Winona's Switchable Skills

[Bronzebot]

Prior to this beta, the perks of Winona were only loosely tied to her as a character - all of her crafts would come at the cost of some mundane materials, but every character had effective access to her entire kit at the additional cost of fixing the celestial portal, and from then on out, a mere 2 moonrocks & purple gems.
When a character's definitive utilities reach this level of public access with no intrinsic synergy to their creator, then the creator themselves, to an extent, become a part of the crafting recipe.
"Winona's Generator/G.E.M.erator/Catapult/Spotlight" simply becomes "Generator/G.E.M.erator/Catapult/Spotlight", and Winona becomes the character who has earlier access to them and the privilege to place them.
If something belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody. What we're left with is this strange character with a tiny hunger drain, a varying crafting speed, a negligible tolerance to darkness and a severe identity crisis.

~ ~ ~

This thread won't be about whether others should be allowed Winona's toys or not, you can find that topic in a couple dozen other threads.
Instead, I'd like to discuss how Winona has gone from being "the character you switch away from" to being "the character you switch into... whilst already playing as her"(?). Let me elaborate with a little scenario:

Some of you might have picked the Spacious Spotlight skill to truly brighten up your base and felt somewhat scammed when night comes but no change in light radius is evident whatsoever. 
That is because you built those spotlights BEFORE you allocated a point into this skill (you fool!) meaning several new spotlights are to be built in order to get this upgrade, while your old array is reduced to merely inferior copies, soon to have a word with mr. hammer.

But spotlights are meant to be shared! That's why they choose different player targets to illuminate when applicable, so even your Winona friend who didn't pick those skills can enjoy these improved lamps as well! Yay!
Oh look, she can even move them wherever she pleases!

Wait a second... 

... this means that technically, Winona can pick this skill, craft the brighter spotlight, deselect the skill via portal, and come back to the improved lamp and enjoy an insight point to spend elsewhere.
In other words, she gets to eat her cake and keep it. 

And how many of her skills share this uh, behavior? Well...

Oh dear.

Skills within Red Outlines are benefits applied to structures during crafting. These upgraded structures can be enjoyed by Winonas without points allocated into these skills. Put bluntly, these are switchable skills.

Skills within Green Outlines require the skill selected to make active use of its bestowed benefits, AKA non-switchable skills (exception: Winona players are able to deploy W.I.N.bot without any skills, but can't prototype it without Founders Keepers I). 

As one might be able to tell, 12 of these skills are switchable and the 13 others aren't (counting the mutually exclusive alignment skills as one).
This means that theoretically, you could start the game with all switch skills, make multiples of every device, reallocate all points to non-switchable skills via portal and enjoy every single benefit of her skill tree at once (minus a mutually exclusive affinity skill) and still have 2 insight points to spare.

...Yeah, feels a bit like we're back to square one again. So where do we go from here?

Personally, I think the simplest solution to this conundrum is to have all of Winona's devices update their current upgrades to align with the skilltree of the last user. 
Updates to devices would occur when a Winona assembles or disassembles any machine, refuels generators, arms catapults manually or interacts with them using the handy remote. Naturally, this would mean that a Winona lacking skills would downgrade any upgraded machines she tampers with (same for non-Winonas).

This would solve the current skiltree balance issue while also removing the requirement to smash and rebuild stuff between upgrades, but there's still the matter of spotlights; since they work with no player interaction besides assembling/disassembling they would be exempt of this new rule.
A theoretical solution to this (no idea if at all possible) would be for generators to update connected machines when interacted with.

I've yet to see anyone bring up this subject so I'm plenty curious, what are your thoughts on all this? 
 

[Ruperstiltskin]

I get what you are trying to say and im 100% with you on it but the thing is some skills gonna be switcheable like wigfrid song can or wormwood plant crafts, i dont think its an issue with winona only, more like a dessing flaw maybe?

[Mysterious box]

12 minutes ago, Bronzebot said:

This thread won't be about whether others should be allowed Winona's toys or not, you can find that topic in a couple dozen other threads.
Instead, I'd like to discuss how Winona has gone from being "the character you switch away from" to being "the character you switch into... whilst already playing as her"(?). Let me elaborate with a little scenario:

Some of you might have picked the Spacious Spotlight skill to truly brighten up your base and felt somewhat scammed when night comes but no change in light radius is evident whatsoever. 
That is because you built those spotlights BEFORE you allocated a point into this skill (you fool!) meaning several new spotlights are to be built in order to get this upgrade, while your old array is reduced to merely inferior copies, soon to have a word with mr. hammer.

But spotlights are meant to be shared! That's why they choose different player targets to illuminate when applicable, so even your Winona friend who didn't pick those skills can enjoy these improved lamps as well! Yay!
Oh look, she can even move them wherever she pleases!

Wait a second... 

... this means that technically, Winona can pick this skill, craft the brighter spotlight, deselect the skill via portal, and come back to the improved lamp and enjoy an insight point to spend elsewhere.
In other words, she gets to eat her cake and keep it. 

And how many of her skills share this uh, behavior? Well...

This honestly isn't new and has been mentioned many times in the past especially during Wormwood's and Woodie's beta. Heck even Wurt has this interaction with the king, the toolshed, and the armermry. For the quests you only need the skill to give him the items after that so long as he doesn't die his buffs remain even if you change your skill tree to remove the quests which I imagine is what most long term world Wurts will do. I haven't confirmed if the hunger buff works this way too but I imagine it's the same.

[GimplyGoose]

I've put about 45 days into a beta world as Winona and I agree that having to rebuild your machines when you pick perks to upgrade them doesn't feel the best.

I think the best way to deal with it would be to update the attributes of the structure on assembly using the selected skills of the Winona that assembles it.

[flamboyant wolf]

Honestly I just assumed they would update based on which Winona put em down last. The fact that it is determined when crafted is pretty fascinating to me, but I'll have to agree it's not the best in practice, especially considering we can't even tell the skilled/unskilled structures apart.

[V2C]

Just wanted to let you guys know that we already have plans to change this, but might be a later hotfix during beta.

[GreenBowers]

Oh no, the secret tech-

[EatenCheetos]

12 hours ago, Ruperstiltskin said:

I get what you are trying to say and im 100% with you on it but the thing is some skills gonna be switcheable like wigfrid song can or wormwood plant crafts, i dont think its an issue with winona only, more like a dessing flaw maybe?

It’s definitely a flaw with skill trees in general and leads to some pretty broken mechanic abuse. The proposed change for Winona is great, but more generally I think switching a skill tree mid-run simply shouldn’t be allowed.

Stuff like this is going to be really hard to curb otherwise