Wortox Rework Thoughts from a 2.3k Hour Wortox Main

[OMEGASCRUFF]

(Context: This post was written after several hours of testing on the original update branch. An update to this branch has come in since then, but I have no idea what was changed in it.)

So I was completely taken off guard when we got a Wortox skill tree today. I really thought it would be just Walter + Warly, but here we are with 3 trees and 2 unexpected characters.

However, now that we're here, there is a lot of feedback that can be given on the Wortox skill tree. It's clear that people aren't thrilled about it, and I understand why, because half of the skill tree is essentially unviable, and the requirements are unrealistic to the original gameplay as this character. It's okay to have some useless skills, especially as prerequisites for better skills. But some of these are highly flawed considering the Insight, inventory requirements, and the expectation to farm large amounts of Souls that you can't even remove from your jars without suffering consequences, thanks to the new Nabsack weapon.

On that note, the jars themselves completely break his gameplay as well. We have an original limit of 20 for a reason, and it's to encourage regular combat. What made the designers forget that? Now the meta will be to use an ally with AoE, or Bramble Husks to farm mass quantities of Souls from Spiders or Bees. No more will I be happy to see the clump of Souls when a boss dies. No more will I bother with Butterflies. And now I'm greatly encouraged to reset my worlds if they don't include a Killer Bee biome. Please, PLEASE reconsider the approach and purpose of this item. We really needed a little more Soul capacity, but this is... too much, and inherently goes against Wortox's current design.

One thing I want to say before getting into what I'd suggest for correcting many of these issues, is that I absolutely adore the skill tree itself. The naughty and nice gimmick is ingenious, and I wish I had thought of it myself.

An additional note, for context, is that I generally play this character solo or on <5 player servers, so my perspective is based on these experiences.

Anyways, let's talk about what can be done to fix some of these issues.

Base Features of Wortox
Map Soul Hop almost entirely fixed this character. His gameplay revolves entirely around resource management in the form of Souls, with a currently-slightly-strict limitation. Minor AoE healing and local teleporting was not enough of a strong niche, but this feature made him the best taskmaster in the game, unbound to location, cooldowns, or item costs unlike Wanda or Winona, and is incredibly character-appropriate. In fact, I would strongly argue that this niche is significantly more valuable than that of healing, which wastes time during combat and is outclassed by Jelly Beans or Pierogies for allies. His niche during bosses comes from kiting with Soul Hopping to keep the target in place and receive no damage himself, and sometimes getting an extra hit in as well depending on attack periods. Healing is for when in a pinch.

There has been one major complaint I've had about Wortox since his inception, and it's his complete lack of synergy with Beefalo. This can be corrected by allowing Souls to heal all allied mobs (including those of other characters such as Webber, Wurt, or Grumble Bees), with a 4x multiplier for Beefalo (the current multiplier for food healing). He should also be able to Soul Hop while riding, both on-screen and in the map. You can do this with a Lazy Explorer already. I was a bit disappointed to see this not included on his skill tree, and would really like to see it either replace a redundant/unnecessary skill, or, preferably, simply added to his base kit.

It would have also been nice if one of these new skills allowed us to teleport with heavy items (statues/chess pieces/etc.) on us, but I would love to see this in his base kit. If it increases the Soul cost in exchange, that would be totally acceptable.

Items
Nabsack - Progression requires WAY too much to make this weapon usable, and by time it is, you already have access to the Shadow Reaper and Cowl. What purpose does this serve if it doesn't do more damage in the endgame? It's also only 200 hits of durability and would require you carry around Silk to make another if it breaks. Collecting large amounts of items consumes far too much durability. This item is not good for combat and there's no reason to use it over a Dark Sword or Glass Cutter when it also requires your inventory be entirely clogged. My suggestion is to make this no longer designed as a weapon but a utility item. Drastically reduce the durability lost per item nabbed (1/4th the current rate, as drastic as this sounds, I think would be good, with how niche the feature is.) Allow this to be used as a Bug Net for a smaller loss in durability. This is thematically fine as a prerequisite skill and can be useful for collecting items with certain farms (Shadow Reaper + Kelp comes to mind, or any Catapult farm.) This item also directly conflicts with shadow alignment's forced use of the Reaper.

Twintailed Heart - Good as is, but I don't see why a spoilage time is necessary when we already have Lazy Deserters as a great gameplay option for Wortox. If we really want to keep the spoilage timer, I would suggest increasing it from 10 days to 15 or 20. This item is slightly redundant with Soul Jars, in its ability to allow you to carry additional Souls, but the limitation of all Souls being used at once and only usable for burst healing keeps it fairly balanced. On the other hand...

Soul Jar - This item is a huge problem. You should not be able to hold more than 1. This item entirely breaks this character and discourages regular combat. I don't even think this should be able to hold more than 20 Souls, due to the addition of Twintailed Hearts for additional Souls capacity. 40 Souls and the ability to hold multiple jars is insane, especially when the existing skills encourage you to carry 5 of these and keep them full. There is no reason to need this amount of Souls. We've been managing just fine for years with the original 20 Soul cap, and a single stack of Bees when necessary. The only reason to be able to have multiple jars is to farm Souls en masse in a single session, which is counter-intuitive to the way this character has historically played and is frankly unfun when I've personally already disliked this grinding experience on Willow with Ember farming. In addition to everything, healing and teleporting are now more efficient on Souls as-is with some of these new skills, exacerbating the issue further. Please reconsider this item's implementation and purpose, as it completely destroys Wortox's existing gameplay loop and balancing, which helps keep him engaging even through the late game experience. The decay rate while not in Wortox's inventory should also be reduced a bit, but that's the least of my problems with this item.

Skills
Here we go... As a note, for all skills referencing Soul Jar capacity, I will be using the current capacity of 40. I really think this needs to be urgently tuned down to 20 Souls and limited to 1 in inventory, and if that advice is actually taken, please adjust any of the math that factors in the jar's fullness by half.

Nice Inclination - I honestly don't mind losing a lot of sanity because I farm Nightmare Fuel as soon as I can early-game, but this does diminish the handiness of eating Souls instead of food late-game and is very unfriendly to new Wortox players. I also don't think the additional healing is really that useful. See below for rework.
Naughty Inclination - In a group, this is way too selfish. See below for rework.
^ I would recommend the extremes be pulled back on these quite a lot, especially since they're not skills you can directly choose. I would instead make Nice Inclination increase your healing by 10-15% and reduce hunger gain from eating Souls by 10-15%. Self-sanity-gain on healing and sanity loss on eating would be unaffected to retain accessibility for new players. The reverse would occur for Naughty Inclination. I also think a large issue is that it's challenging to be Neutral inclination (which is what I'd prefer over either of these personally), due to the currently-imbalanced nature of Wortox's skills.

Day 2 edit: Since the inclination has been a pretty common subject, I want to reiterate that as it stands, Naughty is strictly a downside in practice and occurs with a more self-sufficient, combat oriented build, and perhaps this should do something else to make Naughty inclination no longer a total drag. An idea I had was that Wortox could gain a small damage bonus (~10%) for a short amount of time (~30s) after eating a Soul. To create a counterpart to it on the Nice side, it can be the inverse, a damage decrease instead. You can avoid this happening during combat by eating real food or topping off hunger with Souls when you know you won't be in combat, but it will inevitably come into play at some point. Nice doesn't really have a significant downside, and this would help that a little in a non-disruptive way, while also giving Naughty a practical application as well. This would be in addition to my existing recommended changes. Sanity gain and loss from healing and eating Souls does not need to be touched by these skills. We already balanced this issue correctly in the character refresh, and I don't think it should be adjusted when it's fine as is and the current design of inclination is lopsided and newbie-unfriendly due to changing it.

Lifebringer I - Good.
Lifebringer II - Rework: Remove the health penalty of Twintailed Hearts and Telltale Hearts when used by Wortox to revive another player. The sanity gain is never important in practice.
->
Lifebringer III - Good.

Reaching Souls I - Good.
Reaching Souls II - Bad. But it's fine as a prerequisite. I would rather see this effect on Soul Thief II. This skill unfortunately has no real purpose. You have to really try if you want to avoid picking up souls. Has bad synergy with Soul Pierce as well, but we'll talk about that later...
->
Soul Bastion I - Good.
Soul Bastion II - Bad. Why is this necessary? The built-in delay can simply be reduced, and isn't awfully helpful either. and we already have Reaching Souls for the range increase, so this essentially just acts as an increased heal range, but deeper into the skill tree.
^ I would recommend for this skill line that Reaching Souls I and II both increase heal range. Soul Bastion I can be changed to heal allies sanity by 3-5 per soul. Soul Bastion II can be what Soul Bastion I currently is, with a reduced delay. The current effect of Reaching Souls II can replace Soul Thief II.

Lifted Spirits I - Good, but I'd like to see the speed increased to 15% or 20%. This is really only useful when using Soul Hops outside of the map to travel, but this is a waste of time in general. It's a fine prerequisite skill, though.
Lifted Spirits II - Good, but this has a synergy issue with Soul Decoys. We can fix this with changes to the Soul Decoy skill itself.
->
Reverberation - Good. Actually, it's incredible. This is by far one of the most useful skills in the skill tree, and I almost expected this to be an Affinity bonus instead of something available from the get-go, and only 3 Insight required. This makes kiting bosses insanely cheaper on Souls.
Capricious Movement - Unimplemented. I'm hoping for 20-25% increased efficiency, though. This is a skill that I thought would be broken down into separate skills with incremental bonuses (10%, 20%, 30%) and not just inserted into a single skill, but this is genuinely the buff I was hoping for most out of the entire skill tree for Wortox.

Impromptu Flautist - Bad. Could be made better by increasing the rate of inspiration gain based on sanity level, and inspiration should last longer than 2 minutes. Would suggest that this skill reduces the durability cost of Pan Flute usage as well, in addition to the inspiration mechanic.
Pleasant Pastorale - Bad. Not worth the skill point at this time. Would be more useful if it allowed Wortox's Pan Flute usage to ignore the reduction in sleep duration on bosses when they are put to sleep multiple times. (This is mostly for Misery Toadstool.)
Cloudy Carmen - Bad. Complete rework incredibly necessary, as this functionality is clearly redundant with Pleasant Pastorale in practice.
Part of these skills' issues is that there is no guarantee you will actually want to use the Pan Flute while inspiration is active. I would suggest that the functionality of Pleasant Pastorale and Cloudy Carmen are switched (due to flavor), and Pleasant Pastorale now increases sanity for all allies by about 20 when the Pan Flute is used, which means the inspiration mechanic will actually be somewhat useful both in and out of combat.

Nabsacker - See item suggestions above. This should not be a weapon.
Soul Jar - Good, as just an item craft. But see item suggestions above. Being able and encouraged to hold more than 1 is unhealthy for this character's gameplay.
Overflowing Greed - Bad. This and Covetous Collector require you have 5 Soul Jars clogging your inventory with an insane quantity of Souls you will never need in practice. Instead, I think this should increase your maximum on-hand Souls by 2 for every 8 in your jar, and more than 1 Soul Jar cannot be held at the same time. 70 Souls is more than enough for basically anything, and with Gloomerangs, you can accessibly and easily acquire Souls anywhere outside of the caves from birds. I do not think Wortox should be able to grind for massive amounts of Souls, and I think resource management needs to continue to be part of his gameplay loop. Otherwise, we are discouraging diverse combat on a skill that's supposed to inspire naughtiness.
Covetous Collector - Bad. See Overflowing Greed for the reasoning. However, again, I don't think the Nabsack should be designed as a weapon. If you really want to keep this skill's design, it should just be an additive non-planar damage increase to each attack with any weapon, by 1 damage for every 8 or 10 Souls in your singular jar, or 1 for every 10 Souls if including both on-hand Souls and in-Jar Souls. I don't think of Wortox as a DPS, but base damage is increasingly becoming unacceptable in the meta, and is especially painful when playing solo. A small boost would be nice.

Soul Thief I - Good.
Soul Thief II - Bad. But it's a prerequisite skill, so I understand. I would prefer this does what Reaching Souls II does currently.
->
Soul Pierce I - Bad. REALLY bad. Embarrassingly bad. A rework is crucial. It does very little damage and it will often miss the target. Dropping hoards of Bees on an AoE boss will do unexceptional damage for the amount of setup, and will cause you to overcharge repeatedly and risk stunlock. Holding F is more reliable and better damage. I don't know what this could be replaced with, because the core design of this premise is entirely unviable in practice. ...Maybe do decently strong (~180 damage?) AoE damage when overcharging on Souls. It could do something against Fuelweaver and Bee Queen this way, at least.
Soul Pierce II - Bad. See above. Maybe do a bit of damage when dropping Souls instead? Or, even better, a little AoE damage at your Soul Hop/Echo destination to reward good kiting? 50% of your weapon's base and planar damage would be adequate. Might require an animation update on dropping Souls/Soul Hopping this way to indicate the range/damage effect.

Soul Decoy I - Good-bad? Rework needed. It's great in practice actually, but it has crippling anti-synergy with Reverberation and Lifted Spirits II. I think it should just be on a 5-8 second cooldown and also trigger off of Soul Echos. I also think the decoy should have a red overlay on it to visually distinguish them for other players a bit better.
Soul Decoy II - Good.
->
Soul Decoy III - Bad. This skill is specifically weakened by currently requiring the Nabsack for a damage boost. I think it should just do half the damage of your current melee attack, including planar damage, and also including Void Cowl scaling. The AoE also needs to be larger, as it can easily miss targets like Treeguards due to their range.

Lunar Swindler - Bad. Very bad. Needs a complete rework. Why take this skill when it forces your armor to be Brightshade gear, and it ends your Soul Echo that you could have used to simply dodge the next attack instead? In fact, you can even dodge a additional attack with Reverberation. By making it so we can simply ignore the damage, it's incredibly uninteractive as well. See below for rework.
Shadow Harvester - Bad. Also very bad. This has very little use in practice, as it only lasts for a single hit and consumes your echo. If you've attempted to use this against Bee Queen, you'll quickly see just how unhelpful this skill is. This skill needs to either last the entire duration of your echo or be entirely reworked. It would be acceptable if splash damage dealt to non-targets was decreased in exchange for it being a duration buff. This skill also really needs some form of visual indicator that the effect is active.
^ Personally, when it comes to the alignment skills, I was really hoping that one of these would cause some mixed planar AoE damage at your Soul Hop/Echo destination for a reliable DPS increase that is useful late-game and rewards good Soul Hop kiting. This could be the replacement effect of Soul Pierce II instead, however. This would unfortunately more likely require an animation and a flavor/icon change, and would probably end up on Lunar alignment, if the effect on Shadow Harvester is kept and improved. The rift equipment requirement is fine. (I actually think Lunar alignment could even take Reverberation's effect, and the current spot for Reverberation could be something new, like a random teleport a la Telelocator Staff/Weregoose, but I don't think other players would prefer this option.)

...

I know these are some pretty drastic changes, but as it stands, we're kind of forced into full Nice skills, 3 Insight into Overflowing Greed + Soul Jar, and one Insight for Soul Decoy I, Soul Thief I, or Covetous Collector. Alignment is entirely skippable. The Nabsack just doesn't properly scale with progression as it stands, and directly conflicts with Shadow Harvester as well.

Ultimately, my biggest qualm with this update is the absolute destruction of the resource management mechanics behind Souls, which is a huge part of this character's gameplay experience. Players should be encouraged to engage in combat regularly and be strategic with their resources. Being capable of holding 800 healing worth of Souls in a single inventory slot, in multiple inventory slots, and being actively encouraged to farm Souls en masse by the skills themselves? On top of Twintailed Hearts to boot? This... changes everything on this character, in a simultaneously unengaging yet broken way. I would like to see a more nuanced approach to this skill tree that improves what he currently does in resource management, not completely throw it away like the current skill design accomplishes.

Hope this was helpful as feedback to the dev team, and thanks to anyone who reads all of this.

[Master_NiX]

I kinda wish that "Nice Inclination" would allow Wortox to coexist more peacefully in bases with neutral monsters around.

Like reward him for not being Naughty. Keeping him an enemy to everyone while being nice is just feels weird.

"Look, this guy is very friendly and kind, LET'S KILL HIM"

[salty_cookie]

I agree that the nice inclanation should make neutral mobs not hostile to you, as it is a perfect fit for said inclination

[Mr Giggio]

5 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

It would have also been nice if one of these new skills allowed us to teleport with heavy items (statues/chess pieces/etc.) on us, but I would love to see this in his base kit. If it increases the Soul cost in exchange, that would be totally acceptable

I was hoping for this so much too

[ApoIIo]

5 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Soul Jar - This item is a huge problem. You should not be able to hold more than 1. This item entirely breaks this character and discourages regular combat. I don't even think this should be able to hold more than 20 Souls, due to the addition of Twintailed Hearts for additional Souls capacity. 40 Souls and the ability to hold multiple jars is insane, especially when the existing skills encourage you to carry 5 of these and keep them full. There is no reason to need this amount of Souls. We've been managing just fine for years with the original 20 Soul cap, and a single stack of Bees when necessary. The only reason to be able to have multiple jars is to farm Souls en masse in a single session, which is counter-intuitive to the way this character has historically played and is frankly unfun when I've personally already disliked this grinding experience on Willow with Ember farming. In addition to everything, healing and teleporting are now more efficient on Souls as-is with some of these new skills, exacerbating the issue further. Please reconsider this item's implementation and purpose, as it completely destroys Wortox's existing gameplay loop and balancing, which helps keep him engaging even through the late game experience. The decay rate while not in Wortox's inventory should also be reduced a bit, but that's the least of my problems with this item.
 

I don't mind multiple soul jars personally, especially when they take up inventory slots when idle and decay if not doing that. My beef with it is that you need two hundred godsdamned souls for knapsack to be remotely acceptable. I would probably stick to carrying one or two anyway.

[salty_cookie]

Wanda has to rush archives for her clocks wortox has to rush killerbee biome. I guess this is the logic klei used

[ApoIIo]

wortox has to rush the celestial portal so he can be replaced with a good character

[salty_cookie]

18 minutes ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

wortox has to rush the celestial portal so he can be replaced with a good character

all klei had to do was give wortox 1 skill that insta switched you to wanda

[shigu.exe]

6 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

There has been one major complaint I've had about Wortox since his inception, and it's his complete lack of synergy with Beefalo. This can be corrected by allowing Souls to heal all allied mobs (including those of other characters such as Webber, Wurt, or Grumble Bees), with a 4x multiplier for Beefalo (the current multiplier for food healing). He should also be able to Soul Hop while riding, both on-screen and in the map. You can do this with a Lazy Explorer already. I was a bit disappointed to see this not included on his skill tree, and would really like to see it either replace a redundant/unnecessary skill, or, preferably, simply added to his base kit.

THIS!
As someone who has extensively played Wortox with a Beefalo, I wholeheartedly agree.
Wortox is a character that encourages you to regularly engage in combat to replenish his unique resource, and Beefalos are just this all-in-one solution acting as a means of transport, a weapon, and even a shield. Using one is a great resource efficient way to reliably profit from combat encounters (as opposed to taking hits and having to waste the souls you gained to heal)... but it is just so clunky to use one as Wortox. Right now, to teleport with your Beefalo, you have to dismount, open the map, soul hop, wait a little while for it to teleport to you because of the Beefalo Bell, and finally get back on. And it's not even reliable, the Beefalo might run out of space to move while another player is nearby, preventing it from teleporting while it's visible onscreen.

The rest of your post is insightful as well, and the devs should take notes, but I especially want to highlight the anti-synergy that is Beefalo riding as Wortox in the hopes that it gets addressed.

[Sir.Fux]

I'm coming from an 25 play session with wortox. It was a really fun run. Rushed the Soul Jar asap. Farmed souls with soul decoy pretty efficient on 2 killer bee hives at beequeen. Explored the map and rushed ruins to get more red gems for more soul jars. After I had 3 Soul Jars I went with the nabsack, which  is really cheep when you know how to farm souls quickly. I had the feeling I could be everywhere on the map. I dont think the naughty inclination is selfish at all. Instead of eating the food of others, you can just eat the souls, plus you can still heal your teammates. 

Wortox is pretty good at early-midgame for exploration and playing with unexperienced players, but still lacks somewhat of lategame playability.

How about lunar and shadow perks would not use the soul echo, but instead use a soul itself, with cooldown of course.

[IAmAFurrz]

7 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Ultimately, my biggest qualm with this update is the absolute destruction of the resource management mechanics behind Souls, which is a huge part of this character's gameplay experience. Players should be encouraged to engage in combat regularly and be strategic with their resources. 

i agree, getting souls regularly is already tedious, but its rewarding (enough, in map tps) to keep me playing him. unfortunately the current skill tree is like 'yea this is whats unique about him you can now do 10x that and get a barely passable weapon' as well as have to have 5 inventory spaces constantly taken up by items

 

[aidankocherhans]

Yeah, based on my time with wortox 20 extra soul capacity is exactly how much you'd realistically need, and any extra could just be from captured bees like you'd normally do. It would be a qol feature to not have to manage feeding as much, but more than that would be excessive and change your gameplay loop for the worst. Needing to kill is what makes wortox's gameplay unique, but if you can store 100+ souls that'll kinda go away

[OMEGASCRUFF]

5 hours ago, Sir.Fux said:

I'm coming from an 25 play session with wortox. It was a really fun run. Rushed the Soul Jar asap. Farmed souls with soul decoy pretty efficient on 2 killer bee hives at beequeen. Explored the map and rushed ruins to get more red gems for more soul jars. After I had 3 Soul Jars I went with the nabsack, which  is really cheep when you know how to farm souls quickly. I had the feeling I could be everywhere on the map. I dont think the naughty inclination is selfish at all. Instead of eating the food of others, you can just eat the souls, plus you can still heal your teammates. 

Wortox is pretty good at early-midgame for exploration and playing with unexperienced players, but still lacks somewhat of lategame playability.

I don't think the issue is accessibility on the Nabsack. It's easy, and only tedious, to get the Souls necessary with a Bee biome, and Red Gems are super common from Graves and Stalagmites. The problem is that it's redundant in functionality with existing items and has no niche post-rifts. Wortox really didn't need just a replacement for Dark Swords. It doesn't add anything to his gameplay experience other than requiring a grind to set up, for a tool that ultimately offers nothing unique with further progression. Conceptually, why are we giving a character centered entirely around utility and support a weapon that offers neither of these things? I really think it should just be a tool and the premise is flawed from the get-go.

The Naughty inclination is indeed selfish. You can just eat two Souls for more hunger value instead as Neutral or Nice. Any Wortox can agree with you that saving food for your teammates is a great asset early on, but you can simply... Eat more Souls, especially with how much more efficient healing/teleporting are. We can do this for the team regardless of being Naughty. Losing the Sanity drop doesn't actually help much, and even makes maintaining early game insanity for fuel more inaccessible. I'd rather the sanity was untouched, as it was already rebalanced well when Souls began healing Wortox's sanity a bit. I think making the adjustments I recommended to inclination would fix this and leave room for minor additional effects for flavor (such as reducing the aggro range on hostile enemies a bit, as suggested above and in other threads. Though I think in general, skills that diminish a character's intended downsides should be avoided if possible. Hostile mobs is just minor enough, I think, as long as they still can't be befriended normally.)

Ultimately, I do not think the impact of skills that we cannot directly select should be very large, and as it stands, a Nice nature simply makes Wortox more newbie-unfriendly on food and sanity, but is ultimately superior in all ways for experienced players, especially in the late game. Nice is the only way to go, really, partially due to the skills on the Naughty side.

This is mostly Soul Pierce, and the overemphasis on Nabsack's fault, though. I haven't seen a single beta player have anything positive to say about Soul Pierce, because it's just not a scenario that occurs in a meaningful way during Wortox gameplay. I don't really understand how designers ended up with the idea for this skill at all. Even if they simply increase the damage and the range, it's still uninteractive and only situationally useful against two bosses, for a 4 Insight investment. And if it's buffed, it'll just further conflict with shadow alignment for its accessibility to farm weak mobs. Soul Pierce II NEEDS to be competitive with how stacked the Nice skills are, and I don't think it can afford to be a niche skill when competing with the value of Soul Bastion on the other side. I do really like the premise of the Decoy skills, if its awful synergy with other crucial skill and weapon choices is corrected, but it's simply not worth it when you look at the disproportional utility on the Nice side at the moment other than Soul Decoy I.

At the end of the day, I think the biggest issues we need to prioritize are the gamebreaking changes to resource management courtesy of the jars (and further exacerbated by improved healing/teleport efficiency), the Nabsack + Soul Pierce design philosophy, and alignment's insignificance. The inclinations are admittedly fairly minor when compared to those issues, and I don't think it's a huge deal that Naughty is more tailored for solo play.

...I also saw Capricious Movement was implemented. 200% efficiency. For 3 Insight with 2 good prerequisites. I wanted this skill, but this is... too much. This is way too much. I'm trying my best to remain civil and understanding of Klei's intentions with this skill tree, but it's so disheartening to see design/balancing decisions being made by people who have pretty obviously not put enough time into playing Wortox to understand what makes him engaging to play. It's not about spamming Soul skills. It's about the risk/reward decisionmaking, and strategic choices made by the constraint on Soul capacity and availability. Wortox is a character made excellent and rewarding through a strong ability to triage. This factor is completely gone. Now it's just farming for currency. I... don't really understand how this was allowed to happen. It was one of the core principles behind this character's gameplay.

[Echsrick]

i think the soul jar sould just been a placeable structure you can store souls in for later use when you need them and a seperate skill to increase soul cap to +5 and maybe an upgrate for another +5 instead of the soul jar inventory bloat, you know if you dont base next to a river with trawlers nets and tin fishing bins for an effective soul storage allready


what about eating souls? i allways think eating souls was the worst use you could do with souls, healing and especialy teleporting are just way better, and it would fit thematicaly if theres a naughty skill that increases hunger gain and negates sanity drain from eating souls, that being combined into 1 skill, if thats not allready a thing i dit not do the beta i only read things

[OMEGASCRUFF]

52 minutes ago, Echsrick said:

i think the soul jar sould just been a placeable structure you can store souls in for later use when you need them and a seperate skill to increase soul cap to +5 and maybe an upgrate for another +5 instead of the soul jar inventory bloat, you know if you dont base next to a river with trawlers nets and tin fishing bins for an effective soul storage allready


what about eating souls? i allways think eating souls was the worst use you could do with souls, healing and especialy teleporting are just way better, and it would fit thematicaly if theres a naughty skill that increases hunger gain and negates sanity drain from eating souls, that being combined into 1 skill, if thats not allready a thing i dit not do the beta i only read things

 

The limit on Souls during combat scenarios outside of base and for map teleporting purposes is crucial to Wortox gameplay, and I think your idea of it being a structure would have been significantly less disruptive than the current implementation. I think it would have been fine as a limited-to-one carrier for 20 Souls, but the current feature changes the strategy entirely. You have to make some horrible, HORRIBLE mistakes to be able to die with 230+ Souls accessible to you, on hand. The Twintailed Heart can be made from 10 Souls and is squeezed to drop them all at once (effectively a full heal) at the cost of a single inventory slot but limited by its application to burst healing/resurrection only. This item alone would have been a significant option for resource management, but the jar is completely gamebreaking to the experience.

Soul eating is mostly just to save on resources for teammates, for convenience, and making use of excess Souls. The Naughty inclination increases hunger gain and removes the sanity penalty, and is a free skill based on your choice of Insight investment. It's inherently pretty unhelpful and is more of an opportunity cost because it substantially drops your healing by 25%, which is a significantly more important use of Souls, even in solo play. The unlimited nature of farms in this game, with the addition of the Polar Bearger Bin (and previously Gift/Bundling Wrap), made hunger a non-issue once established, so the Naughty inclination really is just a downside in the mid-to-late game stages of a world. It's just slightly less disruptive in solo play, where Jelly Beans and a Batbat are superior healing options on a character that focuses on avoiding damage by dodging in combat.

Edit: I added some additional thoughts to the OP regarding Nice and Naughty inclination. While I don't really consider Wortox a DPS-oriented character, a few small boosts are appreciated for solo play anyways. I mean, look at how Wormwood turned out, right?

[twitchgabo]

8 hours ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

wortox has to rush the celestial portal so he can be replaced with a good character

We didn't even mention that Wortox is a "real money purchasable" survivor...

 

Wanda is also a "paid" survivor who doesn't even have a Skill Tree yet and she is much more complete than Wortox with his new ST