Some Skills in the Upcoming Wendy Skill Tree Are Just Filler

[renamoe]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to share my thoughts on the upcoming Wendy skill tree update in Don't Starve Together. While I deeply appreciate the continuous efforts by the Klei team to enhance Wendy's gameplay experience, I believe there are certain aspects of the new skill tree that could benefit from further refinement. Below are the skills that I find useful, followed by some that seem less impactful:

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Skills That Enhance Gameplay:

1. Shroud Concept

   I really appreciate that Wendy and Abigail can share their health, allowing them to support each other during boss fights. This feature reflects the bond and affection between the twin sisters, which is wonderful. It makes Wendy players more capable of facing strong enemies by effectively leveraging Abigail's assistance.

2. Abigail's Lunar-Related Skills

   This addition transforms Wendy into a high-damage, single-target fighter, which is excellent for assisting in boss battles. It compensates for Wendy's previous weakness in dealing with powerful bosses, making her more versatile in challenging situations.

3. Improved Elixirs

   Enhancing the Elixirs' effectiveness by buffing their values is highly beneficial. I'm glad that Klei shifted the focus from extending the duration to increasing the potency of the Elixirs, making them more useful during gameplay.

4. Easier Gathering of Mourning Glory

   This skill is particularly helpful because it reduces the time and effort needed to gather Mourning Glory. Without mods, helping Abigail find the Lost Toys can be quite troublesome, so investing skill points to find Mourning Glory more quickly is a significant advantage.

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Skills That Seem Like Filler:

1. Grave Repurposing

   This skill feels somewhat eerie, and its utility is unclear. I'm not sure how it enhances gameplay or contributes to Wendy's abilities.

2. Abigail's Shadow-Related Skills

   The idea is good—adding more value to Abigail's shield/damage reduction and introducing a new type of Elixir—but these skills need a buff. Especially the final skill that involves Abigail murdering small animals or mobs seems unnecessary. It doesn't add much value compared to other more impactful skills.

3. Skills for Converting Dark Petals and Petals

   Petals are already abundant in the game and can be easily collected from the Bee Queen biome. They can also be converted into Dark Petals in stacks by haunting. Having two separate skills to manage this interchange seems redundant and unnecessary.

4. Enhanced Control Over Abigail

   This skill doesn't feel very useful. I personally preferred the previous system where Abigail could be enraged or calmed with a single right-click, and her flower could recall her. Spending three skill points to allow Abigail more interactive movements seems excessive and feels more like a quality-of-life improvement rather than a necessary skill tree feature.

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Final Thoughts

I hope Klei takes these points into consideration as they continue to balance Wendy's abilities. It would be fantastic to see all aspects of the skill tree contribute meaningfully to gameplay, thereby enhancing the overall experience for Wendy players.

Thank you for your time in reading this, and thank you for your continuous efforts to improve Don't Starve Together! Any comments are welcome. 

[Eieni]

They need a "double tap" feature with the flower, where right-clicking the flower in quick succession executes the last command you did. Also lower/remove cooldowns for what are essentially just move commands. I don't understand the long and shared cooldown when the dash "attack" doesn't do any attacking as it does no damage, and hiding Abi prevents her from attacking anyway. Scare off can keep the cooldown.

[cyjs]

Great ideas throughout! Should some gentlemen take a look?   全篇都是伟大的想法！一些先生是不是该看看呢？ 让我们把互相抬起来好吗

[HowlVoid]

This is a really nice put together analysis that gives constructive feedback. I hope the developers read your post.

My thoughts:

Is the purpose of relocating graves maybe to make pipspooks more accessible? This would mean pipspook hunting can be moved from forests where it can be hard to look for their toys. At the very least this means Wendy can base anywhere and have access to them, even in caves. Unless they don't spawn pipspooks?

Can Wendy not make a pig/werewolf farm, when graves spawn ghosts after decorating them? I was also under the assumption that all graves spawn ghosts on a full moon but perhaps that's a quirk only for the developer graveyard set. 

I could be wrong but I believe being able to purify petals is meant to create a infinite cycle of ->purifying flowers->decorate graves with flowers->create dark flowers->purify dark petals. I imagine this is so Multiple Wendy's don't compete for flowers petals over a long time and dry up the resource if no countermeasure plan was in place to keep them from becoming hard to find by new Wendys(the update will cause a large influx of Wendy players and think this is developers planning ahead). Wendy can always have petals to decorate her graves without creating a separate beebox colony to supply the flowers.

I also want to elaborate that changing the ability to decorate graves with dark petals may not be so intuitive. Once the cycle begins it can be continued infinitely but the beginning supply (which is small) of dark petals can be used up by others easily. 

I think they're making it so she can corrupt normal petals into dark petals but also being able to turn them back can still be beneficial for resetting the spoiler timer. I could be wrong about this change though.

Side note: petals have a very large case of uses: ash for healing salve, feeding to beefalo, turns to rot, can be fed to a pig for manure, can be turned to compost, etc etc and was so versatile it was removed from Wormwoods kit (makes me a lil bit salty). And if turning them from dark to normal refreshes the spoil timer... well that's useful. 

Enhanced control is possibly for controller users as that has been a common complain by... well Mike. Maybe other users too.

[WenericMember]

7 minutes ago, HowlVoid said:

This is a really nice put together analysis that gives constructive feedback. I hope the developers read your post.

My thoughts:

Is the purpose of relocating graves maybe to make pipspooks more accessible? This would mean pipspook hunting can be moved from forests where it can be hard to look for their toys. At the very least this means Wendy can base anywhere and have access to them, even in caves. Unless they don't spawn pipspooks?

Can Wendy not make a pig/werewolf farm, when graves spawn ghosts after decorating them? I was also under the assumption that all graves spawn ghosts on a full moon but perhaps that's a quirk only for the developer graveyard set. 

I could be wrong but I believe being able to purify petals is meant to create a infinite cycle of ->purifying flowers->decorate graves with flowers->create dark flowers->purify dark petals. I imagine this is so Multiple Wendy's don't compete for flowers petals over a long time and dry up the resource if no countermeasure plan was in place to keep them from becoming hard to find by new Wendys(the update will cause a large influx of Wendy players and think this is developers planning ahead). Wendy can always have petals to decorate her graves without creating a separate beebox colony to supply the flowers.

I also want to elaborate that changing the ability to decorate graves with dark petals may not be so intuitive. Once the cycle begins it can be continued infinitely but the beginning supply (which is small) of dark petals can be used up by others easily. 

I think they're making it so she can corrupt normal petals into dark petals but also being able to turn them back can still be beneficial for resetting the spoiler timer. I could be wrong about this change though.

Side note: petals have a very large case of uses: ash for healing salve, feeding to beefalo, turns to rot, can be fed to a pig for manure, can be turned to compost, etc etc and was so versatile it was removed from Wormwoods kit (makes me a lil bit salty). And if turning them from dark to normal refreshes the spoil timer... well that's useful. 

Enhanced control is possibly for controller users as that has been a common complain by... well Mike. Maybe other users too.

Probably yes. The relocating grave skill isn't the issue, the new grave skill is, because decorating graves has a cap of four at a time.

I think you're correct about the werewolf farm thing

You're also right about the infinite petal loop (although right now it costs more petals to beautify then it produces, they're fixing that though).

The corrupting petals thing is just so you don't need the grave beautification skill for a source of dark petals to use in the dark petals skills.