Feedback on Wortox skilltree after a lot of testing way to late to the party

[Malfario]

First to say, I am loving this beta, i was a bit underwhelmed with the first iteration of the skilltrees But over time all the problems i personally had have been or are confirmed to be adressed. I would like to also thank Klei for how comunicative they´ve been with us, its been really nice that the issues we had over the diferent changes and aditions have all been delivered alongside notes explaining and contextualicing them. Kudos for the team.

I am gonna go straight to the point, the things i would like to be changed, but know that my overall opinion about wortox is that he is amazing and his skilltree is extremly well done in almost every aspect, these are just shortcomings and rough edges to be expected since we are still on beta.

1-Naughty tree calls for a bit to much points:

The naughty side skills are all very interconected in orther for them to be viable against the harder challenges of the game, which isnt a bad thing to any metric but watching how the skilltree itself has the gimmick of balancing the two sides, it feels a bit ackward how none of the skills on the naughty tree with maybe the exception of the jars are worth it without investing all your points in there.

If you decide you wanna go with naughty you will have 4 skill points left, Which reallisticly will only allow you two convinations of skills, either you go for the right section of the nice tree for souls economy and efficient travel or you go for the panflutes. If we have the affinities in mind is even worse because you wont be able to complete another branch.

TLDR: The naughty tree could have 1 or 2 skills merged together so even if you go full on it you have a bit more of room for customization of the built, even the nice tree could have the same treatment so both trees could benefit more of each other and make balancing the nice and naughty tendencies more viable

2-The final abilities of both tendencies could be expanded:

The ultimate skill of the nice tree being the second healing wave and the final ability of the naughty tree being the souls dealing damage when flying back to wortox.

Both of these ideas are amazing and i love them, But they have their problems.

About souls dealing dmg when flying to you, this becomes a problem in fights without ways to generate souls at a quick rate, such as Celestial champion, Frost jaw, Crab king, Werepig etc. There is an argument for not all charcater skills to be universally used but knowing this is one of wortox ultimate skills, it only being usefull in around 3-5 boss fights its less than ideal. I propose the following option:

Let soul jars actually drop souls over time when left on the ground, this way we could have a way of generating souls in the field for them to travel to wortox and deal dmg, this alone would make it so we would have to think extemly strategically about where to place the jars and how many jars, not to count the inventory managment challenge that will come with it. Because storing soul jars would become a much more important thing now, i think making it so jars inside chest wouldnt drop the souls a fitting change, just so we could have our little stash of tourrets

Another change i would like to propose its for adding alternative movement patterns for the souls, souls moving in a spiral around wortox dealing dmg multiple times around him to cover more area for example, or souls flying very close around wortox for a few seconds, so enemies that got near him would get hit a lot of times etc

About the second wave of healing, its just not necesary, fights already last very short the moment you add a second player, argubly the soul jars alone provide the same benefit been able to carry more souls to fights without adds for more healing. and for wortox alone its simply not wofrth it over the rest of skills.

Again its not a bad skill, it quite benefits soul economy from early to mid game but again being intended to be one of the great things about the tree i think we could add something more impactfull and make the second healing skills cheaper on the skill point side. And because i dont like aimlessly asking for "more tm" i would like to coment on what i would like to see taking the place of these skills on the tree.

Since nice wortox theme is about releasing souls why not play into that and make souls "greatfull" to wortox offering aid to him, lets say if wortox is in a risky situation and he happens to have souls in his inventory these will aid him to survive:

-About to get hit by charlie: 5 souls come out of your inventory and provide light for a short time .

-Receive a final hit: 3 souls in your inventory explodem healing you  a bit and pushing/knovkingall enemies away and stunns them for a moment.

-low on hp :souls autamatically drop of your inventory to heal you over half your health.

3-small stuff:

The shadow ability been limited to the reaper makes me uneasy, because as far as i know the reaper is intended to be the lowest tier of shadow weapons in the context of from beyond, so this skill will limit wortox´s shadow ability to one of the worts weapons of the late game after all have been implemented.

As it is right know isnt as much of a problem, because wortox already had little use for the new and shadowy axe since healing for him is irrelevant, however i would say its a bit sad he can´t benefit from the only other shadow weapon there is. Again, this might be reading a bit to much into the description of the skill, but i would like if it could be changed to "any shadow weapon from the rift". And the same goes for the lunnar skill calling for "brightshade armor" and not "any lunnar aligned armor post rift".

The knabsack could also work as a bug net for easily catch butterflies and bees for soul farming porpuses.

Thats pretty much all i had to say about the handsome devil, again oi really apreaciate the aproach of how information has been delivered  and i hope for teh release for some cool boss rushes.

Wendy and Walter also got a lot of promising stuff but because how many changes are being made to them i am waiting for the next hotfix before talking about them.

Thanks for reading and sorry for any typos, its final weeks and i dont have the time or energy to properly check them.

[adminaaassh]

 

Actually, I had raised concerns about Wortox's Soul Jar leaking souls quite some time ago, and I explained the reasoning in a forum post. Recently, the addition of the Pan Flute generating souls has somewhat reduced the inconvenience of collecting souls. However, I still find it unsuitable and believe it doesn’t address the root issue. I still hope for a method to store souls, as this would provide an additional option for long-term gameplay.