Is Wendy completely outclassed by Willow's skill tree?

[aidankocherhans]

Burning Bernie seems like he can do pretty much everything Abigail can and more, and Willow still has other perks alongside that. Is there anything Wendy and Abigail do better currently?

[ShadowDuelist]

No, Wilow is superior in most regards, but Wendy doesn’t have a skill tree, so I think it’s unfair to compare them yet.

[Picklesaurus]

47 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

Burning Bernie

 
When you say "Burning Bernie", are you referring to this skill?

[WenericMember]

at this point in time, yeah pretty much. 

The single thing that made Wendy so universally useful was Abigai's Taunt, AOE and Availability. Other forms of Taunt & AOE, like Bernie & Weremoose were balanced out by drawbacks - Moose left you with zero hunger, Bernie needed you to be insane. With the Idol Mastery & Bearly Sane skills, those drawbacks are, while not irrelevant, kinda negligible now. Not only that, but Rift weapons also make AOE more Available.

And outside of that, while every character has a lot of utility, the only perk unrelated to Abigail Wendy has is... a 0.75x sanity drain. Which is nice, but QOL more than anything else.

To top it all off, Wendy was hit with  one of the most significant downsides in the game with her 0.75 damage multiplier. Unless you can comfortably kite Bosses with Abigail, it's makes Bosses a slog.

She is still the least stressful character in the game to play, but I think she needs a pretty significant skill tree all things considered, ideally utility focused.It should be fine as soon as she gets her skill tree, unless she ends up as the sequel to wolfgang, which haunts me (:P).

[aidankocherhans]

30 minutes ago, WenericMember said:

Unless you can comfortably kite Bosses with Abigail, it's makes Bosses a slog.

How do you kite with Abigail?

[Siren11]

2 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

How do you kite with Abigail?

Position yourself so the boss doesn’t hit you or Abigail. For example, making sure the Eye of Terror is between Wendy and Abigail should ensure that it will charge toward Wendy and not hit Abigail, and then Wendy can kite normally as long as she doesn’t lead the EoT back towards Abigail. It’s not perfect and bosses with AoE are still a struggle, but I think it’s one of the most fun ways to approach combat.

To answer your question, I think they still feel different enough. I won’t deny that Wendy is lagging behind, but I’m waiting for her skill tree to really judge. I hope Klei does her justice.

[WenericMember]

11 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

Position yourself so the boss doesn’t hit you or Abigail. For example, making sure the Eye of Terror is between Wendy and Abigail should ensure that it will charge toward Wendy and not hit Abigail, and then Wendy can kite normally as long as she doesn’t lead the EoT back towards Abigail. It’s not perfect and bosses with AoE are still a struggle, but I think it’s one of the most fun ways to approach combat.

To answer your question, I think they still feel different enough. I won’t deny that Wendy is lagging behind, but I’m waiting for her skill tree to really judge. I hope Klei does her justice.

I agree about withholding final judgement, but it is kind of important that she is outclassed, as its the difference between her not needing a skill tree for a long time (like Maxwell or Wickerbottom) and needing one urgently (like Wortox and formerly Willow).

I'd say the survivors that need skill trees most are:

• Wendy (Outclassed due to old rework & lack of playstyle diversity)
• Wortox (Soul Cap hinders scaling into late game really badly)
• Walter (Just kind of a a statistically weak character)

22 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

How do you kite with Abigail?

Basically draw Aggro so the boss attacks in your direction but you can still Kite. It's a lot more difficult than normal kiting bc it's really easy to dodge too early, which punishes you by hitting Abigail for 100-200 damage. In exchange though, Abigail applies her hex giving a 1.1x boost to friends damage and bringing your damage from 0.75 to about 1.1x as well, so its pretty important once you move on beyond surviving as Wendy.

[Siren11]

17 minutes ago, WenericMember said:

I agree about withholding final judgement, but it is kind of important that she is outclassed, as its the difference between her not needing a skill tree for a long time (like Maxwell or Wickerbottom) and needing one urgently (like Wortox and formerly Willow).

I'd say the survivors that need skill trees most are:

• Wendy (Outclassed due to old rework & lack of playstyle diversity)
• Wortox (Soul Cap hinders scaling into late game really badly)
• Walter (Just kind of a a statistically weak character)

I think Walter and Warly could probably use skill trees the most, since imo there are some fundamental flaws with their designs. But those are good points about Wendy and Wortox, and they’re probably the next two on my list as well.

Even without a skill tree, Wendy is still the most fun character for me. I’ll happily wait for her skill tree as long as it’s well done and she gets hers before Maxwell.

[WenericMember]

2 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

I think Walter and Warly could probably use skill trees the most, since imo there are some fundamental flaws with their designs. But those are good points about Wendy and Wortox, and they’re probably the next two on my list as well.

Even without a skill tree, Wendy is still the most fun character for me. I’ll happily wait for her skill tree as long as it’s well done and she gets hers before Maxwell.

Yeah, I agree about her still being the most fun character for me.

My list of needed reworks wasn't ordered particularly, they're all roughly even IMO. Warly's probably just behind them, while he does suffer similar issues to Winona, he isn't outclassed like Wendy, doesn't have issues scaling like Wortox and is much more balanced than Walter. Winona's issue was the only thing she wasn't really that interesting to play in a vacuum, as her only perks were crafting speed & lamps (qol) and her catapults, which were expensive and could be us

[Evelo]

Is Nickel outclassed by Xenon?

That's what it feels like comparing Wendy to Willow.

[Catuna_]

3 hours ago, aidankocherhans said:

Burning Bernie seems like he can do pretty much everything Abigail can and more, and Willow still has other perks alongside that. Is there anything Wendy and Abigail do better currently?

burning bernie sucks because it doesn't let you pick an affinity, Wendy sports a lot more damage on a beefalo with 100% uptime AoE but yes characters without skill trees are bound to start to get powercrept in a way

[Arcwell]

4 hours ago, aidankocherhans said:

Is there anything Wendy and Abigail do better currently?

Sure, here's a few things:

• Abby buffs your damage from 0.75x to 1.155x (or 1.54x if you're on a beefalo). Willow has a 1.25x damage modifier only if you use burning frenzy, which A: uses embers, B: requires the target be flammable, and C: requires you take time to cast it and light the target on fire.
• Abby has an immunity window after being hit whereas Bernie does not.
• Abby has AoE whereas Bernie does not (Combustion and Lunar Flames have AoE, however these both cost embers, combustion only works on flammable targets, and lunar flames requires you not take shadow fire)
• Abby is easier to control mid-combat with the ability to rile her up, have her stick close to you, or dismiss her entirely.
• Wendy's sanity modifier is a nice QoL feature. I usually take no efforts to stop myself from going insane, yet it's still uncommon for me to go insane as Wendy. Willow by comparison has nearly half the max sanity of a normal character and loses sanity 1.1x faster (She can regain sanity through fires, although this requires you to be stationary and is less than half the value of a sisturn)

I think it's no secret that Willow as a whole tends to be stronger than Wendy, especially if you ignore ember cost, but that doesn't invalidate Wendy in any way.

[aidankocherhans]

1 hour ago, Catuna_ said:

burning bernie sucks because it doesn't let you pick an affinity

What do you mean it doesn't?

Nevermind, I figured out why. But you can just use the Bernie's affinity perks instead, and Bernie is plenty strong with a large skill point investment

[Catuna_]

10 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

Nevermind, I figured out why. But you can just use the Bernie's affinity perks instead, and Bernie is plenty strong with a large skill point investme

You're still extremely limited on your spells... You probably want controlled burning especially if you need combustion but then you have to pick between fire fighter, burn duration for embers, or fireball for utility
It's a heavily restrictive skill tree branch and as funny as it is, I think it's not great compared to Wendy
I've played around with it a lot when Willow's tree was in beta and a little more after the release and I think that most of the time Bernie is not going to be a better follower than Abigail most of the time outside of fighting shadows which isnt a very big deal

[aidankocherhans]

4 minutes ago, Catuna_ said:

You're still extremely limited on your spells... You probably want controlled burning especially if you need combustion but then you have to pick between fire fighter, burn duration for embers, or fireball for utility
It's a heavily restrictive skill tree branch and as funny as it is, I think it's not great compared to Wendy
I've played around with it a lot when Willow's tree was in beta and a little more after the release and I think that most of the time Bernie is not going to be a better follower than Abigail most of the time outside of fighting shadows which isnt a very big deal

I mean, it makes sense that your spells are restricted when you put so much strength into Burnie, and you can still get all the basic ignition spells. Bernie fighting shadows is pretty significant, he's the only follower that does that and makes the ruins a breeze, and let's you passively farm nightmare fuel pretty much 24/7. Wendy is the worst character for fighting nightmares because Abigail can't buff her damage

[Catuna_]

4 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

I mean, it makes sense that your spells are restricted when you put so much strength into Burnie, and you can still get all the basic ignition spells. Bernie fighting shadows is pretty significant, he's the only follower that does that and makes the ruins a breeze, and let's you passively farm nightmare fuel pretty much 24/7. Wendy is the worst character for fighting nightmares because Abigail can't buff her damage

I mean the thing is that Bernie already kinda afk farms nightmares for you even without the perk, I'm just saying that Willow is way too limited and restricted to be better than Wendy with burning bernie
Wendy does a lot more damage overall also, and Abigail is just more generally useful for any mob that she can attack

[WenericMember]

26 minutes ago, Catuna_ said:

You're still extremely limited on your spells... You probably want controlled burning especially if you need combustion but then you have to pick between fire fighter, burn duration for embers, or fireball for utility
It's a heavily restrictive skill tree branch and as funny as it is, I think it's not great compared to Wendy
I've played around with it a lot when Willow's tree was in beta and a little more after the release and I think that most of the time Bernie is not going to be a better follower than Abigail most of the time outside of fighting shadows which isnt a very big deal

 Personally, I take all lighter skills, controlled burn, burn duration I, bearly sane,  Regen I, Tough Stuffing II, and both alignment skills. That gives basically everything of value aside from Burning Bernie imo.

45 minutes ago, Arcwell said:

Sure, here's a few things:

• Abby buffs your damage from 0.75x to 1.155x (or 1.54x if you're on a beefalo). Willow has a 1.25x damage modifier only if you use burning frenzy, which A: uses embers, B: requires the target be flammable, and C: requires you take time to cast it and light the target on fire.
• Abby has an immunity window after being hit whereas Bernie does not.
• Abby has AoE whereas Bernie does not (Combustion and Lunar Flames have AoE, however these both cost embers, combustion only works on flammable targets, and lunar flames requires you not take shadow fire)
• Abby is easier to control mid-combat with the ability to rile her up, have her stick close to you, or dismiss her entirely.
• Wendy's sanity modifier is a nice QoL feature. I usually take no efforts to stop myself from going insane, yet it's still uncommon for me to go insane as Wendy. Willow by comparison has nearly half the max sanity of a normal character and loses sanity 1.1x faster (She can regain sanity through fires, although this requires you to be stationary and is less than half the value of a sisturn)

I think it's no secret that Willow as a whole tends to be stronger than Wendy, especially if you ignore ember cost, but that doesn't invalidate Wendy in any way.

Abby's shield is nice, but when Bernie can have up to 6* the hp of Abbi, and instantly fill to max with a sewing kit their bulk is comparable against hordes, but Abbi crumbles against bosses. Other than that I guess it just comes down to how much you value embers. This also kinda skews the argument about combat control.

That said, I'd still argue it invalidates Wendy. Like sure, Abbi has some benefits over Willow rn, but ultimately, its a trade off between not having to manage sanity better & costless AOE for the ability to control burn, summon mini dwarf stars, use fuel more efficiently, extinguish fires, permanent mini-torch, 1v1 Much tougher enemies with Bernie, and get frankly ridiculous single target damage or AOE with alignment skills. Sure Wendy has some strengths, but they are completely eclipsed by the things Willow offers in return IMO.

Like... would you prefer a camera or a phone. You can do things with the camera you couldn't with the phone, but the phone still outclasses it.

[Siren11]

4 minutes ago, aidankocherhans said:

Wendy is the worst character for fighting nightmares because Abigail can't buff her damage

Wendy barely needs to fight nightmares anyways bc of her sanity modifier, and you can do things like farm Shadow Splumonkeys for nightmare fuel.

[Gashzer]

17 minutes ago, Catuna_ said:

You're still extremely limited on your spells... You probably want controlled burning especially if you need combustion but then you have to pick between fire fighter, burn duration for embers, or fireball for utility
It's a heavily restrictive skill tree branch and as funny as it is, I think it's not great compared to Wendy
I've played around with it a lot when Willow's tree was in beta and a little more after the release and I think that most of the time Bernie is not going to be a better follower than Abigail most of the time outside of fighting shadows which isnt a very big deal

Fighting shadows is a huge deal and in my opinion made willow better than Wendy even pre-skilltree!

No other follower in the game can target shadows and terrorbeaks are one of the strongest non-boss mobs in the game. For a wee bit more micromanaging you have a much more useful follower, bernie even preskilltree indirectly boosted willow in all boss fights by allowing her to better farm/use night armour and dark sword while bernie didn't give willow any damage boosts like abigail does for Wendy, the massive increase in defence by better utilitizing night armour more than makes up for it. Its an absolute meme that playing Wendy requires you to tame a beefalo which not everyone wants to do.

You dont need combustion or lunar flame when you have burning bernie, burning bernie functionally gives bernie AOE.

Last 3 points i would pick controlled burning, burn duration and fireball. Flame cast is enough for the little amount of ember farming you need to do. Burn duration is useful for mob panic and gives flame cast abit more strength.

The entire point of going burning bernie is that you don't want to farm massive amounts of embers, you want to use bernie more than spells. And burning bernie replaces the need to want spells by allowing faster farming of all mobs therefore more darkswords/night armours, trading the dps of caster willow for better resource farming and not needing to farm embers.

[WenericMember]

2 minutes ago, Gashzer said:

No other follower in the game can target shadows and terrorbeaks are one of the strongest non-boss mobs in the game. For a wee bit more micromanaging you have a much more useful follower, bernie even preskilltree indirectly boosted willow in all boss fights by allowing her to better farm/use night armour and dark sword while bernie didn't give willow any damage boosts like abigail does for Wendy, the massive increase in defence by better utilitizing night armour more than makes up for it. Its an absolute meme that playing Wendy requires you to tame a beefalo which not everyone wants to do.

Not to mention the new ruins nightmare that's a lot more annoying than even terrorbeaks.

[Mysterious box]

6 hours ago, Siren11 said:

I think Walter and Warly could probably use skill trees the most, since imo there are some fundamental flaws with their designs. But those are good points about Wendy and Wortox, and they’re probably the next two on my list as well.

Even without a skill tree, Wendy is still the most fun character for me. I’ll happily wait for her skill tree as long as it’s well done and she gets hers before Maxwell.

Depends on perspective really techincally all Walter needs is a buff to his slingshot and most people would he satisfied so I wouldn't say his issue is fundamental.

Warly does have the biggest issue design wise as being forced to farm sucks a lot of the fun out of the experience and a solution would be a lot harder to come across without just giving him a different incentive to play him outside of cooking. (the worst outcome)

Wendy's a case where the "fun" she offers for most people comes from the fact she gives you a summon that fights alongside you with minimal player input making her a comfort character for people who want to take it easy or are bad at combat. Her popularity has gone down a bit because more of the cast has that comfort character design with Willow directly offering a superior experience.

5 hours ago, Catuna_ said:

You're still extremely limited on your spells... You probably want controlled burning especially if you need combustion but then you have to pick between fire fighter, burn duration for embers, or fireball for utility
It's a heavily restrictive skill tree branch and as funny as it is, I think it's not great compared to Wendy
I've played around with it a lot when Willow's tree was in beta and a little more after the release and I think that most of the time Bernie is not going to be a better follower than Abigail most of the time outside of fighting shadows which isnt a very big deal

There's not really any scenarios I can think of where Abigial shines over Bernie even outside of nightmare creatures especially after they buffed his regen so he won't passively die to shadows at the higher sanity thresholds. Bernie is far more durable, his taunts set mobs up perfectly for lunar flames making him far better at helping with killing hordes than Abigial and even in the case of death he can just get right back into the fight making mistakes less of a issue. But it's not really fair to truely compared a pre skill tree character to a post skill tree one in this scenario.

4 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Fighting shadows is a huge deal and in my opinion made willow better than Wendy even pre-skilltree!

No other follower in the game can target shadows and terrorbeaks are one of the strongest non-boss mobs in the game. For a wee bit more micromanaging you have a much more useful follower, bernie even preskilltree indirectly boosted willow in all boss fights by allowing her to better farm/use night armour and dark sword while bernie didn't give willow any damage boosts like abigail does for Wendy, the massive increase in defence by better utilitizing night armour more than makes up for it. Its an absolute meme that playing Wendy requires you to tame a beefalo which not everyone wants to do.

You dont need combustion or lunar flame when you have burning bernie, burning bernie functionally gives bernie AOE.

Last 3 points i would pick controlled burning, burn duration and fireball. Flame cast is enough for the little amount of ember farming you need to do. Burn duration is useful for mob panic and gives flame cast abit more strength.

The entire point of going burning bernie is that you don't want to farm massive amounts of embers, you want to use bernie more than spells. And burning bernie replaces the need to want spells by allowing faster farming of all mobs therefore more darkswords/night armours, trading the dps of caster willow for better resource farming and not needing to farm embers.

Personally I feel like Burning Bernie only truely exists for people who can't unlock the affinity skills as her spells make farming embers faster and regardless of your route you need to farm embers to maintain your higher for burning bernie.

[arubaro]

This only shows how unnecessary are skill trees

[Catuna_]

11 hours ago, WenericMember said:

To top it all off, Wendy was hit with  one of the most significant downsides in the game with her 0.75 damage multiplier. Unless you can comfortably kite Bosses with Abigail, it's makes Bosses a slog.

you can fight almost every boss in the game with Abigail, it's all about getting used to the learning curve

7 hours ago, Gashzer said:

No other follower in the game can target shadows and terrorbeaks are one of the strongest non-boss mobs in the game. For a wee bit more micromanaging you have a much more useful follower, bernie even preskilltree indirectly boosted willow in all boss fights by allowing her to better farm/use night armour and dark sword while bernie didn't give willow any damage boosts like abigail does for Wendy, the massive increase in defence by better utilitizing night armour more than makes up for it.

i agree that it's sweet to be able to have a follower attack nightmares and i acknowledge that wendy's 0.75x damage mod stinks for them, but lower damage output doesn't really make nightmares harder as much as it just makes them a bigger time sink, which wendy doesn't have to do as often considering that she loses sanity slower than other survivors.
Willow with a dark sword still doesn't really match the dps uptime of Wendy with a hambat in a lot of cases, and night armor is always a cheap armor piece for any character because nightmare fuel is just not a hard resource to come by for anyone

7 hours ago, Gashzer said:

Its an absolute meme that playing Wendy requires you to tame a beefalo which not everyone wants to do.

the word "require" is way too severe, wendy on foot is still dealing more damage than wigfrid would

3 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

There's not really any scenarios I can think of where Abigail shines over Bernie even outside of nightmare creatures especially after they buffed his regen so he won't passively die to shadows at the higher sanity thresholds.

abigail is better for single target damage with pretty much no resource cost for most of your fights, while being more than adequate for day to day use especially with a sisturn that lets you throw abigail away since she levels up to level 2 (and 3) incredibly quickly
im not arguing that willow with her entire kit isn't better, or that wendy is better than willow as a character, i'm saying that bernie (burning or not) is really not as great compared to abigail who's a lot easier to work with, deals higher AoE damage, with 100% uptime regardless of your sanity which makes her a lot easier to use with higher uptime

 

[Siren11]

3 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

Depends on perspective really techincally all Walter needs is a buff to his slingshot and most people would he satisfied so I wouldn't say his issue is fundamental.

Warly does have the biggest issue design wise as being forced to farm sucks a lot of the fun out of the experience and a solution would be a lot harder to come across without just giving him a different incentive to play him outside of cooking. (the worst outcome)

I consider Walter’s slingshot a fundamental part of his character, so that’s why I said there are fundamental issues. But adjusting a few things about his slingshot would go a very long way towards making Walter a really great character imo.

And that is a major issue with Warly (the fact that he’s not good at the stuff he needs to do), but there’s also no incentive to keep playing Warly if you don’t like his character or his downside.

3 hours ago, Mysterious box said:

Wendy's a case where the "fun" she offers for most people comes from the fact she gives you a summon that fights alongside you with minimal player input making her a comfort character for people who want to take it easy or are bad at combat. Her popularity has gone down a bit because more of the cast has that comfort character design with Willow directly offering a superior experience.

That may be true for newbies and casual players, but I would argue that Wendy is fun bc you get to work with your summon in a really interesting way, especially during boss fights. In that sense, Wendy could still be considered “better” since Willow and Bernie do not work the same way. And as others have pointed out, Willow may be stronger, but Wendy still has her niche.

[Mysterious box]

6 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

I consider Walter’s slingshot a fundamental part of his character, so that’s why I said there are fundamental issues. But adjusting a few things about his slingshot would go a very long way towards making Walter a really great character imo.

Fair I can agree.

7 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

And that is a major issue with Warly (the fact that he’s not good at the stuff he needs to do), but there’s also no incentive to keep playing Warly if you don’t like his character or his downside.

Honestly I feel like if they fixed the farming issue the incentive to keep playing in his case would resolve itself. For example if the ingredients for his spices and buff dishes were more common I feel like more people would stick with him as buffs and modifiers are a really fun idea even if he shares them however the biggest issue is that the process to get to them are so specific and time consuming that it sucks the fun out of the experience currently.

10 minutes ago, Siren11 said:

That may be true for newbies and casual players, but I would argue that Wendy is fun bc you get to work with your summon in a really interesting way, especially during boss fights. In that sense, Wendy could still be considered “better” since Willow and Bernie do not work the same way. And as others have pointed out, Willow may be stronger, but Wendy still has her niche.

This is debatable considering Willow and Bernie do work together in the way of the aggro(Bernie) and the support(Willow) You can't remotely control Bernie's level of aggression like Abigail  but you can pull him out of situations if you need using the calming function much like Abigail. Bernie's teamwork is giving Willow time to cast her spells and gathering enemies for mass extermination.

42 minutes ago, Catuna_ said:

abigail is better for single target damage with pretty much no resource cost for most of your fights, while being more than adequate for day to day use especially with a sisturn that lets you throw abigail away since she levels up to level 2 (and 3) incredibly quickly
im not arguing that willow with her entire kit isn't better, or that wendy is better than willow as a character, i'm saying that bernie (burning or not) is really not as great compared to abigail who's a lot easier to work with, deals higher AoE damage, with 100% uptime regardless of your sanity which makes her a lot easier to use with higher uptime

I can agree in some aspects but there basically is no resource cost for Bernie either in day to day fights due to him receiving boosted his regen in a later update day to day fights generally won't wear him out unless your jumping into every possible fight back to back and the nightmares alone won't be enough to kill him or hinder his recovery due to his planar defense. That being said due to hound waves being a constant threat of the surface and spiders being the best source of embers assuming you don't have a bee field nearby even his repair costs in the worst case scenario end up being more or less free.

Overall though I'd say Abigail is a glass cannon and Bernie is a taunt tank so they do fulfil different roles