Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25411747-20140904180030/@comment-24899099-20140904195651

NoBanana wrote: You make a "best metal" thread and don't even include the obvious winner, steel. I mean look at it:

Pros

 * Much cheaper, extremely cost effective.
 * Contains full toolset (unlike both other metals).
 * Large part of the "Triple Crossbow" combat hotbar, which is an extremely effective assasination and general purpose weapon set.
 * Fast as mithril, and cheap enough to multi-weild (without spending hours at a vein or gathering horns).
 * Can be made natively in bulk on many habitable islands, making an effective tool for tribes.

Cons

 * Least damage of all three metals (countered by multi-weild).
 * Armour is slow (anyone so dedicated to murdering stuff uses ranged weapons with a woven vest).

I'll counter this point before it comes up, yes, triple crossbow is better than triple Yewbeam. Triple Yewbeam may have a higher DPS, but it requires feathers, and that is it's downfall. Feathers are neigh impossible to farm renewably (coups and nests take far too long for it to work without a lot of hands and a massive farm). This means you need to go to mainland or snowpeak, and sit next to the spawnpoint of a tiny (and surprisingly fast) animal, killing it and hoping it drops a feather, and trying your best to notice any feather it drops (it is quite literally the smallest item in the game).

In this time you could be mining and refining steel, a much faster process, which is also required for creation of steel arrows on top of feathers. Creating a steel arrow takes roughly three times as long as creating a bolt would. Creating anything less than a steel arrow is either pointless (iron arrow), or sacrifices too much DPS and important mass murdering features (stone arrow).

Not only this, but it hardly even matters. The triple crossbow technique has a DPS of around 80-90. All three bolts consecutively fired kills a mithrilite. Since almost all tribes are incapable of equipping their entire force with anything higher than bento (for hopefully obvious reasons), this means that it requires a single shot to murder a single villager. You fire a shot every two seconds from a range potentially far greater than any any other weapon in the game (excluding the bugsword), and this already exceeds the requirements of any player. Unless you are singlehandedly charging into a tribe with intentions to murder around 6 fully armed and armoured mithril/bluesteel users, there is no point in taking the next step and getting this new weapon.

Time is valuable, and the time spent gathering feathers is time wasted. "Takes a long time to make" is a written con of bluesteel, time is clearly a factor in this debate, and steel beats all the other metals in that respect by far, and so does a crossbow set over a set of yewbeam bows. If your foe has left before you could strike revenge, they got the last laugh, and they won. The last thing you want is for your opponent to win. That defies the point of advancement.

I've put bluesteel in the poll for now because the only possible use I can think for either of them is a Bluesteel Ignitor, a slight step up from a flint and steel. Have you ever actually tried gathering feathers on a chicken spawn Point? There's a 100% dropchance, They Respawn incredibly fast and Everything but a club oneshots them, You can easily gather 100+ feathers in 5 minutes, Often enough that's enough for the entire game. The only real downside is inventory managements, that many feathers takes up alot of space.

You don't need a farm, Just when you go to gather moss either make 3-4 battleclubs or a couple of steel weapons and then just slaughter the chickens, Incredibly easy.

Other than that I Think that the only Tools out of the bluesteel tree that are Worth making is the Bluesteel igniter and arguably the Bluesteel spear. I do prefer Mithril over bluesteel.