wortox So, inclinations, huh? (The Extended Cut Nobody Asked For)

[crushcircuit]

I've been really excited about the skill trees so far, and I especially love the concept behind Wortox's skill tree. It's REALLY cool to see the justice and balance theming for it, and I think it's shaping up to be really great!

I do have some criticisms, though. I believe that it's currently weighted in the favor of Naughtiness just a bit too much. There's a lot that could be said on that matter - I do believe that the Reaching Souls/Soul Bastion branch is quite underpowered, currently - but I'd like to specifically focus on inclinations at the moment.

The Niceness inclination is a lot less generally useful than the Naughtiness inclination. This has been the case since the beta started, but the most recent update nerfed it extremely badly by removing the healing perks, however meager they were, alongside removing one of the few downsides to having Naughty inclination.

THE NUMBERS:

Spoiler

Wortox's souls heal for +20. He receives +2.5 sanity whenever he releases a soul, and loses -5 sanity every time he eats a soul.
In this beta, with the introduction of Soul Bastion, he can heal for more.

Before the most recent patch:

• When using Soul Bastion, neutral Wortox's souls healed for +25
• Nice Wortox's souls healed for +25. If he had Soul Bastion, he healed for +33.5
• Nice Wortox received +5 sanity whenever he released a soul, and lost -10 sanity from eating souls
• Naughty Wortox's souls healed for +15
• Naughty Wortox was unaffected by releasing or eating souls

After the most recent patch:

• Nice Wortox no longer has the Monster tag. (Pigmen/bunnymen/catcoons don't attack on sight, pigmen/bunnymen can be used as followers)
• Nice Wortox receives +5 sanity whenever releasing a soul, and loses -10 sanity from eating souls
• Naughty Wortox has 10 seconds to recover from a soul overload (releasing, eating, or depositing in a Soul Jar)
• Naughty Wortox is unaffected by releasing or eating souls

Additionally, regardless of inclination, Wortox's souls now heal for +30 when using Soul Bastion.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Nice Wortox was directly nerfed and Naughty Wortox was directly buffed, despite Naughty having a severe advantage already. Definitely not the intention, but it is what it achieves. The -10 sanity per soul consumption with Nice inclination is extremely harsh, and +5 sanity per soul released does effectively nothing to combat this. It's only a +2.5 bonus to his normal gain vs a -5 penalty to his normal loss, which really stacks up. Not to mention that, generally, you eat souls a lot more than you release them. (Or at least, I do.)

In this current state, I know people who want to spec into Niceness, but don't want to have to suffer the sanity loss from eating souls, so instead opt to be neutral to avoid it. I would also like to note in this current state that, technically, eating spoiled meaty stew is better than eating a soul with Niceness inclination. For him, spoiled meaty stew gives +37.5 hunger and -5 sanity, while souls give +25 hunger and -10 sanity each.

Additionally, while removing the Monster tag is pretty neat, both as a frequent suggestion actually being implemented, and for lore-wise Wortox becoming a Certified Nice Boy™, it really... doesn't mean all that much. At least for me personally.

While Naughtiness inclination gives a whopping 10 seconds to recover from a soul overload-- this doesn't sound like much, but is incredibly forgiving in the heat of the moment-- Niceness inclination simply... lets you not get attacked by certain mobs.

I am certain some people would love the ability to use followers as Wortox. I am not one of these people, I have never been, and I don't find the perk to be useful. Wortox can use the pan flute for free with his first neutral perk, which allows for a far more effective method of pacifying and/or picking off enemies, both in small and large groups. If I wanted to use followers, I would be playing Webber or Wurt instead.

Plus, in comparison to the Naughtiness inclination perk, it's not nearly as useful or widely practical. There are many situations you can overflow on souls. There aren't nearly as many situations where a pigman could actually kill you. Naughtiness inclination has no meaningful downsides, yet this perk does, which is quite odd to me.

WHAT DO THEY DO?

With all that said, I don't really care to see Naughtiness inclination getting nerfed. I would much rather see Niceness buffed to be on-par with Naughtiness!

It could be cool to see Niceness gain a greater focus on sanity manipulation, perhaps in the vein of Willow or Wormwood. I find myself going insane as Nice Wortox rather often due to the sanity downsides, but I wouldn't mind it as much if there was a reliable way to harness it in some way, like gaining some sort of benefit while insane or being able to recover from it easier.

Willow is affected more by both positive and negative sanity auras, can easily create fire for a easy and convenient positive sanity aura, and has Big Bernie to fight for her while insane. Wormwood can easily manipulate his sanity levels via destroying and replanting plant life. Perhaps Niceness Wortox's sanity gain from releasing souls could be buffed, and/or the Nice tree could have perks that give him some sort of benefit while insane?

I'm not 100% certain on the idea myself, so please feel free to give your own ideas for how they could change the inclinations! I just want to at least put something on the table to get the idea across.

Additionally, at the moment, the way Niceness and Naughtiness inclinations are built encourages players to lean extremely hard into one side to reap all of the rewards. I don't think this is inherently bad, but with how skill trees work, it makes it difficult to build the tree exactly how you'd want without sacrificing really great skills.

I think it could be cool to introduce some sort of perk for being "inclined" towards neutrality. The perk would be unlocked by having a certain amount of skills spec'd into the tree - alongside being "neutrally aligned", of course. I'm not certain what this perk would be, but I think it would make picking perks from either side more appealing, as opposed to it feeling like the "incorrect" way to use the tree. Again, maybe others would have some nice input on this. I think it could be interesting for it to be more fitting for Wortox at his core, rather than either extremes of the other two.

[Master_NiX]

1 minute ago, SSneaky said:

Nice shouldn't change agro

Stop trying to take away my bunnies and cats from me ;-;

[gaymime]

9 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

Nice shouldn't change agro, just because the soul stealing imp is nice doesn't mean that it's not a soul stealing imp.

Instead, make it so that the followers of players can get healed.

Or something.

wilson slaughters more pigs than a butcher and he is not penalized. if he gets a pass why shouldnt wortox get a chance at rehabilitating his reputation?

[Master_NiX]

"Nice" side is more of a teamwork side, what's stopping you from taking what you like and going full naughty?

 

I am doing Nice build with 4 talents in Naughty tree.

[Master_NiX]

Just now, SSneaky said:

Racism.

Well, that is one of the things that can change. Klei did an animation with Pig and Merm after all.

[gaymime]

2 minutes ago, SSneaky said:

Racism.

times are-a-changin'

[Dingle]

My best builds force me into Neutral, anyway. Grabbing Nice or Naughty means I have to sacrifice something big, like soul damage or lunar/shadow alignment. It's really limiting. I have a big post on this in my Problems with Neutral Perks post, that you already saw. (This one: )

 

When I was messing with Nice, I got tons of sanity. It's because I'm really used to avoiding eating souls, from playing Wortox for quite awhile. Meaty Stew and Scotch Eggs 4ever.

Drop 3 souls and it's like eating cactus. As long as you don't eat souls.

[Jazzuo]

7 hours ago, Dingle said:

When I was messing with Nice, I got tons of sanity. It's because I'm really used to avoiding eating souls, from playing Wortox for quite awhile. Meaty Stew and Scotch Eggs 4ever.

Drop 3 souls and it's like eating cactus. As long as you don't eat souls.

so if you think about it, the nice side is overshadow by a cooked cactus because every cooked cactus equal to 1.5 souls, which means that if you go naugthy and cook a cactus you have the best of the two worlds. actually crazy

[Mysterious box]

8 hours ago, SSneaky said:

Nice shouldn't change agro, just because the soul stealing imp is nice doesn't mean that it's not a soul stealing imp.

Instead, make it so that the followers of players can get healed.

Or something.

I will say this becomes baffling when you look at Webber as well are we to assume he's not nice enough to not get treated as a monster?

[Dingle]

28 minutes ago, Jazzuo said:

so if you think about it, the nice side is overshadow by a cooked cactus because every cooked cactus equal to 1.5 souls, which means that if you go naugthy and cook a cactus you have the best of the two worlds. actually crazy

What's even more crazy is that you're saying it's faster to get cactus than it is to get souls.

I can get souls, in huge amounts, fast. Not sure what you're doing where you can get cactus faster.

[Mysterious box]

8 hours ago, gaymime said:

wilson slaughters more pigs than a butcher and he is not penalized. if he gets a pass why shouldnt wortox get a chance at rehabilitating his reputation?

As I mentioned above where does Webber fit into this picture morally speaking I don't mind if it stays but it really doesn't make sense.

[Jazzuo]

2 minutes ago, Dingle said:

What's even more crazy is that you're saying it's faster to get cactus than it is to get souls.

I can get souls, in huge amounts, fast. Not sure what you're doing where you can get cactus faster.

i mean if that's the problem you can always go for the green mushroom biome and get a lot of green caps, besides even if you say souls are easier to get you need basically triple the amount, instead of double with food

[Dingle]

Just now, Jazzuo said:

i mean if that's the problem you can always go for the green mushroom biome and get a lot of green caps, besides even if you say souls are easier to get you need basically triple the amount, instead of double with food

I can get souls way faster than that, though.

What are you doing for soul farming in your Wortox games?

[Jazzuo]

Just now, Dingle said:

I can get souls way faster than that, though.

What are you doing for soul farming in your Wortox games?

the problem is not how fast you get souls, the problem is how much you need basically, because if you need that many, you need 15 souls to get 30 sanity, which i mean, it isn't that much tbh, considerer that is more than half your souls maximum without soul jars and with 2 soul jars half, and if you go with a lot of soul jar to heal sanity is kinda useless because you're using a lot of inventory slots, at that point just cook green mushroom.

[Dingle]

3 minutes ago, Jazzuo said:

the problem is not how fast you get souls, the problem is how much you need basically, because if you need that many, you need 15 souls to get 30 sanity, which i mean, it isn't that much tbh, considerer that is more than half your souls maximum without soul jars and with 2 soul jars half, and if you go with a lot of soul jar to heal sanity is kinda useless because you're using a lot of inventory slots, at that point just cook green mushroom.

You get 75 sanity for 15 souls as Nice.

You can drop souls to max your sanity as you farm them.

There's also souls in the soul jars. A jar would give 200 sanity. A stack of green caps would give 300. But again, filling up a jar should be much faster than collecting 40 green caps.

I'm still interested hearing about how you farm souls as Wortox.

[djturner]

Personally I will pay any price to be at peace with catcoons. To quote Wolfgang, "I will make it fit!"

More seriously, I quite like the way Nice is designed; it makes the gameplay loop of eating souls no longer a great one. That's kinda the point and I assume is intended to incentivize a nice Wortox "walking the walk" of giving up his soul consuming ways and instead, against his anatomy, eating normal food. Or perhaps freeing more souls to compensate for the few he still eats. You're leaning into one of his disadvantages and in return another goes away. It's cool design in a lore sense.

I agree that the utility of it could be improved in some way, but the framework of what it means and how it operates in practice is well done imo.

[Jazzuo]

2 minutes ago, Dingle said:

You get 75 sanity for 15 souls as Nice.

You can drop souls to max your sanity as you farm them.

There's also souls in the soul jars. A jar would give 200 sanity. A stack of green caps would give 300. But again, filling up a jar should be much faster than collecting 40 green caps.

I'm still interested hearing about how you farm souls as Wortox.

i mean, it's still oportunity cost, why would you use a full jar to recover sanity?, like i don't think it's that hard tho, with wortox you have like 3 times the movement you had before, and actually want to use souls in more ways than recover sanity, if you go nice mostly of the time you're gonna play with people and you want souls to make soul hearts, because is faster than drop 10 souls, and it's a burst of healing very nice, still 5 sanity it's not that good, and a cooked cactus it's not that hard to get the longer you play tho, because chances are you're going to find a dessert biome, and as wortox you can tp everytime they regrowth, and cooked it, or with the green mushroom biome, which you can tp very easy to find it

[Dingle]

23 minutes ago, Jazzuo said:

i mean, it's still oportunity cost, why would you use a full jar to recover sanity?, like i don't think it's that hard tho, with wortox you have like 3 times the movement you had before, and actually want to use souls in more ways than recover sanity, if you go nice mostly of the time you're gonna play with people and you want souls to make soul hearts, because is faster than drop 10 souls, and it's a burst of healing very nice, still 5 sanity it's not that good, and a cooked cactus it's not that hard to get the longer you play tho, because chances are you're going to find a dessert biome, and as wortox you can tp everytime they regrowth, and cooked it, or with the green mushroom biome, which you can tp very easy to find it

Why heal people with twintail hearts instead of soul bastion? Do you really do this? I have followup questions if you do.

Souls are still vastly faster for sanity recovery. As a bonus, you're also not eating cactus that your teammates could have eaten, and got twice as much sanity from. I'm also not bringing up cooking time, or loading times to get to the green mushroom biome.

[Jazzuo]

2 minutes ago, Dingle said:

Why heal people with twintail hearts instead of soul bastion? Do you really do this? I have followup questions if you do.

Souls are still vastly faster for sanity recovery. As a bonus, you're also not eating cactus that your teammates could have eaten, and got twice as much sanity from. I'm also not bringing up cooking time, or loading times to get to the green mushroom biome.

i mean it kinda depends on the situation, but if you heal people with soul bastion it's kinda fine most of the time, but yeah the main problem with that is that you don't actually know the health of your teammates and twintail hearts make that less important, most of the time.

i mean, if you think about the time you lose for cooking or load into the caves you need to count the time you need to get soul jars, or how fast you can get souls with the nice side, because actually the best perk to farm souls fast is on the naugthy side and cost 5 insight points, so you can go for the neutral perks, but actually are not that great to generate souls for the nice side, the neutral perks are actually good with the naugthy side, but yeah i mean, it's overkill at that point

[gaymime]

59 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

As I mentioned above where does Webber fit into this picture morally speaking I don't mind if it stays but it really doesn't make sense.

webber looks like a weird spider which is common and prolific. i can understand why webber gets no redemption; he looks like the scary violent guys. wortox is pretty unique-looking so he is pretty recognizable(krampi are quite rare in the constant). i can't go much further than that though or we get into "everyone can use a slingshot or read a book so why can't they use someone elses' kit" territory

[OMEGASCRUFF]

I had a feeling this would happen, and it's why my initial recommendation was to remove the inclination's impact on sanity altogether. It's not newbie friendly and it can hurt people in the early game before access to way more food than you can deal with becomes a factor.

I was fine with the heal difference, but just wanted to see it reigned in a little (probably to 22.5 and 17.5 HP), and my opinion would be different if we kept it, and I'd just say "deal with it." My opinion would also change if Wortox could actually heal friendly mobs, but Bunnymen are still pretty meh in combat, and I'm just very uninterested in follower gameplay due to how non-interactive and niche it is. (8 years playing and a mountain of spools. Still refuse to unlock Wurt, fish farms be damned.)

Firstly, wear a Top Hat/Tam o' Shanter and use Tents/Siesta Lean-To's. They're still full efficiency on Wortox.

I do want to note that your Soul farm is a really strong source for a quick heal to your sanity. I think the best option without Soul Pierce or a Shadow Reaper is to just abuse Bramble Husks in a Bee farm, or, ideally, a Killer Bee biome. Wortox happens to be really good at rushing the Celestial Portal if your server doesn't have a Wormwood.

But you should probably not be building for Nice inclination without a good reason to buff your heals. This would mean larger player counts or small servers with characters who have limited options for healing, specifically Wormwood. For the former, you can probably get a Willow, Wendy, Wigfrid, Woodie, WX, Winona, Walter, or Wormwood to help you with mass Soul farming. For the latter, both Woodie and Wormwood have AoEs and Bramble Husks make you self-sufficient. Willow can also just make you a sanity station.

You can also take Pleasant Pastorale for a daily Soul bonus on a Nice build pre-rifts, but I'd rather keep Overwhelming Greed and Soul Decoy I, personally.

This experience would be less painful if they just bring down the extremes here, yet again. This would probably end up being a 7.5 sanity loss and 3.75 gain.

It's mathematically inconsistent, if Naughty doesn't also change (pls do not), but I care more about balance anyway. With that in mind, I'd be down with the sanity loss staying at -10, but the sanity gain bumped to 7.5. At least, this way, you can drop some Souls pretty quickly to fuel up your Enlightened Crown on the Lunar alignment, so it'll be rewarding in the late game without wasting space or consuming resources for sanity food (though late game Banana Shakes are godly anyways.)

I think that covers everything. Sorry I write so much about something so small.

[Dingle]

2 minutes ago, Jazzuo said:

i mean it kinda depends on the situation, but if you heal people with soul bastion it's kinda fine most of the time, but yeah the main problem with that is that you don't actually know the health of your teammates and twintail hearts make that less important, most of the time.

i mean, if you think about the time you lose for cooking or load into the caves you need to count the time you need to get soul jars, or how fast you can get souls with the nice side, because actually the best perk to farm souls fast is on the naugthy side and cost 5 insight points, so you can go for the neutral perks, but actually are not that great to generate souls for the nice side, the neutral perks are actually good with the naugthy side, but yeah i mean, it's overkill at that point

I don't think I'd ever want to heal with the twintail, as that is a ton of wasted healing. I want to generally heal people if they're at half health, not at 1 health. Plus Soul Bastion means you get 30 healing per soul now, and even as prepatch or Neutral Wortox you get a lot of sanity from healing during a boss fight.

Soul jars are a bad argument, you'd have to compare it to finding the deserts, etc, you want jars anyway, and once you get your jars you're done. Nice side soul generation is a better argument. You can do a 9 nice 6 naughty build to get soul decoy or soul pierce. You only need one of them to make souls extremely easy to farm. This prevents you from getting lunar/shadow, though. I'd like it if Soul decoy explosion was 2 points instead of 3.

Barring that, there's a lot of team synergies I can think of for really fast soul generation. If we get rid of those, its still killing bees and spiders with knabsack or ham bat versus picking cactus or greencaps. Even pre beta, this was way faster in my experience.

You don't seem willing to talk about your experience as Wortox, so I don't know how much further this can go.

[cropo]

32 minutes ago, gaymime said:

webber looks like a weird spider which is common and prolific. i can understand why webber gets no redemption; he looks like the scary violent guys. wortox is pretty unique-looking so he is pretty recognizable(krampi are quite rare in the constant). i can't go much further than that though or we get into "everyone can use a slingshot or read a book so why can't they use someone elses' kit" territory

That, and Krampi generally appear to PUNISH those who had done wrong, including pigs. It's kind of weird that pigs attack Wortox when Krampi are some of the biggest defenders of pigs.

The pigs are incredibly stupid as well, how would they realize Wortox is some kind of soul-devouring demon? Do they even know what a soul is, and the consequences of eating it? Maybe the Hamlet pigs might, but I seriously doubt the Constant pigs do, even Bunnymen are able to rationalize Meat=you most likely murdered someone to get it.


Klei has also backtracked on monster hostility in the past with the Shamlet disguise, I don't think it's an interesting downside and the ability to optionally turn it off by speccing a certain way seems like a good compromise for it.


I think OP is 100% right about eating souls as nice Wortox though, I think Wortox should get reduced penalties for eating regular food while nice.

[Jazzuo]

13 minutes ago, Dingle said:

I don't think I'd ever want to heal with the twintail, as that is a ton of wasted healing. I want to generally heal people if they're at half health, not at 1 health. Plus Soul Bastion means you get 30 healing per soul now, and even as prepatch or Neutral Wortox you get a lot of sanity from healing during a boss fight.

i mean, you're saying that if you use a full jar soul you gain 200 sanity, and twintail heart is less than a full jar tho, besides you say that is easy to get souls, and you can waste it on sanity, but not on twintail hearts

[OMEGASCRUFF]

9 minutes ago, Jazzuo said:

i mean, you're saying that if you use a full jar soul you gain 200 sanity, and twintail heart is less than a full jar tho, besides you say that is easy to get souls, and you can waste it on sanity, but not on twintail hearts

I like them for the burst healing option too, on top of emergency resurrection, and make them right before a boss for the spoilage. If you end up not using it in combat, you can throw it in ice Chester so it lasts longer and friends can teleport to you from it.