s deerclops adds a deathray attack to its movepool.
I literally never fight this boss. Never could’ve gotten the attack pattern down, shadow hands, and lack of good loot doesn’t incentivize me much. Doesn’t help that I play almost exclusively Calamity, where I’m fighting much better bosses at that point in progression.
I think relogic was afraid of people seeing deerclops as a free boss at the start of the game, so they added a mechanic that would always damage you to prevent you from beating the boss with just skill and barely any items
He basically said deerclops is a shitty bossf8ght because the shadow hands are completely unpredictable and they have random speed when they spawn and come from offscreen
Dearclops isn't a terraria boss, he's from don't starve. So technically you can't say he's the worst in the game because he's not from the game. Does that sound fair?
That’s not really what they’re saying though. They’re saying he’s the worst boss because the shadow hands (the attack terraria-esque in nature) ruin it.
I really like the darkness idea, especially if they make it so that it works with the don’t starve seed so that you need to grab a light or take damage.
I really like the variety Deerclops adds to the roster of Terraria bosses, but I wish it was executed better - best thing to do imo would prob add an indicator to go in between the legs
What if instead of the shadow hands Deerclops takes a moment to roar which summons a Hound or two offscreen to chase you, itd break the repetitiveness of this boss which is another issue people have with the boss as you've have to move away from Deerclops to dodge the hounds from hitting you into deerclops attacks which would be an advantage over the eye beam. Also an easy way to show off Hounds which in DT are super fast terrifying threats in the early game - much like Deerclops.
Deerclops is made and ruined by the lack of despawning to me. Because he doesn’t despawn I fight him any time I get flinx fur during pre-hard. If he despawned I wouldn’t fight him until he’s the last boss before the Wall, which I wouldn’t even do because his drops aren’t useful at that point. I’d only fight him for Chester.
The shadow hands never hit me, but i fight deerclops by hovering just in front of him in the air with rocket boots. You have to be precise but you can take 0 damage if you do it right, i beat him in expert mode with a sbowball launcher and use the hand warmers so i dont get the freeze debuff
Infernum mod changes him almost as it was described in this video. In his second phase It adds the eye laser, makes hands either spawn in fixed positions above and below the player(to force him to move horizontally) or makes a half-circle behind player's movement direction, or he just spawns them randomly at NORMAL distance making the player to kill them. He also summons them around himself in phase two to force player to stay close
This is why I cheese it pretty much every playthrough to get the early Chester, and then fight it in early hardmode/late prehardmode if I feel like having an actual fight
Another solution: Have the hands spawn somewhere along the circle around Deerclops that triggers invincibility, then hold their position for a moment, and shoot in a straight line at the player, no homing or turning. Encourages close quarters by not factoring player location into where it spawns (by adding extra motivation to keep you inside that circle), while also shaking up the movement in a both random but telegraphed way.
Me: walking in snow biome during a snow storm, only defeating eye of cuthulu, and dealing good damage ageinst the eow. Deerclops: haii :D Me: *no please* Deerclops: i shall terminate you >:)
6:32 that kinda sounds like hands that Ancient Fuelweaver spawns during fight in dst, they don't infict any debuf they just make Fuelweaver invincible for time while hands are alive
honestly i like deerclops having the shadow hands as it references the fact that deerclops has the second highest sanity drain aura (-400/s) in don't starve together, and feast clops has the highest (-800/s). expert mode giving deerclops a laser attack would fit really well, in fact infernum mode from the infernum addon for calamity mod gives deerclops a laser attack as well as a ring of shadow hands like you mentioned. personally i think a better change than the shadow hands would be making the first two ice attacks in the combo larger the lower deerclops's health is (similar to what revengeance mode in calamity does), and then making a single shadow hand appear once the ice hitboxes from the third attack also appear. this way the player is punished more for not going through deerclops's legs to the other side of him during the first two, and the player needs to stay on their toes to dodge the shadow hand after backing away from deerclops in the third attack.
Given how shadow hands work in DST, seems like the natural choice is to have them always come in from offscreen.
good idea but then cant someone just zoom in a lot and let another player easily kill them or just oine player zoom in an out?
@@hollowknightenjoyer off screen as in what is rendered, not shown
@@dish7877 wdym?
@@hollowknightenjoyer as in its the same distance for every player no matter how zoomed in you are
@@hollowknightenjoyer Terraria renders slightly _more_ than it normally shows!
I assume it's a consistent size, no matter your resolution/zoom level, you can actually see how far it renders by using the "Better Zoom" mod!
it doesn’t have leg hit boxes? jesus no wonder it took ages to kill as a pre hard mode player with the plasma sword
also when i recently fought against them, i naturally did the running between the legs option, and never saw the arms to hit me. i also think the slowness is a decent mechanic as it can prevent new players from using gorilla (don’t know how to spell it) warfare tactics but should only be used one they are between far away and near
oh expert mode change that explains it.
@@soggyflipflop the word you are looking for is guerrilla
@@soggyflipflop gorilla warfare sounds like an awesome nature documentary about 2 packs of gorillas having a war against eachother
@@nguyentanphat7tc324 hell yeah
another massive grievance i have with this boss is just how repetetive it is. a boss with THIS much HP should not just be 3 attacks that loop within the span of ~6 seconds. i feel like if they change this boss they have to also do something about his ice attacks and expand his moveset a bit to make the fight more fun in general. that, and also giving more reason to get the loot from this boss. its as you say, there's almost nothing that's really worth getting from this boss unless you're gunning for it early on, and even then it usually gets outclassed by most weapons by the time you defeat Eater/Brain or Skeletron. only really eyebone is useful, and it's just quality of life at the end of the day.
They should've just gone with Don't Starve Together's HP value for Deerclops, with 4k on classic, ~5-6k on expert, and ~7-8k on master. That puts it a bit above Queen Bee and firmly pre-skeletron, which is really when Deerclops should be fought since the drops are pretty much useless post-skeletron.
Shoutout to when Deerclops was first added and the HP scaling was bugged to use normal enemy HP scaling, so it had 14k on expert and 21k on master.
I totally agree about how repetitive the boss is.
"how repetitive it is"
you're comparing her with which bosses exactly to say that? she's one of the most unique bosses, and it's not like the other pre-hm bosses (and even some hm ones) have more than 3 attacks anyways, meanwhile, Deerclops is the only boss that changes her attacks based on the player's position, if the latter is far or above her head.
"a boss with this much HP should not be just 3 attacks that loops within the span of ~6 seconds"
her HP is reasonable and you can still beat her pretty fast, if you can't, it's either skill issue or you are skipping proggression so you can't complain about how long the fight is, remember that she's SUPPOSED to be fought after skeletron so she must have the stats of a boss of that level of proggression (even though she can be fought in the very early game because she doesn't despawn). her HP pool is high also because heat potion makes her dmg negligible and you could face-tank and DPS check her way more easily if she had a lower HP pool, she also only has 10 defense balancing out even more her high HP pool. and how is she "looping 3 attacks" any different from other pre-hm bosses?
"expand his moveset"
that is already the biggest in pre-hm and even among some hm bosses?
-unique mechanic of beign invulnerable at a certain distance
-snowball attack if player is far
-3 hit attack with ice spikes if player is close
-shadow hands if the player is above her head
-constant shadow hands on expert+.
"only really eyebone is usefull and it's really just quality of life in the end of the day"
why are you disregarding QoL items? if anything eyebone is MORE valuable than weapons dropped from the bosses you mentioned because if you are opting to use it you can stick with it for the rest of your gameplay, even post-ml, because it won't get outclassed by another item that is the same with higher numbers.
@@nideer could you please put subway surfers gameplay, family guy, and some random mobile game ad to the sides of this
@@nideerare you this passionate about everything involving deer, or……?
It's not even clear that you're supposed to go beyween it's legs. Up until this video I had no idea that you could just walk under it without getting hit.
Yeah, I've been playing for years and had a rough time the first time beating Deerclops. All enemies deal contact damage, with the telegraph being their sprite. Only exception I can think of is Moon Lord, but in his case, the active/damaging parts are eyes and lasers. Also, flattening an arena in the snow biome isn't something i think to do every playthrough.
Yeah, as a non DS player I had no idea either so the fight went on like 5x longer than it should have cause I was spacing to avoid damage the only way I knew how to and making it invincible. I didn't really like it.
@@evnbd as a DS player I had no idea you could go under the legs. I thought you just had to sort of wiggle back and forth in front of him
@@syrup5940 yeah wiggling in front of him did not work for me either 😭 if only we knew
You may discover it using melee and or cthulu dash, but I don't think I would've realized had it not been spoiled for me
Deerclops goes one of two ways:
1. God please kill me now why the fuck won't it die already this is getting ridiculous.
2. Alright here we go time to fight and it's dead.
No in-between.
For me it is an in between lol
This just makes me think about how the Eye of Cthulu was implemented in dst. Deerclops got fucked up in Terraria, meanwhile the Eye and to a lesser extent the Twins of Terror are fairly designed in dst.
Ikr? It seems so unfair
Twins should've gotten different attacks, but I completely agree
Twins are bs in dst
you're basing that exactly on... this video? That just shrugs off most of the point of doing bosses in terraria in the first place?
Got a Steam deck, decided to try out terraria again after almost a decade. First boss I meet, by accident, deerclops. At first I grew incredibly frustrated at (what I thought was) my inability to use the steam deck controls properly. Because, obviously, if this boss is the first one I meet, it's gotta be pretty weak and it's just me being a noob, right? Well, I found out he does not respawn, so I thought, hey, lets use this boss to learn the controls properly. I did, killed him, and still felt like an utter noob for taking so long with him. Imagine my surprise when I eventually summoned the eye, and turns out no! It was the deerclops that was the bastard.
And the loot this BOSS gives is underlevel at the point You can kill him everything else is better
@@juandavidacunapinzon740 I've always felt like it's supposed to be some kind of power scaling thing, like the boss they got from terraria are the eyes, which are some of the easiest bosses. Terraria universe is just built different
@@juandavidacunapinzon740hey his expert mode drop that gives you your own shadow hands is actually pretty good early game. Gives good defense for less tanky builds
@@blademasterzeronope its trash
@@varun3771 That feels a bit harsh, since I can see some value in it, especially looking at the wiki for a reminder on what it does and how it happens.
It's like the spore sac from Plantera, or the volatile gelatin from Queen Slime, yes there are better options for weapons against bosses and such, but I'd say it could be a decent choice if you don't have many good options. The wiki even says it can be good for events like the Tier 1 Old One's Army, or for menial tasks like fishing where the player is left defenseless and has to depend on their minions / accessories for support.
Literally every single boss except Moon Lord has contact damage over pretty much their entire bodies, there's nothing that would suggest that you would be able to walk under Deerclops without taking damage
With Moonlord, the main indication is just that he's so massive it would be nearly impossible to not contact his sprite while fighting. Deerclops does not have this property.
What I really like about your idea of giving it a death ray is that, in a weird way, it actually turns deerclops into a training fight for the real moon lord at the end of the game. There's no other boss that uses a sweeping ray like that, and the stakes are so incredibly high by the time you get to moon lord (fuck up too much and you have to do the pillars again... That is WAY more punishing than the usual "wait until night/grind new spawn items" because the pillars are an *ordeal.* ) that it's brutal to try and actually *learn* how the final boss works.
If deerclops has it, by very nature of not despawning it has the *lowest* stakes of any boss, so it's oddly perfect to stick something like that on. A player has all the time in the world to figure out how that works and how to dodge it with worse equipment, so come the end of the game, it's a movement and even a telegraph they've got some experience with already.
Is it weird to use a crossover boss for that? I mean yeah, but Terraria's just a weird game. Just look at how sentry summoner basically only exists because of DD2 lol. I think that is a *phenomenal* idea that sticks true to the source material *and* serves a function in the grand overarching game design. I'm not sure if that's what you were thinking when you came up with the idea but I wholeheartedly support it on those grounds alone.
i think there's a death ray in infernum
Gonna use this as a chance to complain
Sentry summoner used to be very fun, mainly because when using the DD2 ranged sentries, they would immediately fire, giving summoner a fun too use attack option before whips
Now they have to wait a lil, completely removing that option.
Tbh I think all sentries should have that effect, firing immediately upon spawning and allowing for an interesting way of attacking as summoner
Actually, with the latest dst update, that might be more fitting than ever...
@@gernanite911 every fucking mod uses death ray in every boss, it's like a requirement
If you leave enough spare fragments, you can simply craft the Celestial Sigil
Most of the attacks proposed are actually in infernum deerclops. Down to the lazer, darkness, and hand only attacks, all while keeping the same three stage ice wall attacks.
It's quite a fun boss.
(Also, I took to doing jumping loops over deerclops one side ice walls because it's easier to deal with the grouped hands than the random ones.)
The laser was in Eternity mode first
@@IcyPK_Studios Wait, does EMode still have the shadow hands or does it also remove them?
I wouldn't know. When I did my Infernum playthough the only boss I skipped was Deerclops just out of spite for it.
i despised deerclops infernum actually
@@LoraLoibu iirc eternity mode removes the rng shadow hands but masochist mode readds them
2:48 I like how he just sounds so calm at first when he talks about the Moonlord's projectiles
Then delivers such a frustrating tone right as he's about to mention Deerclop's projectiles
Sorbet's pronouns are the neopronoun set boy/boy/boy/boys/boyself, confirmed on boy Discord server today on 9/24/2024
@@the_r4ts I'll just use the gender-neutral form of "he/him."
It's funny how you mention laser eyes, because a lot of Terraria mods revamp Deerclops to have a similar attack.
It has laser eye during christmas
@@joroc That's also where it's invincibility design comes from
Why does the deerclops even use shadow hands? It's not really shadow-aligned in DST, and there's no other mention of Charlie being around.
It would have made more sense to give it a single laser blast like the Winter's Feast event
i think its supposed to represent deerclops' high sanity drain? but executed kind of poorly tbh
@@lenship2 the high sanity drain is represented by the fight
@@azricon If the fight didn't have the shadow hands, it wouldn't be so painful
That's the point of this video
It’s likely because(along with deerclops himself) the shadow hands are one of the most recognizable aspects of DST. A core aspect of the game that appears relatively early.
I think it honestly would have been better if deer clops gave you a sanity debuff that slowly increases as time goes on (reduced by eating food) if it gets over a certain amount, slow moving shadow creatures spawn off screen and make their way to the fight, they shouldn't have much hp, needing you to focus them for maybe 1-2 seconds for them to die and if the sanity debuff reaches max terror beaks spawn which are faster and require a bit more focus to kill them. (THIS IS IF THEY WANTED A SANITY MEHCANIC WITH SHADOW CREATURES AT ALL I DON'T THINK DEERCLOPS AS IT IS INGAME CURRENTLY SHOULD HAVE THIS MECHANIC)
The deathray idea is actually already implemented in the modded difficulty Eternity Mode from Fargo’s Souls Mod. In that mod, the “1,2,3” rhythm is kept throughout the entire fight but it has subtle changes that start being implemented as its health gets lower - one of these is a deathray that sweeps the side of him you’re on right after the 3rd attack, forcing you to react quickly and jump over him before it hits you. It’s definitely better than the shadow hands in vanilla (The shadow hands in eternity mode are actually pretty redundant. they just grab you and force you to mash your WASD keys to escape but deerclops doesnt attack for a couple of seconds while this happens, so theres no cheap hits. he can appear either side of you after doing this so you do have to react to where he comes from but it doesn’t really interact with the shadow hand attack, but the shadow hands being kind of useless is more fun than them being unfair)
Deerclops isn’t even close to the most fun boss in eternity mode, but it’s certainly a step up from telefrags.
And then the shadow hands come back in Masochist Mode (a Fargo's difficulty harder than Eternity) and only prove the point of this video further - that shadow hands suck and contribute nothing to a well designed fight. (Not a slight against Masochist, though, since it is an intentionally kinda stupid difficulty and the fact that readding a vanilla mechanic can ruin some fights is definitely worth showcasing in a difficulty like that)
@@tornadotoss Masochist was intentionally designed as a "You want pain? *Fine.* But don't complain to us after this." kinda deal
Eternity mode deerclops would be my favorite fight if it wasn't so damn tanky
i skipped deerclops because the drops were ass and the fight confused the shit out of me
it wasn't until i watched this video that i realized that i have literally never had fun fighting deerclops
The only reason I even fight deepclops is for chester. God I love chester
Literally only fought it for the BANGER theme
The main reason why I hated deerclops is because it punishes you for not being a melee brawler or a tank. I prefer summoner/ranger, and this is the only boss in the game that out right forces you to stay in melee range for the entire fight. It's a really poor design for a sandbox game. Imagine if the eye of cthulu did the same thing. The don't starve crossover gear is also the weakest stuff in the game conceptially, with only the expert drop being worth anything at all...
This actually isint as big of an issue as you think. A boss forcing you into melee distance isint a bad thing when 1 the boss doesnt really have a way to deal with far away opponents or flying ones and 2 given the fact the majority of mage and ranged weapons dont get worse at close range at all and in the case of summoner you actually want to be that close to bosses anyway to get whip hits in. Deerclops doesnt actually do much damage even with summoner gear. He can be tanked pretty easily even without full warding. If anything the worst thing about the fight outside of the hands is the fact he can inflict frozen. No boss should be able to inflict a debuff that stops you from playing the game
@@NotSnak The problem with forcing the other classes into melee range is a massive problem. The defence differences between the best prehardmode summoner and the best melee brawler is 15 vs 25 (no defence reforges).
I don't know if you play in the harder difficulties, but in master difficulty, defence is 1:1 with damage (in classic it's 1:0.5, meaning your defence is half as effective), which means that the best summoner build would be taking 10 more damage per attack in this boss fight. Summoners are meant to have agile builds that focus more on dodging than tanking, but forcing you into melee range with a boss that has undodgable attacks (shadow hands) isn't fair.
In master, deerclops does 60 damage on melee and shadow hands, and does 78 on ice spikes. That means that a summoner with 15 defence is taking 45 damage per hit, with many of those hits being unavoidable. Compare that to the melee tanker taking 35 and you can see why it's a design flaw to put a squishy class in melee range.
@@Handles_AreStupid i play on master exclusively sometimes FtW. Defense really isint an issue. Again summoner actively wants to be close to bosses to get summon tag damage and in the case of deerclops thats fine because his attacks are fairly tankable even on Ftw and GFB. Setting up a heart lantern campfire and some potions + having some warding or a worm scarf. Or endurance and warmth potions. Flinx coat + platinum pants and helmet make deerclops's damage trivial as long as you arent getting hit constantly. If you only get hit by the hands here or there then its fine.
Still poorly designed but having to get close to the boss is not an issue even for the weakest class defensively
@@NotSnak You only need to get close for a brief moment every now and then. The tag stays active for quite a while.
@@Handles_AreStupid yes but it is in your best intrest to stay close to bosses. Whip damage contributes a fair bit to summoners high damage. Additionally most whips have on additional hit effects that last only 1 to 2 seconds such as the speed bonuses. you're encouraged to stay close and do alot of damage with then
Completely agree. Deerclops was one of the hardest bosses to beat in my master mode no hit journey. The poor telegraphing and immediate spawning of the hand’s hit boxes, racked up so many attempts.
I'm sorry, **no hit**?
@@monkebox3436what are you... not getting about this? what's confusing about it?
@@DarkShard5728 sounds like torture
I don't really think no hit challenges count towards a boss being bad since the game isn't about not getting hit, those challenges are stupid anyway.
@@coin4898 I'm pretty sure challenges aren't exactly supposed to be easy or a goal of the game
Sure, some games present challenges but for sandbox games it literally doesn't make sense to give the player a challenge
at least not one you can't overcome by just improving slightly, getting lucky, or getting better gear
anyway point is that's why it's a challenge
saying "the game isn't about not getting hit" is like telling someone water isn't about having flavor
Of course it's not, but why not add some flavor mix, bc, you know, you can
I really like the suggestions you gave to fix the issues, hopefully we could get some changes but the deathray sounds like a ftw idea.
deeclops' difficulty spike in expert/master pretty much gives players 2 options: cheese the fight with minecarts/projectiles or wait until you are essentially pre-mech boss where fighting him makes all his drops redundant other than the eyebone.
Idk, to me the boss is okay to beat in the middle of prehardmode. I would argue that the boss becomes too easy after queen bee and skeletron, because pretty much all you have to do is not get beat up by the ice spikes and not go far from the boss. I beat him with pre-skeletron gear by just jumping to his other side when he was about to do his ice attack
You can beat it as the first boss even on master mode if you set your spawn near the place where you fight it and keep dying and dying until you kill it
I've never died to deer clips, I usually fight it immediately after EoW and it just doesn't seem to do any damage.
I didn't actually know about the legs hit box thing so I've just been dodging the swarm of shadow hands and facetanking the hits from the ice attack, with shadow armor and a worm scarf it's not a threat.
@@benito1620 The shadow hand swarm (when you go above deerclops) has been said to be _easier_ to dodge than the occasional shadow hands
Expert isn’t bad, I haven’t tried master though. Just throwing bodies at him until he dies usually works fine
Even if deerclops is not a good boss he is still my favorite pre-hardmode boss because of its design and don't even get me started on his theme. One of the best boss themes in the game
as someone with hundreds of hours in both terraria and dst, i think they should also make it more clear how deerclops is meant to be fought. i mean, even after so long in both games, i had no clue that the intended strategy was to kite it like in dst until after my first couple fights with it
Yeah, you should always assume new players will be going in with zero prior knowledge, and deerclops does not to that. I always tried to go over it and got my ass clapped by shadow hands, so I always thought the fight was way to difficult for that stage of the game. But because it doesn't despawn on death I would repeatedly die, have to walk all the way back over to the snow biome, chip away a small amount of its health, and repeat
just like every other boss in terraria. You don't notice because you've played so much you already know the patterns
@@TheLifeLaVita There's a difference between figuring out when a boss is going a specific attack, and how to avoid that attack to begin with. Even once you memorize what attacks it's going to do and when, absolutely nothing about Deerclops says you should dodge them by *walking through the boss' sprite* , because the game has presumably ingrained on you at that point that all enemies deal contact damage, and you're unlikely to have any i-frames at that point.
@@Dinoman972 you talk like that's supposed to be a bad thing while it's a unique feature. It's not that hard to realize that you're so used to 10 years of no-deerclops that you are biased against it. New players have no problems. Deerclops is rare and absolutely not mandatory. You don't find its summon in chests like the eye. So drop the bias and let's avoid making up problems when there are none thank you
@@TheLifeLaVita I literally only started playing the game shortly after 1.4.4. came out. I'm by no means a Terraria expert, but I didn't have to die to Skeletron 100 times and memorize its entire attack pattern to figure out I should dodge its hands in general, and destroy them before the main body so it has less attacks overall. Because that's actually intuitive game design that builds on everything the game had taught me so far, and that's what made the fight fun.
But absolutely nothing about it prepared me for a zombie-type enemy that punishes being anywhere except within its sprite, because that's the opposite of what every single other enemy in the game up until that point does. And I couldn't have possibly figured out I can move through its legs without looking it up online, as seems to be the case with multiple other people in this comment section. It's unique, yes, but not in a good way.
And being optional is hardly an excuse for being simply not fun, especially when the player has so little control over when the boss is summoned. Imagine a more casual player is trying to make a nice build in the snow biome, then a blizzard appears and they have to fight this thing out of nowhere.
I'm not sure how many other newer players share this sentiment, but it's bold to claim that not liking Deerclops is universally an old guard thing with no proof.
Deerclops needs to hit A LOT harder to incentivize people to kite it
Also, the shadow hands are f-ing up the rhythm of the boss and thats a very serious issue when it relies on kiting and timing
The second part is literally the entire point of the video
Deerclops hits very hard if you fight it at a stage where its drops are still useful
the shadow hands represent shadow creatures, which also screw up kiting in dst!
@@ILOVETOWEROFPHONESNAPPING they're still way too common
@@ss3nm0dn4r8 similar to dst
A while back I did a true melee nohit, and deerclops was the first boss to truly make me suffer for no reason other than the shadow hands. A fight that would've otherwise been really fun turned into me staying very slightly in front of deerclops so I could move as little as possible to dodge him, because the more I moved, the more likely I would get hit by an unavoidable attack
Not only that, but as someone who has never played don't starve but have played terraria a ton, the boss is so different from all the others and yet there is no real way to know that you should stay that close to the boss so that he doesn't do the high damage ice rocks or whatever (there is the obvious indicator that you should stay close enough to damage him, but nothing suggests being even closer makes him not do that attack), AND there is absolutely nothing indicating the legs have no hitbox, I didn't even know that until watching this just now, since literally all other enemies in Terraria have a hitbox that looks like the exact size of their sprite.
every other enemy in the game damages you when you touch them, so its a safe guess that you shouldnt run directly into him
@@humanbean6672 that's kinda what I said
I have been no hitting terraria bosses recently for fun, dear clops wasn't the hardest, but the most annoying because it just felt like the hands would sometimes be completely unavoidable
With a title like that, I was ready to get mad at this video when I clicked on it, but I found myself agreeing with everything you said! I haven't fought the boss on expert mode so I didn't know about the agony that is the shadow hands, but I'm glad to hear from somebody who likes the fight as much as I do. The rhythm of the "intended" fight is incredibly satisfying, and it feels very faithful to Deerclops's home game.
The main if not only reason I don’t usually fight deerclops until after hardmode in my master mode playthroughs because he has so much damn health. The best prehardmode weapons still take like 15 minutes. It just takes so long it’s really annoying
For some reason I remember this boss being easy to cheese if you just stood under it, was I just remembering it wrong? Either way good analysis of the problems with it
Deerclops has a blind spot in its hitboxes at its feet, where only the third hit of the combo and shadow hands can hit you.
It's far from safe and you will die unless you have high defense or an obscenely strong whipstacking build that can outdps it, since that third hit freezes you (which cancels a grapple, which you probably use for knockback immunity to stay there), hits pretty hard, and the shadow hand RNG can still fuck you over.
The SemiHypercube lore expands...
@@sorbetcafe iirc there was or still is an exploit with using minecarts on a rail bouncing between i think 3 length railroad
There use to be an exploit with the boss that includes tables for some reason
I'm pretty sure the cheese method in question is the furniture + minecart method that avoids the ice spikes and fools any shadow hand that predictively aims, which you mentioned in passing in your cheese strats video.
One other thing that could be changed with the Deerclops fight is there being some year-round obtainable freeze immunity, probably with Warmth Potion because it makes thematic sense. You can build up a lot of defense before the fight and it's enough to facetank most attacks, but the freeze effect makes it hard to return to safety if you get hit too many times.
The hands were what got me excited initially, I figured it was like Skeletron projectiles... At first you go ''What am I supposed to do?!'', then the very pattern itself makes it obvious when you stop to look at it, not with shadow hands. I think they are the key to making this fight a bit more varied, I wanna make quick calls on whether I can engage or, if a hand is starting to form with a generous telegraph, for example, dodge backwards instead. Then you avoid ranged attacks by closing back in, then get a guaranteed window within at least his next 3 attacks. Instead of ruining the cqc dodge loop, it breaks it up and makes it less repetitive.
I also really like the idea of having them synced and then spawn at deterministic positions relative to deerclops, you see them spawn as you dodge past, then quickly decide how to move immediately upon passing him. But it would be nice to have a reason to back off a bit here and there, maybe one of the given hand spawns isn't about dodging quickly and instead about continuing to move away fast, still a quick call to make.
Yep, I went through the same woes when I tried nohitting Deerclops on release. I eventually stopped the dodge rhythm altogether and just hopped in place to avoid the ice spikes, giving me more reaction time if a shadow hand spawned.
I complained about the randomness on the forums once, and it was acknowledged by a dev, but nothing was actually done about it. Sad.
7:13 If they don't wanna completely rework how they function they can have it spawn off screen and lunge from the sides at the player exactly with the rhythm of the attack, depending on health they also get a chance to come from above or below inflicting blackout on hit.
Aligning the shadow hands with the rhythm would definitely make them 10x better
god, that hand appearing inside your hitbox after dodging the ice wave hurt me irl
i really like your points here, and i also like the fix of having the shadow hands come from much further off screen and travel more slowly and less frequently so you have time to disentangle yourself from the close-quarters combat, dodge the hand, and then fall back into a rhythm. also while we're on the topic, why can't the radio thing be placed like a monolith? in every way except name, the radio thing is a monolith. i just want to be able to place a decorative radio thing, red!
Deerclops in don't starve: hahaha i destroy your base at night.new players fear me, but if you defeat me i will give you an amazing item to survive never ending rain and thunder strikes next season.
Deerclops in terraria: i have shit attackpattern,small chance of spawning during rare weather condition,no summon item found unless crafted,good luck searching for flinx fur
I give shit and forgotten items that are worse than used to defeat me.
So, something... interessting just happened. I had never fought this boss before nor knew how it'd spawn, so one night after defeating the Torch God and running around replacing torches, it was naturally a blizzard in the snow biome and this dude spawned and wrecked my stuff. Now maybe I should have just picked up my things (Mediumcore) and returned, but since it's health got lower and you could return after dying, I kept coming back, slowly whittling it away while dying more times than I had died before on that world. On the last life, I died while it had litterally 30 health left, and after a few seconds, it also died. Upon returning, it had not dropped anything. To say my disappointment was immeasurable and my day ruined is an understatement. (seriously, it does not drop anything if you are dead while it dies?)
Wrecked ur stuff? Huh this ain't dont starve
@@luminiumbytes9586 Mastermode, no arena and little boss knowledge leads to getting messed up
4:40 heavy mod users: "ill ignore that"
Honestly im too dumb to realise the attacks have pattern, so i just assumed that the boss was weirdly annoyingly designed to counter the way u r supposed to beat him. And then every other cheese devs ould think of. Which made it a very weird raid boss for me and my friends
there is a funny lizard..
Your lizard has no idea just how many people have watched them crawl up your arm
Huh, it never occurred to me that you're supposed to do this run-through-the-legs thing, since it makes the hands so hard to dodge. I always did the strat where you kite in one direction with a ranged weapon, like you showed at 4:00.
Good video essay. I think you touched on the reasons that Deerclops is unappealing better than anyone else has. I would add one thing though: the fact that Deerclops doesn't despawn when you die kind of ruins the fight, because it means no matter how good or bad you are you can just throw yourself at the boss over and over again until it runs out of health. There's a good reason other bosses despawn when they kill you, and encouraging players to beat the boss in such a boring and unintuitive way is not good design
I never forget how deerclops jumped my ass on MEDIUMCORE WHILE IT WAS IN A BLIZZARD I DIDN'T EVEN KNEW OF ITS EXISTENCE 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Oh yes, isn't that fun?
Did you know it can actually still continue to spawn naturally after you've beaten it, unlike every other boss?
So, even if you've killed deer before, it can still spawn at night in the tundra.
Hope you didn't like setting up home base there!
@@nathancarver7179 Yeah dude this is annoying asf, i would rather do calamity infernum then get on mediumcore again because of this trauma XD
Was that leezard a gecko
yes
Some small insight about the scream attack: it only enters it if all checks for other phases failed.
Additionally, it cannot start the animation(and therefore inflict the debuff) if any of these are true
A. It is moving up or down (includes falling, but not teleporting or hoiking)
B. 120 frames have not passed since it last finished an attack
C. the target is immune to slowed (like wearing an ankh shield)
D. Your distance to it in the X axis is less than 100 units, being equal to 6.25 tiles(16 units = 1 tile)
Note about the distance on the X position: it's measured from the center of deerclops' hitbox to the closest point inside of your hitbox. Most of the time, this point is on the right edge of your hitbox if deerclops is to your right, and vice versa.
Ok, that's good to know. I spent a while summoning Deerclops and trying to get close enough to fight it without being slowed and like 80% of the time it would happen, I could never quite identify why it wouldn't happen sometimes but it was probably due to moving up or down.
@@sorbetcafe if you ever need to know something from the code, such as hitboxes or detailed mechanics, let me know! I like explaining this stuff. I say hitboxes because some projectiles have hitboxes that aren't accurately displayed by mods with hitbox visualizers(like some of EoL's projectiles)
@@sorbetcafe small oversight from my comment: the 120 frames can also be since it spawned, so for 2 seconds it's guaranteed to not start the animation
hi photonic
@@itstruce. Hi truce
I first encountered Deerclops when I was fishing for frozen crates. As a non-DS player, I had no clue what it was at all. I saw a boss healthbar appear and I'm like oh shit what the hell is going on. I didn't know how I was supposed to fight it, I jumped in the air to dodge its shards. I had good defense so I was able to tank shadow hands, but they were definitely annoying. I'm pretty sure the only real reason I won was because I had The Bee's Knees and the Bee Gun with good modifiers, and you can't really miss when the bees fly towards the enemy's hitbox anyways. I was well post-Skeletron at that point and was gearing up for the Wall, so I didn't really gain much except for a pet that lets me store inventory overflow and a REALLY annoying axe.
My personal gripe with Deerclops (and some other non-bosd enemies) is the debuff, the idea of being chilled making you slower makes sense, but it really doesn't play fun since
A. It makes dodging considerably harder, and if you can't dodge, you can't easily get rid of the debuff
B. The debuff is removed by a specific potion/accessory that you would only need for this fight (and a few specific enemies) and literally nothing else in the game
(Correction: the debuff Deerclops applies is Slowed, not Chilled, meaning you can't remove the debuff without a hardmode accessory. Which is arguably worse than having to use a niche accessory/potion)
The shadow hands exacerbate this issue as well, so actually maybe I only have a problem with it because of the hands
The boss doesn't inflict chilled, just Frozen and Slowed (which only lasts for a split second so it's almost comepletely ignorable). Not saying that makes it better though, because instead she inflicts slow, which you need a hardmode exclusive item to be immune to, and by that point almost none of Deerclops' drops are useful.
@@venomousslime6797 Oh really? Then that's even worse, I'd much rather just have some damaging debuff over slowed
@@charmeleonevolves5553 Yeah. Also did i make it seem like I'm trying to go against your point? Cause that's not really what I'm trying to do.
@@venomousslime6797 Nah, you just pointed out an incorrect part of my statement, and I'm acknowledging it and expressing my dislike for the fact that it's worse than I thought
If I could change one thing, I’d make these changes:
Deerclop’s roar would have a reverse knockback effect on the semicircle above him which would drag you into his body, but he’d only roar if the player is above him but not out of range (aka: he’s still vulnerable).
The Shadow Hands would work like Calamitas Clone’s projectile phase transition, where Deerclops goes invincible and keeps roaring to summon swarms of Shadow Hands to sweep the arena by either swooping into you or overhead. During Phase 2, each time Deerclops roars, he summons like 4-5 Shadow Hands which work like the phase transition where they swoop at you or overhead, but slower since Deerclops has other attacks now.
It’s not very Don’t Starve-y, but it works for Terraria and would fit the rhythm mostly. The only issue I can see is if one of the Shadow Hands swoops into as you pass under Deerclops, since you can’t jump over the hand or you’d bump into Deerclops.
Ok but Deervlops isn't the worst designed boss, it is Queen Slime. Just projectile spam, minions spam that conributes to projectile spam, and her only actual attack is a slam that has the worst defined hitbox in the game.
Queen slime is my favorite pre plantera boss, the minions are a non issue, they are a game mechanic to force the player to not backtrack and instead keep running one direction. She always summons the minions behind her in both of her phases, so build a skybridge and hold A or D until you win. If queen slime feels like an annoying minion reliant bullet hell boss, then you just havent adapted to the boss's unique design
@@bombthing I don't feel like "hold A until you win" is a convincing argument towards good design
@@arcturuslight_ Then I take it you think wall of flesh is bad too?
@@bombthing Unique scenario requirement =/= avoidance of bullshit.
Sure, plenty of other bosses benefit from kiting or otherwise looping movement, but unless you take an large amount of time to clear the children, Queen Slime introduces too much unpredictable projectiles. If they were slower but still bounced, I find Queen Slime would be more tolerable, but as it is, I have to agree that she's just not fun at all.
yeah queen slime is indeed one of my least favorite bosses
NOT BAD just not enjoyable, and without wing is a death sentence.
rewards good, design simple, the fight? all over the place and the minions are not good
sniper slime, spamming and flying, feels like your fighting an army in the worse way possible
BUT STILL SHE'S FORGIVABLE SINSE SHE'S AN OPTIONAL BOSS NOT A REQUIREMENT
Fun fact: In the Fargo’s soul mod eternity mode, the deerclops DOES have a deathray attack in its final phase, likely in reference to the same thing you mentioned in this video
Sidenote: I hadn’t known that this was a legitimate reference to don’t starve, and I thought it was just a weird thing the Fargo devs came up with, so when you mentioned it in this video I was genuinely surprised.
Deerclops needs ONE little thing, a buff to its weapons
or a rework to some of them, i feel like giving the player deerclops' ice attack is the most obvious way to go, as it's, simply put "fucking awesome"
i'd say replace the dumbass shadow hands the bone helm has with it
😮👉 true melee support 👈😲
@@fortnitesexman I’d say add a true melee weapon with the ice spikes as an on-hit effect
This was an extremely well written video essay. I hope relogic sees and implements this. They may have already though, I didn't enjoy fighting deerclops because of exactly what you mentioned and so never really bothered.
really interesting video :D I wanna know ur opinions on queen slime tho since its slime barrage attack and minions can be hell to deal with
Queen Slime is pretty bad, but the main thing that's frustrating about Deerclops to me is that it could actually be good. The whole premise of the boss fight is undermined by a single attack, whereas Queen Slime is just all-around a mess of projectiles. Ruining something good is worse than being bad to begin with, imo.
@@sorbetcafe ooh fair point
Much agreed. Gotta hand it to snow armor though for the clutch- set bonus makes you immune to the frozen debuff that deerclops applies with the ice attack. It means losing 7 defense as compared to the gladiator armor as well as losing the knockback immunity, but I'll take it if it means not having WASD and my grapple disabled.
I actually like this boss. I didn't even knew you supposed to fight him from the bottom. I always would make row of platforms and shoot my minishark or whatever i had before defeating WoF. I found that its quite enjoyable to dodge his hands or this ice pieces from the ground. Its some good mix between dodging and actual terraria-like fight. First try i even didn't got slow debuff lol.
doesnt have 20k hp in mastermode?
@@manachromeYT It was bugged! The proper HP it should have, according to the wiki is *15172*
@@LoraLoibu ok
I remember when I first got back into Terraria after a long break. I encounter this beast early on, get destroyed repeatedly and think to myself,
"am I really THAT rusty?!"
Then I fight literally anything else early game and realize, no. This fight is just outta pocket.
The legs don’t have a hitbox? How am I supposed to know that?
uhhhhhh trial and error aka accidently running into the legs and realizing you didn't take damage
In my opinion the shadow hand should spawn in top of deerclops, or the way that deerclops is atacking, like if deerclop is atacking to the right, the shadow hand will spawn from the right and move to the right (and stoping at front of deerclopses leg), and when he does the two way spike (the one at the end of the combo) one hand will spawn to the left and move to the right, and another one fromright to the left, but staying close to the ground, this could be giving the new player kinda of a hint on how to dodge deerclops attack and also discouraged player to just tank deerclops attack
Love this, thanks much.
Been looking for ways to improve this boss, I feel much the same way -- you're supposed to dodge and use close-quarters combat, but it's just *so* counterintuitive compared to the entire rest of the game, and the fight itself doesn't feel like it does a good job of encouraging that.
As stated, the drops are mediocre at best, and it sucks that you can randomly encounter this with only an ironskin potion and a shackle. The natural spawn doesn't *go away* either, so goodbye tundra bases literally forever.
The CC effects the boss has are terrible to deal with as well. It's *designed* to give the player slow, permanently (in short it checks to see if current target has slow effect and, if not, applies it to all nearby players). The freeze effect in expert and master lasts as long as or longer than your s, so getting hit once could very well mean you're hit two or even three times. And of course, slow/chilled/frozen make it that much harder to dodge outright, which further incentivises the player to *stay the hell away* rather than get up close.
There are people that swear by simply jumping over whenever boss does ice spikes attacks, but I genuinely can never get that to work, and I'm wondering now if part of that is due to the hands foobar-ing the entire interaction.
It should be like the light boss, that in the day its weak and only does the ice attacks and in the night it has the beam hands and more hp plus extinguishes nearby light sources.
god no im so sick of timed bosses. we already have like 6 of them.
This makes no sense
As far as I know NO enemy in dst does this
My probably bad opinion is that moon lord is the worst boss in the game, but the argument for deerclops is definitely compelling.
Moon Lord is awesome. I don’t see anything wrong with him, he’s a perfect final boss
Moon Lord just an alright boss personally for me. Nothing amazing, but it not bad at all
I really do dislike moonlord too
This boss is utterly fucking ridiculous in Fargo's Eternity Mode. It disables the ability to stand on platforms and can freeze you, and because it attacks so fast, it can stunlock you to death.
pretty bold statement considering queen slime is quite possibly the worst boss in gaming history
it's true, queen slime is also really bad. but deerclops is on par i'd say. queen slime is at least easy to defeat once you learn that you just need to keep running in one direction from the boss to beat it, the slimes she spawns can't reach you that way. most of the fight is just bad because there's really only ONE way to fight it viably. deerclops is just constant hell with the RNG infused shadow hands and repetitive fight, though
Yeah but queen slime is sexy unlike deerclops
@@coin4898 I could be disgusted but i chose to say based
@@coin4898 that's just your opinion
in gaming history????
I've fought it once, and on normal mode after skeletron, but before the wall. I didn't even bother building an arena. I just went to a spot in the tundra friendly to easy movement and spawned it in, and I defeated it, hardly using any healing potions. I'm not sure if I even had buffs on. It was SO EASY thanks to its immensely predictable attack pattern.
My man made a whole video on why shadow hands are bad lol
Learned a lot about Deerclops thanks to this vid. Will have to try it out the next time I play Terraria with my friends.
Got around to fighting this boss. Still hate it. The fact that the Shield's dash makes you bounce off and get hit feels counterintuitive to how you're intended to dodge its attacks. Shadow Hands also suck for every reason already said.
My survivability did increase when fighting so there's that.
Okay the boss isn’t the greatest but c’mon, just listen to the music.
As much as id love to agree, the shadowhands are a welcome addition for me, i like how it makes you think between each movement
Nice Argument unfortunately Queen Slime
queen slime is good though??
@@KwikBR nuh uh
@@KwikBRI’ve changed my mind though deerclops is worse
feel like making it so that the hands cant spawn within like a 4-5 player standing vertically radius of deerclops' legs would make it so that they still cut you off and hit you, but they dont hit you directly *into* him or one of his attacks that you were just trying to dodge
edit: or if they made it so that before the hands gain a hitbox, they come in from very far away and then when they get close enough, they gain a hitbox (indicated by colour change or opacity change presentably) and dash at the player, this way the *are* still random, BUT you have PLENTY of time to react to them
About the deerclops deathray attack you proposed, Infernum (Calamity mod expansion that makes every boss harder)’s deerclops adds a deathray attack to its movepool.
eternity mode also adds that iirc
and eternity
I literally never fight this boss. Never could’ve gotten the attack pattern down, shadow hands, and lack of good loot doesn’t incentivize me much. Doesn’t help that I play almost exclusively Calamity, where I’m fighting much better bosses at that point in progression.
dewwcowops is a pwetty gwod bewoss.
amazing video, i wish there were other boss analysis videos like this
In fwont of whew you'we gowing
8:03 So that's where Fargo's souls got that laser beam from!
1:40 on a video called why deerclops is the worst
me when framing device to contrast how something I want to like is ruined by an awful attack exists
I think relogic was afraid of people seeing deerclops as a free boss at the start of the game, so they added a mechanic that would always damage you to prevent you from beating the boss with just skill and barely any items
I didn't watch the video, (and never will) you are wrong.
Have a nice day.
He basically said deerclops is a shitty bossf8ght because the shadow hands are completely unpredictable and they have random speed when they spawn and come from offscreen
I love the silly lizard at the end
Yep lizard so silly!
Dearclops isn't a terraria boss, he's from don't starve. So technically you can't say he's the worst in the game because he's not from the game. Does that sound fair?
That’s not really what they’re saying though. They’re saying he’s the worst boss because the shadow hands (the attack terraria-esque in nature) ruin it.
??? what does this even mean
You have some good points one small issue
(Boss music)
deewcwops comes fwom the cwossowew with don't stawve togethew
dawg 💀💀
i beat him first try and thought it was a little repetitive but fun, i just jumped over him the whole time
is he saying deercwops, pwayer and cwosover?
I really like the darkness idea, especially if they make it so that it works with the don’t starve seed so that you need to grab a light or take damage.
Skill issue
True
Someone should contact the devs and send them this video, you make great points.
skill issue
Lol
Lol
I really like the variety Deerclops adds to the roster of Terraria bosses, but I wish it was executed better - best thing to do imo would prob add an indicator to go in between the legs
What if instead of the shadow hands Deerclops takes a moment to roar which summons a Hound or two offscreen to chase you, itd break the repetitiveness of this boss which is another issue people have with the boss as you've have to move away from Deerclops to dodge the hounds from hitting you into deerclops attacks which would be an advantage over the eye beam. Also an easy way to show off Hounds which in DT are super fast terrifying threats in the early game - much like Deerclops.
Deerclops is made and ruined by the lack of despawning to me. Because he doesn’t despawn I fight him any time I get flinx fur during pre-hard. If he despawned I wouldn’t fight him until he’s the last boss before the Wall, which I wouldn’t even do because his drops aren’t useful at that point. I’d only fight him for Chester.
The shadow hands never hit me, but i fight deerclops by hovering just in front of him in the air with rocket boots. You have to be precise but you can take 0 damage if you do it right, i beat him in expert mode with a sbowball launcher and use the hand warmers so i dont get the freeze debuff
Infernum mod changes him almost as it was described in this video.
In his second phase It adds the eye laser, makes hands either spawn in fixed positions above and below the player(to force him to move horizontally) or makes a half-circle behind player's movement direction, or he just spawns them randomly at NORMAL distance making the player to kill them. He also summons them around himself in phase two to force player to stay close
Also, a honorable mention to wall of flesh's IMPS in legendary mode. I have 2,3k hours in game and those imps made me hate it.
Yeah, without farming an imp statue for banners they're an absolute nightmare and even with banners they're quite annoying
This is why I cheese it pretty much every playthrough to get the early Chester, and then fight it in early hardmode/late prehardmode if I feel like having an actual fight
Another solution: Have the hands spawn somewhere along the circle around Deerclops that triggers invincibility, then hold their position for a moment, and shoot in a straight line at the player, no homing or turning. Encourages close quarters by not factoring player location into where it spawns (by adding extra motivation to keep you inside that circle), while also shaking up the movement in a both random but telegraphed way.
Me: walking in snow biome during a snow storm, only defeating eye of cuthulu, and dealing good damage ageinst the eow.
Deerclops: haii :D
Me: *no please*
Deerclops: i shall terminate you >:)
6:32 that kinda sounds like hands that Ancient Fuelweaver spawns during fight in dst, they don't infict any debuf they just make Fuelweaver invincible for time while hands are alive
honestly i like deerclops having the shadow hands as it references the fact that deerclops has the second highest sanity drain aura (-400/s) in don't starve together, and feast clops has the highest (-800/s). expert mode giving deerclops a laser attack would fit really well, in fact infernum mode from the infernum addon for calamity mod gives deerclops a laser attack as well as a ring of shadow hands like you mentioned.
personally i think a better change than the shadow hands would be making the first two ice attacks in the combo larger the lower deerclops's health is (similar to what revengeance mode in calamity does), and then making a single shadow hand appear once the ice hitboxes from the third attack also appear. this way the player is punished more for not going through deerclops's legs to the other side of him during the first two, and the player needs to stay on their toes to dodge the shadow hand after backing away from deerclops in the third attack.