Nice Inclination Feedback

[viblym]

Nice Inclination still feels very bad to play because of its balancing.  Naughty inclination was perfect as it was (even before they re-implimented the healing downside) and does not need to be changed, all my feedback on nice inclination is to merely bring it up to speed with Naughty. I'm going to spend some time addressing the issues with it, the rational behind those issues, and some tweaks I'd suggest. I am trying to be concise and thorough with my words, so if what I'm typing is bloated, please understand that I feel it is necessary to convey everything with context, for ease of understanding. I have played Wortox a variety of times in this beta testing out his features, and have done several survival worlds at this point with friends as Wortox in and out of beta.
 
For starters - The Sanity Loss
Nice inclination doubles the sanity drain and gain from consuming and releasing souls. Consuming souls as regular Wortox negates 5 sanity and releasing them grants 2.5 sanity. With nice inclination those are flat out doubled, with you loosing 10 sanity per soul and gaining 5 per released soul. I understand the logic behind implementing this, it adds more value to each soul. The problem is that this just makes recovering sanity through other means that aren't souls after feeding yourself is significantly harder, with Wortox's reduced values from all regular foods you already cannot reliably use sanity food to restore yourself (that and all sanity foods have very small regeneration values, even ones like Jelly Salad restore 50, which grants Wortox 25 sanity in return, which would only account for the consumption of 2.5 souls, and will give you 18.5 hunger, which isn't great. Sleeping for sanity back is also pretty ineffective as it will just drain your hunger again. This leaves you with dapperness and passive sanity regeneration auras as a consistent way to regenerate sanity that isn't overly costly. Previously, players would frequently utilize the Tam o' Shanter to counteract Wortox's sanity loss from consuming souls, and it was decently effective at its job. With the increased sanity loss values, you cannot recover from that sanity loss before having to eat again and loosing it all over. So your option is releasing souls, so for every 1 soul consumed you have to drop 2 more. The cost goes from simply eating 5 souls to get your hunger up to spending up to 15 souls just to balance out the sanity loss.

Consuming other foods? Eating a spoiled meaty stew is more effective for your hunger and sanity than consuming a single soul. Consuming a meaty stew in general as Wortox is more effective than consuming souls. I understand that foods with high values can and will exceed soul consumption. So it begs the question, why doesn't Wortox with Nice inclination just eat regular food if the sanity downside is that draining? And, well, it's because it feels like it goes against Wortox's niche. It's a shallow excuse, but I think having to consume regular foods as the character who is specifically encouraged to consume souls just doesn't feel good in gameplay, and as silly as it sounds, yes, I have been playing the game. I don't want to trade one downside (heavy sanity loss from consuming souls) for just dealing with his other downside (decreased efficiency when consuming regular foods). Either way you're operating at a loss, either way it doesn't feel intuitive to do. Lore and gameplay often don't add up because they wouldn't mesh well, but Wortox needs to consume souls to survive. That is part of his curse, as neat as it would be for nice inclination to be Wortox pushing as far away from that behavior as he can, it's still his curse, and it's still part of him.

Nice inclination does not have the soul retention perks to encourage this kind of soul spending. Naughty inclination side has objects like soul jars and soul overload protection that allow you to exceed the 20 soul carry limit. You can utilize these perks with nice inclination (This is what I do) but from a tree balance perspective this isn't great, Nice inclination is all about give, you reduce the amount of souls you personally utilize for yourself in exchange for giving souls to others for their own utility, as well as having to release extra souls for more sanity to counteract its downside. The implications of this I understand, Nice Wortox does not want to hoard souls and Naughty Wortox does. That being said, what you get in return for releasing and spending more souls as nice inclination Wortox, is not even close to on par with Naughty Wortox's return on souls. In fact Wortox's entire tree feels like it was balanced around the player utilizing soul jars. Two of Wortox's three branches are somewhat dedicated to increasing the value of souls and reducing the cost of them (Bastion and Soul Hopping) but then the Twintail costs 10 souls to craft. The twintail is very good and nice but it's also rendered redundant first summer, where you can just soul hop to any location and place as a lazy deserter.

Twintail could be improved by making it so instead of pulling the twintail releases the souls, it instead adds them back to Wortox's inventory, acting as a Nice Inclination method of soul storage. That way even after its utility has been surpassed by player progression (life giving amulets, telltales, lazy deserters, etc.) It will still maintain utility as a perk. In my current Wortox worlds once I get a network of lazy deserters I will reperk away from the Twintailed heart, as it is useless to me by that point. Lazy Deserter networks are not difficult to setup. In addition to acting as direct soul storage, removal of the twintailed heart's spoilage would be nice as well. I could ask why the twintailed heart spoils when regular souls don't spoil, but I know it's just for balance. It is not necessary.

Naughty inclination sanity restoration. Wortox initially did not have sanity restoration upon releasing souls, this feature was added during or around the time of Wickerbottom's rework, specifically to counteract his specific sanity loss from consuming souls, as it was too unforgiving at the time; This was an all around great Wortox buff, as it also increased the hunger value of consuming souls to 25 hunger each, gave him map soul hopping, and soul echo, which were all fantastic additions that make Wortox feel much better to play. This felt like Wortox's own mini rework, so I bear the state Wortox was in before and after this mini tweak, with his skill tree changes. Naughty Wortox, does not need sanity regeneration from releasing souls. He does not have it. This is fine. In my efforts of discussing the downsides of Nice inclination it's brought up that the sanity regeneration from releasing souls is "actually really good" and not having it as naughty Wortox is "bad". Yes, Wortox will not gain sanity from releasing souls, but that feature was initially added to counteract his sanity loss from consuming souls in the first place, which naughty Wortox also does not have. Wortox has halved sanity loss values from consumables, monstrous auras, and will have a breeze maintaining sanity with a Tam o' Shanter, with a massive margin of efficiency compared to Nice AND Neutral Wortox. It's QoL for a downside you've eradicated with Naughty inclination. Naughty Wortox also has decreased healing from souls, but this only applies to the naughty player, other players are still healed all the same.

Removing the Monster Tag is not a significant enough upside to balance or counteract the sanity loss from Nice Inclination, nor does it put it on par with Naughty Inclination. Pigmen, Catcoons, and Bunnymen are easily avoidable. Wortox can teleport away from them, the threat they pose to Wortox is incredibly conditional. I understand some people like followers, but Wortox does not particularly benefit from having or utilizing followers. As crass as it may sound, you're better off playing Wurt or Webber if that's the gameplay style you want. Not every character is a follower character, and not every character has potential as one. Nice Inclination has no benefits to utilizing followers as Wortox to make this perk anything more than letting you recruit these specific mobs, that the rest of the roster already can. It doesn't lock you out of any significant interactions. I don't need or want it to be removed, I am completely ambivalent towards it, it only provides appeal to a very specific kind of person under very specific conditions. The changes it makes to your gameplay as a whole are not going to be significant, nor does it give Wortox a unique perspective.

Reaching Souls and Soul Bastion could use a buff. Reaching souls 1 is a nice buff, it's a good addition but reaching souls 2 makes the perks feel bloated. These two could be condensed into one perk that increases the range souls heal at. Reaching Souls 2 speed increase is actually more hazardous, as nice Wortox does not have soul overload protection, and might not have soul jars. So I'd actually recommend moving this affect of reaching souls. Soul Bastion 1 and 2 could also be condensed, with soul Bastion 1 accounting for the 2nd perks buff. Soul Bastion with all perks only adds 10 hp to your heal, which does not feel significant enough to warrant spending 4 perks on it. In my opinion, if Soul Bastion, instead of spawning a smaller soul that healed 10 hp, gave a player a buff or "soul nexus" type affect that gave a bit of health over time, or even latched to a player missing hp to heal them, that would have potential. That way, even if a player moves away from the soul drop point, they still benefit from it. I've also considered reworking soul bastion into an outright health barrier, where once soul  bastion has triggered, it will either instantly apply healing to a injured player, OR buff them (like stated before) UNTIL the player is injured, and then apply health over time, up to its respective value. This buff if not triggered would simply wear off after some time has passed (it does not have to be long, something like 30 seconds would be fine and have ample time to be utilized in combat after being applied).

Being able to buff my friends in combat is very much what I'd like to do, and consistently knowing when to heal players I can't even visualize the health of is difficult, so having something that ensures they get necessary HP would be lovely. There's even potential in Wortox getting a perk alongside soul bastion that visualized the HP of others, possibly with soul particle that emanates off of a player with increasing frequency and abundance the less HP they have, at near max HP, a small soul swirl could cascade off of a player every few seconds, at half HP, two or three could rapidly pool out, and at 1/3rd hp or lower the player is a upward waterfall of soul energy, indicating that their life is about to leave them. That way the visual affect is non-obstructive, but still a visual indicator.

All in all I think the sanity value modifier for Inclinations is neat on paper, but its execution is not great and doesn't feel great in gameplay. When discussing skill trees with friends, we are all in agreement that the Nice Inclination sanity loss is pretty awful, and I was granted condolences by them when they saw that the perks that I enjoy utilizing gave me Nice Inclination.

 

[Dingle]

I like how half of the opinions are that Nice is better than Naughty. Or vice versa.

With a smaller amount preferring Neutral.

[crushcircuit]

THANK you for this, i agree with all of this and im glad somebody else is saying this too :'D

i recently swapped to naughty inclination and it made playing wortox so much more fun to me, but even still i did also notice that in general, wortox is balanced around soul jars now. i dont particularly feel any want or need to use them because i do not like hoarding souls in such a manner, so it is the slightest bit disappointing that it feels like the "objectively correct" skill to perk into when that truly should not be something that exists.

(i would've much preferred if wortox got 1 skill that just increased his max soul capacity to 40 or something, and then the rest of that branch was a bit more focused around the knabsack as a tool... but this isnt about naughty and im almost certain it's too late to change by now)

i think the soul bastion buff you suggested has potential to be really interesting. i would love some sort of overheal mechanic implemented, it seems absolutely perfect for that branch. it would also be absolutely lovely to have a way to see what my friends' HP is at without badgering them into using status announcements LOL, i imagine its particularly awful for console players who dont even have that option

[gaymime]

yeah, being able to see hp would be such a benefit! i cannot tell you how many times i was at max health and a helpful wortox "healed" me to make sure i was doing alright x''D

[Koomin]

This is pretty entertaining since I personally think the nice inclination bonuses are very superior to the naughty ones.  They seem well designed to me since it seems like preferences are split, and I really like that in order to get the stronger nice side benefits you have to deal with a more significant downside. Such strong upsides being free would not be great, and most of the description you gave was describing how the downside being more of a downside was more impactful, which actually sounds like it's working as intended.  You are getting rid of a whole negative by losing the monster tag, of course the other downside should become more extreme.  Additionally, the added sanity on dropping souls is super useful, and if you want to eat souls, just drop some to counteract the sanity loss.  It's very doable.

I would agree more with the statements if you weren't able to mitigate almost all of the downsides by just taking soul jar. I do agree that it is annoying to be forced to get skills from naughty for the concept to work, though.  The first neutral perk should actually have been soul jar when looking back at the design, since literally every build should have it.

Agreed that reaching souls 1 and 2 are redundant and should be combined.

[kehun]

i lovee nice inclination 

[asdsaax]

1 hour ago, viblym said:

The problem is that this just makes recovering sanity through other means that aren't souls after feeding yourself is significantly harder, with Wortox's reduced values from all regular foods you already cannot reliably use sanity food to restore yourself

That's the point.
if you manage yourself well enough, you will be rewarded with sanity control so immaculate that you can pull of this:

and Wortox has such abudance of souls that managing harsher penalties shouldn't be an issue
all it takes is just eating when necessary, dropping few souls and let sanity items do the rest
not to mention that pleasant pastorale is there to support you everyday

u just gotta adapt for the benefits or find a build with purpose that satisfies you
and I think you just don't like what "nice" Wortox has to offer and the price that comes with it
 

1 hour ago, viblym said:

Nice inclination does not have the soul retention perks to encourage this kind of soul spending. Naughty inclination side has objects like soul jars and soul overload protection that allow you to exceed the 20 soul carry limit. You can utilize these perks with nice inclination (This is what I do) but from a tree balance perspective this isn't great, Nice inclination is all about give, you reduce the amount of souls you personally utilize for yourself in exchange for giving souls to others for their own utility, as well as having to release extra souls for more sanity to counteract its downside. The implications of this I understand, Nice Wortox does not want to hoard souls and Naughty Wortox does. That being said, what you get in return for releasing and spending more souls as nice inclination Wortox, is not even close to on par with Naughty Wortox's return on souls. In fact Wortox's entire tree feels like it was balanced around the player utilizing soul jars. Two of Wortox's three branches are somewhat dedicated to increasing the value of souls and reducing the cost of them (Bastion and Soul Hopping) but then the Twintail costs 10 souls to craft. The twintail is very good and nice but it's also rendered redundant first summer, where you can just soul hop to any location and place as a lazy deserter.

I think you interpret it too literally
to put it simply:
Naughty Wortox benefits when holding on souls
Nice Wortox benefits when releasing them (Like that CC Crown example)

and yes, to shine as Nice Wortox you will have to store a lot of those to benefit from mass releasing them or crafting twin-tails because that's expensive
reminder: collecting souls is significantly easier thanks to decoy/shadow harvester

perks aren't mutually exclusive for a reason, and you gotta combine them with inclination to achieve desired results
 

1 hour ago, viblym said:

Reaching Souls and Soul Bastion could use a buff.

No, how healing buff and indirect teleportation discount needs a buff??????????????
3 points is a fair price for increasing soul's value especially when you can get storage for them
and soul bastion 2 is for multiplayer slaving, only because it's there that doesn't mean that you have to get it
as matter of fact, you don't have to

+ that would just ruin point managment and general balance

 

2 hours ago, viblym said:

something that ensures they get necessary HP would be lovely.

That's valid
 

 

2 hours ago, viblym said:

As crass as it may sound, you're better off playing Wurt or Webber if that's the gameplay style you want.

"Why play anything if you can play X"
I think you could use your own advice in the context of your entire post

I'm happy with nice Wortox as he is
and I can recognize that Klei did good job with him
 

 

2 hours ago, viblym said:

we are all in agreement that the Nice Inclination sanity loss is pretty awful, and I was granted condolences by them when they saw that the perks that I enjoy utilizing gave me Nice Inclination.

Condolences from me too, because ya can't have everything that you want?

[viblym]

37 minutes ago, Koomin said:

and if you want to eat souls, just drop some to counteract the sanity loss.  It's very doable.

 

You can see why this is an issue as detailed in my full post

2 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

That's the point.
if you manage yourself well enough, you will be rewarded with sanity control so immaculate that you can pull of this:

and Wortox has such abudance of souls that managing harsher penalties shouldn't be an issue
all it takes is just eating when necessary, dropping few souls and let sanity items do the rest
not to mention that pleasant pastorale is there to support you everyday

u just gotta adapt for the benefits or find a build with purpose that satisfies you
and I think you just don't like what "nice" Wortox has to offer and the price that comes with it
 

I think you interpret it too literally
to put it simply:
Naughty Wortox benefits when holding on souls
Nice Wortox benefits when releasing them (Like that CC Crown example)

and yes, to shine as Nice Wortox you will have to store a lot of those to benefit from mass releasing them or crafting twin-tails because that's expensive
reminder: collecting souls is significantly easier thanks to decoy/shadow harvester

perks aren't mutually exclusive for a reason, and you gotta combine them with inclination to achieve desired results
 

No, how healing buff and indirect teleportation discount needs a buff??????????????
3 points is a fair price for increasing soul's value especially when you can get storage for them
and soul bastion 2 is for multiplayer slaving, only because it's there that doesn't mean that you have to get it
as matter of fact, you don't have to

Condolences from me too, because ya can't have everything that you want?

Well this response is rather catty.
-Any character can utilize the Enlightened Crown with much more effectiveness by eating literally any sanity food, even a cheap cooked green cap will garner more sanity than releasing a soul as Wortox. This is not new tech, nor is it specific to Wortox.

-Twintail is not used as soul storage. You do not get the souls back upon using a twintailed heart, they are released instantly.

-Soul Bastion at maximum power adds 10 hp to a heal. It's as effective as a honey poultice.

Feel free to reread my post for a more in depth exploration of the balance of his perks, and why they do or don't work.

[crushcircuit]

one thing i would like to add that stands out to me about nice inclination is that the rest of wortox's kit does not have any synergy with followers in the slightest. i've seen some people say that nice branch works better with a team, but having followers in a team setting... doesn't really help you, because you have actual friends that you can use instead.

followers cannot be affected by any of wortox's abilities. he cannot heal them. they dont really give much use to him in the slightest. i'm not sure why people would want to use followers as wortox, when it feels like it'd be so much more fun with a character that has abilities revolving around that. i would genuinely love to know why, since i've never seen anybody explain why they like it.

i just don't think such a harsh downside should be given to something that quite literally every character but wortox has. it's just not his niche, at least as far as i can see it. a skill tree perk that makes him closer to other characters instead of working alongside his preexisting abilities whilst punishing him for it simultaneously just feels odd to me.

[Koomin]

13 minutes ago, viblym said:

You can see why this is an issue as detailed in my full post

 

My next sentence explains why it is in fact not an issue.  Soul jar exists, and you should get it and use it.  If you are refusing to get soul jar for thematic purposes I feel for you, but it does exist and completely solve your problem.  Again, it should have been a neutral perk.  Beyond that though, it does completely solve your sanity concern.  Just gather and drop souls as designed.

[Dingle]

I usually just eat when low on sanity, then replenish. You can't go under 0 sanity.

So when you're farming, you fill your hunger, kill a shadow creature, then drop some souls. Then farm souls a little more. Works out great.

I'd say more tips, but there's been a couple topics exactly like this before.

I like Nice a lot. I don't mind if its buffed. But more likely is they'd just nerf Naughty again. And that's annoying if I solo as Wortox, as Naughty builds are the only viable ones solo, still.

[asdsaax]

48 minutes ago, viblym said:

Well this response is rather catty.
-Any character can utilize the Enlightened Crown with much more effectiveness by eating literally any sanity food, even a cheap cooked green cap will garner more sanity than releasing a soul as Wortox. This is not new tech, nor is it specific to Wortox.

-Twintail is not used as soul storage. You do not get the souls back upon using a twintailed heart, they are released instantly.

-Soul Bastion at maximum power adds 10 hp to a heal. It's as effective as a honey poultice.

Feel free to reread my post for a more in depth exploration of the balance of his perks, and why they do or don't work.

Good, will match your signature

-Then play as other characters or something?
that perk is very exclusive to Wortox because he can't utilize food for sanity recovery to it's fullest due to 50% penalty, which made him the worst crown user
and instead he can utilize souls that are very abudant and as Wortox player I cherish it deeply because it's better than grinding cacti or whatever for
those 27k/50k/100k boss fights and everyday use

-I said that you need a lot of storage for twintails, to explain how hoarding souls for power isn't the same as
storing them to benefit from releasing/utilizing them

-To get to 90/100 HP you need: 5 souls without upgrades, 6 souls as naughty, 3 souls with soul bastion
do you see how less souls blown for healing saves up for teleportation in general and ruins rushing?
+ souls are rather more abudant than honey poultice which makes it even better

Yeah, feel free to reread my post too, to understand why your problems are more likely an issue of bad sanity managment and matter of personal preference

[Bumber64]

Does twintail work with soul pierce or not?

39 minutes ago, Dingle said:

I like Nice a lot. I don't mind if its buffed. But more likely is they'd just nerf Naughty again. And that's annoying if I solo as Wortox, as Naughty builds are the only viable ones solo, still.

Next update: Naughty Wortox can't equip CC crown. Nice inclination unchanged.

[Dingle]

4 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

Does twintail work with soul pierce or not?

Next update: Naughty Wortox can't equip CC crown. Nice inclination unchanged.

Twintail does not. It acts exactly like dropping 10 souls at once. So it's for healing only.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

I've made a thread partially addressing this issue. There's a lot to say about this. But there's just no point bumping my thread for discussion til the devs are back from break and so long as the forums remain all about Wendy Williams. But TL;DR Nice is the problem, and punishing Naughty did not fix the issue.

The Naughty nerf specifically hurts solo players and challenge runners more than anyone, for no good reason. It's also a lot harder to avoid a Naughty build when in the late-game. The two main problems are that Nice is a bit inconvenient in the early-game, and that its skills are just too weak to justify investing Insight points in them. Soul Bastion is the biggest problem, by far, in my eyes.

To address the inclinations themselves, here's my preference: Buff them both, with a greater benefit to Nice. Remove the heal penalty on Naughty. Give Nice more food efficiency and Naughty more Soul efficiency for hunger (I suggest 125%, so 62.5% value from 50%.) The food efficiency is a way greater trade and would help to remedy the increased sanity penalty on Soul eating as Nice in the early-game. Hell, I'd like them to reduce the Nice penalty to 7.5 and the healing bonus to 3.75 instead, too (down from the current 200% to 150%.) It's just too drastic of a change to the numbers. Nerfing Naughty was not the answer; it was totally fine as is. Nice needed fixing and this did nothing to correct the issue.

With this done, there's as, you mentioned, another major problem - Soul Bastion in specific needs a rework. A big issue with it is that it's redundant with one of Wortox's core functions. If you need more healing, just drop another Soul. The main perk in this skill branch is the reduced penalty on healing for multiple players, which is a really niche perk and also not even available til Soul Bastion II. I think Soul Bastion needs an entirely new function it provides, ideally one that also makes it appealing to solo players and people who play in smaller servers.

As of now, the Nice skills other than the Lifted Spirits branch do not offer enough. I'm okay with Twin-Tailed Heart staying the same, honestly, because the burst healing on them is really nice, as is the on-hand full-health revival, and I think it's fine to have a single 3-skill branch of skills that are entirely dedicated to multiplayer here. (The main issue with it is that it becomes unnecessary in the late-game once Lazy Deserters are set up in all desired locations. The revival is nice to have, but it was never that meaningful as Life Giving Amulets are incredibly cheap as-is. But on the Naughty side, one of Soul Pierce or Soul Decoy III are pretty skippable, so...) But as it stands, there's two branches that are only helpful for multiplayer to begin with, and Soul Bastion just doesn't do enough already. As of now, it's virtually impossible to justify a Neutral or especially a Nice build when solo and its benefits are pretty trivial in the late-game, and that's something that should be addressed urgently. The theme of Wortox's skill tree suggests that there's a choice to be made here, but there is none. It's just dependent on the nature of your server.

I personally think Soul Pierce is severely overrated, especially if Shadow Harvester is the chosen affinity, but when you compare Soul Pierce to its counterpart in Soul Bastion, the former gives so much more value than the latter that there's just no competition here. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think Soul Bastion is just... that bad. I don't think most people are playing in giant servers where you're dog-piling bosses like that, and even when they are, the duration of normally painful fights is significantly shorter, and the need for healing is lower as a result. The purpose of this skill needs to be re-addressed entirely, and my fear is that the solution you provided is still not appealing enough to make Nice builds as viable as Naughty builds.

...

If I were to redo Soul Bastion, I'm honestly not entirely positive of how I'd do this in a truly effective way, but I have a couple ideas. I think a dedicated thread toward discussion specifically regarding Soul Bastion might be in order, but it's definitely very relevant to your qualms about the Nice inclination just not doing enough. The skills just don't provide enough pull to back it up. Wortox doesn't really need a higher heal, especially since the 20-Soul limit is long gone. But adding a new kind of value to his existing heal would be much more tempting.

My current thought is that it needs to provide a bonus that everyone would appreciate. A thought that's been brought up before is over-healing (increasing the targets' HP above their HP cap), which is cool in concept and on the right track, but I don't think it actually does anything useful in practice, and would rather keep the second healing wave instead. If you've ever played Maxwell before with success, you'll know how little your max HP actually matters. What matters much more, actually, is your armor.

So the way I'd personally want to see this reworked is that the second wave of healing with Soul Bastion would add a small shield to players instead, acting effectively as a free temporary health-pool to your armor. This would make it so, SO much more appealing, even on a solo playthrough (if you're brave enough to ditch Soul Pierce), simply to conserve the cost of materials and time spent on armor. It's unfortunately a little less useful in the late-game still, with the cost of Brightshade/Void Repair Kits being fairly trivial after a certain point, but it would still be very nice to have, especially if you're not relying on post-rift armor for every single fight and only using them when the planar defense is relevant. Anyone in any stage of the game would benefit from having armor that's less likely to break in a pinch, regardless of anything. But with the effectively added durability to armors through a temporary shield, I still think it would provide a lot more value than it currently does, and this trait would also combo with other characters pretty well (those that prefer to use Marble Armor, Dreadstone Armor, Night Armor, Thulecite Suit, even a Magiluminesence, etc.) As far as numbers are concerned, I won't pretend to know the answer without the ability to implement and test a feature like this. But I think it would be fine if each Soul added around 7.5-10 HP worth of shield, probably capping at around 20, 22.5 or 30 HP (depending on value per Soul and desired outcome.) The shield would use the end value of damage after armor and any other reductions, and I think a 15-30 second duration would be fine on this buff. The HP value added to the shield would expire with this time incrementally, not the entire shield itself.

Soul Bastion I can just provide half value of the shield. Soul Bastion II will provide the other half and speed up the second small Soul that applies the shield along with the reduced penalty depend on number of players healed.

...

This is quite a bit more programming, though, and would probably need some small visuals to go along with it too. It's hard to get changes made when it's more money spent on manpower, so I would get it if they're apprehensive about doing something this interesting/nuanced compared to simple number changes.

So if we want to go a really easy route to make Soul Bastion better, just make it heal a little sanity for allies too. I'd really rather that this was an additional effect added to Lunar Swindler, with something comparatively useful attached to Shadow Reaper, since I think they're both a little underwhelming as far as affinities are concerned with no pre-rift value other than the built in damage/resistances (not that Wortox would be the first character with underwhelming affinities...), but hey, it would make Wortox one of the two characters who can sustain allies' sanity in combat (the other being Wigfrid, speaking of underwhelming affinities.) I'm not sure about the numbers, but 5 sanity seems fair for allies, 2.5 sanity for Wortox himself. This would also help greatly if it's preferred to keep the current values to sanity on Nice inclination and leave them untouched, as a whopping 7.5 heal to sanity from healing will greatly help to combat the cost of eating Souls.

I don't love that Wortox is able to manage all 3 of his stats so freely with just one item that has no functional limits anymore (unlimited Soul Jars, yay!!!), but Nice inclination can kinda already do this anyways, as the 5 sanity heal is not negligible at all, and you can use it to upkeep the Enlightened Crown on Lunar affinity builds or get out of insanity creature range if necessary. So, I dunno, just lean into it at this point, I guess. (The above post by @asdsaax touches on this. Naughty is actually weaker than Nice due to the loss of sanity control on heals. Banana Shakes are fine for Enlightened Crown upkeep already, even with Wortox's penalty, though.) But I think Nice's formula is primarily broken by Soul Bastion being awful, and it's a nearly-required skill to achieve Nice inclination, specifically once Twin-Tailed Hearts outlived their usefulness.

 

These are the Nice builds I would like to be viable in the future for long-term worlds, but as it stands, this setup is weak and niche, and it's purely because of Soul Bastion's failure to provide anything new to Wortox's gameplay or his allies.

Spoiler

As of now, I only find these Nice builds to be viable and, again, Lifebringer III begins to lose its purpose as the world develops. (It's still a bit nice to have tho for convenience, won't lie there.) These are all great builds and all, but notice the complete lack of Soul Bastion in all of them...

Spoiler

There's definitely a non-negligible chance that Soul Pierce will become too weak in comparison, as it's incredibly niche other than farming Souls with few resources available, and pretty redundant with both Soul Decoy III and Shadow Harvester. It also kinda provides little with highly efficient farm setups (in fact it can be disruptive to them, like Varg farms...), but that's a topic for another day (like day 1, when I complained about it being bad at the very start of the beta... I think everyone just had new toy syndrome with it.) I have structural qualms with that skill too, but the subject here is about fixing Nice. It's not just the inclination though, it's largely the skills not having enough value. At least full Naughty is objectively superior for solo play, and has its niche during both Fuelweaver and Bee Queen, and the overload protection is insanely good QoL for Wortox on its own. It'll have its appeal, regardless of Soul Peirce's state (and would be a little easier to justify in multiplayer if Neutral skills were slightly better... but at least they're... fine-ish...)

Anyways, TL;DR unnerf Naughty and rework Soul Bastion, make small adjustments to Nice and/or buff both inclinations instead. Soul Bastion is legit the biggest problem on his skill tree and it's what makes Nice inclination less desirable. There's just not enough pull to pick a Nice build other than Lifebringer III and the sanity heal and we... still have good food, even with the penalty, so... But overall, I think this multi-pronged approach would please everybody better (especially if we made some further improvements to the Neutral branch on top of all of this, but we all know that's still a thing.)

 

[somethin]

57 minutes ago, crushcircuit said:

followers cannot be affected by any of wortox's abilities. he cannot heal them. they dont really give much use to him in the slightest. i'm not sure why people would want to use followers as wortox, when it feels like it'd be so much more fun with a character that has abilities revolving around that. i would genuinely love to know why, since i've never seen anybody explain why they like it.

Taking nice means I can easily feed pigs monster meat for hambat without having to kite them in the early game. Also having an option to hire pigs for chopping trees out of bearger logging season is pretty convenient as I love to build big bases. I just love the convenience really.

[BalkanCockroach]

Wish they just buffed Nice with an interesting bonus instead of nerfinmg naughty.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

8 minutes ago, Bumber64 said:

Does twintail work with soul pierce or not?

Next update: Naughty Wortox can't equip CC crown. Nice inclination unchanged.

pls ughhhh This can't be the way they approach balance but the Naughty change showed us they are willing to address issues this way. I expect better.

Just wanted to add a tip that Pleasant Pastorale works for this.

Also, general pro tip for all Nice/Neutral builds, you can bundle Twin-tailed Hearts. pls don't fix this i need it and it adds value to the skill branch thx

[viblym]

5 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

I've made a thread partially addressing this issue. There's a lot to say about this. But there's just no point bumping my thread for discussion til the devs are back from break and so long as the forums remain all about Wendy Williams. But TL;DR Nice is the problem, and punishing Naughty did not fix the issue.

The Naughty nerf specifically hurts solo players and challenge runners more than anyone, for no good reason. It's also a lot harder to avoid a Naughty build when in the late-game. The two main problems are that Nice is a bit inconvenient in the early-game, and that its skills are just too weak to justify investing Insight points in them. Soul Bastion is the biggest problem, by far, in my eyes.

To address the inclinations themselves, here's my preference: Buff them both, with a greater benefit to Nice. Remove the heal penalty on Naughty. Give Nice more food efficiency and Naughty more Soul efficiency for hunger (I suggest 125%, so 62.5% value from 50%.) The food efficiency is a way greater trade and would help to remedy the increased sanity penalty on Soul eating as Nice in the early-game. Hell, I'd like them to reduce the Nice penalty to 7.5 and the healing bonus to 3.75 instead, too (down from the current 200% to 150%.) It's just too drastic of a change to the numbers. Nerfing Naughty was not the answer; it was totally fine as is. Nice needed fixing and this did nothing to correct the issue.

With this done, there's as, you mentioned, another major problem - Soul Bastion in specific needs a rework. A big issue with it is that it's redundant with one of Wortox's core functions. If you need more healing, just drop another Soul. The main perk in this skill branch is the reduced penalty on healing for multiple players, which is a really niche perk and also not even available til Soul Bastion II. I think Soul Bastion needs an entirely new function it provides, ideally one that also makes it appealing to solo players and people who play in smaller servers.

As of now, the Nice skills other than the Lifted Spirits branch do not offer enough. I'm okay with Twin-Tailed Heart staying the same, honestly, because the burst healing on them is really nice, as is the on-hand full-health revival, and I think it's fine to have a single 3-skill branch of skills that are entirely dedicated to multiplayer here. (The main issue with it is that it becomes unnecessary in the late-game once Lazy Deserters are set up in all desired locations. The revival is nice to have, but it was never that meaningful as Life Giving Amulets are incredibly cheap as-is. But on the Naughty side, one of Soul Pierce or Soul Decoy III are pretty skippable, so...) But as it stands, there's two branches that are only helpful for multiplayer to begin with, and Soul Bastion just doesn't do enough already. As of now, it's virtually impossible to justify a Neutral or especially a Nice build when solo and its benefits are pretty trivial in the late-game, and that's something that should be addressed urgently. The theme of Wortox's skill tree suggests that there's a choice to be made here, but there is none. It's just dependent on the nature of your server.

I personally think Soul Pierce is severely overrated, especially if Shadow Harvester is the chosen affinity, but when you compare Soul Pierce to its counterpart in Soul Bastion, the former gives so much more value than the latter that there's just no competition here. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think Soul Bastion is just... that bad. I don't think most people are playing in giant servers where you're dog-piling bosses like that, and even when they are, the duration of normally painful fights is significantly shorter, and the need for healing is lower as a result. The purpose of this skill needs to be re-addressed entirely, and my fear is that the solution you provided is still not appealing enough to make Nice builds as viable as Naughty builds.

...

If I were to redo Soul Bastion, I'm honestly not entirely positive of how I'd do this in a truly effective way, but I have a couple ideas. I think a dedicated thread toward discussion specifically regarding Soul Bastion might be in order, but it's definitely very relevant to your qualms about the Nice inclination just not doing enough. The skills just don't provide enough pull to back it up. Wortox doesn't really need a higher heal, especially since the 20-Soul limit is long gone. But adding a new kind of value to his existing heal would be much more tempting.

My current thought is that it needs to provide a bonus that everyone would appreciate. A thought that's been brought up before is over-healing (increasing the targets' HP above their HP cap), which is cool in concept and on the right track, but I don't think it actually does anything useful in practice, and would rather keep the second healing wave instead. If you've ever played Maxwell before with success, you'll know how little your max HP actually matters. What matters much more, actually, is your armor.

So the way I'd personally want to see this reworked is that the second wave of healing with Soul Bastion would add a small shield to players instead, acting effectively as a free temporary health-pool to your armor. This would make it so, SO much more appealing, even on a solo playthrough (if you're brave enough to ditch Soul Pierce), simply to conserve the cost of materials and time spent on armor. It's unfortunately a little less useful in the late-game still, with the cost of Brightshade/Void Repair Kits being fairly trivial after a certain point, but it would still be very nice to have, especially if you're not relying on post-rift armor for every single fight and only using them when the planar defense is relevant. Anyone in any stage of the game would benefit from having armor that's less likely to break in a pinch, regardless of anything. But with the effectively added durability to armors through a temporary shield, I still think it would provide a lot more value than it currently does, and this trait would also combo with other characters pretty well (those that prefer to use Marble Armor, Dreadstone Armor, Night Armor, Thulecite Suit, even a Magiluminesence, etc.) As far as numbers are concerned, I won't pretend to know the answer without the ability to implement and test a feature like this. But I think it would be fine if each Soul added around 7.5-10 HP worth of shield, probably capping at around 20, 22.5 or 30 HP (depending on value per Soul and desired outcome.) The shield would use the end value of damage after armor and any other reductions, and I think a 15-30 second duration would be fine on this buff. The HP value added to the shield would expire with this time incrementally, not the entire shield itself.

Soul Bastion I can just provide half value of the shield. Soul Bastion II will provide the other half and speed up the second small Soul that applies the shield along with the reduced penalty depend on number of players healed.

...

This is quite a bit more programming, though, and would probably need some small visuals to go along with it too. It's hard to get changes made when it's more money spent on manpower, so I would get it if they're apprehensive about doing something this interesting/nuanced compared to simple number changes.

So if we want to go a really easy route to make Soul Bastion better, just make it heal a little sanity for allies too. I'd really rather that this was an additional effect added to Lunar Swindler, with something comparatively useful attached to Shadow Reaper, since I think they're both a little underwhelming as far as affinities are concerned with no pre-rift value other than the built in damage/resistances (not that Wortox would be the first character with underwhelming affinities...), but hey, it would make Wortox one of the two characters who can sustain allies' sanity in combat (the other being Wigfrid, speaking of underwhelming affinities.) I'm not sure about the numbers, but 5 sanity seems fair for allies, 2.5 sanity for Wortox himself. This would also help greatly if it's preferred to keep the current values to sanity on Nice inclination and leave them untouched, as a whopping 7.5 heal to sanity from healing will greatly help to combat the cost of eating Souls.

I don't love that Wortox is able to manage all 3 of his stats so freely with just one item that has no functional limits anymore (unlimited Soul Jars, yay!!!), but Nice inclination can kinda already do this anyways, as the 5 sanity heal is not negligible at all, and you can use it to upkeep the Enlightened Crown on Lunar affinity builds or get out of insanity creature range if necessary. So, I dunno, just lean into it at this point, I guess. (The above post by @asdsaax touches on this. Naughty is actually weaker than Nice due to the loss of sanity control on heals. Banana Shakes are fine for Enlightened Crown upkeep already, even with Wortox's penalty, though.) But I think Nice's formula is primarily broken by Soul Bastion being awful, and it's a nearly-required skill to achieve Nice inclination, specifically once Twin-Tailed Hearts outlived their usefulness.

 

These are the Nice builds I would like to be viable in the future for long-term worlds, but as it stands, this setup is weak and niche, and it's purely because of Soul Bastion's failure to provide anything new to Wortox's gameplay or his allies.

  Reveal hidden contents

As of now, I only find these Nice builds to be viable and, again, Lifebringer III begins to lose its purpose as the world develops. (It's still a bit nice to have tho for convenience, won't lie there.) These are all great builds and all, but notice the complete lack of Soul Bastion in all of them...

  Reveal hidden contents

There's definitely a non-negligible chance that Soul Pierce will become too weak in comparison, as it's incredibly niche other than farming Souls with few resources available, and pretty redundant with both Soul Decoy III and Shadow Harvester. It also kinda provides little with highly efficient farm setups (in fact it can be disruptive to them, like Varg farms...), but that's a topic for another day (like day 1, when I complained about it being bad at the very start of the beta... I think everyone just had new toy syndrome with it.) I have structural qualms with that skill too, but the subject here is about fixing Nice. It's not just the inclination though, it's largely the skills not having enough value. At least full Naughty is objectively superior for solo play, and has its niche during both Fuelweaver and Bee Queen, and the overload protection is insanely good QoL for Wortox on its own. It'll have its appeal, regardless of Soul Peirce's state (and would be a little easier to justify in multiplayer if Neutral skills were slightly better... but at least they're... fine-ish...)

Anyways, TL;DR unnerf Naughty and rework Soul Bastion, make small adjustments to Nice and/or buff both inclinations instead. Soul Bastion is legit the biggest problem on his skill tree and it's what makes Nice inclination less desirable. There's just not enough pull to pick a Nice build other than Lifebringer III and the sanity heal and we... still have good food, even with the penalty, so... But overall, I think this multi-pronged approach would please everybody better (especially if we made some further improvements to the Neutral branch on top of all of this, but we all know that's still a thing.)

This is very well put, I appreciate the reply! I hadn't actually considered that a side perk of nice increasing sanity loss from regular foods could be counteracted by a reduction of Wortox's regular food buffer. That's an interesting idea, and yes I heavily agree that I would not be so besmirched by the downside if it had more interesting aspects of it to make it more mechanically diverse from regular gameplay. I LIKE downsides when they're interesting, I like when they encourage unique ways of playing the game, but backtracking on a unique character mechanic and playing like everyone else but slightly worse doesn't feel like a downside I'd like to engage with. In a perfect world a characters downsides are as expansive as their upsides. A slight percentage increase only makes things more tedious. And yess so many soul bastion suggestions, it seems pretty sadly overlooked as far as skill tree discussion goes, and I'd hate to see it be glossed over.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

1 minute ago, viblym said:

This is very well put, I appreciate the reply! I hadn't actually considered that a side perk of nice increasing sanity loss from regular foods could be counteracted by a reduction of Wortox's regular food buffer. That's an interesting idea, and yes I heavily agree that I would not be so besmirched by the downside if it had more interesting aspects of it to make it more mechanically diverse from regular gameplay. I LIKE downsides when they're interesting, I like when they encourage unique ways of playing the game, but backtracking on a unique character mechanic and playing like everyone else but slightly worse doesn't feel like a downside I'd like to engage with. In a perfect world a characters downsides are as expansive as their upsides. A slight percentage increase only makes things more tedious. And yess so many soul bastion suggestions, it seems pretty sadly overlooked as far as skill tree discussion goes, and I'd hate to see it be glossed over.

Thank you. Yeah, overall, I do subscribe to the idea that the downside should be kept. But just like the overloading protection compensates for one area of Wortox's downsides, Nice should probably have a counterpart to it that directly interacts with Nice's primary drawback. I think a 25% boost would be enough to justify things, especially since I'm pretty sure it's enough to maintain the Enlightened Crown almost entirely from when it drops with just Banana Shakes. We can currently use Jelly Salad on any build for full upkeep, though it's a slower eat, and everyone hates the spoilage time on it anyways, even with a Polar Bearger Bin to help. And 25% more value from eating Souls would just be a minor nice-to-have on Naughty, since you kind of end up with more food than you can ask for at a certain point in this game and there's little else to do with it solo other than sanity restoration and Meaty Stews. This might make me prefer Jerky, though, when I can elect to use it on my food supply.

I really hope Soul Bastion gets fixed though. It's really much more challenging to make major changes like this once the beta is over, and it really hasn't been getting the attention it needs this whole time.

[Evelo]

As a pure solo player, I look at the nice side and go, "What does this offer me in anyway?"

That's my biggest criticism about Wortox currently. Naughty has stuff that appeals to solo but nice generally does not.

[crushcircuit]

4 hours ago, somethin said:

Taking nice means I can easily feed pigs monster meat for hambat without having to kite them in the early game. Also having an option to hire pigs for chopping trees out of bearger logging season is pretty convenient as I love to build big bases. I just love the convenience really.

this is incredibly interesting, thank you for the response! i still don't find it useful enough in direct comparison to naughty inclination, but im extremely grateful to get some reasoning outside of ppl just saying "well he's nice now... so they should like him :)" (no offense towards ppl who have been ofc but its a tad unhelpful in gameplay discussions... plus webber is also a good boy and they treat him the same way!)

39 minutes ago, Evelo said:

As a pure solo player, I look at the nice side and go, "What does this offer me in anyway?"

That's my biggest criticism about Wortox currently. Naughty has stuff that appeals to solo but nice generally does not.

IMO dst should be primarily balanced around co-op first and solo later, but the problem is that as somebody who primarily plays co-op i still think naughty is in a better spot right now. none of my current builds (solo or co-op) utilize the soul bastion branch in any way, and i actively go out of my way to stick to neutral or naughty inclination in order to avoid nice inclination. i think on both ends it could use some work to be a bit more useful

i also really like twintailed hearts, the tp ability seems REALLY nice, but i think they could use a small buff - even just making the souls go in your inventory when you squeeze them would be super nice, then maybe soul jars wouldnt be the end-all be-all solution for that sort of thing? i also agree w/ a point that was brought up earlier that them having spoilage is a bit unnecessary

i also think the first and second perk for them could stand to be combined bc theres no way youd JUST get the first one unless you just want telltale hearts 2 for whatever reason... itd be less expensive to just make the heart imo, even for newbies. but atm i have no idea what theyd make the second perk to replace the respawn penalty removal, it just feels like an odd choice (esp since the mechanic can be turned off in config, nullifying the utility of that perk completely, but maybe that's a weak point for me to bring up)

[ApoIIo]

4 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

To address the inclinations themselves, here's my preference: Buff them both, with a greater benefit to Nice. Remove the heal penalty on Naughty. Give Nice more food efficiency and Naughty more Soul efficiency for hunger (I suggest 125%, so 62.5% value from 50%.) The food efficiency is a way greater trade and would help to remedy the increased sanity penalty on Soul eating as Nice in the early-game. Hell, I'd like them to reduce the Nice penalty to 7.5 and the healing bonus to 3.75 instead, too (down from the current 200% to 150%.) It's just too drastic of a change to the numbers. Nerfing Naughty was not the answer; it was totally fine as is. Nice needed fixing and this did nothing to correct the issue

Thanks but no thanks, the incredibly quick sanity control is the ONLY reason I play nice Wortox and sink points into garbage like "healing more".

5 hours ago, crushcircuit said:

followers cannot be affected by any of wortox's abilities. he cannot heal them. they dont really give much use to him in the slightest. i'm not sure why people would want to use followers as wortox, when it feels like it'd be so much more fun with a character that has abilities revolving around that. i would genuinely love to know why, since i've never seen anybody explain why they like it.

I know a friend whose entire gameplay revolves around being a multiplayer healpet. He was INCREDIBLY upset about catcoons and pigs in pig king bases (like 3/4 of bases in pubs) inconvinicned him and specifically him, to the point he quit the game until nice inclination was added. Don't ask me why that's upsetting, I don't relate to it, I hate healing others and I would have just killed the pigs/catcoons in the question. But his reasoning was along the lines of "I'm supposed to be a multiplayer assisting player but I'm not allowed to exist in common player bases :/"

1 hour ago, Evelo said:

As a pure solo player, I look at the nice side and go, "What does this offer me in anyway?"

That's my biggest criticism about Wortox currently. Naughty has stuff that appeals to solo but nice generally does not.

the teleport perks are basically bread and butter for every skill tree to be fair, and im fine w/ the rest being multiplayer oriented

[OMEGASCRUFF]

24 minutes ago, ApoIIo said:

Thanks but no thanks, the incredibly quick sanity control is the ONLY reason I play nice Wortox and sink points into garbage like "healing more".

I didn't take it away in my suggestion.

[ApoIIo]

Just now, OMEGASCRUFF said:

I didn't take it away in my suggestion.

FML, I read past the word hunger. Skipping my morning coffee too many days in a row...

Also I really personally don't want Wortox to have improved mortal food efficiency, better digestion from being nice doesn't make much sense, and if anything naughty would be hungrier for souls than normal.