Willow's endothermic torch. A revamp to the Willow playstyle.

[StealthBeast]

Most of us can probably agree to these two statements:

1: Everyone is in dire need of options for fighting griefing. (Especially base torching)

2: Willow is in dire need of buffing. Something that isn't hokey. A serious, game changing contribution unique to only her.

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• The endothermic torch would be an exclusive item craftable only by Willow.
• It's lesser use is being able to light things like lone standing trees on "fire". This allows you to cool yourself/a thermal stone casually on the go, much like a standard torch lets you in winter.
• Its greater use is when used on a flammable player-made/replanted structure, it extinguishes fires, and further, creates its own "fire" which spreads FAR more rapidly than normal fire, canceling out the chain reaction. This is harmless to the affected structures. The "fire" quickly dies down.

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"Ah.. great item but.. isn't this just gonna be a rerun of the whole "Wigfrid's really only good for her helmets", meta? 1 Willow, craft a bunch endo torches, hand em out, welcome back to being useless... right?"

NO. Because Willow's a fireweaver damn it. When SHE endo torches the base, it afterwards leaves a small flickering flame or aura that acts as a protective barrier that prevents the structure from being torched again for quite a bit of time. ONLY A WILLOW DECIDES WHAT WILL AND WILL NOT BE SET ABLAZE MUAHAHA.

Now we have a proper way to fight the torch griefers. Buying us more precious time to inform a mod or complete a votekick, rather than roll back, which should be our LAST resort. We'd have WAY less rollbacks. How do you stop a griefing Willow? A friendly Willow. It turns Willow into an incredible team-player. Every base wants at least 1 Wickerbottom, and now every base wants at least 1 Willow.

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So how's it crafted? It's gotta be something you could make almost immediately, yet not so mundane as to grab a few things on Day 1 and craft like 20 of them. I'm thinking normal torch ingredients + a massive sanity hit (and you actually gotta have the sanity. You can't just craft em at 0 sanity) This plays further into the teamwork aspect as well, as you want to keep your Willow safe and sane (well, sane if preferred). "Hey, could you make me an endo-torch?" "Sure, but my sanity's really borked at the moment." "Then let's go fix that, shall we?"

It would certainly make her quite the master of Summer too... For better or for worse. Who knows. Maybe we'd get to see more Day 1 Spring servers from this too. Spring/Summer is like.. an entire half of the game that pub goers almost never get to see.

[AnimeDasho]

A great suggestion. Personally im not a fan of adding new stuff to make Willow useable again, i think what she has should be buffed instead, but i think your idea is unique and interesting. Currently writing on a post of my own about Willow, so your post helped inspire me, even though i may not agree that this is what should be done.

[StealthBeast]

On 7/19/2017 at 0:30 PM, AnimeDasho said:

A great suggestion. Personally im not a fan of adding new stuff to make Willow useable again, i think what she has should be buffed instead, but i think your idea is unique and interesting. Currently writing on a post of my own about Willow, so your post helped inspire me, even though i may not agree that this is what should be done.

What do you mean by, "She should be buffed" exactly? Willow is beyond the concept of boosting or shifting a few numbers around for balance. Balance, actually, isn't really the chief problem with Willow. Willow suffers from the same issue Wolfgang used to. Wolfgang used to basically just be a Wilson without a beard who hit a little harder. But they didn't simply nerf or buff him, they turned easily the most boring character in the game into one of the most fascinating, dynamic ones.

I agree with your sentiment that adding items in the game to fix characters should be avoided. For instance, I feel Bernie was a terrible idea. He just .... didn't bring anything to the table. He doesn't expand the capabilities of the player, he doesn't give the players difficult decisions to make, he doesn't synergize with Willow, he doesn't have any special demands, he's just... there.

But as far as I see it, the only way to make Willow a unique, important character in this game is by playing into her pyrotechnical side, and the least convoluted way that I can think of is probably going to involve either implementing a new item exclusive to her or by changing the way she interacts with the existing fire items.