Thinking about Webber's skill tree :)

[Skelewar]

Yeah, skill tree ideas thread. What can I say, it's very fun to speculate.

We're talking WEBBER this time! These are just rough ideas for fun. Getting upset is strictly forbidden.

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I'm imagining three main trees, Beard tree, Spider tree, Spider Queen tree.

Beard Tree-----------------------------------------

Similar to Wilson, Webber is the only other character who grows a beard. We can forgo perks like "growth rate" and "insulation" because those are lame. Instead, lets cut right to the chase: beard storage. What would Webber store in his beard? Spiders of course! One annoying aspect of Webber is the need to manually pick up your spiders in order to take them from caves to surface or vice versa.  Additionally, if another player loads either end of the sinkhole, this can cause problems with spider loyalty/neutrality when the Webber is not on the same side. This will help alleviate those problems.

Spider Storage 1: Store 1/2/3 spiders in your beard respective to tier 

Spider Storage 2: Store 2/4/6 spiders in your beard respective to tier

That's pretty much all I've got. Perhaps this tree could be expanded into the "Webber" tree and relate to more of his base aspects, like being a monster, but I wouldn't want anything that directly removes a con- like "pigs are not hostile towards you anymore".

Spider Web Tree----------------------------------------

Starting off with general QoL perks-

Tamed Spider Faster Movement Speed. It's true that spiders teleport to you if they're too far away, but it can still take a little while. This is just a small QoL perk to generally pad the tree. Better ideas welcome.

Tamed Spiders No Longer Eat Food Off The Ground. Splendid! Do note, this does NOT apply to spiders that are "tamed" by a decorated den, they are still attracted to food like normal. This aspect is very important since that is a vital way to manipulate your spider army when you want to park them in an area for safe keeping. This is just QoL to stop eyeballs, horns, eggs and anything else from being gobbled up before you have a chance to react. I know that blowing the webby whistle will briefly stop spiders from eating off the ground, but it's not perfect. This is just QoL to make that easier.

At some point I'm imagining the tree splitting into many options--a web if you will-- leading to a perk or two that relates specifically to each species of spider, similar to how Woodie has branches for each were-form. Of course, only nurses, spitters, depth danglers, warriors and default are really viable spider friends... no one really goes out of their way for the shattered or strider spiders so their perks may be for padding. Nothing we haven't seen before to be honest (Goose branch/Torch branch/Coaching branch moment). Perhaps instead they can be given really good perks to make them viable? Regardless, each branch will only have 1 or 2 perks to unlock relating specifically to the spider in question. For example...

Advanced Nurses:  1. Heal more often.     2. Heal more towards Webber himself.

Advanced Spitters: 1. Never melee attack, ranged attack only.        2. Web spit also slows/sticks targets to spot. Perhaps multiple shots build up slowness until a brief moment of standstill before resetting, similar to how ice staff builds up to a freeze.

Advanced Warriors:  1. More damage.    2. Taunt. Will goad current enemies into focusing aggro onto them.

Advanced Danglers: 1. Increased attack speed?  It's difficult since they're effectively reskinned warriors. Open to ideas.

Advanced Cave Spiders: 1. Stronger resistance when in shell.   2. Being hit while hiding in the shell deals recoil damage to attacker.

Advanced Shattered Spiders: 1. Spike attacks only harm intended target.   2. Can attack nightmare creatures.

Advanced Sea Striders: Okay I dont have a clue. Webber can ride them across the ocean lol, if they die Webber drowns. Idk.

I've also left out the default spider... What could they be given besides boring health/damage buffs?

After unlocking X number of perks from the Spider Tree, the Spider Queen Tree is accessible.

Spider Queen Tree-------------------------------

One major annoyance with Webber is how the "optimal" strategy involves you killing yourself in order to haunt tier three nests and spawn a spider queen in order to access nurse spiders as quickly as possible. This is stupid. That's why to start off the queen tree we have...

Craftable Spider Queen Sweet: Using monster meat, butterfly wings and something moderately expensive (purple gem? nightmare fuel? honey comb/wax?) Webber can craft a sweet treat to feed to any unsuspecting spider. The spider will then have a hypnotized expression on its face and try to enter the nearest tier 3 spider den, only to emerge from it seconds later as a fully fledged spider queen. This is meant to be comparable to Woodie's treeguard-summoning skill.

Spider Queen Savant: Webber can befriend a spider queen, simple as. The queen no longer spawns any spiders, and only 1 can be tamed at a time. I do NOT want an army of Queens to be "new meta", just a single mini-boss friend comparable to Bernie.

Spider Queen Specialist: Webber can ride on a spider queen. Yup. It moves around at speeds comparable to a walking cane on a road tile. This is not meant to be a free Beefalo. Beefalos are a time and resource intensive mount that grant you high speed and good damage, base damage for an Ornery beef being 50 per hit. Spider Queen would be an easily accessible (character and perk specific) mount that is decently fast, not near Woby or a Beef, but it does do a good 80 damage per hit. Couple this with its low attack speed... I think it could actually be kind of balanced.

now finally,

Alignment----------------------------------------

Awww yeah! The juicy part! Webber's alignment would obviously be two new powerful types of spiders. However, it is vital that these two new spiders are not made with switcherdoodles/crafts. This would ruin it all, since anyone could mass craft one kind of doodle and then switch to the other and get the best of both worlds. That's not how these alignments should work. Also, the spiders could not be made with pure horror/brilliance, since only horror is obtainable pre-endgame and that would create an imbalance between the two choices. Rather, I thought of two options for how to access these special spiders.

1. Special spiders would replace one type of spider species specifically, adding on to their previous species-specific perks. The obvious choices are the Danglers (they live in the ruins and Atrium) and Shattered (they live on the moon). When a dangler or shattered is tamed by a perk wielding Webber, they would evolve into their buffed form. Danglers would turn black with red eyes, resembling Webber's Triumphant Skin and Shattered would break out from their rocky casings, resembling Webber's Moonbound skin.
2. Special spiders are born from the corpses of dead default allied spiders. A slain spider would either shed it's mortal coil and emerge as a shadow creature-version, or it's corpse would turn inside-out/possesed just as a horror hound does and become reanimated. I think this idea is really cool, but it would be rather easy to mass produce them. Perhaps the solution if to mix the two, and make the special spiders come from the corpses of specific species? Regardless let's get to their effects.

Shadow Side: These spiders have special powers, including the obligatory planar attack and defense as well as added bonuses v.s. lunar aligned enemies, as well as something else! Some options I've thought of-

1. Shadow spiders could have the Bone Armor effect on them, negating an instance of damage dealt to them based on a timer
2. Shadow spiders could teleport a short distance away after taking damage, similar to shadow creatures, and then teleport back in to deliver their next attack.
3. Shadow spider attacks have a chance to summon a shadow tentacle- similar to thulecite club

Lunar Side: Same deal, obligatory planar attack and defense as well as added bonuses v.s. shadow aligned enemies, plus-

1. Moon spiders could give off a permanent aura of light
2. Moon spiders could attack via gestalts within them, which inflict grogginess and eventually sleep on enemies. Remember wormwood has a skill tree perk that puts enemies to sleep too.
3. Moon spider attacks have a chance to summon a gestalt- similar to enlightened crown

 

Finally to cap it all off, put a dang spider pet inside the rocky den for goodness sake! Crafted with butter muffin perhaps. There's my full concept, I can't wait to hear your thoughts, thanks for reading!

[BalkanCockroach]

20 hours ago, Skelewar said:

Spider Queen Specialist: Webber can ride on a spider queen. Yup. It moves around at speeds comparable to a walking cane on a road tile. This is not meant to be a free Beefalo. Beefalos are a time and resource intensive mount that grant you high speed and good damage, base damage for an Ornery beef being 50 per hit. Spider Queen would be an easily accessible (character and perk specific) mount that is decently fast, not near Woby or a Beef, but it does do a good 80 damage per hit. Couple this with its low attack speed... I think it could actually be kind of balanced.

How about full domestication for 5 minutes at the cost of 2.5 meat. Slower than ornery but similar damage? (Without war saddle). Also maybe bondable with webby whistle? Or something else.

[Dr.Webber]

 

[Jakepeng99]

On 1/17/2024 at 6:50 PM, Skelewar said:

Spider Storage 1: Store 1/2/3 spiders in your beard respective to tier 

Spider Storage 2: Store 2/4/6 spiders in your beard respective to tier

Cool idea. 

[Dr.Webber]

@DownloadADuck wavey not cool

[goblinball]

I like webber not receiving any penalty from eating monster meat, although it’s not really very useful as they’re not very strong foods even as webber. I think it’d be fun if he got a perk which made monster meat and monster lasagna provide more stats so that they’d be a really good alternative to other healing/sanity sources for webber