Does anyone else have these problems with Wurt? (problems with her skilltree)

[Jakepeng99]

I am known for liking Wurt so i felt like making this. And yes, her skilltree is a big part of this, but its not the only thing. I had before said that Wurt's skilltree was the best in the game in terms of design, though i feel this has flipped after playing with it awhile. 

For context, Wurt has had flaws before her skilltree, that were ignorable and not the biggest and still she was kinda fun. These flaws were:

• With enough merms, you basically win the game. Once you spend the initial resources on the houses, you are set for life as they are extremely cheap to recuit, and can overpower most the important bosses. It can get boring.
• Too much similarities to Webber. Wurt often ends up outclassing Webber in many scenarios. Which is why i believe Merm's should be utility focused, while spiders combat focused to add a differation.
• Merm civilisation is just a bunch of houses and a king. The kingdom can feel unalive and dead. (The tools are an interesting concept at the least)

Though, Wurt's skilltree made these main problems worse, and has brought even more with it, including overbloating.

Because of the new skill tree with the extreme buffs to merms, the merms are essentially immortal with large dps. There is not much strategy in merms and they are brainless to use, which feels unrewarding and boring now. Merms got buffed combat wise so much, even though they were already so good at combat. They cost almost nothing to recruit and shred almost anything. 

I have tried old followers like bunnymen, and found they feel more fun to use because they are not broken. 

 

In terms of utility, little was added. There was the toolshed, though it feels weird to use because of how the tools randomly break. Its only usefil for shoveling stumps, since you can just get more merms to chop faster.

 

Though, another problem now is her unrelated side abilities, which make her feel overbloated and weird. They divert focus from her main perks, the merms, and feel gimmicky.

The mosquito bombs might be fine as a craft any survivor can use, but they have no relation to merms which is Wurt's main perk. They feel like a... distraction? Not sure how to word how i feel. There are also elements to it that feel gimmicky and anmoying. For example, when you use the bomb and try to re-collect the mosquitos, they run away from you. Its tons to keep your eye on, and they anti-synergise with merms.

The wetness skills are the most gimmicky of them all. Keeping wetness up is a weird experience, and takes a lot of attention. The idea is alright, but it feels like too many different things on one character. If this skill was ported to some sort of body armour accessable by anyone, it may be interesting for other characters to utilise.

 

 

Overall, Wurt's skilltree made me realise character's are more fun with a focus. Wurt now feels like she has perks all over the place. Focused characters like Wortox i find much more fun nowdays. Though, i still like Winona's skilltree which is done well.

 

 

 

[grm9]

6 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

With enough merms, you basically win the game. Once you spend the initial resources on the houses, you are set for life as they are extremely cheap to recuit, and can overpower most the important bosses. It can get boring

isn't that the point of wurt? she pretty much was gunpowder the character, long setup time but allows you to brainlessly kill things

[Jakepeng99]

17 minutes ago, grm9 said:

isn't that the point of wurt? she pretty much was gunpowder the character, long setup time but allows you to brainlessly kill things

Every time you use gunpowder, you have to spend alot of resources.

 

Wurt gets free, stronger "gunpowder" forever once she sets it up once. The problem is it ends up becoming free afterwards, where normally bosses are resource in resource out.

[marshyds]

maybe the 5th round of reworks will make her perfect?

the game's followers being so uncomplicated is a big reason why wurt's merms are so meh in terms of utility imo.

a decent course of action could be for example creating ocean merm traders, who wurt gets better deals from compared to other survivors. this would add both ocean content and wurt content.

[Mysterious box]

44 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

In terms of utility, little was added. There was the toolshed, though it feels weird to use because of how the tools randomly break. Its only usefil for shoveling stumps, since you can just get more merms to chop faster.

No matter how many merms you get once you hit a certain number you get diminishing returns compared to merms with tools due to the fact each individual merm is just that much faster at their job. Also if you intend to farm the time saved is incredible. I do wish merms could repair their tools if they go by the station with their tools under a certain durability though.

49 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

The mosquito bombs might be fine as a craft any survivor can use, but they have no relation to merms which is Wurt's main perk. They feel like a... distraction? Not sure how to word how i feel. There are also elements to it that feel gimmicky and anmoying. For example, when you use the bomb and try to re-collect the mosquitos, they run away from you. Its tons to keep your eye on, and they anti-synergise with merms.

The mosquito bombs are surprisely good dps that being said it's best to wait till nightfall to catch them if you don't want to have them fight to the death or you can fake attack to make them fight each other making them easier to grab in the process if you can get them before they die.

52 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Because of the new skill tree with the extreme buffs to merms, the merms are essentially immortal with large dps. There is not much strategy in merms and they are brainless to use, which feels unrewarding and boring now. Merms got buffed combat wise so much, even though they were already so good at combat. They cost almost nothing to recruit and shred almost anything. 

I have tried old followers like bunnymen, and found they feel more fun to use because they are not broken.

Unfortunately I think they didn't expand on merm to player combat interactions for fear of stepping on the Webber's toes too much as that sadly his area of expertise.

While I do still mostly enjoy Wurt's skill tree she further highlights how much skill overlap is going to be problematic for future skill trees and why we can't have more new characters at this point.

[Jakepeng99]

49 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

No matter how many merms you get once you hit a certain number you get diminishing returns compared to merms with tools due to the fact each individual merm is just that much faster at their job. Also if you intend to farm the time saved is incredible. I do wish merms could repair their tools if they go by the station with their tools under a certain durability though.

1 hour ago, Jakepeng99 said:

The mosquito bombs might be fine as a craft any survivor can use, but they have no relation to merms which is Wurt's main perk. They feel like a... distraction? Not sure how to word how i feel. There are also elements to it that feel gimmicky and anmoying. For example, when you use the bomb and try to re-collect the mosquitos, they run away from you. Its tons to keep your eye on, and they anti-synergise with merms.

The mosquito bombs are surprisely good dps that being said it's best to wait till nightfall to catch them if you don't want to have them fight to the death or you can fake attack to make them fight each other making them easier to grab in the process if you can get them before they die.

Im not really arguing about if things are strong or weak, only if i find them fun.

I know mosquito bombs are strong. Tools are probably alright in some way even if i find them a waste, but the way they are implemented is gimmicky, you have no control over it so they can chop when you would rather them shovel and break their tools when you dont want them too. Merm chopping speed was never really an issue that needed a fix, it would be better if the tools let them do more new stuff than the same stuff.

They also till soil but it feels like it is not enough, it would be better if they helped water plants or something because they feel inactive in the process.

1 hour ago, marshyds said:

maybe the 5th round of reworks will make her perfect?

the game's followers being so uncomplicated is a big reason why wurt's merms are so meh in terms of utility imo.

a decent course of action could be for example creating ocean merm traders, who wurt gets better deals from compared to other survivors. this would add both ocean content and wurt content.

I'd kinda like if each follower had it's own niche in a follower rework update.

Bunnymen could help farm, have their combat method, and possibly dig stuff up for you if high loyalty.

Pigmen now regen hp too, but slower. They will chop wood. I am not sure how to simply expand them. Maybe they can collect stuff from the ground but it might be annoying. 

Merms would have Wurt stuff.

[SilverSpoon]

I think of Wurt as a "Last resort for people who can only play solo," so I don't mind if she's a too strong.

[arubaro]

She was one of my favorite chars and now i don't think I will ever play her again outside of making merm theme set pieces.. 

The mindless power creep of some characters are ruining the experience 

[grm9]

47 minutes ago, arubaro said:

She was one of my favorite chars and now i don't think I will ever play her again outside of making merm theme set pieces.. 

you know that you can just play with no skill tree perk, right?

[arubaro]

1 hour ago, grm9 said:

you know that you can just play with no skill tree perk, right?

I know but the feeling of ignoring content because is bad kinda ruins the experience 

I rather play other games than needing to force myself into ignoring a lot of content to enjoy a littke more balanced game..(if atleast bad designed skill trees were the only thing that makes no sense...). At that point is better and easier to find a better developed non service game

[Jakepeng99]

3 hours ago, grm9 said:

you know that you can just play with no skill tree perk, right?

I seen this argument for skill trees so much, that i cant really be bothered to argue against it most the time because it is a kinda annoying response.

 

The game is more fun when i feel like i am trying my best to survive, rather than trying to be worse on purpouse to try compensate for it. And there is actually some people who do this, i know NPC maxwell uses no skilltrees except Wilsons because he finds the rest to overbloat, though its not a good reason for everyone to just ignore content and pretend it isnt there. Also, Wurt was still needing something still to make her merms more interesting, Wurt before the skilltree can get repetitive after awhile. Her skilltree addressed it in a weird way at least.

4 hours ago, arubaro said:

The mindless power creep of some characters are ruining the experience 

Players in 2019 would be suprised that Wickerbottom, the best character, is now seen as mid compared to the rest of the cast, even with huge buffs.

22 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

Unfortunately I think they didn't expand on merm to player combat interactions for fear of stepping on the Webber's toes too much as that sadly his area of expertise.

Also, this is not what i mean.

I meant it would be better if they added little combat skills at all. Them being so op is what makes there no strategy.

[Mysterious box]

10 minutes ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Also, this is not what i mean.

I meant it would be better if they added little combat skills at all. Them being so op is what makes there no strategy.

That's what I was getting at it seems clear that they want combat skills to be a Webber thing

They've made Wurt brute force prep with little control to contrast Webber having all the control but less overall power.

22 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

They also till soil but it feels like it is not enough, it would be better if they helped water plants or something because they feel inactive in the process.

Tilling the soil is the most time consuming process them Watering the crops feels unnecessary considering how little time it takes.

22 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Merm chopping speed was never really an issue that needed a fix, it would be better if the tools let them do more new stuff than the same stuff.

It kinda did considering we always needed ton of Wood and the speed at which they chopped wood scaled poorly with larger numbers.

[Jakepeng99]

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

It kinda did considering we always needed ton of Wood and the speed at which they chopped wood scaled poorly with larger numbers.

Not really. Even with just 6 merms its enough to chop all the wood you realistically need to make the houses.

 

Also they scale well, put them in the middle of trees so they dont push each other.

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

Tilling the soil is the most time consuming process them Watering the crops feels unnecessary considering how little time it takes.

It just feels clunky the way they do it. Its kinda nit picky of me. It doesnt feel smooth.

1 hour ago, Mysterious box said:

That's what I was getting at it seems clear that they want combat skills to be a Webber thing

They've made Wurt brute force prep with little control to contrast Webber having all the control but less overall power.

 

 

[Mysterious box]

3 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

Not really. Even with just 6 merms its enough to chop all the wood you realistically need to make the houses.

 

Also they scale well, put them in the middle of trees so they dont push each other.

It's made a massive difference on my end try timing large scale deforestation with and without the tools it's a massive difference as your lumberyard gets bigger you could get away with 6 with no tools but your wasting an incredible amount of time with it as even ignoring the stump removal the chopping speed per tooled merm scales significantly.

3 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

It just feels clunky the way they do it. Its kinda nit picky of me. It doesnt feel smooth.

I feel it looks clunky visually but result wise it's nice I do wish they'd have them divide up the sections they'll work on tilling so it doesn't look so weird but it's definitely their second most useful trait to someone like me who isn't a fan of farming.

As for the last point this is gonna be controversial but they kinda backed themselves into a corner survival wise we've got so many items that trivialize the survival aspect of the game that the only way they can make appealing survival content is to make it overly dangerous late game or further overload early game players it's the problem with powercreep. 

The reason they probably didn't double down on production abilities for Wurt like some may have wanted is because it would more or less make her a completely automated character.

[Jakepeng99]

8 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

It's made a massive difference on my end try timing large scale deforestation with and without the tools it's a massive difference as your lumberyard gets bigger you could get away with 6 with no tools but your wasting an incredible amount of time with it as even ignoring the stump removal the chopping speed per tooled merm scales significantly.

I mean not really. Instead of wasting resources on tools, i would just use more merms.

8 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

As for the last point this is gonna be controversial but they kinda backed themselves into a corner survival wise we've got so many items that trivialize the survival aspect of the game that the only way they can make appealing survival content is to make it overly dangerous late game or further overload early game players it's the problem with powercreep. 

The reason they probably didn't double down on production abilities for Wurt like some may have wanted is because it would more or less make her a completely automated character.

Or add new biomes and creatures in the world. Or nerf stuff. (Players will get over it)