Willow Skill Tree Suggestions

[Crestwave]

Happy Holidays! The devs are likely on vacation right now, but as someone who’s played Willow quite a bit, I just wanted to drop some feedback on her skill tree for when they come back.

My number one request: Lighter should have Absorb as an alt action like Maxwell’s shadow top hat (i.e., you can cast it directly from your inventory if you’re holding alt). It currently feels really awkward to use, especially considering you’re often pressured by things burning up.

Patch Up could use a buff; it takes over 43 minutes for him to heal to full with the max health skills. Or in reality, never, because the skill requires him to be in big form and the crawling horrors spawning at 50% sanity easily out-damage his healing.

We currently don’t have any skills for holding bernie, so I suggest the skill should heal bernie at a much faster rate when held. This would be a nice alternative to sewing kits in early-game (particularly before you get canes), while not being too relevant in late-game.

Shadow flames have so much design potential as a concept but falls flat because its implementation is really basic. Some ideas for buffs/reworks that are thematic to the shadow flame concept:

• Add splash damage

  • Currently, the skill does 40 physical damage and 60 planar damage

  • One of these can be changed to have a small splash effect, damaging the target *and* nearby mobs, while the other still only damages its target

  • The spell already has a small circular burst effect when hitting an enemy, so anims can likely be kept as is

• Add target prioritization

  • For example, the flames could home in on the mobs with the least % of health left to finish them off

• Allow excess damage to chain to other mobs

  • E.g., if you kill a 40 health spider with shadow flames, it would spawn another 60 damage shadow flame

  • Or if we’re feeling generous, it could spawn a shadow flame with 10 less damage instead of basing it on excess. So it would go 100 -> 90 -> 80 -> 70 -> 60 -> … if it manages to keep killing mobs. This would be super fun to combo with Combustion!

• Add percentage damage

  • The skill could do additional damage equal to 1% of the enemy’s current health

  • This would make it a great opener for bosses like Misery Toadstool while not being too strong because they get harder on later phases (where 1% of current health will be significantly lower)

  • In short, you just skip through the boring intro part

Also, this is mostly coming from a logical standpoint, but why do Varg flames (and by extension, lunar flames in PVP) supercool players and not thermals? Code-wise, the only thing blocking it is the fact that it only searches for combat entities as valid targets. Balance-wise, a mere watering can cools thermals perfectly fine so I don’t think it would be too unreasonable.

Finally, Bernie’s affinity skills should ideally count for the Burning Bernie skill. You still wouldn’t have enough points to get the Willow affinities, but it would allow you to get another regular lighter skill if you prefer to.

 

P.S. It would be neat if Burning Frenzy gave off some light and/or let you light enemies on fire with regular weapons.

[Torakshik]

Can you please tell me how you know shadowflame does 40 normal damage and 60 planar damage?
 

[drc008]

This moonfire cd should never have existed，Maybe it could be reduced to four seconds.

[zhangsheng]

Maybe the CD should disappear, I have a better solution.

 

On 12/24/2023 at 3:21 PM, Crestwave said:

Add percentage damage

• The skill could do additional damage equal to 1% of the enemy’s current health

• This would make it a great opener for bosses like Misery Toadstool while not being too strong because they get harder on later phases (where 1% of current health will be significantly lower)

• In short, you just skip through the boring intro part

This is almost impossible, Misery Toadstol with 99999 health will lose nearly 1000 health when hit, which is clearly unrealistic, and Klei will not allow such high damage to occur.

[Dr.Webber]

I think the fire raiser affinities should be reflective of each other preferably the tendrils route but I'm ok with other option and I think when applying burning Bernie to lunar aligned Bernie the fire silhouette should be blue like lunar flames rather than white like a gastalt also when applying fire to structures, and you have the control, burning as an activated skill you have to press something else to trigger it