Wortox Final Tweaks Megathread

[ApoIIo]

2 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

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.

Halved would also work, since Wortox already loses half sanity from insanity auras of mobs all it'd do would be extending that same perk to magic items.

[Sum0]

On 12/13/2024 at 8:16 PM, Dingle said:

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.

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

beehive yes but im asking for beeboxes.       

[Dingle]

58 minutes ago, Sum0 said:

beehive yes but im asking for beeboxes.       

Oh not sure. Do watering cans do damage? Couldnt you just hammer and rebuild if you really need for beeboxes?

[Sum0]

It is about the general design.     There are already 2 characters that are heavy benefiting from having kille beehive biomes generated in the world.   It is so beneficial that someone have to check via command if there is such a biome generated in that world.

Because if there isn't a killer bee biome guess what     most ppl gonna regen the world until they have it since there is no equal source for souls or amber or whatever in the game.

Not even 25 spider nest LVL 3 right next to each other is an equal alternative. No flingo bee box setup. Nothing comes close, not even when you're putting in the grind and that what sucks most.

I've tested so much making it work without killer beehive biome, but it's just not worth the effort. Especially considering it should be possible to have an somewhat equal source of souls and amber on official servers for example, where worlds usually don't last hundreds of days.

All I'm saying is having the efficiency of your character decided by rng world gen is not a good design IMO. 

Fixed by having a item for example that get placed on the ground near the bee boxes and get ignited with a torch or etc. which forces killerbeees to leave bee boxes for the duration it burns.

 

[Dingle]

12 minutes ago, Sum0 said:

It is about the general design.     There are already 2 characters that are heavy benefiting from having kille beehive biomes generated in the world.   It is so beneficial that someone have to check via command if there is such a biome generated in that world.

Because if there isn't a killer bee biome guess what     most ppl gonna regen the world until they have it since there is no equal source for souls or amber or whatever in the game.

Not even 25 spider nest LVL 3 right next to each other is an equal alternative. No flingo bee box setup. Nothing comes close, not even when you're putting in the grind and that what sucks most.

I've tested so much making it work without killer beehive biome, but it's just not worth the effort. Especially considering it should be possible to have an somewhat equal source of souls and amber on official servers for example, where worlds usually don't last hundreds of days.

All I'm saying is having the efficiency of your character decided by rng world gen is not a good design IMO. 

Fixed by having a item for example that get placed on the ground near the bee boxes and get ignited with a torch or etc. which forces killerbeees to leave bee boxes for the duration it burns.

 

Really a problem with the design of world gen in general.

Did you get a world with no triple mactusk biome? Ok, then your world has 25% of the mactusk amount than it would have had.

No killer bee biome? Welcome to a world with way less honeycomb.

Two deciduous forests? Have fun with that.

I use a mod that just forces triple mactusk and a killer bee biome, for this reason. But its strange to me that I need a mod for this. It should just be default.

[Echsrick]

26 minutes ago, Sum0 said:

It is about the general design.     There are already 2 characters that are heavy benefiting from having kille beehive biomes generated in the world.   It is so beneficial that someone have to check via command if there is such a biome generated in that world.

Because if there isn't a killer bee biome guess what     most ppl gonna regen the world until they have it since there is no equal source for souls or amber or whatever in the game.

Not even 25 spider nest LVL 3 right next to each other is an equal alternative. No flingo bee box setup. Nothing comes close, not even when you're putting in the grind and that what sucks most.

I've tested so much making it work without killer beehive biome, but it's just not worth the effort. Especially considering it should be possible to have an somewhat equal source of souls and amber on official servers for example, where worlds usually don't last hundreds of days.

All I'm saying is having the efficiency of your character decided by rng world gen is not a good design IMO. 

Fixed by having a item for example that get placed on the ground near the bee boxes and get ignited with a torch or etc. which forces killerbeees to leave bee boxes for the duration it burns.

 

i am just killing anything i come across and automatic fish farm by basing next to river is good too like it helps, i not even realy visit the killer bee biome to get more souls

[twitchgabo]

I have absolutely 0 concern if my world doesn’t have a killer bee biome.

If you get the flute perk you can farm at least 6 souls per day (you can get more if you play the flute with birds around)

all seasons but winter u can farm butterflies  near your base for souls and you can always craft boomerangs for easy souls lol.

the only issue with wortox to me is the knabsack being not only a bad item , but the need to spend one point on this skill to get the jar is extremely annoying.

 

[Echsrick]

2 hours ago, twitchgabo said:

I have absolutely 0 concern if my world doesn’t have a killer bee biome.

If you get the flute perk you can farm at least 6 souls per day (you can get more if you play the flute with birds around)

all seasons but winter u can farm butterflies  near your base for souls and you can always craft boomerangs for easy souls lol.

the only issue with wortox to me is the knabsack being not only a bad item , but the need to spend one point on this skill to get the jar is extremely annoying.

 

or if you like me and base at a river so fish spawn near you and place a boat onto the river with the trawlers nets and tin fishin bins you get passive fish income and storage for later uses if in need of souls, its rather effective too

[crushcircuit]

i and several others i've talked to about wortox's skill tree still find soul bastion and nice inclination as a whole to be a bit underwhelming. just so i'm not a broken record here, we've been further discussing that in this thread:

Spoiler

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/162711-nice-inclination-feedback/

 

 

[BalkanCockroach]

Wortox skills are pretty satisfactory for the most part but i hope this doesn't mean they are done with him. Imo the knabsack and affinities still need some tweaks. 

[Y0sH]

Bumping for the Devs return. Happy belated New Year everyone.

[Echsrick]

summary of what i think? sure

knapsack is not good and i think it sould never have been a weapon

lots of filler skills and locks for not so freedom

theres a skill that for what ever reason increases power of other skills.....THAT ARE FROM DIFFEREND BRANCHES....wich just wrong

the reaper still calls wortox a mortal, he sould get unique quotes

unique idle animation depending if nice or naugthy just seem like a cool little thing

panflute skills....eh....fine? well exchept one of them wich realy is not fine at all

something i missed maybe

[Arepantera]

Naughty wortox is super fun, perhaps the most fun I've ever had with any character. I think that all future skilltrees and reworks should match this one in terms of quality

Nice wortox is very underwhelming however. I'm not sure how to fix this. Nice wortox's perks are inclined towards multiplayer play, but his strongest inclination perk, not being a monster anymore, is something that only helps singleplayer play, in case that you want a lot of wood without using a giant to destroy a forest. But that problem get's fixed because being in multiplayer fixes wood problems so the nice inclination as a whole ends up feeling conflictive, weird, janky... One thing that I'd add is allow nice wortox the ability to heal friendly mobs and make a "soul hat", armor equipable only for mobs, it would be the nice counterpart of knapsack.

[Dingle]

A couple things I've been thinking about recently, if we're compiling issues:

I increasingly dislike how the knabsack is forced on us. It's a weird filler point if you never use it, but you need it for Soul Jar and Overwhelming Greed.

This is a leftover from the old start of beta design, but now it's just a punishment point. Wortox already has a lot of filler points and the locks, so losing one really forced filler (if you don't use the item) doesn't seem too loose.

I'm now really liking the idea of having Soul Jar and Greed as a 2 point line, and Knabsack and Covetous as a separate 2 point line.

I think Cloudy Carmine is probably the absolute worst perk in his skill tree right now. Just awful. Some reasons in that thread above.

I also wish they'd make the Neutral tree bigger. Say 4 or 5 perks total, instead of just 3. I started to think this after I posted all those possible ideas for a Cloudy Carmine replacement.

It would help a lot for late game and solo build variety, if the Neutral tree is more fleshed out. I posted some details on this in my Wortox Builds thread, but summary is that you really eventually get pigeonholed into Naughty, because there's not much in Neutral and a lot of Nice becomes much weaker over time. I'd say past mid-game, though definitions of this will differ a lot by person.

I'd link my builds thread, but I plan on making a new one once the next Wortox hotfix is out (if it tweaks build options, anyway).

 

[OMEGASCRUFF]

Since it's been a month, I want to add an update to my thoughts on what needs to be changed, in order of urgency (they're all important, though.)

1. Remove the self-heal nerf on Naughty. Seriously, it's just annoying for solo play. Get rid of it. It does nothing to fix balance. If you want to "fix" Nice (an imaginary problem since Nice builds actually have the luxury to heal their sanity with their Soul farms), it doesn't have anything to do with the inclination. It has to do with the fact that...

2. Soul Bastion is garbage. All it does is improve your Soul efficiency on healing and its speed by a little bit. That's it. These things are completely unnecessary for healing in specific. This skill is not worth taking at all, and it needs a major rework. A suggestion I made in another thread is that the bonus healing is made to be a shield instead of a heal, as it would actively prevent armor loss and could enable tanking in some cases (depending on how caps and timers are handled) but it's just one idea. This skill alone is the reason why Nice builds feel so unsatisfying. (I'd prefer if Soul Bastion II somehow remained optional in a rework, due to how points line up on the skill tree, but it's more important to me that this skill actually does something useful at all.) The fact that this skill requires 3/4 points to take at all just seals the deal that it's a bad investment. On top of everything, with Lifebringer currently providing basically no worthwhile value for solo play, Soul Bastion needs to do a LOT more if we want Nice builds to be even remotely considerable. Both main Nice skills branches cannot be multiplayer-exclusive in functionality. It's just stifling the player's expression this way. This skill is conceptually flawed and I haven't seen anyone say a single good thing about it.

3. Nabsack is still bad, and we all know it. Bug catching won't fix it, it would just make it ever so slightly more tolerable, and that's not how we set good goals. The durability for item grabbing makes it functionally unusable. It needs to be literally like 4x better at grabbing durability, if not entirely infinite, so long as it's a mandatory skill. Like it has been said in a few other threads, I would prefer if...

4. Soul Jar and Overwhelming Greed could be split from Nabsacker and Covetous Collector on the skill tree. (The same can be done for Lifted Spirits I + Capricious Movement and Lifted Spirits I + Reverberation, for symmetry.) Nabsack being an early-game weapon but basically forced to pick in your skill tree is not cool. It does almost nothing if you're unwilling to take Covetous Collector to begin with, so forcing it just feels bad at this point. Separating these skills branches would free up availability for a point to be spent on Neutral skills or Affinity or Capricious Movement, and would make builds feel a lot more complete.

5. Both affinities could use an additional effect that is independent from post-rift gear. I made a suggestion that Lunar provides a little sanity healing and Shadow provides a little damage when Souls are dropped, but this could be anything. It doesn't have to be big, but some other effect that does something pre-rift would be really nice on these skills. Post-rift exclusive effects on alignment seem to be pretty unpopular.

6. Cloudy Carmine needs an additional effect. While it's funny to use, it clearly needs another incentive to be picked. Lower durability cost when using Pan Flutes, or a higher frequency for inspiration, I don't really care. It needs something else. It's already very challenging to find room for this skill in any sort of optimized build, but it's obvious that it needs something more. It's just too expensive to abuse, and some of the most important bosses in this game don't even fall asleep to begin with.

7. Soul Pierce is actually pretty mediocre in practice. While it's great for farming Souls early on, it's useful in two total boss fights, and can pull unwanted aggro on a day-to-day basis. I can't even run my Varg farm with this skill, which stinks, because it's my favorite way to gather Souls in late-game worlds. Soul Decoy is just fine at farming bees without this skill, and even offers a little better control. I'd like to see Covetous Collector's boost to its damage be entirely moved to Soul Pierce II instead, because the loss of build freedom is a huge opportunity cost to this skill, and this change would open it up better. I DID find a very fun niche use case for this with a specific farm, and it obviously makes clearing trash mobs faster, but this skill's condition to trigger just isn't particularly easy to have happen in important fights without going out of your way to collect Butterflies or relocate a bunch of Moleworms into an arena, or dropping Souls Decoy III for Pleasant Pastorale (a pretty bad trade), and nothing will conceptually fix that. Hell, it doesn't even hit soulless bosses. It's nice to have for low-pressure combat, but at the steep cost of 4/5 Insight, I haven't looked back since I've dropped it entirely. The Covetous Collector thing really needs to change, though. The damage bonus shouldn't be on a separate branch of skills, because it effectively turns this skill into an investment of 5 Insight for maximum power, which is unreasonable for how niche it is for things that actually matter. If the problem then becomes that Covetous Collector is too weak, well, that should be part of the Nabsacker rework. It's not Soul Pierce's fault that those two skills are bad, so why should it suffer?

8. ...We need to talk about this. Can we please eventually do something about biomes in worldgen? This has been a problem for a long time, but we now have two characters who are highly dependent on Killer Bee biomes, and the fact that you could end up with only one MacTusk camp is just as obnoxious as ever. It doesn't have to be this update, but now that Killer Bees are nearly mandatory for early- and mid-game progression, things need to change really badly here. I shouldn't need to use fallible mods for this. Can this please be considered in the next content update? Forcing repeated worldgen until we get a usable world is really uncool. If the problem is maintaining diversity across different worlds, then maybe it's time to look into randomly generated setpieces and boons again, but keep actually optional biomes optional. It's been awhile since boons have been updated anyways. Making us suffer during worldgen is not the answer.

If #1-7 are all addressed, I will be extremely happy with the skill tree. And I mean really happy, not just merely satisfied (like those feedback polls love to set the benchmark so low.) All of these things address clear design flaws, and should be tackled if we want a truly great experience with the skill tree implementation. I know there's a lot of mixed opinions on skill trees being a thing in this game entirely, so it's incredibly important that they're done as well as possible to convince more players otherwise, and I know it's significantly more challenging to fit in updates to these after release.

[Picklesaurus]

21 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

1. Remove the self-heal nerf on Naughty. Seriously, it's just annoying for solo play. Get rid of it. It does nothing to fix balance. If you want to "fix" Nice (an imaginary problem since Nice builds actually have the luxury to heal their sanity with their Soul farms), it doesn't have anything to do with the inclination. It has to do with the fact that...

How would you feel if instead of less healing Naughty Wortox would go on the oposite direction of Nice Wortox's perk of not being hated by being hated by all neutral mobs?  Bees, Goats, Bearger, Spelunky, Beefalos (without saddle), Koalefant, Bunny king, Krampus, Treeguards, Saladmanders, Rock lobster, Snurtle, I just find the idea of Naughty Wortox having stolen or done something so bad to them that they never forget and hate him forever really funny and would make for some fun gameplay instead of the less healing he has right now. Nice Wortox being hated by none, Neutral Wortox being hated by some and Naughty Wortox being hated by all is a really cool and unique concept in my opinion.

[Echsrick]

3 minutes ago, Picklesaurus said:

How would you feel if instead of less healing Naughty Wortox would go on the oposite direction of Nice Wortox's perk of not being hated by being hated by all neutral mobs?  Bees, Goats, Bearger, Spelunky, Beefalos (without saddle), Koalefant, Bunny king, Krampus, Treeguards, Saladmanders, Rock lobster, Snurtle, I just find the idea of Naughty Wortox having stolen or done something so bad to them that they never forget and hate him forever really funny and would make for some fun gameplay instead of the less healing he has right now. Nice Wortox being hated by none, Neutral Wortox being hated by some and Naughty Wortox being hated by all is a really cool and unique concept in my opinion.

no, just no, thats just an very bad idea, alsol why would they? most of those are not that intelligence to realize what the conchept of a soul even is

[OMEGASCRUFF]

15 minutes ago, Picklesaurus said:

How would you feel if instead of less healing Naughty Wortox would go on the oposite direction of Nice Wortox's perk of not being hated by being hated by all neutral mobs?  Bees, Goats, Bearger, Spelunky, Beefalos (without saddle), Koalefant, Bunny king, Krampus, Treeguards, Saladmanders, Rock lobster, Snurtle, I just find the idea of Naughty Wortox having stolen or done something so bad to them that they never forget and hate him forever really funny and would make for some fun gameplay instead of the less healing he has right now. Nice Wortox being hated by none, Neutral Wortox being hated by some and Naughty Wortox being hated by all is a really cool and unique concept in my opinion.

I honestly just don't think it's necessary. Naughty's only important upside is the overload grace period, which feels really good, but I'm not convinced it's worth the loss of the ability to use your Soul farm for sanity heals + chip heals during boss fights (especially with allies.) The whole Soul eating thing is really... unimportant.

In specific to your suggestion, though, I don't think it would make sense to extend the aggression to mobs who normally are always passive but have assist AI, such as Saladmanders, Splumonkeys, Rock Lobsters, and Koelefants. I wouldn't consider Snurtles, either, since they're not really aggressive, so much as they just do an item steal that also does a little damage. They're just hungwy. Beefalo would also be a problem due to taming, but at this point, there's literally no compelling reason for Wortox to bother with taming one, so it's whatever. I know all of this sounds kinda bad from the surface, but I actually see a ton of farming potential with auto-aggression from more mobs, especially Bees. Soul Decoy is a really reliable source of safe AoE, and aggressive AI makes farming things way easier. I think most players would see this as a total downside, though, and it would make Wortox uniquely awful at using Bee Boxes.

Just wondering, why do you think Naughty or Nice need anything on top of what already exists when you remove the self-heal nerf from the equation? Is it an issue of balance? Or do you want there to be more flavor? If you want more flavor, then I think the double naughtiness gain thing that people have suggested seems pretty obvious, though I don't know what else I'd do for Nice other than maybe increased mob befriend timers. I don't really think they needed anything for balance. Without the self-heal thing, they felt pretty close to ideal in that department, to me. I think Naughty was overall very slightly worse than Nice without the self-heal nerf, if you're looking at them in a vacuum independent of their associated skills, but they were still close enough that they both felt good to me. I wouldn't mind some additional quirks for flavor, of course, but I think it's important that they don't touch the core gameplay loop very much.

[Picklesaurus]

1 hour ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Just wondering, why do you think Naughty or Nice need anything on top of what already exists when you remove the self-heal nerf from the equation? Is it an issue of balance? Or do you want there to be more flavor?

I don't think it needs and it is also not about balance, I also don't like the less healing thing, its just that if the devs think it needs something other than the less healing I think this would be a cool suggestion/fun, it would make for some fun gameplay and fit the flavour part of this version of him being Naughty and doing bad things to others, if it was about balance I wouldn't make this suggestion since those mobs being hostile towards Naughty Wortox is not that much of a downside as most people would believe and you noticed quickly, it could also just be an expanded version of his original monster tag with some of those neutral mobs also hating him instead of all the ones in that list, bees could be excluded for example - even though I thought people used flingo and fire to get honey from beeboxes. Don't you think it would be fun? It could even give a use for Cloudy Carmen if they made Cloudy Carmen have a soothing effect on mobs, turning mobs that are neutral but would normaly hate non nice Wortox neutral towards him for a bit after they wake up - allowing you to interact with their befriending mechanic if they have or approach beefalos herds that would hate naughty wortox safely so you can get one to tame - instead of just not hostile as it is right now.

[ColdHeaven]

So far i have some good solutions for knabsack and kind affinity

For knabsack just separate it from the soul jar entirely. 

Knabsack should be its own tree, and it should be a neutral tree

Tier 1 unlocks the knabsack,  the knabsack has a maximum damage of 50 depend on filled inventory

Tier 2 knabsack now has a maximum damage of 68 with 100 souls grabbing items with it no longer cost durability. Can also catch butterflies and bees costing 5% durability

Tier 3 now hit 68 damage with just 30 souls.you can now catch frogs,spiders, moleworms,rabbits costing 10% durability

For good affinity he should gain a flat amount of 5 sanity when feeding pigs,bunnies,beefalo and 20 when feeding another player a crockpot dish with a cool down.

 

 

[Soul7k]

11 hours ago, Echsrick said:

theres a skill that for what ever reason increases power of other skills.....THAT ARE FROM DIFFEREND BRANCHES....wich just wrong

panflute skills....eh....fine? well exchept one of them wich realy is not fine at all

I'm with you 100% on these two the damage should be baseline or at the very least tied into the other two branches when the branches that utilize it require you to invest heavily in them already. I get that it was a byproduct of the original design but as of right now it's current implementation makes no sense and is taking the spot of literally anything else that could have been added. Tbh the whole right side is still too interconnected yet disjointed because of it. Meanwhile each branch on the nice side is disjointed and not tied to eachother

The things not attacking you after waking up....could be replaced by anything I'm not really sure what the purpose of it is really. Maybe repairs for pan flutes using souls, or his own pan-flute craft made out of nightmare fuel, souls, reeds/twigs or something.