Winona's shadow affinity is underwhelming compared to her lunar affinity.

[HeatAndRun]

Personally I'm quite enjoying the new new skill tree of Winona, but the gameplay is mainly focused on her lunar affinity. There're little reasons to choose the shadow affinity for Winona. For now the shadow side is focused a little too much on the early game management aspect. They're easier to access than the lunar side perks, but the max potential of shadow side is pretty.. Underwhelming.

Spoiler

You need to give up the attractive Wagstaff gears including the semi WOBOTs and Telelocators, and utility of the enlightened crown shards. And all the perks you can get are :

1. Go across over the water gap : Can be replaced by using grass boats.

2. Can be revived at the point you designated without losing your inventory : You're playing Winona now, and if you died that means your structures left behind the battlefield are in a trouble.

3. Immune to Charlie's attack : Still drains sanity, and you need a light source to interact with anything anyway.

4. Can go to any wormhole point : This one's quite nice, but You can't relocate the Wormholes, if you don't have one near your base.

Most of all, They share the same cooldown, and for now there's no active way to accelerate the cooldown.

The perks of shadow sides are mediocre, but they're definitely better than nothing. The point is, they are still not enough to compensate the losing access to lunar-side gears. I think the main problem is the lack of unique crafting recipes for shadow side. There are so much possibility on her shadow side craftings that couldn't make into her skill tree.

For instance she can use thulecites, or dreadstones on her unique shadow-side crafting recipes. Those are solid materials good for building structures, thematically fits well with Winona.

I personally think, the ability of those shadow side strucutres can bring the concept of "Protection" of shadowy gears, such as thulecite crown or umbralla. Imagine a structure that protects you and your catapults by pushing away the enemies, generating a shadowy force field periodically. Or there could be an upgraded version of nitre generator, which has the triple max capacity of the old nitre generator, to solve the problem of low max fuel capicity of nitre generator compared to the GEMerator in late games. I strongly wish there's more shadow side recipes coming before the beta ends.

[MrMyther]

Winbot is not exclusive the the tier 2 wagstaff perk :)!!

[HeatAndRun]

11 minutes ago, MrMyther said:

Winbot is not exclusive the the tier 2 wagstaff perk :)!!

Thank you for letting me know, I was confused about some details. Her affinity skills preconditions are more complex than previous skill trees

[Mysterious box]

14 minutes ago, HeatAndRun said:

Personally I'm quite enjoying the new new skill tree of Winona, but the gameplay is mainly focused on her lunar affinity. There're little reasons to choose the shadow affinity for Winona. For now the shadow side is focused a little too much on the early game management aspect. They're easier to access than the lunar side perks, but the max potential of shadow side is pretty.. Underwhelming.

You need to give up the attractive Wagstaff gears including the semi WOBOTs and Telelocators, and utility of the enlightened crown shards. And all the perks you can get are :

1. Go across over the water gap : Can be replaced by using grass boats.

2. Can be revived at the point you designated without losing your inventory : You're playing Winona now, and if you died that means your structures left behind the battlefield are in a trouble.

3. Immune to Charlie's attack : Still drains sanity, and you need a light source to interact with anything anyway.

4. Can go to any wormhole point : This one's quite nice, but You can't relocate the Wormholes, if you don't have one near your base.

Most of all, They share the same cooldown, and for now there's no active way to accelerate the cooldown.

The perks of shadow sides are mediocre, but they're definitely better than nothing. The point is, they are still not enough to compensate the losing access to lunar-side gears. I think the main problem is the lack of unique crafting recipes for shadow side. There are so much possibility on her shadow side craftings that couldn't make into her skill tree.

For instance she can use thulecites, or dreadstones on her unique shadow-side crafting recipes. Those are solid materials good for building structures, thematically fits well with Winona.

I personally think, the ability of those shadow side strucutres can bring the concept of "Protection" of shadowy gears, such as thulecite crown or umbralla. Imagine a structure that protects you and your catapults by pushing away the enemies, generating a shadowy force field periodically. Or there could be an upgraded version of nitre generator, which has the triple max capacity of the old nitre generator, to solve the problem of low max fuel capicity of nitre generator compared to the GEMerator in late games. I strongly wish there's more shadow side recipes coming before the beta ends.

Keep in mind they mentioned the shadow affinity isn't finished.