Thoughts and suggestions on wendy's skill tree

[Asmybelle]

She's my favourite character so I figured I'd play the beta and offer feedback while I still can. Also thanks to klei for doing regular updates on a game I bought 6 years ago.
I looked at forum posts to see other people's suggestions on wendy skills as well.

On the bright side, what I mostly like are the new commands for abigail (I don't find them perfect yet) and the fact we can craft and move graves (now we can finally use these lovely grave skins practically).

Pipspook-related skills and sisturn skills seem fine as they are, maybe small tweaks but it does feel like a direction wendy should be able to go in. For flower shroud, I'm waiting to see what it becomes, and I'm hyped for the "haunt" command to come.

1) Main concern, Abigail commands are a bit unpractical compared to before. Basically you right-click the flower in your inventory then move your mouse to the center of the screen and left-click the command (so one more click than it used to be), also take into account all icons look fairly similar. It makes the overall motion of riling up/calming/unsummoning take more time and be easier to screw up if you're in a tight situation. Suggestions to improve this :

-have a dedicated key shortcut to show up abigail commands, this isn't a very elegant solution but it exists

-give wendy a right click option anywhere on screen, similar to wortox' teleport, when she has the flower in her inventory

-have the commands ring show up close above the inventory slot where the flower is (or to the side if it's a different type of inventory layout), this can remove the time of moving mouse to flower>mouse to center screen

-click, or right click on abigail on the field directly to display the command ring

-since one of the issues I noted is about the time it takes to give commands that is increased, it could be mitigated by shortening wendy's "command give" animation, when she whispers to the flower and is stuck in this for a moment

Obviously I don't know if this is an issue for console players

2) "attack to" command feels a bit awkward, even when she's riled up abi doesn't attack right as she arrives to destination. But I think it could simply be named "send to" or something
3) "escape" command does feel a bit pointless since you can unsummon abigail directly
4) the skill to convert petals to dark petals+the opposite feels useless, especially if abigail's gonna gain a "haunt" command that lets her turn flowers to evil ones, and also considering wendy's graves grow evil flowers over time. Dark petals' only utility is crafting nightmare fuel or wendy-specific items, evil flowers themselves could be used as insanity/sanity station if they were plantable closer, and that's about it. Currently it costs 4 petals+1 nightmare fuel to get 2 dark petals, which is a net loss.

-If this skill is intended as comfort and not for nightmare fuel production, it should at least give back 4 dark petals to reimburse the nightmare fuel you spend.
-Another option is to give more use to dark petals in general crafting recipes. Suggestions I've seen by other people include making dark petals usable in endtables and vases+make them last long or forever to have a use for the sanity aura, or give a recipe to turn dark petals to mourning glories.

5) a change I'd like which isn't related to the skill tree but it's been there forever : Abigail glitches sometimes and will hit small mobs as they touch her event when she's calm. This can be annoying mostly for lategame because if you want to make pens with mobs you basically have to play with abigail unsummoned all the time, which is a bit sad.

Now for suggestions on content that doesn't necessarily need changes
1) obvious we have a gestalt abi so it's kinda sad we don't get a nightmare abi. As for gestalt abi, she could be able to attack shadow creatures (which kind of nullifies wendy's only weakness being shadows, similar to beefalos). If this were the case it would be nice that shadow abi would, instead of removing wendy's weaknesses, make her strengths greater. Another option for gestalt abi would be to have a sleep inducing attack, or having a sleep aura that makes mobs attack slower. To make the slow aura's power more complex to abuse, something that could be interesting would be to make it affect players as well.

2) vengeful spirit skill seems fun but a bit isolated in its category, other skills to go with it could be nice. For instance, wendy could turn other people into ghosts temporarily (out of body experience) and they could only go back to normal through wendy's power (or regular resurrection). Other complementary skills can be stuff about resurrecting other players.

3) a skill to make pipspooks come out and play with other players as well would be heartwarming. For instance, decorating graves with petals would spawn pipspooks and with dark petals would spawn bigspooks. Such pipspooks wouldn't provide a quest but would have a positive sanity aura (although the fact evil flowers grow around graves would kind of offset the point)

4) more interesting potions. I've seen people use distilled vengeance for farming big amounts of mobs, otherwise it's mostly spectral cure-all and nightshade nostrum for bossfights, there doesn't seem to be that many other use cases.

-For vigor mortis, it could be nice if the potion also gave abi a big light radius (+possibly a good sanity aura) so she can be your own portable star in caves for instance.

-The main suggestion is to be able to apply several potions to abigail at a time, though I'm not sure it would help vigor mortis that much

-new battle potion suggestions : potions that increase/decrease her aoe's range associated with an increase/decrease in damage, and a berserk potion that gives abi big buffs but riles her up and makes her ignore commands and unsummon for a while

 

[scratchvarius]

Since you mentioned animation, I'd like to add that when Abigail's skill (scare) animation is interrupted by an attack, it enters cooldown. Not sure if that's intended.