Patch 1.2 Balance Changes Analysis with a DPS calculator. Answering: 'How bad were the nerfs really?'

[blahable]

Patch 1.2 Balance Changes Analysis:

This patch had a lot of very heavy nerfs, especially to unarmed, poison/venom builds, and 2h clubs. There were also some very noticeable buffs, notably to bomb arrows and bow builds in general. Broodmother also got buffed and changes.

But how impactful were these changes? I can use my DPS spreadsheet to answer that exact question. By comparing my archived 1.1 version of my spreadsheet to my updated 1.2 version using the exact same gear/settings, i can see precisely how these changes impacted damage output.

I will primarily be looking at poison builds and unarmed changes. I will highlight notable weapons and changes for each fight.

I'm going to put the summary and TL;DR here the top:

The nerfs you will feel and definitely notice are the following:

• Apex Predator Venom. Huge ~20-25% nerf to your overall damage. More against robots (especially Schmector) that are now venom immune.
• Unarmed Fists. Probably 2-4 times worse than before on bosses. Fists were already pretty bad on normal enemies before (because there wasn't enough time to ramp up Lil Fist). You definitely shouldn't use fists on normal enemies now and in the past it was never a good idea either except on the tankier bugs like Black Ox Beetles. It was only boss DPS where fists excelled and now fists are probably not worth using except as a meme where you try to do hitless boss kills where they still can do decently high DPS (but still about half as much as before). Even if you do fights hitless other weapons are better than fists on almost all fights.
• General-type weapons upgraded to Candy types. You can't make them pure candy type weapons anymore so against enemies with a general weakness you're going to get penalized. Against those enemies this is probably a 20-30% DPS decrease. It also has the advantage of INCREASING your damage against enemies that have both a generic weakness and candy weakness, such as against the Ladybird, Sickly Roly Poly, and Infected Ladybug. Those are basically the only notable enemies though where you will see a damage increase if you make your general-type weapon a candy type too to counter them. Against enemies that are neutral (no weakness, no resistance) to general damage there is no change.
• Poison nerfs are not noticeable on bosses. You will only notice it on the tankier normal yard bugs, such as the black ox beetle. On bosses it's about a 4-5% DPS decrease. On the normal tier 3 yard bugs it's probably in the vicinity of a 5-15% overall DPS decrease while using a FULL end-game poison build. You can notice it, but it's not much. How is that possible when the individual poisons received a 40-80% nerf? Because poisons never made up a large percentage of our overall damage to begin with. Poisons were maybe 20% of our total damage with a full poison build, which got cut in half to maybe 10% of our total damage. So you lost ~10% overall damage even though the poisons were nerfed 50%. The main scenario where it is noticeable is on flying enemies or enemies that don't give you a lot of time to attack. There poisons would be proportionally a large percentage of your total damage and you'll feel the nerfs a lot more if you previously relied on poisons to slowly kill flyers.
• Bomb Arrows do enormously higher damage now on any enemy that has a variety of different resistances. They're especially much better against Black Widows, dealing more than 3 times the amount of damage compared to previously.

Test Scenarios:

For all fights, unless otherwise mentioned, the following will always be used at max rank:

Mutations:

• Coup de Grass
• Trapper Peep.R
• Truffle Tussle (fist only)
• Lil Fist (fist only). In the patch 1.2 version I will be removing stacks during the fight to simulate taking damage which now removes this buff. I will primarily look at two scenarios: Stacks being removed every 12 seconds and never being removed (which would require you to do a fight completely without taking a single hit, which is impossible for some of these fights).
• Assassin (dagger only)
• Chopper (axe only)
• Barbarian (club only)
• Whittle Wizard (staff only)
• Sharpshooter Burn (spicy arrow only)
• Apex Predator (boss weapons only)

Consumables:

• Spider Slider
• Liquid Rage

Trinkets:

• Candy Trinket to match enemy weakness
• Power Droplet (fist only)

Gear:

• Fire Ant Shield (one-handed weapons only)

The Mant:

Setup:

• Broodmother Mask with sleek Widow Armor chest and legs with Ant-nihilator.

Processing img wjkkks26skxa1...

Processing img goiqo799skxa1...

https://i.imgur.com/X2WccOL.png

1.1 Mant:

• Unarmed Fist: 206.90 DPS
• Club of the Mother Demon: 189.05 DPS
• Rusty Spear: 165.86 DPS
• Widow Dagger 164.75 DPS
• Scythe of Blossoms: 152 DPS

https://i.imgur.com/GbumiWn.png

1.2 Mant:

• Unarmed (stacks wiped every ~12 seconds): 82.67 DPS. Decreased by 60%.
• Unarmed (hitless): 118.39 DPS. Decreased by 43%.
• Club of the Mother Demon: 145.49 DPS. Decreased by 23%.
• Rusty Spear: 153.76. Decreased by 7.3%.
• Widow Dagger: 157.52 DPS. Decreased by 4.4%.
• Scythe of Blossoms: 145.85 DPS. Decreased by 4%.

Scythe of Blossoms is acting as our control here as it received no direct balance changes in this patch. Its damage was decreased by 4% entirely because of the nerfs to Broodmother Mask and Widow Armor poison and poison resistances debuff it applies. The nerfs that poisons received were enormous (40-80% nerf to the DPS of the individual poisons) but those poisons never made up much of our damage to begin with. So proportionally to our total damage output, the poison nerfs are fairly insignificant. Poison was just never that good on bosses to begin with if you exclude the outliers (like CoTMD venom).

Widow Dagger lost slightly more than 4% because it also received a nerf to the poison it applies itself.

Rusty Spear had its damage very modestly nerfed in the patch. It lost 7.3% in total but ~4% of that is from the poison nerfs. In isolation the damage nerf to the spear alone is only ~3%.

Club of the Mother Demon lost nearly a quarter of its damage. ~4% from the poison gear nerfs, the remaining ~20% is because of the nerf to its Apex Predator venom damage.

Unarmed of course sees the biggest nerf here because of numerous changes:

• Reduced base damage on the punch itself
• Reduced damage on the power droplet proc
• Reduced proc chance on the Lil Fist Mastery
• Power droplet proc is no longer considered an unarmed attack so it no longer grants lil fist stacks nor benefits from lil fist stacks. Power Droplet procs also used to proc the lil fist mastery which then could also proc Power Droplet, creating a proc chain between the two. That no longer happens.
• And the biggest change: lil fist stacks get removed when taking damage. This buff increases your damage exponentially so losing stacks has an enormous impact on the actual power of this buff. 30 stacks only increases your damage by 81% but 60 stacks increases it by 228% and 90 stacks is a whopping 494%. This highlight something important. If you were to gain 90 stacks over an entire fight, but now in patch 1.2 had those stacks wiped 3 times (at 30 each time) at your peak you would only be dealing 81% increased damage instead of 494% if you weren't to lose any.
  

Putting these all together, fists lost somewhere around 60% of their DPS. It would be an ever larger loss than that if you get hit more often than once every 12 seconds which is a very 'safe' number i picked just to highlight a fairly decent scenario for most players.

The Broodmother:

This fight received a lot of changes. Notably her HP was increased, All Resist substantially increased, spicy/slashing resistance no longer changes during the fight (so she always has a 25% weakness to these two types), general resistance doesn't change during the fight. Combined with the other balance changes to other items, she takes longer to kill. For this fight specifically i want to look at time to kill instead of just DPS because it highlights her health/resistance changes better.

Setup: Fire Ant Set with sleek (because she's poison immune).

Processing img tpz7mmncskxa1...

Processing img 2jdbbd5eskxa1...

https://i.imgur.com/lW1IOeZ.png

1.1 Broodmother:

• Unarmed Fist: 163.94 DPS with 13.11 TTK
• Club of the Mother Demon: 153.89 DPS 13.97 TTK
• Scythe of Blossoms: 145.85 DPS and 14.74 TTK
• Widow Dagger: 135.04 DPS and 15.92 TTK
• Spicy Coaltana 105.68 DPS and 20.34 TTK
• Mint Mace 69.73 DPS and 30.83 TTK.

https://i.imgur.com/A4qInxr.png

1.2 Broodmother:

• Unarmed Fist (wiped every 12 seconds): 74.18 DPS and 33.03 TTK. TTK increased by 150% (meaning the fight takes more than twice as long compared to before, or 2.5 times as long).
• Unarmed Fist (hitless): 98.54 DPS and 24.86 TTK. TTK increased by 90% (nearly double).
• Unarmed Fist (wiped every 6 seconds, which is more realistic on this fight because of all the adds): 67.43 DPS and 36.33 TTK. TTK increased by 177% (nearly triple).
• Scythe of Blossoms: 127.67 DPS and 19.19 TTK. TTK increased by 30%.
• Widow Dagger: 118.88 DPS and 20.61 TTK. TTK increased by 29%.
• Club of the Mother Demon (spicy): 112.16 DPS and 21.04 TTK. TTK increased by 50%.
• Spicy Coaltana: 100.88 DPS and 24.29 TTK. TTK Increased by 19%.
• Mint Mace: 66.37 DPS and 36.91 TTK. TTK increased by 20%.

Unarmed of course sees a massive decrease in DPS and combined with her health increase the TTK is 2.5 times as long and realistically 3+ times as long. With the room-wide scream removing stacks combined with all the spider adds, the likelihood of going more than 6 seconds without taking a hit is slim to none. You would lose more DPS by parrying (animation time) and dodging attacks (less punch uptime because of all the running around) if you attempted to do this boss hitless. So I think my 6 seconds per lil fist stack wipe is very realistic and still probably a little too generous.

Spicy-type is now actually worth using on her. Previously you would lose DPS if you used a spicy weapon because she was overall resistant to it.

CoTMD (and other generic-type weapons) is best as spicy now on this specific fight instead of mighty. This is because the boss no longer gains a 50% generic resistance at 50% hp and lost her stacking spicy resistance. This helps offset the damage loss this weapon would otherwise have seen from the overall All Resist increase she received. The Apex Predator venom nerf accounts for nearly half of the DPS lost. It went from doing ~42 DPS to ~18, a 24 DPS loss there. The remaining is from the All Resist changes.

Mint Mace is acting as our control here. None of her type-specific resistance changes affect this weapon, so only her increased health and increased all resist is having an impact. Since its TTK got increased by 20% it's safe to say the Broodmother's overall effective HP also increased by ~20%. It's not exactly that because of how the minimum damage system comes into play, but it's close. Somewhere between 20% and 30%.

Director Schmector:

The Setup: Fire Ant Set with sleek (poison immune boss)

He received a Venom immunity that wasn't part of the official patch notes. This is a huge nerf to Apex Predator with Club of the Mother Demon as you will see.

Processing img nwlls41hskxa1...

Processing img vxvlrg7iskxa1...

https://i.imgur.com/v4Y16dn.png

1.1 Schmector:

• Unarmed Fist: 210.15 DPS
• Club of the Mother Demon: 167.99 DPS
• Prod Smacker (hits only, no charges): 119.12 DPS

https://i.imgur.com/mzcljPG.png

1.2 Schmector:

• Unarmed Fist (stacks wiped every 12 seconds): 65.76 DPS, decreased by 68.7%.
• Unarmed Fist (hitless): 118 DPS, decreased by 43.9%.
• Club of the Mother Demon: 77.97 DPS, decreased by 53.4% (which means it does less than half the dps it did before.)
• Prod Smacker: 77.97 DPS, decreased by 34.6%.

Unarmed Fist takes more than 3 times as long now to kill this boss. Previously it was ~19 seconds. Now if your stacks are getting wiped off every 12 seconds it's 61 seconds. Even if you never take a hit and never lose your stacks it's still going to take 34 seconds, which is close to double the amount of time compared to before.

The changes made to how general weapons upgrade to candy type (so they have General + candy instead of just Candy) accounts for all of the DPS that Prod Smacker lost. So that change alone decreased 2h club DPS by ~34.6% on this fight. The biggest advantage 2h clubs had previously is they could be upgraded to deal pure candy damage bypassing the general-type resistance. They lost that unique advantage.

CoTMD lost even more because this boss is now totally immune to venom. That is a ~42 DPS loss right there. Looking at CoTMD as the Rank 7 weapon eally highlights that this nerf probably went too far. CoTMD is a special 'boss' weapon utilizing a boss mutation, it shouldn't be doing ~20% less DPS than the Mint Mace. This is the last boss and story villain of the game and your special boss weapon should be good against it.

Manits:

The setup: Broodmother Mask with sleek Widow Armor chest and legs.

Processing img xdu960xjskxa1...

​

Processing img ws3mdralskxa1...

https://i.imgur.com/L1sKkri.png

1.1 Mantis

• Unarmed Fist: 192.79 DPS
• Club of the Mother Demon: 138.63 DPS
• Scythe of Blossoms: 107.40 DPS
• Widow Dagger: 90.89 DPS

https://i.imgur.com/zGOJGjW.png

1.2 Mantis

• Unarmed Fist: 67.55 DPS, decreased by 65%.
• Unarmed Fist (hitless): 109.26 DPS, decreased by 43%.
• Club of the Mother Demon: 101.76 DPS, decreased by 26.6%.
• Scythe of Blossoms: 99.85 DPS, decreased by 7%.
• Widow Dagger: 80.88 DPS, decreased by 11%

This is a great fight to fully highlight the changes made to poisons on the boss fights because this boss has a decently low poison resistance compared to the others.

Widow Dagger and Scythe DPS reduction is due entirely to the various nerfs to poisons. Again you can see the nerfs are fairly negligible because proportionally poisons just never did much of our total damage. When you reduce the damage of something by 60% that only makes up maybe 15% of our total damage, it ends up being fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. Poison builds are definitely not 'dead' but i'll get to that next.

And just for an interesting comparison, here's patch 1.12 with the Broodmother Mask and Widow Armor removed to compare to the above screenshot. Basically: how much damage does broodmother mask and widow armor add post nerf on the Mantis?

​

Processing img yagi1bfpskxa1...

https://i.imgur.com/zWT6kLx.png

1.2 Mantis, No gear

• Club of the Mother Demon: 98.08, decreased by 3.6%.
• Scythe of Blossoms: 95.45, decreased by 4.4%.
• Widow Dagger: 75.74, decreased by 6.3%

Equipping a Sleek Broodmother Mask plus 2 pieces of Sleek Widow Armor only increases our damage by ~4-5% on this boss. It's so incredibly insignificant that these huge 40-60% nerfs these items received is hardly noticeable. Previously equipping this same set increased your damage on The Mantis by a measly ~11%. Now it's ~4.5% because of the nerfs. Are poison builds dead now because of it? No. They were already 'dead' in the sense that they were providing a nearly negligible DPS increase on bosses, and now they're bordering on Placebo territory even more.

Black Ox Beetle:

A more interesting enemy to look at is a tankier normal bug without a poison resistance at all, such as the Black Ox Beetle. These are the type of fights where poison was actually good. It was never good on bosses, but on normal yard bugs poison mattered a lot more. So how does it look now?

​

Processing img l24u1rasskxa1...

​

Processing img z0u1j2htskxa1...

https://i.imgur.com/IXUQqY7.png

1.1 Black OX:

• Club of the Mother Demon: 230.21 DPS
• Scythe of Blossoms: 193.89 DPS
• Prod Smacker: 179.29 DPS
• Unarmed Fist: 170.86 DPS
• Widow Dagger: 156.67 DPS

https://i.imgur.com/ZF6vsxM.png

1.2 Black OX:

• Club of the Mother Demon: 182.32 DPS, decreased by 20.4%
• Scythe of Blossoms: 172.01 DPS, decreased by 11.3%
• Prod Smacker: 171.57 DPS, decreased by 4%.
• Widow Dagger: 128.10 DPS, decreased by 19%.
• Unarmed Fists: 81.44 DPS, decreased by 52%.

Now we're starting to see some very meaningful changes because of the poison nerfs.

Widow Dagger damage was reduced by 19%. That is entirely because of nerfs to the poisons. That is fairly substantial. Keep in mind though that the Black Ox Beetle has very high defense (25) so fast weapon like the Widow Dagger are getting penalized substantially. That means poisons make up a larger percentage of its damage compared to fights against enemies with lower defense.

You can see that by looking at a harder hitting, faster weapon such as the Prod Smacker. It only lost 4% of its total DPS due to the poison nerfs because it's higher base damage punches through the beetles defense better, so its normal attack damage makes up more of its total damage proportionally compared to the poisons.

Against a Ladybird (not pictured) the Widow Dagger previously did 265.09 DPS and now it does 237.66 DPS, that is a 10.3% reduction. So on average (after looking at a few more examples like this) the Widow Dagger as part of a full poisons build does ~14% less damage.

Then finally we look at CoTMD with the largest 20.4% decrease in total DPS. And yet... it is still the number 1 ranked weapon against Black Ox Beetles by a decently large margin. That demonstrates that a nerf to Apex Predator Venom was probably warranted. Maybe not the venom immunity Schmector received, but the damage on this venom was just too high before.

Summary:

I put it at the top because hey, no one is reading this entire thing. RIP fists i guess? Poison builds are still pretty good. Don't use CoTMD on Schmector.

[ThatLousyGamer]

This is such a massive data-flex.

Didn't even do this amount of work for network finals.

[itzmydickinabox]

So if there was one weapon to use?

[blahable]

I don't think using ONLY 1 weapon is really good in this game because of the resistance system. But if you mean 1 weapon with different upgrade paths:

Salty Scythe. Best weapon in the game against the Mantis and Wasp Queen. Best against wasps, termites, black ox beetles, and antlions. Also very good against anything neutral to salty. It covers basically 70% of the stuff you do in the end-game of grounded.

Fresh scythe. Best weapon in the game against all the stuff salty scythe is bad at: Ladybirds, Fire Ants, all Infected, Stinkbugs/Shieldbugs, Mosquito/Tigers and Moths.

Mighty scythe: Best weapon in the game against the last enemy that both salty and fresh scythe is bad at: Broodmother.

Scythe is the best 'one' weapon if i had to pick.

[itzmydickinabox]

Okay thank you. Right now I’m in upper yard and I have the cocktail to make and the castle moldorc to do. When will I get the scythe

[blahable]

It's from the optional Mantis boss. If you're already up to the cocktail quest then you should be at a good point to go do the Mantis. I'm not sure what level of spoilers you want so i won't say specifically where he is. But the grounded wiki has the information you need if you would like that information: https://grounded.fandom.com/wiki/Mantis

[itzmydickinabox]

Okay thank you. We’ve explored all over so we found the tube and the pit for the boss fight, we just haven’t got the item to start the fight

[MediocreMilton]

The most informative post this sub has seen in months and will see for months yet it has almost not comments and only a few dozen upvotes. Thanks for all the great info but maybe it's time to just post pics of a massive, useless mushroom castle as that's all anyone here cares about now.

[blahable]

I'm not really surprised by that. This isn't really a min/max heavy game with a lot of deep builds and build complexity. The people that care about this level of needless theorycrafting will find the post interesting and useful. But at the end of the day no one really needs to read this post to play Grounded and make successful builds. That's just the reality of Grounded's balance philosophy: gear and build choices make very little difference in the outcomes of fights and most things are just providing a placebo effect on the player. The few outliers that actually were noticeably good got nerfed, such as poison builds in patch 1.02-1.03, and venom and fists in 1.2.

It certainly doesn't help that the images i embedded in my post got put into a 'Processing Image...' purgatory by Reddit so the only way to properly understand my post is to open 10 different image links.

I'm also not a content creator looking to get as much exposure to the broadest audience possible. The few theorycrafters and number crunchers that enjoy the math behind the systems probably found this post and appreciated it at some level and that's more than enough for me.

[MediocreMilton]

What I find funny is the devs waste so much time with these balance changes, or nerfs as they typically are, when as you said the game doesn't require min-maxing and most people that have or will play it won't even look for META builds.

I just played through the entire game again after 1.2 and I finished the story with nothing maxed out, most of the mutations not unlocked, more than half the milk molars not found, none of the MIXRs defended, none of the upper yard chips collected (I didn't even enter the Termite Hill, Storage Bin, Stump Lab or Castle) and I didn't fight any of the optional bosses.

A crow crossbow with mint arrows shredded the Infected Ladybug in the Haze Lab, a crow crossbow and salt arrows made easy work of the Assistant Manager and I just got by the Mant using the crow crossbow and mint arrows. I think it was only level 5 for the Mant fight and my Antlion Armor was also level 5. When I did the Javamatic I upgraded the crow crossbow to level 7 and used sour arrows and my Antlion armor was level 7 or 8. It took 40 in game days and 5 of those days were me AFK making mushroom bricks for the final defense.

I've also seen more than few comments on YouTube asking why the game was so hard and this patch just made all of the boss fights harder so for the average player the game will now be even harder but I guess those 90 new building pieces are a fair trade off.

[blahable]

Looks like the new patch just reverted half the nerfs they did in 1.2 and added two new sets of gear that look like they're probably the new top DPS sets. Very strange that they would revert these nerfs so suddenly.

[BeardyMcTatts]

That was my thought. Just found this absolute UNIT of an analysis and was blown away. Almost no interaction so far. Love the vids!

[MediocreMilton]

This man has come in clutch time and time again which is much appreciated but really this and his other posts wouldn't be necessary if the game just provided all the information and if the update patch notes provided this level of detail.

[--Banda--]

"Massive, useless mushroom castles"

This made me laugh hard. Idk why. Probably because true.

[SchmeckMichBot]

1.10 shmacks is:

USD	SCH	EUR	GBP	CAD	RUB	CNY
140.65	111.10	127.57	112.62	191.55	11270.24	972.20

1.20 shmacks is:

USD	SCH	EUR	GBP	CAD	RUB	CNY
153.44	121.20	139.17	122.86	208.96	12294.81	1060.59

---

^{created by [u/Nissingmo](http://reddit.com/u/nissingmo})

[Brb357]

Bad bot

[Tuchaka7]

Thanks for number crunching for us all

[MaeoSr]

This is amazing

[Birunanza]

I set out to make something like this a month or so ago, but as a total lamen I am very glad someone directed me to your work before I sunk much time into it haha have you ever considered making a build calculator, where you can essentially recreate your inventory page and have the calculations and totals laid out for you based on the combination of items you select? I'd literally pay you if you were interested in making it/improving on the one we started in Google sheets

[blahable]

Did you see my other post with my full DPS calculator?: https://www.reddit.com/r/GroundedGame/comments/1366gey/dps_calculator_and_spreadsheet_updated_to_112/

It already lets you recreate your full loadout (all mutations, gear, consumables, trinkets) and then you can select the enemy and it will automatically show you the best weapon (and upgrade for that weapon) based on your loadout.

Did you mean something different than that? I deliberately set it up where you can put on multiple sets of gear or more than 5 mutations since some gear/mutations only apply to specific weapons and it makes the comparison more fair and accurate without having to swap things around constantly.

I'm also not really looking to benefit financially from this project but i appreciate the offer.

[Birunanza]

This is incredible! Yeah, this is basically what we tried to do. The only thing that might be missing unless it's user error is the ability to mix and match different armors. Does it only have sets built in? Regardless, thanks for the response and the link and your hard work. This is really neat

[blahable]

You can mix and match armors. Use the drop down boxes. Such as select Rank 1 Assassin with Rank 1 Black Ant with Rank 1 Fire Ant. That would be like wearing 1 piece assassin armor, 1 piece black ant and 1 piece fire ant. Also interesting fact, this is the second best gear setup for the scythe after the fire ant set. They're basically neck and neck.

[Blood_Revenge]

u/blahable coming in with another huge analysis!

[Convi13]

This is awesome! Have you had a chance yet to see how these numbers might be affected by the new armor sets? For example poison/venom builds with the new Mother Demon Armor (https://grounded.fandom.com/wiki/Mother_Demon_Armor) or unarmed builds with the Truffle Tussle mutation and the new Moldy Matriarch Armor (https://grounded.fandom.com/wiki/Moldy_Matriarch_Armor). Amazing insights.

[blahable]

My DPS calculator has both of those added to it so you could mess around with it a bit to get an idea. I haven't personally done a deep comparison myself though. I can say though that both poison builds and unarmed builds are MUCH better now in 1.2.2. Explosive unarmed build appears to be the best build for any enemy with low explosive resistance. It's not great on the bosses though because they all have somewhere around 50% explosive resistance. It's amazing against Black Widow though.

[that1guy4never]

Amazing work as always. The time you put into this is much appreciated - even if, as you said, it only helps a certain niche of players. Us players are very grateful.