[Game Update] - 646982

[ApoIIo]

3 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

It does matter as the best pre-rift content crusher with consistent 110 DPS and viable synergies with CC crown, bone armor and void robe which outperforms the scythe in majority of situations 

Against what pre-rift bosses did you test and compare the two? 110 dps also sounds stupidly low. A fresh ham bat with no celestial crown and x1 damage multiplier has more dps than that. I'm not referring to using nice souls to fuel crown when I say this: What are you doing?

 

5 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

I explained that already and why I shouldn't be able to pick neutral?

I don't want to lose classic wortox stats + thematically people aren't just bad or good, but can be much more complex like Wortox himself

and I don't want my neutral gaming gone because people say so lol

Fair enough I guess? By design neutral was the only one never rewarded for leaning in any direction but if it's just the quotes you like then that's understandable. I love the changes though and I'd like them to stay. I enjoy my earlygame nice build.

10 minutes ago, Jppacs said:

Neutral is equal in power to naughty but nice is better than both.

Uh, interesting assessment but I completely disagree. Naughty's downside is very neglible and its upsides are super nice. Why care about healing oneself for 5 less hp when you can amass hundreds of souls in seconds with naughty perks?

Meanwhile neutral never ever had anything unique from original wortox.

[asdsaax]

19 minutes ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

Also 110 being the highest damage Wortox can reach on his own is just misinformation, it's 176 with reaper.

Nah math wise crown is more consistent in DPS because it always hits for 110

Meanwhile Wortox hits for 176 just twice

and trust me, against toadstool/dfly you would lose DPS by teleporting, also gotta consider consistency of ramp up damage which can be always interrupted

and it starts from 68 to 88 or so? Which already makes for a huge gap

[Jppacs]

10 minutes ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

Against what pre-rift bosses did you test and compare the two? 110 dps also sounds stupidly low. A fresh ham bat with no celestial crown and x1 damage multiplier has more dps than that. I'm not referring to using nice souls to fuel crown when I say this: What are you doing?

 

Fair enough I guess? By design neutral was the only one never rewarded for leaning in any direction but if it's just the quotes you like then that's understandable. I love the changes though and I'd like them to stay. I enjoy my earlygame nice build.

Uh, interesting assessment but I completely disagree. Naughty's downside is very neglible and its upsides are super nice. Why care about healing oneself for 5 less hp when you can amass hundreds of souls in seconds with naughty perks?

Meanwhile neutral never ever had anything unique from original wortox.

At least it's still a disadvantage, having less healing is never a good thing, unlike draining sanity, which can be useful, meanwhile the advantage of going neutral is having access to equal amounts of offense and decent support, I guess. 

Edited December 15, 2024 by Jppacs

[ApoIIo]

2 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

and trust me, against toadstool/dfly you would lose DPS by teleporting, also gotta consider consistency of ramp up damage which can be always interrupted

and it starts from 68 to 88 or so? Which already makes for a huge gap

I don't trust it, but my power is out so it's not like I can test it yet. I will keep you posted when I am able to.

2 minutes ago, Jppacs said:

At least it's still a disadvantage, unlike sanity, meanwhile the advantage of going neutral is having access to equal amounts of offense and decent support, I guess. 

Losing -15 sanity a day is honestly worse than healing slightly less. Losing 35 convinience when I want to go from 0 to max hunger turns off my enlightened crown temporarily, which while a very small complaint, is still worse than healing 5 less hp in my opinipn.

 

 

[asdsaax]

1 minute ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

don't trust it, but my power is out so it's not like I can test it yet. I will keep you posted when I am able to.

You can just use calculator and remember about the bone armor unlike the last time

30 minutes ago, Dingle said:

What about getting rid of the pan flute perks? That would set you Neutral. And you'd heal for more due to Soul Bastion I.

It's technically valid especially when considering my own logic, but I still think that neutral Wortox loses by comparison to nice one because of the change and that's my main problem...

Because nice Wortox had fat downsides and he was the one losing on flute in exchange for late power if you force him early...

[ApoIIo]

3 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

You can just use calculator and remember about the bone armor unlike the last time

"Unlike last time" bro you just said wortox with enlightened crown has 110 *dps*. Even if the dst character strictly hit twice per second with a ham bat it'd be around 118. The attack interval is somewhere around 0.4 so it's even more in reality.

[Jppacs]

8 minutes ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

I don't trust it, but my power is out so it's not like I can test it yet. I will keep you posted when I am able to.

Losing -15 sanity a day is honestly worse than healing slightly less. Losing 35 convinience when I want to go from 0 to max hunger turns off my enlightened crown temporarily, which while a very small complaint, is still worse than healing 5 less hp in my opinipn.

 

 

you can still eat food for hunger and losing sanity is beneficial when you want to farm fuel or destroy unseen hands for example. healing 5 less still means you have to use a 5th soul for every 4 heals non naughty wortoxes use. healing less is never good, it's straight up always a downside. nice inclination should have a downside.

Edited December 15, 2024 by Jppacs

[Jppacs]

On 12/14/2024 at 12:18 AM, JesseB_Klei said:

 

• Choosing either Affinity skill will skew The Scales which cause inclinations to happen quicker.

 

After testing a bunch of combinations, this makes inclinations happen too quick, which makes a neutral tree hard to justify and gives you an extra point to spend on whichever side, making the tree too free form like what Jason's post said the team was trying to avoid. Not having the extra inclination crystals makes this skill point have to be assigned on the desired inclination's side and restricts the skill tree just enough to have lots of options without being able to do it all, also making non inclined skill trees more valid.

[Master_NiX]

Well, I am just glad that this update hasnt ruined my build so far.

[Pokrotecki]

I hope the knabsack's visuals get changed so it actually looks like a sack being swung and not that stiff thing that we have now.

[Dingle]

1 hour ago, Jppacs said:

After testing a bunch of combinations, this makes inclinations happen too quick, which makes a neutral tree hard to justify and gives you an extra point to spend on whichever side, making the tree too free form like what Jason's post said the team was trying to avoid. Not having the extra inclination crystals makes this skill point have to be assigned on the desired inclination's side and restricts the skill tree just enough to have lots of options without being able to do it all, also making non inclined skill trees more valid.

This was the point though. To make the skill tree less tight.

"Slightly more free form" doesn't equal "too free form". Like you said, it's one extra point. One (1).

Compare it to Wendy's tree. That one is the most free form of the entire roster. No locks except the affinities. Combined skills to the point where formerly longer branches are just 2 or 3 points now. No hidden costs, like Reverberation to power up affinities.

Theres other examples, but summary is that Wortox's tree is still the tightest/least free form of the whole roster. Or at least pretty high up there.

[thesooz9000]

12 hours ago, Bearger Enjoyer said:

The damage buff caps at 1.25x for 100 souls which doesn't even let pierce souls break the 34 damage threshold, only buffing their damage by 6. With pierce I skip covetous collector altogether. For decoy it is a bit better buff but I still do not find it worthwhile so I don't take it.

Pls I had 4 people send me this conversation with captions like "look forums funny" and I learned today that no one on discord recognized me on here

you are the funny wortox main

[Jppacs]

Try building combinations as strong as you can on the skill selection screen with and without the affinity point spent(to simulate not having the crystal, keep the point you would use on the affinity), picking an affinity now is worth two skill points basically, and heavily skews your tree, several people are complaining here that the tree feels too free now and has no stakes, after testing I figured this was what put it over the edge, not having this mechanic could make a few combinations people are saying are too good and too easy to get a bit more fair. I like stuff how it is now, but not everyone is happy with the way the tree is, that's why I made this suggestion. I like the freedom but I also understand where people are coming from.

[Koomin]

One of the main issues making Wortox's skills so restrictive is that there are a bunch of filler skills on the middle parts of chains that often do absolutely nothing and create dead zones.  This is especially true for the naughty side of the tree.  The skills need to be condensed down like what recently happened for other characters in this beta when they were in a similar situation.

- Soul decoy 2.  This skill does nothing besides make you spend an extra point to get decoy 3.  Making your decoy last an extra few seconds has basically no use case.  If it draws aggro it gets hit and dies and living longer did nothing.  If it doesn't draw aggro no one cares if it lives longer.
- Lifebringer 2.  This is mostly filler, but at least has a minor use, even though no one would probably mind to see it dropped. The nice side of the tree is definitely not as bad in this respect as the naughty side.
- Soul thief 2.  This skill does nothing until you get soul pierce unless you actively flee from your souls.  The entire purpose of it is to allow you to intentionally jump around while your souls fly to you damaging enemies.  Stopping here in this chain without proceeding to get soul pierce is non-sensical.
- Reaching souls 2.  This does the same thing that reaching souls 1 does, which is not particularly interesting or needed to have duplicate skills.  It also makes your souls move faster towards you, which makes it antsynergistic with soul pierce, removing even more possible builds.

Examples of how this causes issues:
Have 2x points left that you want to put into naughty?  If you haven't started the decoy chain, putting the 2x points in soul decoy is bad since soul decoy 2 doesn't do anything.  If you haven't started the soul pierce chain, putting the 2x points in soul thief is bad since soul thief 2 is useless when you won't be getting soul pierce.  The chains all effectively have dead parts in the middle. 

Suggestion:
1. Soul decoy 2 and lifebringer 2 should be deleted.  Their entire purpose is realistically to make their chains longer and make it difficult to reach their capstone, but the locks on the chains already provide the difficulty and investment requirement.  Beyond that, putting points into completely useless skills like soul decoy 2 feels bad.
2. Soul thief 1 and 2 should be combined.  Having a skill that does nothing unless you get the later skills in the chain is not good.  To make up for getting 2 skills for one point, make the bonuses weaker than what you currently get if you select both skills.
3. Reaching souls 2 should be deleted.  Beyond keeping the tree symmetrical, reaching souls 2 is clearly filler since it just does what reaching souls 1 does, and it's not particularly interesting to just select the same thing multiple times.  (It also adds your souls coming to you faster, which is probably a negative as covered above)
4. Soul jar and knabsack should have their positions swapped, but that one has been discussed to the ground at this point

Some subset of these changes being implemented even alone would be helpful updates.

Condensing the skill tree like this would add a bunch of viable builds and make it possible to select more skills that actually do something.  It is clear that this is an option since it is something that happened for other characters in the beta when faced with the same issue. This would also make it possible for people to actually use and have fun with the neutral skills.  Currently there are too many critical skills to click on to really be able to fit any of them into a build, but with these changes it becomes more possible.  And to be clear, if we need to balance out the power increase if it is too high, skill strengths can be reduced a bit when they are merged to make up for it and keep the power level the same while increasing interesting choices and enjoyment.

Pictures of suggestion:
Merge the bottom skills of each middle chain
Delete the middle skills of each side chain
Swap soul jar and knabsack

Skills that are being merged/deleted

Updated appearance:

[salty_cookie]

1 minute ago, Koomin said:

filler skills

I wouldnt mind the filler skills being merged.

[MarsLombax]

After soloing all the bosses for the Vortox, I will say the following:
He became too imbalanced due to the unlimited number of souls. I think we need to remove the containers and focus on the net for catching insects. Because farming a million souls in a couple of seconds and throwing them around with his skills is not a problem at all. And when you manually catch each insect and store them, then you begin to appreciate every additional soul, because catching them is not so easy.
Now he is some kind of terminator with infinite souls. Just increasing the maximum souls a little would be enough, why allow them to be stored in infinite quantities?

[WenericMember]

Patch tmrw copium

[asdsaax]

On 12/16/2024 at 7:46 PM, Koomin said:

One of the main issues making Wortox's skills so restrictive is that there are a bunch of filler skills on the middle parts of chains that often do absolutely nothing and create dead zones.  This is especially true for the naughty side of the tree.  The skills need to be condensed down like what recently happened for other characters in this beta when they were in a similar situation.

- Soul decoy 2.  This skill does nothing besides make you spend an extra point to get decoy 3.  Making your decoy last an extra few seconds has basically no use case.  If it draws aggro it gets hit and dies and living longer did nothing.  If it doesn't draw aggro no one cares if it lives longer.
- Lifebringer 2.  This is mostly filler, but at least has a minor use, even though no one would probably mind to see it dropped. The nice side of the tree is definitely not as bad in this respect as the naughty side.
- Soul thief 2.  This skill does nothing until you get soul pierce unless you actively flee from your souls.  The entire purpose of it is to allow you to intentionally jump around while your souls fly to you damaging enemies.  Stopping here in this chain without proceeding to get soul pierce is non-sensical.
- Reaching souls 2.  This does the same thing that reaching souls 1 does, which is not particularly interesting or needed to have duplicate skills.  It also makes your souls move faster towards you, which makes it antsynergistic with soul pierce, removing even more possible builds.

Examples of how this causes issues:
Have 2x points left that you want to put into naughty?  If you haven't started the decoy chain, putting the 2x points in soul decoy is bad since soul decoy 2 doesn't do anything.  If you haven't started the soul pierce chain, putting the 2x points in soul thief is bad since soul thief 2 is useless when you won't be getting soul pierce.  The chains all effectively have dead parts in the middle. 

Suggestion:
1. Soul decoy 2 and lifebringer 2 should be deleted.  Their entire purpose is realistically to make their chains longer and make it difficult to reach their capstone, but the locks on the chains already provide the difficulty and investment requirement.  Beyond that, putting points into completely useless skills like soul decoy 2 feels bad.
2. Soul thief 1 and 2 should be combined.  Having a skill that does nothing unless you get the later skills in the chain is not good.  To make up for getting 2 skills for one point, make the bonuses weaker than what you currently get if you select both skills.
3. Reaching souls 2 should be deleted.  Beyond keeping the tree symmetrical, reaching souls 2 is clearly filler since it just does what reaching souls 1 does, and it's not particularly interesting to just select the same thing multiple times.  (It also adds your souls coming to you faster, which is probably a negative as covered above)
4. Soul jar and knabsack should have their positions swapped, but that one has been discussed to the ground at this point

Some subset of these changes being implemented even alone would be helpful updates.

Condensing the skill tree like this would add a bunch of viable builds and make it possible to select more skills that actually do something.  It is clear that this is an option since it is something that happened for other characters in the beta when faced with the same issue. This would also make it possible for people to actually use and have fun with the neutral skills.  Currently there are too many critical skills to click on to really be able to fit any of them into a build, but with these changes it becomes more possible.  And to be clear, if we need to balance out the power increase if it is too high, skill strengths can be reduced a bit when they are merged to make up for it and keep the power level the same while increasing interesting choices and enjoyment.

Pictures of suggestion:
Merge the bottom skills of each middle chain
Delete the middle skills of each side chain
Swap soul jar and knabsack

Skills that are being merged/deleted

Updated appearance:

You can have literally everything without consequences and skip on inferior stuffs
full healing without offense penalty, because there's no restriction
and full offense without healing penalty, because you can stay neutral
+can still keep affinity and flute upgrades

if the jar was at second I would've to sacrifice boosted healing at least
but instead of diversity we have... meta build that has every perk

Edit:
Sorry to be the party pooper, but I don't think that idea could be realistic ;-;

Edited December 19, 2024 by asdsaax

[Koomin]

37 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

You can have literally everything without consequences and skip on inferior stuffs
full healing without offense penalty, because there's no restriction
and full offense without healing penalty, because you can stay neutral
+can still keep affinity and flute upgrades

if the jar was at second I would've to sacrifice boosted healing at least
but instead of diversity we have... meta build that has every perk

Edit:
Sorry to be the party pooper, but I don't think that idea could be realistic ;-;

I think the consequences here would be that you failed to get either naughty or nice and are stuck as neutral, no?  It's not a horrible consequence, but definitely not preferred for most.  They just added stuff to the patch here to help tip the scales since it is generally beneficial.  It seems like it is working pretty much as intended where you have to sacrifice something that you want, but allows for more builds and more fun and actually useful skills to be selected.

You are also missing a bunch of skills that a lot of people like, but you personally appear not to (which is fine, just worth pointing out that this isn't the optimal build for everyone that you are implying).  For example:
-The left chain of skills is pretty useful in multiplayer worlds, and you don't have it here.

-You didn't get the ability to hold extra souls, and also didn't get the naughty bonus to have extra time before overload, which is definitely a setback.

-You didn't get knabsack (which does have its uses at least) or covetous collector (making your souls and decoys weaker)

-You didn't get the bastion capstone, so are not actually full healing

Lastly:

-As I mentioned at the end of the post, it's definitely possible to reduce the power of some of the skills that are getting combined to make the choices less clear and to compensate for the added freedom if it is actually too strong.

-Making just a subset of the changes I proposed would be a step in the right direction, and might be a good settling point.  All of them at once might be too far, and seems worth proposing builds and theorycrafting like you did here to find the right changes.

 

Edited December 19, 2024 by Koomin

[asdsaax]

1 minute ago, Koomin said:

stuck as neutral

this is literally good... because you don't have healing penalty from naughty side and you get to save up on teleports (you need 3 souls instead of 5 or 6 with bastion to heal up around 100 HP, I think it's self explanatory)
Being neutral literally benefits you in that situation

 

3 minutes ago, Koomin said:

The left chain of skills is pretty useful in multiplayer worlds, and you don't have it here.

I'm not missing out, not really

My issue with your change is that it giga overbuffs solo Wortox and kills his nuances which I explained earlier and you don't need multiplayer perks for that.
and if you wanna be a healing slave for multiplayer then people will easily make up for you sacrificing I dunno... soul pierce?
Wendy and Wormwood are walking soulpierces and you will be walking with semi maxed out skill tree without weaker perks after jar branch

therefore you will have 2 builds only, the solo and healing slave one, when entire point of your change was supposed to be diversity.
Allow me to continue why:

8 minutes ago, Koomin said:

-You didn't get the ability to hold extra souls, and also didn't get the naughty bonus to have extra time before overload, which is definitely a setback.

That's what jars are for. before skilltree you were literally forced to play around 20 soul cap, so that's not even an option to consider imo
 

9 minutes ago, Koomin said:

-You didn't get knabsack (which does have its uses at least) or covetous collector (making your souls and decoys weaker)

People hate that item so much because it barely competes with hambat  and dark sword and decoys are already strong enough to 2 shot bees or 3 shot hounds without any scaling
besides current Covetous Collector doesn't even make a difference (unless I missed out on some custom rebalance to justify it but I didn't see it in your post)
so I'm not really missing out on upgraded spacebar

besides you made that change to avoid knabsack in the first place, so there's no inferior perks on our way
 

12 minutes ago, Koomin said:

-You didn't get the bastion capstone, so are not actually full healing

It only makes multiplayer healing slightly more efficient and faster... but Wortox's healing is already potent enough unless it's some weird 10+ player situation?
but again you can sacrifice entirety of soul-pierce and let Wendy carry your AoE needs
It's the basic bastion boosts healing by general by allowing 2 wave, Bastion II just reduces multiplayer penalty (I didn't see any custom rebalances from you about that)

tl;dr: Your tree is unbalanced because it buffs Wortox too much and he doesn't suffer any consequences for his choices
and missing out on multiplayer perks is not a good argument

[Koomin]

5 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

this is literally good... because you don't have healing penalty from naughty side and you get to save up on teleports (you need 3 souls instead of 5 or 6 with bastion to heal up around 100 HP, I think it's self explanatory)
Being neutral literally benefits you in that situation

 

I'm not missing out, not really

My issue with your change is that it giga overbuffs solo Wortox and kills his nuances which I explained earlier and you don't need multiplayer perks for that.
and if you wanna be a healing slave for multiplayer then people will easily make up for you sacrificing I dunno... soul pierce?
Wendy and Wormwood are walking soulpierces and you will be walking with semi maxed out skill tree without weaker perks after jar branch

therefore you will have 2 builds only, the solo and healing slave one, when entire point of your change was supposed to be diversity.
Allow me to continue why:

That's what jars are for. before skilltree you were literally forced to play around 20 soul cap, so that's not even an option to consider imo
 

People hate that item so much because it barely competes with hambat  and dark sword and decoys are already strong enough to 2 shot bees or 3 shot hounds without any scaling
besides current Covetous Collector doesn't even make a difference (unless I missed out on some custom rebalance to justify it but I didn't see it in your post)
so I'm not really missing out on upgraded spacebar

besides you made that change to avoid knabsack in the first place, so there's no inferior perks on our way
 

It only makes multiplayer healing slightly more efficient and faster... but Wortox's healing is already potent enough unless it's some weird 10+ player situation?
but again you can sacrifice entirety of soul-pierce and let Wendy carry your AoE needs
It's the basic bastion boosts healing by general by allowing 2 wave, Bastion II just reduces multiplayer penalty (I didn't see any custom rebalances from you about that)

tl;dr: Your tree is unbalanced because it buffs Wortox too much and he doesn't suffer any consequences for his choices
and missing out on multiplayer perks is not a good argument

It seems you really like your specific favored skills and I'm happy for you about that.  I would absolutely not choose this single true solo build that you are referring to for my own solo game, so this is probably just something you personally gravitate to.  If I were choosing, I would lean towards moving points from the bastion chain to the knabsack/souljar chain, and getting the naughty side benefits, which I think are worth more than it seems you do.  (My proposed knabsack change wasn't for me to avoid it- I actually think it has uses, it was to free it up for people like you who want to avoid it and have shared that.  Build diversity change at work!)

It seems we might value different things here, which is great, and this seems like it is a pretty good demonstration of how this change would allow us more freedom to select builds we think are good and the other does not.  The current tree mostly funnels people with divergent opinions into the same builds, which is the concern many have brought up.  I don't agree with a lot of your takes on the powers and benefits of the different skills, but think that is ok, and that freeing up the tree a bit like this allows us to choose some unique skills and builds for ourselves.

Again repeating (just due to that last comment in your post about buffing) that reducing some skills power levels to compensate, or not implementing every single change I've proposed, are options that I have mentioned. 

[Kondr_]

thoughts almost about vengeful spirit and grave resurrection skill and twin-tailed heart1-2 and all resurrection options.

would like more diverse resurrection options. (like Wandas watch has different effect)
and also would like more diverse max hp penalty stuff management: increase and decrease (Wendy got one here, while Wortox - life-and-soul oriented character not)

For example: I always thought that Wigfrids resurrection song should not ressurect 2 naked harmless bodies. it should summon eternal warriors right to the middle of the fight instead. i mean transform ghosts into temporal characters with immaterial battle spear and battle helmet (without inventory). they die after some time or after inspiration or song goes down (or lose all hp ofc).

suggestion: Mb good Wortox or something in good tree should let souls somehow heal max hp penalty wounds? (it is ok if it will be instead of resurrection-functionality of twin-tailed heart since you will be able to use normal hearts)

[Edible Coal]

On 12/19/2024 at 3:35 AM, MarsLombax said:

After soloing all the bosses for the Vortox, I will say the following:
He became too imbalanced due to the unlimited number of souls. I think we need to remove the containers and focus on the net for catching insects. Because farming a million souls in a couple of seconds and throwing them around with his skills is not a problem at all. And when you manually catch each insect and store them, then you begin to appreciate every additional soul, because catching them is not so easy.
Now he is some kind of terminator with infinite souls. Just increasing the maximum souls a little would be enough, why allow them to be stored in infinite quantities?

i like how nobody talks about this lol, going from 20 souls max to 100 is insane

Edited January 10, 2025 by Edible Coal

[Echsrick]

3 hours ago, Edible Coal said:

i like how nobody talks about this lol, going from 20 souls max to 100 is insane

because its not new, you could allways catch butterflys and kill them all later for your instand souls, soul jar is litteraly just that, butterflys that are allready dead inside the jar, and you cant even use those souls while there inside the jar, you have to manualy remove them first

[OMEGASCRUFF]

On 1/10/2025 at 5:38 AM, Edible Coal said:

i like how nobody talks about this lol, going from 20 souls max to 100 is insane

I did, immediately. Didn't matter, and it is what it is at this point.

Also I carry 200, not 100. Yippee!

23 hours ago, Echsrick said:

because its not new, you could allways catch butterflys and kill them all later for your instand souls, soul jar is litteraly just that, butterflys that are allready dead inside the jar, and you cant even use those souls while there inside the jar, you have to manualy remove them first

Oh, stop. It's not the same time investment, resource management, or ease of access, and you know it. I'm so exhausted of hearing this. Wortox's meta has clearly changed immensely with the Soul Jar, which is easily observable when playing the beta, especially in groups. He doesn't have to play conservatively anymore. Souls are individually much more meaningless in cost. Let me know the last time you caught and held onto 180 bees in your inventory, and how long it took to get those compared to now, or how you could somehow directly convert excess Souls into bees as storage.