Wormwood's skill tree: Evaluation and Brainstorming

[Prinha]

I was originally replying to 

 

But since my posting got pretty long, I think it deserves its own threat. The discussion is becoming a little heated with lots of back and forth between wormwood mains and other players. I think the problem is that all of us are expressing a lot of "I don't want x, it's underwhelming" but offering only very little in terms of suggestions. So I want to invite all of you to start brainstorming with me. Instead of saying "I don't want Flytrap! It's useless!" start saying WHAT you want. Klei is much more likely (see fancy berry bushes) to implement actual doable suggestions, but they'll probably not respond well to "remove x skill" for y reasons. Feel free to suggest whatever your creative mind comes up with. It doesn't have to be perfect or even above average. I'm sure, if we all work together, we can come up with some decent ideas. For Wormwood!

This is my original posting, where I'm giving feedback on the skilltree as I see and tested it. I would like to find replacements for some of the more aweful skills, but of course my perception is subjective. Anyways here it is:

I think, Wormwoods issue is, that his hamlet skills translate poorly into DST. We don't have flytraps or bramble roots, there is no mud spa or poop literally everywhere. Since he used to be the only character who could mass plant seeds, that became his focus and niche. Then came the RWYS update and while he got some good updates regarding his usage of fertilizer, the ability to masstend crops didn't really make up for taking away his unique role. Personally I was glad that Wormwood was freed from his farm only duty.

I am one of those evil megabasers that use the celestial portal freely. Wormwood has always been one of my favourite characters. Even if he's no longer burnable, I like him for his quotes, for his persona, for smearing poop on his body and for the fact that he forces me to kite cleanly, though that's somewhat offset by the existence of jellybeans.

I occasionally use him during spring to massfarm stuff and am disappointed most of the time. Yes, farming is a bit faster, but it's not that much of a difference and if I didn't like him that much, I'd probably not switch at all. The bee attraction can be really annoying.

I won't comment on the Lunar Cultivator or Lunar Guardian skills, since I haven't tried those ingame yet.

• Seed Sleuth useful in early game, good as a first skill 7/10
• Growth I-III decent skills, especially extension of bloom duration. 8/10
• Petal Production Skill has some flavour and that's it. Petals aren't needed all that often and they aren't rare. May have some niche use in making poop from werepigs or taming beefalo in the very early game, except WW won't bloom easily at that point. Will just turn into piles and more piles of rot lateron, especially in public servers. And rot is already overflowing by midgame anyways. Given that this skill requires some investment to get and clogs up precious inventory space, it's just pretty bad. 2/10
• Shade Plant Not tested yet
• Farmhands I-III The range is pretty big, but it doesn't actually do all that much. It was already very easy for WW to tend to plants, doesn't seem worth spending 3 points in it. 4/10
• Fly Trap Is this supposed to help a bunch of newbies dealing with the Lord of the Fruitflies? Maybe peoples creativity can be jogged to find some use for fruitfly 'followers'. From my point of view this skill is almost useless. Spawning the Lord is already very easy and also NOT desirable after aquiring a fruitfly on each shard. In fact he's so annoying that people make distraction farmplots to spawn him there and farm in their main plots in peace. 1/10
• Bee Kind It could be worse. I guess it makes for decent hound protection, if the world spawned with a killer bee biome. Still can't harvest bee boxes without provoking killer bees, how disappointing. I have to try this with the terraria seed preset. 5/10
• Butterfly Friend I like it as a low effort skill. Very useful for newbies who haven't figured out how to kill butterflies yet. Also useful for people that lag. 7/10
• Mushroom Mastery I-II Growth is pretty fast, makes a decent skill for those rare times, where planters are used. 7/10
• Mushroom Multiplier Skill seems to be broken right now. I'm only getting 4 shrooms from a maxed planter. 0/10
• Moon Shroom Cloud  Will take time to find a good use for this. It has some potential as an oh **** button but panflutes exist. It's pretty time consuming to amass moon shrooms. 6/10
• Poor Sap The sap seems to only do damage, if the creature can actually poop. Used on bunnymen, there was no poop and also no damage animation. Used on creatures that actually can poop, it's yield is pretty meh, especially when compared to feeding a werepig. Haven't come up with ideas on how to utilize the damage yet. In my opinion this skill is mostly funny, have big doubts on its usefulness. 4/10
• The plant crafts Perks are working and useful. I'm only missing the ability to turn butterflies into moon moths. Fancy berry bushes are of course amazing. I think nobody would talk about these, if the rest of his tree was improved. 8/10 

 

Ideas on what to give Wormwood instead:

• The ability to plant moon shrooms in mushroom planters or some way to exchange shrooms for moon shrooms (swap for sap?)
• A passive that reduces his hunger drain while blooming (swap for petal production)
• Change Flytrap. Maybe WW could modify a scare crow with the help of some living logs into a living scare crow that keeps away Lord of the fruitflies.
• Let WW harvest bee boxes undisturbed with the Bee kind! perk.

I have no ideas on what to replace Farmhand I-III with. I would really like to see something that expands the usefullness of bramble husk, bramble traps and Compost Wrap, but those things don't fit into the "wormwood specialized in farming" niche that they are going for. This niche should absolutely exist, since farming is one of the things, people pick wormwood for. 

[Jakepeng99]

I have an idea to indirectly buff flytrap, make the evil fruit flies have the possibility to stun brightshades, and make the little flies neutral. (Also let them be caught by a bug net.)

[Neu7ral]

I want Wormwood to be able to pick up Butterflies and Bees as long as they are interacting with a flower, picking a bee would damage him, but it makes no need of bug nets.

[ShadowbirdRH]

Rather than nerfing blooming's drawback of increased hunger, I'd be more in favor of buffing the benefit to speed. Maybe both could be options on opposite sides of the skill tree?

One idea that's been making a lot of noise in my head is bringing Hamlet's snaptooths to DST by way of a skill in Wormwood's tree. Should be difficult to spawn, probably a top tier skill behind a lock, maybe only usable by the light of a full moon, and require a fleshy bulb for crafting material. Once one is in world, it could behave same as in Hamlet, able to be fed meat to grow into an immobile form that produces more snaptooths.

Another that I really like/want is better mushroom handling. Being able to grow mushrooms in the earth from spores, being able to grow mushrooms into mushtrees, though since perpetual light is a big deal and it's similar to mushlights/glowcaps, I'd think that should require shroomskin from the toadstool (or loot stash), as a material for 5-10 items to trigger the transformation.

Butterfly Friend isn't useless, it's a nice touch, and would be especially improved with Neu7ral's suggestion of being able to catch them (and bees) net-free, possibly as a separate skill.

Seed sleuth is pretty close to useless, but could be much improved if it instead of or in addition showed what plant was to be created when about to plant an unidentified seed.

Wormwood's ability to tend to plants just by being near while blooming is already pretty great, and improving the range does very little to make it better. It barely even needs to be a skill at all, and definitely doesn't need to be three skills. It could go straight to the full upgrade with a single skill point and could still be a skill that isn't worth spending a point on. I'd suggest cutting out the lesser versions and putting it on a branch of the skill tree that involves blooming.

It's easy to overlook, but the petal production skill has a lot of potential. I don't think this needs to be changed or removed.

I would say Bee Kind and Fly Trap are both wastes of space. At least Bee Kind could be improved to prevent bees from attacking when harvesting honey from bee boxes and possibly to enable net-free capture.

Crafting plants is nice, but I think the berry costs could use a bit of adjustment. It's fair that you'd need more juicy berries considering the bushes yield more berries per harvest, but I don't think they should require as much more, considering how much longer it takes them to actually grow those berries. Also, grass tufts would be appreciated.

I haven't tested this so I don't know whether or not this applies, but if those crafted plants require periodic fertilization after planting, I would think something needs to be done to counteract that. Either the plants should be grown like structures on viable ground instead of going to inventory and thus be treated as new/natural plants instead of transplanted ones, or I think Wormwood should be able to craft something that heals the damage of transplanting. I lean more toward the former.