mixed notes about skill trees

[chickaen]

When my Don't Starve group heard about the introduction of skill trees, we had a lot of opinions and ideas on them, mostly positive but with some hot takes, and I thought I'd catalogue some of them here.

Firstly, the consensus so far is that the idea of more skill trees is  super cool and exciting, and it's great that some less powerful characters like Woodie and Wormwood are getting some of the attention they need. That being said, Wolfgang as one of the stronger characters seems a little spoiled with a skill tree. If Klei's plan is to introduce skill trees to every character, and it seems like that is the plan, there should be concerns towards who gets improved in what way and why. Affinity seems like a very cool mechanic to add to each character but the range of the skill tree on stronger characters like Wolfgang, while not explicitly bad, feels unnecessary.

Second, every since the Wilson rework, I've become the local Wilson main of the group, and at this point this is mostly a personal complaint, but with the introduction of other character's skill trees, Wilson feels less interesting/weaker by comparison again. The skill tree made sense for him thematically as a scientist, and although I'm just as excited as anyone to see the cool new abilities, especially on Wormwood my old main, I can't help but feel a little sad about it. The fact that he has a degree of improvement makes him a solid baseline character for other characters to be balanced around, but the fact that they also get only positive skill trees and their base buffs sort of blows that out of the water.

It would be nice if Wilson's skill tree functioned better than others to balance this somehow. Some ideas we had towards this included having him get a higher total number of skill points, or having other characters have downsides as part of their skill tree as well. An interesting way to balance this would be for other characters to have less skill points at base, but being able to take specific downsides in exchange for access to more. For example Wolfgang could opt to take more damage from sanity monsters/darkness in exchange for access to 2 or 3 more skill points. This also maintains Wilson's idea as the most straightforward beginner character, and matches his lore as a researcher/scientist. You could also increase Wilson's point gain rate, but that shouldn't be the only solution since it means at the final state Wilson still sucks.

Lastly, we all agree please buff Willow next. She really needs it. Maybe to address griefing concerns her first ability could be something like fires deal less damage to players/player built structures.

Overall though, we're all really looking forward to the cool new content, especially affinity related things, and are excited for things to come.

[YouKnowWho]

1 hour ago, chickaen said:

An interesting way to balance this would be for other characters to have less skill points at base, but being able to take specific downsides in exchange for access to more.

I actually really like this idea. It’d encourage more specialization and interesting group dynamics.