Wortox Final Tweaks Megathread

[Y0sH]

The Beta has been extended to presumably mid January leaving the Devs a little more time to polish up Wortox's Skilltree (and most of all enjoy their holidays). Compared to the more "vocal" groups of survivor's player bases I made this Megathread in an attempt to create a single place for Wortox players to voice the minor changes/tweaks they'll like to see before release. With the overwhelming amount of posts in the Beta branch it's been difficult to get a consensus of what remaining fixes Wortox needs. Below I will try my best to list the proposed changes from recent forum posts:

1. Knabsack. Most players seem to not like it as ONLY a weapon with increased pickup with a abysmally slow animation. Also changing the pickup animation off of the space bar while it's already linked to a right click on the mouse seems like a small QOL that can be fixed. Giving the Knabsack an option to be used as a bug net to catch critters ie: Bees, Butterflies etc.. seems like a great middle ground (maybe increase durability loss if used as a bug net). 

2. Filler Skills & Locks. While filler skills aren't necessarily new with the addition of Skilltrees, they seem more so painful within Wortox's Skiltree because this can result in you being locked behind one inclination that has a substantial impact to your playthrough. This also hurts build options for those that like to mix and match between the two inclinations and neutral. The main culprits IMO are the Lifebringer 2&3 and Soul Decoy 1&2. Better outlined here: 

Spoiler

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/162261-wortoxs-final-changes-before-release/#comment-1773911

 

TLDR: A longer lasting decoy doesn't add much to combat and will most likely be hit immediately anyway when you teleport for kiting or safety, Lifebringer 2 should be added to 3 for less point usage in the tree.

3. Naughty Self-Healing. The Nice Tree is extremely strong while not starving together (pun intended) having revives, teammate teleporting and hostile mobs being neutral and recruit-able with insane healing. The Naughty side of the tree is more geared towards solo/combat oriented gameplay and feels bad with a lessened self heal amount. Considering with this inclination you're most likely engaged in more combat it makes since to be "greedy" with souls and heal the normal 20hp over the current 15hp in fact I'd argue that it'll be more in character for this inclination to do less TEAM healing than Nice. 

4. Affinities. Wortox's affinities are locked behind specific gear/weapons making them only useful for endgame only (besides the standard damage/defense per alignment) . I think to give players a better option pre-rifts would be to bring back the planar damage option added to the Knabsack to better bridge the gap between pre and post. Another idea is something @Koomin posted here: 

Spoiler

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/162318-specific-rift-gear-alignment-skills/

 

Outliers: Neutral & Beefalo Teleporting. The Neutral part of the tree still seems underwhelming and hard to spec into with how impactful the Naughty and Nice skills are. I think the general consensus of flute focus is fine but seems to need "more", however it's hard to say what that "more" is. The teleporting while on a beefalo has been mentioned a few times most recently from @Dingle's post here: 

Spoiler

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/161931-wortox-feedback-after-playing-12-6-build/#comment-1769781

 

I think the option to telepoof with a beefalo but not be able to teleport a with Wortox while mounting one seems odd. Maybe allow teleportation with a beef without giving a Soul Echo and when teleporting with a beef from map increase souls cost if the player just absolutely cant get off the beef to tp?

Sorry if I missed any tweaks wanted from Wortox players, please add them below!!

Thanks for the very hard work and transparency with this beta Klei and I hope you guys have an enjoyable holiday break!! 

[Dingle]

One missing one off top of head:

It would be nice if the echo timer had some other visual indicator than staring at the souls in your inventory.

Maybe something like your echo speed trail sputtering, smoking more, or even just ending a couple seconds before the actual echo timer runs out.

[Koomin]

Thanks for gathering it all here.  This one being mentioned in the skill tweaks would be helpful:

 

[Y0sH]

6 minutes ago, Dingle said:

One missing one off top of head:

It would be nice if the echo timer had some other visual indicator than staring at the souls in your inventory.

Maybe something like your echo speed trail sputtering, smoking more, or even just ending a couple seconds before the actual echo timer runs out.

Yea I often miss the echo timer indicator while fighting and find myself taking unexpected hit or using more souls than I intended.

[ApoIIo]

1 hour ago, Y0sH said:

2. Filler Skills & Locks. While filler skills aren't necessarily new with the addition of Skilltrees, they seem more so painful within Wortox's Skiltree because this can result in you being locked behind one inclination that has a substantial impact to your playthrough. This also hurts build options for those that like to mix and match between the two inclinations and neutral. The main culprits IMO are the Lifebringer 2&3 and Soul Decoy 1&2. Better outlined here: 

  Hide contents

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/162261-wortoxs-final-changes-before-release/#comment-1773911

 

 

 

I understand what they were going for with the lock skills, but neutral Wortox could definitely use more build freedom.

1 hour ago, Y0sH said:

3. Naughty Self-Healing. The Nice Tree is extremely strong while not starving together (pun intended) having revives, teammate teleporting and hostile mobs being neutral and recruit-able with insane healing. The Naughty side of the tree is more geared towards solo/combat oriented gameplay and feels bad with a lessened self heal amount. Considering with this inclination you're most likely engaged in more combat it makes since to be "greedy" with souls and heal the normal 20hp over the current 15hp in fact I'd argue that it'll be more in character for this inclination to do less TEAM healing than Nice. 

Personally I think an opposite to Nice's improved heals is fine, what they could do to compensate (if one finds compensation necessary) instead might be making naughty appeal to more risk-taking players and rewarding being high hp(>80%?) despite having weakened heals? Since naughty is agreed to be the combat Wortox, his souls/decoys or damage multiplier(1.1x?) could get a little bump when he's healthy.

1 hour ago, Y0sH said:

4. Affinities. Wortox's affinities are locked behind specific gear/weapons making them only useful for endgame only (besides the standard damage/defense per alignment) . I think to give players a better option pre-rifts would be to bring back the planar damage option added to the Knabsack to better bridge the gap between pre and post. Another idea is something @Koomin posted here: 

  Reveal hidden contents

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/162318-specific-rift-gear-alignment-skills/

 

I really like the Shadow affinity thematically, reaper Wortox just feels right and it is a great reason to move on from Knabsack my detested as his personal weapon of choice. Instead of resurrecting the usage of that terrible thing which I hate very much and won't stop talking about how much I hate it, I wouldn't mind having two tiers per affinity (with the first of each being some sort of earlygame-usable effect and the second one being rift gear-oriented) so Wortox can retain a sense of post-rift progression while getting more than a 10% modifier from affinity early on. Also +5 planar damage is really not bridging any gap between pre- and post-rift, let's be real. So even if you wanted to attempt that, you'd have to take a different approach.

Furthermore, since they announced in the last hotfix that they consider relieving some of the skill tree's tightness/preconditions, this would afford at least +1 skill points to make such an adjustment fit right in.

1 hour ago, Y0sH said:

Outliers: Neutral & Beefalo Teleporting. The Neutral part of the tree still seems underwhelming and hard to spec into with how impactful the Naughty and Nice skills are. I think the general consensus of flute focus is fine but seems to need "more", however it's hard to say what that "more" is. The teleporting while on a beefalo has been mentioned a few times most recently from @Dingle's post here: 

  Reveal hidden contents

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/161931-wortox-feedback-after-playing-12-6-build/#comment-1769781

 

I think the option to telepoof with a beefalo but not be able to teleport a with Wortox while mounting one seems odd. Maybe allow teleportation with a beef without giving a Soul Echo and when teleporting with a beef from map increase souls cost if the player just absolutely cant get off the beef to tp?

Neutral's current row is honestly super nice, I really like my periodic soul delivery or the ability to burn panflutes into souls in a pinch, as well as using the 5-second window to give AG and bishops brain aneurysms from a distance. (Yes I know you can torch bishops but this is far less work and torching doesn't work on sleepable bosses)

That said I would love to fit a second row of non-panflute related skills under it, neutral could honestly be called "panflute" tree instead so having things besides the panflute in the neutral column would simply feel more normal. I don't mind not being able to teleport on a beefalo in solo but given how annoying it has proven to be in multiplayer with other players keeping my beefalo hostage by keeping them loaded I would love the ability to teleport on beefalo. Given we can teleport other mortals with souls already, I don't see why not.

Addendum: Instead of lunar affinity reusing the "planar defense mob received physical damage" effect, how about it capitalizes on Wortox's newfound illusionist/decoy-making niche and display two illusory Wortox's next to him(copying all his movement 1:1) while active?

[Steorra]

 

1. There are many ppls who dislike the knapsack is because of the duration losing when collecting massive items. I don't think it's a good idea to increase the duration losing for capturing butterflies if there's a chance to use the knapsack as a bug net.

 

2. That's the original intention of the "you have to choose" part. There was some criticism quoted that "Wendy players want everything", but if to improve or to merge some filler skills of Wortox for easier unlock upper skills, it would be a true "almost everything I could achieve" situation for Wortox as I view.

 

3. I'm not sure what issue lies here. It seems more like a necessary sacrifice if you want to be Naughty. And you still have an option of "trying to avoid Naughty result for your build". At least the Nice and Naughty result are not necessary part for a particular skill tree build aren't they?

 

4. I agree with this point because I do think knapsack should be more useful and improved more. Though there may have an argue about balance if knapsack could be more effective in mid/end game combat.

But for other side, lock the affinities by particular items is not cool. It would results a potential issue when we have more lunar/shadow items in future. I do hope these two locking mechanics could be rework or improve in a more freedom way

 

[Echsrick]

thank you! if i may add something from my thread of some things of what i said before, its mostly about

knapsack how it sould have bugnet abbilitys as so many voiced

the locks being very tight and so suggested that for more player skill tree freedom that the locks sould need only 3 from a side to unlock and/or that neutral skills can alsol work towards locks for freedom in building your skill tree

and some visual kind of things, that being the shadow reaper having unique lines for wortox so he will not call wortox a mortal anymore and new nice/naughty idle animations where i tried makin art of it to better represent what exactly i mean with it


 

 

[Dingle]

16 minutes ago, Steorra said:

 

1. There are many ppls who dislike the knapsack is because of the duration losing when collecting massive items. I don't think it's a good idea to increase the duration losing for capturing butterflies if there's a chance to use the knapsack as a bug net.

 

2. That's the original intention of the "you have to choose" part. There was some criticism quoted that "Wendy players want everything", but if to improve or to merge some filler skills of Wortox for easier unlock upper skills, it would be a true "almost everything I could achieve" situation for Wortox as I view.

 

3. I'm not sure what issue lies here. It seems more like a necessary sacrifice if you want to be Naughty. And you still have an option of "trying to avoid Naughty result for your build". At least the Nice and Naughty result are not necessary part for a particular skill tree build aren't they?

 

4. I agree with this point because I do think knapsack should be more useful and improved more. Though there may have an argue about balance if knapsack could be more effective in mid/end game combat.

But for other side, lock the affinities by particular items is not cool. It would results a potential issue when we have more lunar/shadow items in future. I do hope these two locking mechanics could be rework or improve in a more freedom way

 

2 is kinda hypocritical given all the merging of skills Wendy got in last hotfix, isn't it?

[HeatAndRun]

I wanna add some QoL stuff of mine here :

Special effect for Wortox's soul decoy to make its visual different with the real player. Similar to Wagstaff's transmission effect.

Add visual effect to other players when playing as Wortox, to let them guess other players' health. For example some red cloud floats around the players with HP lower than their max health.

Moonlens QoL : Moonlens should reveal the holder on the map, like the celestial orb does. This change will let other players know when to squeeze Wortox's twintailed hearts by viewing the map, when the Wortox player holds Moonlens in their inventory.

Area indicator for Wortox's AoE attacks - Shadow Reaper AoE & Soul Decoy AoE. Like how Walter's thulecite skills shows the exact AoE radius.

[Steorra]

5 minutes ago, Dingle said:

2 is kinda hypocritical given all the merging of skills Wendy got in last hotfix, isn't it?

You should not give accusation about a point which is just happened after the original "Wendy current skill is better enough".

And this response is for Wortox. Wendy skilltree still need to choose for particular build even after merging. I would agree that if Wortox still have to choose their upper skills after some merging as same. 

But I won't agree to make Wortox become more easier to have more upper skills than current stage - which already break the 2 affinity line in day 15. It would be imbalance as someone already gave same worries about Wendy before.

Wortox with current skill tree is strong as well, just like that how many of you think about previous Wendy. 

Even I still agree that knapsack and two Wortox affinities line still need improve. It seems you just ignored this part for a simply personal controversy lol.

[Dingle]

3 minutes ago, Steorra said:

You should not give accusation about a point which is just happened after the original "Wendy current skill is better enough".

And this response is for Wortox. Wendy skilltree still need to choose for particular build even after merging. I would agree that if Wortox still have to choose their upper skills after some merging as same. 

But I won't agree to make Wortox become more easier to have more upper skills than current stage - which already break the 2 affinity line in day 15. It would be imbalance as someone already gave same worries about Wendy before.

Wortox with current skill tree is strong as well, just like that how many of you think about previous Wendy. 

Even I still agree that knapsack and two Wortox affinities line still need improve. It seems you just ignored this part for a simply personal controversy lol.

I believe Wortox builds are a lot tighter than Wendys builds, especially now. I'll check to make sure soon, I plan on switching to her for awhile soon for long playthroughs like I did for Wortox.

I saw the knabsack stuff, just didn't comment. I usually just like stuff like that.

I don't take anything you say personally, if that's what you mean. I occasionally call you out, but I don't go out of my way to.

[Y0sH]

9 minutes ago, Steorra said:

But I won't agree to make Wortox become more easier to have more upper skills than current stage - which already break the 2 affinity line in day 15. It would be imbalance as someone already gave same worries about Wendy before.

The "More upper skills" I referred to in this post were skills that players in said inclination was going to spec into anyway regardless of the point cost.

If a player chooses the Nice inclination they're almost certainly going to pick the revive perks. Players that choose Naughty will most likely pick the Decoy perks. Doing so will LOCK you into a inclination which is why the Devs specifically pointed out that they're looking into more build options in today's update. I don't know how this has anything to do with Wendy as she doesn't have an overall set of perks forced upon her based on a set of skills she chooses. Please keep the Wendy whining and propaganda out of this thread.

27 minutes ago, Echsrick said:

thank you! if i may add something from my thread of some things of what i said before, its mostly about

knapsack how it sould have bugnet abbilitys as so many voiced

the locks being very tight and so suggested that for more player skill tree freedom that the locks sould need only 3 from a side to unlock and/or that neutral skills can alsol work towards locks for freedom in building your skill tree

and some visual kind of things, that being the shadow reaper having unique lines for wortox so he will not call wortox a mortal anymore and new nice/naughty idle animations where i tried makin art of it to better represent what exactly i mean with it


 

 

I'm almost sure they listened to the animations posts you made and I can't wait to see what they come up with!!

21 minutes ago, HeatAndRun said:

I wanna add some QoL stuff of mine here :

Special effect for Wortox's soul decoy to make its visual different with the real player. Similar to Wagstaff's transmission effect.

Add visual effect to other players when playing as Wortox, to let them guess other players' health. For example some red cloud floats around the players with HP lower than their max health.

Moonlens QoL : Moonlens should reveal the holder on the map, like the celestial orb does. This change will let other players know when to squeeze Wortox's twintailed hearts by viewing the map, when the Wortox player holds Moonlens in their inventory.

Area indicator for Wortox's AoE attacks - Shadow Reaper AoE & Soul Decoy AoE. Like how Walter's thulecite skills shows the exact AoE radius.

All great suggestions especially Wortox being able to see or sense player's not a full health. Hopefully something like this can come with varying degrees of cloud color. Like red when very low yellow ish when hurt and green/ no cloud at all when full health.

[Steorra]

5 minutes ago, Y0sH said:

The "More upper skills" I referred to in this post were skills that players in said inclination was going to spec into anyway regardless of the point cost.

If a player chooses the Nice inclination they're almost certainly going to pick the revive perks. Players that choose Naughty will most likely pick the Decoy perks. Doing so will LOCK you into a inclination which is why the Devs specifically pointed out that they're looking into more build options in today's update. I don't know how this has anything to do with Wendy as she doesn't have an overall set of perks forced upon her based on a set of skills she chooses. Please keep the Wendy whining and propaganda out of this thread.

I personally agree that other nice skills need more improvement for more competitiveness. But I thought current Naughty tree is good enough?

[Y0sH]

8 minutes ago, Steorra said:

I personally agree that other nice skills need more improvement for more competitiveness. But I thought current Naughty tree is good enough?

His entire Skilltree currently is "good enough" honestly but small tweaks can better enhance his builds without necessarily making an already strong character stronger. The 15hp to 20hp self healing at the cost of lowered or even halved team heals is a good trade and closely matches The Nice and Naughty theme. The idea behind Nice inclination being Giving and abundance of healing for everyone then Naughty being selfish and greedy with average healing for yourself and lower for everyone else. However, objectively most of us Wortox players are satisfied with his skilltree it's just very black or white when making builds with it and we're trying to get to a more "grey" possibility of build making if that makes sense. 

[OMEGASCRUFF]

5 hours ago, Dingle said:

One missing one off top of head:

It would be nice if the echo timer had some other visual indicator than staring at the souls in your inventory.

Maybe something like your echo speed trail sputtering, smoking more, or even just ending a couple seconds before the actual echo timer runs out.

Hmm, I'm not sure which skill triggers this and I honestly haven't bothered to test it, but I'm pretty sure that red glowy soul effect that shows up around your player does this. This might be from an affinity or something else, I'm not really sure. I just know it appears sometimes and stare at my inventory like a loser anyways. I'd check right now if I could, and I could easily be wrong, but it's a different visual from pre-overloading on Naughty. But I'd prefer seeing this animation I'm remembering depict any echo (it might do this already?) and affinities get something special for visuals. It feels so unsatisfying to use their abilities, which might be a pretty large contributor to their lack of uproarious applause from the community.

 

As for missing popular tweaks I've seen that OP hasn't specifically mentioned... hmm.

I've seen a lot about adjusting Nice inclination, and as far as I can tell that was the entire thought behind the heal nerf on Naughty but... It didn't fix anything. I made an entire thread about this and I'd rather not get too deep into it for a second time. But it's been brought up quite a lot and hasn't been addressed directly by the last patch. I provided a few specific suggestions to replace this choice across many threads, even a few before this update, as have others, but we didn't actually fix the problem in the end and now mostly everyone seems unsatisfied with the results.

I see Soul Bastion is specifically mentioned as one of the weakest skills on the tree, and the way its built in its prereqs is antithetical to mixing with Soul Pierce, making it even harder to justify combining opposite sides of the skill tree here. In general, I think it would be good if it offered something a little more useful to solo play, especially if you don't have to sacrifice Soul Pierce in exchange due to the faster Soul movement (though I've been pretty happy lately with Soul Decoy instead and dropping Pierce entirely, probably in the minority though.) The main problem is that 2 out of 3 branches of Nice skills do little or nothing for solo players, and there's 3/situationally 4 branches that already demand full investment to serve their purpose. I wish I could think of another use for Twin-tailed Hearts to make them do something meaningful in solo play, but I just can't think of anything that makes sense for them. So, really, I think Soul Bastion or its prereqs need a better reason to be taken in favor of the more competitive skills in Naughty.

Uh... There's been mixed reviews this whole time on affinities. I don't mind that they're attached to gear, especially since Lunar offers flexibility that can make it worthwhile, and the reaper is thematic, but it would be nice if they were a little more impactful and universally useful, and I get why people don't like being married to a specific piece of equipment. I think a lot of people still skip them, but I'm not really sure without a better sample size. There's been all sorts of various feedback throughout the beta though regarding them, and they don't provide any additional reason to take them prior to rifts other than the innate affinity perks, so I think there's a bit of opportunity left on the table here.

Lastly, character specific controller woes. Look, I recommend against controller usage for this game whenever possible for PC users, but we have other systems that this game supports and we should do as much as we can to improve the experience. I don't know enough about the DST controller experience to weigh in myself, but it sounds like a really important pain point for Wortox players in specific, though I'm sure a more universal solution could prove helpful to all sorts of players. I just can't really provide much feedback about this though, but controller DST seems like.... suffering. Especially with my OCD over inventory management.

As far as recurring subjects go, I think that's pretty much it. There's been a few good suggestions that didn't get a lot of traction, of course, so I'd really encourage the dev team to spend some time reviewing some threads that may have gotten lost in all the hubbub.

 

Otherwise, I just want to add to your point about the Neutral skills. A big problem is that nobody has talked about them enough recently. My opinions are half-baked, but I'd rather share them than say nothing. They are still not particularly compelling on their own and are really just an insight dump before an affinity demands a point from it later in the game. I feel like they're still just not enough at the moment to warrant holding onto, and they don't do anything to help you change your affinity to Neutral either, though I'm not sure that's even desirable at all. I've made room for Pleasant Pastorale recently and they're not really THAT bad, but they're definitely disposable. Cloudy Carmine would be more worthwhile if there were any real flexibility in the skill tree, but it I've only been able to make use of it in one skill setup at all. It's... all right. I just don't think it makes a real difference, but maybe I'm overlooking an especially valuable use case. Probably good against Spulmonkey hoards and Moslings and such, or the completed Ancient Pseudoscience set piece, things like that. I really haven't tested it enough during natural gameplay to say with certainty, and I still don't feel like it's worth 10% of my Pan Flute until super later on when that matters less, but the skills matter less themselves by that point too. Impromptu Flautist doesn't really cover Pan Flute usage on its own. I would have preferred reduced durability loss on Pan Flutes be tucked into one of these skills. But again, not really sure about specifically Cloudy Carmine. It might have more potential than I'm giving it credit, but I gotta let my opinions on it cook in the oven a bit more and do some better play testing on it.

[Sum0]

 

My humble thoughts after playing (beta) wortox for about 160h.

I focused on nasty and neutral builds.

For nasty builds, I believe the following changes would improve the characters long- and short-term experience.

 

First of all, the Shadow Reaper should be more attractive to go for since it is locked behind so many hours of gameplay.  It should be more exclusive for him with no downsides.

Currently it was very disappointing for me getting the Reaper.    not so much when I did boss rushes. but very much when I played it more casually 

Let Wortox refill reaper durability with souls. I'm thinking of Wanda's weapon, for example.

Remove sanity drain from Reaper when Wortox has the nasty inclination active. Having downsides on a weapon where you spent an ability point on just feels bad.

Remove sanity drain from darkness when Wortox has the nasty inclination active. or let him gain like 1.5 sanity per mob that dies close to him instead. He even mentions his love for soul feasts. vice versa, give Wortox sanity gain when near friendly mobs while he has the nice inclination active. Maybe that's already the case; I'm not sure.

It doesn't make sense that he is going insane from a little darkness while being nasty. I mean, he didn't go insane when he was hanging out with Krampus back then, so it doesn't feel right, in my opinion.

 

Beyond that, I totally agree with the currently discussed Nabsack changes. Adding the plana dmg back via pure horror or something similar seems to be the right way.

Additionally, having the option to pick up things with it should be bound to a different key instead, as mentioned already by other users. 

Don't let Nabsack lose durability when it picks up single stacked items. only if it's actually collecting more than one entity. 

Bugnet feature would be great.

 

For neutral builds, I also have some thoughts.

 

Having the soul echo cooldown shown next to the mouse cursor via a little diminishing icon would be very intuitive.

Created souls from the pan flute should always spawn on set points instead of randomly around the player. So the combo with releasing butterfly stacks and killing them with the incoming souls from the pan flute for soul pierce jumping would be more consistent.

[ApoIIo]

10 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Otherwise, I just want to add to your point about the Neutral skills. A big problem is that nobody has talked about them enough recently. My opinions are half-baked, but I'd rather share them than say nothing. They are still not particularly compelling on their own and are really just an insight dump before an affinity demands a point from it later in the game. I feel like they're still just not enough at the moment to warrant holding onto, and they don't do anything to help you change your affinity to Neutral either, though I'm not sure that's even desirable at all. I've made room for Pleasant Pastorale recently and they're not really THAT bad, but they're definitely disposable. Cloudy Carmine would be more worthwhile if there were any real flexibility in the skill tree, but it I've only been able to make use of it in one skill setup at all. It's... all right. I just don't think it makes a real difference, but maybe I'm overlooking an especially valuable use case. Probably good against Spulmonkey hoards and Moslings and such, or the completed Ancient Pseudoscience set piece, things like that. I really haven't tested it enough during natural gameplay to say with certainty, and I still don't feel like it's worth 10% of my Pan Flute until super later on when that matters less, but the skills matter less themselves by that point too. Impromptu Flautist doesn't really cover Pan Flute usage on its own. I would have preferred reduced durability loss on Pan Flutes be tucked into one of these skills. But again, not really sure about specifically Cloudy Carmine. It might have more potential than I'm giving it credit, but I gotta let my opinions on it cook in the oven a bit more and do some better play testing on it.

It is pretty funny just holding f vs ancient guardian and killing him effortlessly with 18 panflute casts. Is that worth it? Absolutely not, two decon staff uses for one of the easiest bosses ain't it. But it's funny. 
I really appreciate the free occasional 6 souls with pastorale and the free random use. Kept me going for a while longer a lot of times.

[Sum0]

2 hours ago, Sum0 said:

 

My humble thoughts after playing (beta) wortox for about 160h.

I focused on nasty and neutral builds.

For nasty builds, I believe the following changes would improve the characters long- and short-term experience.

 

First of all, the Shadow Reaper should be more attractive to go for since it is locked behind so many hours of gameplay.  It should be more exclusive for him with no downsides.

Currently it was very disappointing for me getting the Reaper.    not so much when I did boss rushes. but very much when I played it more casually 

Let Wortox refill reaper durability with souls. I'm thinking of Wanda's weapon, for example.

Remove sanity drain from Reaper when Wortox has the nasty inclination active. Having downsides on a weapon where you spent an ability point on just feels bad.

Remove sanity drain from darkness when Wortox has the nasty inclination active. or let him gain like 1.5 sanity per mob that dies close to him instead. He even mentions his love for soul feasts. vice versa, give Wortox sanity gain when near friendly mobs while he has the nice inclination active. Maybe that's already the case; I'm not sure.

It doesn't make sense that he is going insane from a little darkness while being nasty. I mean, he didn't go insane when he was hanging out with Krampus back then, so it doesn't feel right, in my opinion.

 

Beyond that, I totally agree with the currently discussed Nabsack changes. Adding the plana dmg back via pure horror or something similar seems to be the right way.

Additionally, having the option to pick up things with it should be bound to a different key instead, as mentioned already by other users. 

Don't let Nabsack lose durability when it picks up single stacked items. only if it's actually collecting more than one entity. 

Bugnet feature would be great.

 

For neutral builds, I also have some thoughts.

 

Having the soul echo cooldown shown next to the mouse cursor via a little diminishing icon would be very intuitive.

Created souls from the pan flute should always spawn on set points instead of randomly around the player. So the combo with releasing butterfly stacks and killing them with the incoming souls from the pan flute for soul pierce jumping would be more consistent.

and please give a option to repair beeboxes or to lure bees out without damaging the beebox.    current state is to always having to base near wasp hives if there is no wasp hive biome its like the character is 50 percent nerved in comparrison to if there was a wasp hive biome.

[Dingle]

12 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Hmm, I'm not sure which skill triggers this and I honestly haven't bothered to test it, but I'm pretty sure that red glowy soul effect that shows up around your player does this. This might be from an affinity or something else, I'm not really sure. I just know it appears sometimes and stare at my inventory like a loser anyways. I'd check right now if I could, and I could easily be wrong, but it's a different visual from pre-overloading on Naughty. But I'd prefer seeing this animation I'm remembering depict any echo (it might do this already?) and affinities get something special for visuals. It feels so unsatisfying to use their abilities, which might be a pretty large contributor to their lack of uproarious applause from the community.

 

As for missing popular tweaks I've seen that OP hasn't specifically mentioned... hmm.

I've seen a lot about adjusting Nice inclination, and as far as I can tell that was the entire thought behind the heal nerf on Naughty but... It didn't fix anything. I made an entire thread about this and I'd rather not get too deep into it for a second time. But it's been brought up quite a lot and hasn't been addressed directly by the last patch. I provided a few specific suggestions to replace this choice across many threads, even a few before this update, as have others, but we didn't actually fix the problem in the end and now mostly everyone seems unsatisfied with the results.

I see Soul Bastion is specifically mentioned as one of the weakest skills on the tree, and the way its built in its prereqs is antithetical to mixing with Soul Pierce, making it even harder to justify combining opposite sides of the skill tree here. In general, I think it would be good if it offered something a little more useful to solo play, especially if you don't have to sacrifice Soul Pierce in exchange due to the faster Soul movement (though I've been pretty happy lately with Soul Decoy instead and dropping Pierce entirely, probably in the minority though.) The main problem is that 2 out of 3 branches of Nice skills do little or nothing for solo players, and there's 3/situationally 4 branches that already demand full investment to serve their purpose. I wish I could think of another use for Twin-tailed Hearts to make them do something meaningful in solo play, but I just can't think of anything that makes sense for them. So, really, I think Soul Bastion or its prereqs need a better reason to be taken in favor of the more competitive skills in Naughty.

Uh... There's been mixed reviews this whole time on affinities. I don't mind that they're attached to gear, especially since Lunar offers flexibility that can make it worthwhile, and the reaper is thematic, but it would be nice if they were a little more impactful and universally useful, and I get why people don't like being married to a specific piece of equipment. I think a lot of people still skip them, but I'm not really sure without a better sample size. There's been all sorts of various feedback throughout the beta though regarding them, and they don't provide any additional reason to take them prior to rifts other than the innate affinity perks, so I think there's a bit of opportunity left on the table here.

Lastly, character specific controller woes. Look, I recommend against controller usage for this game whenever possible for PC users, but we have other systems that this game supports and we should do as much as we can to improve the experience. I don't know enough about the DST controller experience to weigh in myself, but it sounds like a really important pain point for Wortox players in specific, though I'm sure a more universal solution could prove helpful to all sorts of players. I just can't really provide much feedback about this though, but controller DST seems like.... suffering. Especially with my OCD over inventory management.

As far as recurring subjects go, I think that's pretty much it. There's been a few good suggestions that didn't get a lot of traction, of course, so I'd really encourage the dev team to spend some time reviewing some threads that may have gotten lost in all the hubbub.

 

Otherwise, I just want to add to your point about the Neutral skills. A big problem is that nobody has talked about them enough recently. My opinions are half-baked, but I'd rather share them than say nothing. They are still not particularly compelling on their own and are really just an insight dump before an affinity demands a point from it later in the game. I feel like they're still just not enough at the moment to warrant holding onto, and they don't do anything to help you change your affinity to Neutral either, though I'm not sure that's even desirable at all. I've made room for Pleasant Pastorale recently and they're not really THAT bad, but they're definitely disposable. Cloudy Carmine would be more worthwhile if there were any real flexibility in the skill tree, but it I've only been able to make use of it in one skill setup at all. It's... all right. I just don't think it makes a real difference, but maybe I'm overlooking an especially valuable use case. Probably good against Spulmonkey hoards and Moslings and such, or the completed Ancient Pseudoscience set piece, things like that. I really haven't tested it enough during natural gameplay to say with certainty, and I still don't feel like it's worth 10% of my Pan Flute until super later on when that matters less, but the skills matter less themselves by that point too. Impromptu Flautist doesn't really cover Pan Flute usage on its own. I would have preferred reduced durability loss on Pan Flutes be tucked into one of these skills. But again, not really sure about specifically Cloudy Carmine. It might have more potential than I'm giving it credit, but I gotta let my opinions on it cook in the oven a bit more and do some better play testing on it.

I've been using Pleasant Pastorale in my last playthrough (talked about it in my thread) and current playthrough (haven't posted it yet). I have two thoughts on it:

In a normal game, it's probably not worth it after a certain point. It just needs a little boost of some sort. Or Impromptu does, which would boost Pleasant. It's possibly worth it very early game, before you get a jar. I also kind of liked it when doing ocean stuff for Pearl. I still feel ambivalent about it, even though it's competing with weak options at that point, in our limited builds.

For speedrunning, it has a great use. You can blow through your panflute for emergency souls, fast. Its a trickle of souls over time with Impromptu, and then you could blow it multiple times for a bigger soul infusion.

Didn't bother with cloudy when I heard it worked for 5 seconds.

27 minutes ago, Sum0 said:

and please give a option to repair beeboxes or to lure bees out without damaging the beebox.    current state is to always having to base near wasp hives if there is no wasp hive biome its like the character is 50 percent nerved in comparrison to if there was a wasp hive biome.

You can with healing salve, spider glands, honey poultice, etc. Ancient Wortox secret.

[Mike23Ua]

I’ll add in my suggestions here but I’ll try to keep it a short TL:DR-

Separate Naughty & Nice variations even further: If “Nice” Wortox can befriend mobs that are normally hostile to him then his downside should be occasionally having Krampii spawn to try to kick him around for denouncing his evil heritage. Provide really good incentives to both branches (such as what a knabsacker can do and it’s physical appearance )

Allow the Gnabsacker to have Bugnet AND Grass Trap creature catching properties (because in his animated short we see these magic bags snagging up everything?!) 

Allow Teleportation while on a Beefalo for “Mounted Combat Purposes” maybe make  him unable to put heavy objects on a Beefalo so that he has to use his unique teleport to carry heavy items?

And yeah that’s pretty much all I got.

[Y0sH]

4 hours ago, Sum0 said:

Currently it was very disappointing for me getting the Reaper.    not so much when I did boss rushes. but very much when I played it more casually 

Let Wortox refill reaper durability with souls. I'm thinking of Wanda's weapon, for example.

Remove sanity drain from Reaper when Wortox has the nasty inclination active. Having downsides on a weapon where you spent an ability point on just feels bad.

Remove sanity drain from darkness when Wortox has the nasty inclination active. or let him gain like 1.5 sanity per mob that dies close to him instead. He even mentions his love for soul feasts. vice versa, give Wortox sanity gain when near friendly mobs while he has the nice inclination active. Maybe that's already the case; I'm not sure.

It doesn't make sense that he is going insane from a little darkness while being nasty. I mean, he didn't go insane when he was hanging out with Krampus back then, so it doesn't feel right, in my opinion.

The reaper not having a sanity drain on the capstone weapon for one of his affinities does make ALOT of sense and I haven't really noticed because while playing as Wortox before the skilltree I was very used to being insane most of the time. It almost feels like an oversight to have sanity drain from the Scythe. Repairing it with souls also is a nice idea as well. 

[Echsrick]

20 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

Separate Naughty & Nice variations even further: If “Nice” Wortox can befriend mobs that are normally hostile to him then his downside should be occasionally having Krampii spawn to try to kick him around for denouncing his evil heritage.

this could get annoying, so there sould be a warning of sorts or simply he gets douple the krampus points from doin killing things

[Y0sH]

Ok I'm back from confirming the sanity drain that must've slipped my mind is actually a thing lol. It feels bad that a weapon that my Affinity skill is dedicated to drains my sanity and this might need to be looked at considering that there is no downside to the lunar side. 

[ApoIIo]

1 hour ago, Y0sH said:

The reaper not having a sanity drain on the capstone weapon for one of his affinities does make ALOT of sense and I haven't really noticed because while playing as Wortox before the skilltree I was very used to being insane most of the time. It almost feels like an oversight to have sanity drain from the Scythe. Repairing it with souls also is a nice idea as well. 

What about the "pre-rift" affinity before the reaper was negating sanity drain from magic items? I don't imagine it's too hard on a being made of magic.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

1 hour ago, Y0sH said:

Ok I'm back from confirming the sanity drain that must've slipped my mind is actually a thing lol. It feels bad that a weapon that my Affinity skill is dedicated to drains my sanity and this might need to be looked at considering that there is no downside to the lunar side. 

Ehh. I get why it's a little weird, but the drain on it is so low to begin with, I'm not even sure it's really worth being offended by it. It's 3.3/min if I remember correctly and I think a Dark Sword is 20/min comparatively, so... I used to run Void gear on Wortox pretty much full-time for any combat ever, and the sanity drain never affected my gameplay a single bit. I suppose I'd prefer it be removed for thematic reasons too, but I wouldn't make a fuss about it either with numbers this low. But I think it would make sense to tie it to the alignment, not the inclination, as nothing's stopping you from choosing Lunar + Naughty. They don't have any inherent conflicts.

...Soul repair for the scythe is kinda spicy, though, but they don't seem willing to give that to the even the Nabsack, so it seems a little optimistic. But it's rad.

 

27 minutes ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

What about the "pre-rift" affinity before the reaper was negating sanity drain from magic items? I don't imagine it's too hard on a being made of magic.

This seems kinda unlikely as it stands, what with the current purpose of the Nabsacker and all as a Dark Sword alternative. But, boy, would this be a great character to make use of Night Armor and Dreadstone gear without the drain. To be honest, I think this might be a little bit too powerful, even if it makes thematic sense. A partial reduction as a compromise might be a better approach? I'm not really sure, but it would definitely change my preferred equipment by quite a lot, and I don't know how a bonus to Lunar would compete with this. I'll think about it a bit, though, for now.