Wickerbottom's Lackluster Rework and how to Improve it

[Fuffles]

While I'm not a lot on the forums anymore due to some decisions made for DST, it honestly saddened me by how a character with so much potential got such a mediocre character refresh. I would like to point out what went wrong with it and how one could improve it.

                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Let's start by exploring who Wicker is based on her design and her pre-rework state. Her title is the Librarian, so its easy to assume she worked in a library. Her appearence is that of an old lady. Her quotes and perk of starting with Science Machine knowledge indicate she is very knowledgeable, while her other perks state that she is an insomniac, dislikes spoiled food (but then again who doesn't?) and writes her own books as well, which have magical powers in the constant. Very simple theme, fun to explore..

Now to the beta rework.
She got herself a set of new books which are mostly utilities for various things in the game and some nullifiers that eliminate mechanics (like temperature for example). It is a neat idea to give her a few more books, but I dont like their direction, generally anything that nullifies game mechanics rubs me the wrong way.
She got herself a bookshelf which unlocks some of the locked new books, provides a place to store them and recharges them whenever a player holding them is around. While I like the idea of making your books last longer it more or less solidifies her as a book-slave per se and since it recovers books it makes her a swappable character, since Maxwell can read her books as well.
Her insomnia got stronger, but honestly this doesn't feel like a downside anymore. Tents and sleeping overall had uses in singleplayer since you could skip days and recover at the cost of hunger. Since this is impossible in multiplayer they just made it a recovery station, which isnt bad per se, but can be replaced with food.
And since she is now fully immune to sleep this makes her ignore enemies that utilized sleep as a crowd control, effectively making it an upside.
She also refuses to eat food below 20% freshness. Honestly downsides that are built around spoiled food are just a joke imo, it barely impacts things.

Overall the rework mostly touched up on what she already had and didn't really introduce anything new to her character which is why its really disappointing to me.
We have great characters that have interesting playstyles like Wormwood, Warly or WX78, but Wicker just doesn|t belong to them and Im sorry if you are a Wicker main and disagree.

                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Now how would I approach her rework. First of all she needs a playstyle, so why not utilize the books fully?
(Before you angrily comment, read it fully)
The core idea here would be that wicker is unable to use any standard weapons, no spears, no nightswords, nada. She is old after all, you could simply make her say something akin to "I'm not as fit as in my younger days..." when trying to equip a weapon / attack an entity with fists/tools. Now instead of wicker utilizing traditional weaponry, she would use her books. We have tech from the Forge for equippable books that cast spells with a reticule, so let's expand on this.
While I wont go into potential ideas for offensive books, I can grant some inspiration via a clip from a Cartoon Network show which did offensive books quite well in my opinion.

Spoiler

 

The books could have different casting styles as well! Like being channeled and following your cursor as long as you dont move or cancel the spell or one-off casts like we have currently. The general idea is to encourage wicker to stay further away from fights and use books to affect fights in drastic ways. The only problem with this would be direct fighting with enemies that pursue you, for which I feel like she should have a starting book that works closely to The Three Musketeers portrayed in the clip above at 1:15. Like I said, the concept can go as vast as it gets it just would require some creativity to pull it off well.
Here's also where I would make the books less effective in hands of other bookreaders (Maxwell and potential future characters), I feel since they wouldn't know as much about literature so the books would either be less effective or do nothing in their hands.
She could keep some utility books too, since the world of literature is not only about tactics and war.

Now that we have a fun playstyle with a downside to give the player direction as for how to combat it, let's look at her other "upside" as I called it, her insomnia.
Sleep immunity isn't necessarily a strong upside but one nonetheless, I feel like exploring the insomnia part a bit more would be on point, but more as a downside. I feel like maybe granting her grogginess or blurred vision (not Wagstaff levels ofc) in the morning for a few seconds would be an annoying but a visible downside. I myself am not very sure of this specific part, but I feel like in general looking more into the effects of insomnia on one's body could give some inspiration for this one.

While I feel like keeping the Science Machine knowledge is a solid perk to keep, the spoiled food one is not. It just feels random, like it was made just to meet some kind of quota for a character's perks.

                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Overall this post is not meant to give you a fully polished, thought out with stats & such rework, but an idea of what direction one could have taken wicker into.
Feel free to give your thoughts in the comments, or how you would have approached the rework instead, since you never know if a Klei Dev wont be intrigued by your idea.

[Evelo]

Brilliant ideas here. The clip you used actually showed off a ton of potential Klei can go with this idea. The art department wouldn't be happy considering the amount of work they'd have to do but over all it is really cool and would definitely fit her old age. After all Wendy is the only character (well and Wes) who deal less damage with weapons. The reason I believe was because she is a child. Webber, Wurt, and Walter are children but they don't have this down side. Why should someone who is older be as capable as fighting as say Wilson?
I hope Klei retracts the Wickerbottom refresh and comes back with more expansive changes.
After playing more and reading more in depth of the character refresh I actually really like it the way it is. The only issue I have is her "downsides" but I personally prefer characters with impactful downsides. (Warly's Picky Eatting, Wormwood's Sanity & Healing)

[maxwell_winters]

8 minutes ago, Fuffles said:

it makes her a swappable character, since Maxwell can read her books as well.

Can we just not? I don't like when this argument is applied to Warly and Winona but it is even worse for Wickerbottom. Why would you even switch to Maxwell? He's probably the worst character in DST at this point. The lowest health stat, the weakest combat minions in the game. He's not even worth swapping to if you want wood and stone since you don't need as much in the late game after the March QoL and there are multiple other methods to farm them.

14 minutes ago, Fuffles said:

The core idea here would be that wicker is unable to use any standard weapons, no spears, no nightswords, nada.

This would alienate most of her mains and encourage swapping to Maxwell even more. 

[Copyafriend]

46 minutes ago, Fuffles said:

The books could have different casting styles as well! Like being channeled and following your cursor as long as you dont move or cancel the spell or one-off casts like we have currently. The general idea is to encourage wicker to stay further away from fights and use books to affect fights in drastic ways. The only problem with this would be direct fighting with enemies that pursue you, for which I feel like she should have a starting book that works closely to The Three Musketeers portrayed in the clip above at 1:15. Like I said, the concept can go as vast as it gets it just would require some creativity to pull it off well.

Cool so walter but like 50x better and also with utility magic. Hard no. I prefer magic to be almost entirely utility only. 

 

this is the biggest problem with combat magic and ranged weaponry and the reason it more or less doesnt exist in anything more than a very limited capacity in this game:

its really REALLY boring. 
 

the game is not designed with ranged combat in mind, enemies walk towards you then attack. The moment a character has a ranged attack it immediately turns into a game of keepaway. Which is boring. Its the biggest problem with walter, you just kite the enemies out of their attack range slowly and its boring. If his range was doubled itd be way way too easy, itd just take forever. The same exact problem would exist with wickerbottom. Its just a game of hitting the enemy, moving out of their range, and repeat until dead.

you cant make a combat mage because it breaks 99% of the basic principles of the game. If walters dps wasnt trash he’d be the best character in the game. Wanda gets like half an inch extra range with her whip and people consider it the best weapon in the game despite being tied with the darksword in actual dps. Its because of a slight range boost. The game just cant handle it. I get what you’re saying and it sounds fun. But it sounds like the kind of fun you get from downloading a cheat character mod.

[Hornete]

I don't think I want another combat character personally.

Still would down for the idea of wicker being able to equip her books and slap enemies even if it were for a measly 10 damage, just for the hilarity of it, lol.

[Antynomity]

ninjayas

[Jinjetica]

I agree with the first half...not so much the 2nd half...

[Parusoid]

22 hours ago, Fuffles said:

doesn't feel like a downside anymore

Lower HP certainly does, she now has 125

[AugyBear]

Wickerbottom has a pretty solid identity as an advanced resource farmer, and I particularly enjoy that about her playstyle. Her books let you do all kinds of ridiculous farms, such as:

• Bee queen tentacle farm
• Ocean fish farm (new Aquatic book)
• Vegetable/fruit farm
• grass/twigs/reeds farm (with lureplant)
• feathers/meat/gold/krampus farm (morsels > pig king for the gold)
• Werepig and Moon staff farm (new Lunar book)

With the new Apiculture book she also excels at killing the simpler bosses that don't have AoE, like Moose, Ancient Guardian, Crab King, etc.

Everybody complains that "she's just a switch character for Maxwell", which would be easily resolved by having Maxwell be unable to read her books. However, there is a vocal group who would also hate that change, so the dev team is really caught between a rock and a hard place here. Maybe have Maxwell's sanity go to 0 on each book reading as a compromise? He focuses on shadow magic, she focuses on lunar magic as far as I can tell. She can't use his book to make shadow puppets, so I don't see why he should have free reign to use her books without consequences.

For her downsides, they currently fall into the category of "fluff", since they really just sell her as an old lady rather than create unique mechanical challenges. Her main gameplay currently focuses around building advanced farms and sanity management to run them, so maybe some other interactions with Sanity and sleep is where we can find an interesting character quirk with mechanical consequences.

A stacking sanity debuff for every night she goes without sleep would give her insomnia a real bite. To counteract this, you would need to get her to sleep using some kind of consumable sleep aid (sleepy time tea, mandrake soup, etc.) among other requirements. You could really play up this angle, making it so that she has to be at high health and relatively full in order to sleep, has to be comfy in a tent or fur roll, no lights nearby, etc.

Managing her mental health would be a great counterbalance to all her Constant breaking abilities, without creating a "book meter" or something similar.

Any thoughts?