Winona main on winona rework

[JustExo]

As somebody who really enjoys playing Winona, I see a lot of people throw out suggestions for how to improve the character which I just don't agree with, so I wanna address some of the problems I have with the design of the cbaracter as well as talk about my own suggrstions and how it would help build aspects of the character that I really enjoy.

People bring up that Winona is a swap character a lot, and it feels like a lot more recently, and their solution is to make Winona catapults only usable for her which, while on the surface may seem fine but in practice I think this suggestion would be bad. Catapults are pretty costly, and in a team setting it becomes really hard to justify the cost of using up all those rocks, rocks which are often used in a lot of other projects/items by other people. If your teammates don't see a return on investment like; being able to solo bee queen, having a working hound trap, or even just automating things like pigs, then they definitely won't be as supportive towards the rock investment, and it would just make the catapults worse for it. To me the appeal to catapult setups is to make whatever threat you're facing less of an event that you have to prepare for, and more of something that anybody is able to get up and do without asking for help. and making Winona's catapults only usable by her would butcher that aspect of her.

That being said, it is still an issue that people go on to put her structures down, then never play the character afterwards, which people attribute to the portal and say that there should be something to decentivize you from swapping off of her which is fine. The best way to get people to keep using the character in my opinion is to give winona a buff to the structures whenever she is near them ie: catapults shoot faster, they could deal more damage. Spotlights can debuff shadow creatures when someone whose insane is in their light, maybe make them attack slower so that players can get an extra hit in, make their (shadow creatures) attacks deal less damage, or just lower their defense. People tend to overlook winona's spotlights, but you have to consider it if you're gonna talk about reworking the character

I also think if Winona was able to repair equipment other than just clothing items it should also be something exclusive to her seeing as how she's an engineer who loves taking things apart to see how they work, it would make sense that she could put them back together maybe limiting its repair capabilities to one time per item would be a good balance change to this hypothetical buff, since repairing equipment would be extremely good.

on top of all of these, I think Winona just needs more structures, and unique interactions with her structures. The two biggest suggestions that I see lots of people agree with me on are that Winona should be able to craft an irrigation system to keep plants watered and prevent smoldering which would help farming oriented characters without making their perks irrelevant. as somebody who bases with Wormwood players pretty often, I think having a system in place for Winona to support them by being able to make it easier for them to water things would be really nice to have. A possible unique character interaction between Winona and Wormwood could be added where only Wormwood and Winona are able to mix in different types of fertilizer into the water system, and water/fertilize them at the same time. My next suggestion is meant to make Winona a bit better at boating by adding a rudder with the idea being that, any character can use the rudder once its attatched to a boat, but Winona just has more control over it since she's the one that built it, so it'd make sense for her to be able to use it better than most

Overall; Winona just needs more things that are unique to her. A character thats built around their structures would need to have a reason to continue playing them once their structures are put down. Adding character specific interactions with them and making even more structures to have unique interactions with would help decentivize her just being seen as a "swap character" and seen more as a support character that helps others through her structures.

Spoiler

Klei if you want to yoink these ideas, go for it just give me skins for her structures pls