Winona's skill tree is too focused around catapults

[splorange]

Quick ramble, apologies for adding onto the forums fire.

I have put a decent amount of time into Winona for the time that this beta has been available, I tend to have fun messing around with new quirks and experimenting to find uses for the new content, which is where Winona's new inventions shine. It felt special to create a system where I had W.I.Nbots collect resources automatically, said resources are then teleported using the telepad to my main storage where W.O.B.O.T automatically deposits it all. Despite these mechanics and structures being a bit undertuned and unfinished in it's current state (beta) I have an enjoyable time playing around with these new machines, but there was something about Winona's skill tree that really bothered me. 

Half of Winona's skill tree is catapult upgrades.

Why is so much of Winona's identity her catapults? It feels bad knowing that there is a single perk responsible for new inventions and the majority of the rest is catapult upgrades. Her catapults have 13 skills, but her spotlight only gets 2 (not that it needed more, just pointing out a huge imbalance)

Winona was already low on exclusive inventions before the skill tree and it is disappointing to me that the skill tree is mostly just tuning (5% faster catapult attack speed, really?)

Another part that I find upsetting is that the enhanced planar generators powered by pure horror and brilliance respectively do not do anything to her other inventions, it only powers up her catapults. Would love to see a W.I.Nbot do a pure horror-enhanced shadow sweep akin to the shadow reaper to harvest fields of grass.

It doesn't help much that catapults in the current patch feel underpowered. With them greatly reducing the time it takes for them to destroy a target it also greatly increases the chance of the catapults being trampled and destroyed in a single attack during the fight. For so much of the character being based around catapults it's not fun knowing that catapults are unusable in most fights without losing a ton of resources (there are some exceptions to this, like dragonfly and fuelweaver). Most of the time they are way too high risk to use.

For a character designed around engineering, I find it really sad that most of the skill tree doesn't spark much creativity. If the developers ever do decide to give the skill tree an overhaul like Wormwood, I would love to see some of her catapult skills compacted and more perks for new inventions.

[Cuernito.]

dont you know? klei changed her name to Winopult so now all this meh perks make much more sense

Just now, NekoSoulx said:

dont you know? klei changed her name to Winopult so now all this meh perks make much more sense

jokes aside i think 1 or 2 perks focused on her crafter abilities could be pretty game changed. at least thats my opinion.

[shuishuihuohuo]

I also don't think that Winona's skill tree is well designed. Most of the skills are uncreative numerical enhancements, and these skills have crowded out those with creativity. When we talk about her character traits, we find that the benefits and drawbacks of her character traits are not proportional. The increased speed of crafting items cannot make up for the drawbacks brought by the consumption of satiety.