Some thoughts about Wendy

[Pig Princess]

Wendy rework gave a lot of tools to Wendy players to work with, and buffed character as a result a lot. While I think Wendy right now is fun to play, there always is a room for improvement; I saw some complaints on forums about her being too strong, but all people posted as a suggestion to improve situation were quite simple nerfs, which wouldn't balance character while keeping Wendy fun, but rather lead to more grind/make unique playstyle just not worth the resources. So I thought for a while and came up with idea, which I want to share and read people's opinion about it.

Health of Wendy and Abigail could be linked in a way that percentage of remaining health of either one would try to match percentage of the other one, and that destination health value to be the lowest in the pair, no matter whether Wendy or Abigail were hurt. That means, that Wendy would have one more reason to fight with Abigail, since letting Abigail's health drop would lead to rapid drop of Wendy's health (drop rate could be as fast as starving, for example).

That was general idea, and to make it possible to restore health of both Wendy and Abigail to maximum value, as well as in order to give this system flexibility, I'd suggest to allow health pools to try to align unless the difference is less than 20%. Which means, that if Abigail is destroyed (0%), Wendy's health would drop to 20% of Wendy's health (30 hp) at a rate of starvation; Abigail's health after that wouldn't rise above 40% treshold, leaving Abigail at 60/120/240 hp until Wendy heals herself of spams spectral cure-alls to outheal Abigails health drop rate.

Likely results of that and possible examples of situations, which would occur:

- majority of boss fights wouldn't change since rate at which both Wendy and Abigail take damage often is either high and player uses both healing and ghost healing (bee queen, fuelweaver, 3rd phase of celestial champion), damage rate is low for both (dragonfly, toadstool, antlion, crab king, 1st and 2nd phases of celestial champion), or player already spams spectral cure-alls (shadow pieces with tier 3 rook, frog rain). Or 600 ghost and 150 human hp are enough to last for magority of the figh/full fight (tanking deerclops).

- Abigail would still be able to take unlimited amount of bees and regular spiders without any extra resources spent on Wendy's and Abigail's healing and buffing respectively. In other words, Abigail would be just as good against these enemies as single-player Abigail is, shred through them as she always could, in particular.

- Wendy would need to actively help Abigail in order to prevent as much damage as possible in case of spider warriors (spawning from every tier 2 and 3 den), hounds, frogs, pigs, merms, bunnymen, bishops, etc. Afk behaviour would lead to extra resources spent on healing both Wendy and Abigail.

- Wendy would need Abigail's elixirs more often in order to spend less resources for healing herself - to keep that percentage health value difference as low as possible; another option would be to let Abigail's health drop and then spend extra resources to heal both sisters (which is balanced considering Abigail in general farms extra resources, such as butterfly wings, meats, honey without bee box), keeping Abigail in flower and fighting with 0.75 damage modifier, or fighting with Wendy and Abigail at very low health both. This leads to variety of decent possible strategies, which is a good thing, in my opinion.

And that's it. I know that rework happened long time ago, developers avoid adding disadvantages to existing characters in general, and there is lot of other content to be added with higher priority, so I'm sure Wendy won't change anymore. Maybe somebody could create mod with this change, or I will have more time in the future, learn how to mod it and do that myself, or this topic will soon be lost in the sea of suggestions and all of this remains on paper. But nevertheless, I want to share idea because I'm curious of people's opinions.

[Guille6785]

I'm confused what exactly this would achieve, I wouldn't like to play with this

[Pig Princess]

The idea is to adjust difficulty of playing as Wendy to be more in line with other surviviors; I personally have no problems with that since I look more on what I can achieve (solo worlds) or how can I help team (multiplayer worlds), as well as how much player skill is encouraged and whether it's fun to play, but it seems there are a lot of people who are bothered by balance a lot more. I just read a few discussions and think that opponents of rework defenders have some fair points (for example, Abigail right now discourages beginner from learning how to fight crowds and basic mobs), and I like to try to solve diffucult issues with open solutions (not pre-thought ones like closed-answer type of tests).

So what it would achieve:

1. Beginners would have incentive to participate in the fight and learn, afk behaviour would be discouraged.

2. Power level and disadvantage strength ratio would be closer to other surviviors, e.i. great power which feels earned for more people since it requires to manage great disadvantage. Good examples of such balance are Warly and Wormwood, in single player - Wilba.

3. Wendy would be more fun to play as (in my opinion), since disadvantage as well as advantage can and should make playstyle more more unique, engaging, but not tedious. For example, Warly has well-designed interesting disadvantage, which I enjoy to manage, but I can't say the same about Wes (rework made things better though).

But I know that my point of view regarding disadvantage is unpopular, and it's perfectly fine to disagree.