Wes Skill Tree Concept

[Pruinae]

9 hours ago, Cheggf said:

I fish for food when I rush a boat base, and I often play Wes while I'm doing that. If you're primarily staying on the ocean fish is a great food source. The only reason most people don't fish for food is because most people don't like engaging with the ocean and want to do it the minimum amount possible, so they hoard food before departing then put it in an ice box on the boat.

Amassing the seeds you want is the longest and slowest part of farming. If you try to farm, this perk would waste 100x more time than the slower work perk. Especially considering most things that the slower work perk would even affect can be aided with followers or entirely replaced by giants like bearger. There's no alternative for getting seeds. If I want to avoid the work penalty perk, I can use things like pigs, bearger, or even deerclops to help me do it faster. If I want to avoid the seed penalty perk, there's nothing I can do. I need to spend 5x as much time gathering seeds, I need to spend 5x as much time hoeing the ground, I need to spend 5x as much time planting seeds, I need to spend 5x as much time shoveling weeds, and I need to spend more time tending to the plants. Eventually it would reach a point where as long as I don't let the seeds spoil I won't have to put up with the annoying thing any more, but this is an enormous time sink that's incomparably larger than the minor work decrease he has. 

What is the idea of it? That you, the supposedly more advanced player, entirely ignore game mechanics and delegate them to other players? What if there are no other players? Or are you referring to Wes just not being able to farm at all and instead he just makes those annoying flowers for subpar tea, so that the supposedly more advanced player is supposed to not need to think about things like season preference, family happiness, water, nutrients, crop combos, or fertilizers, and instead he just mindlessly spams unidentified seeds to get the same weed over & over again?

I'm glad you shared your boat base experience, you are right in the "people being biased against the ocean" department, I fail to see how randomized fishing would affect that, maybe your grip is with another part of the perk or maybe I am failing to see something?

The idea is "bad luck when interacting with earth elements", that did involve making farming worse enough to discourage farming as solo Wes, to make the player consider using a resource they usually wouldn't go for, while not making it impossible to do it the usual way long-term or in multiplayer (other players get the specific seeds for you, which they would have an easier time doing with you around). 
If one chooses to play Wes with a beefalo, they might choose to use "Clown to Earth" but no "Evil Eye", it would enable them to farm beefalo treats to get away with a lot more than otherwise. Using Dreadstone might keep one constantly insane, the Soothing Tea might be a big deal in that scenario. The 80% might have come across as too much of an arbitrary number, I simply did not want to bar Wes from farming entirely, and I value Forget-Me-Lots, so it seems like a good thing to me.
There's also the notion of seeing farming as something that slows the game down in and of itself, which is kind of funny to consider.

9 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Do you think that people don't ever use things like thulecite, gems, rocks, papyrus, or the million other useful items that the sunken & ag chests provide? Just because you personally do not go for these treasures for those rewards specifically does not mean that the rewards don't exist at all. Regardless of whether you personally are going for the sunken chest to try to get a walking cane, to try to get thulecite, or to just see what you get, if you get thulecite from it you still get thulecite from it. Every piece of thulecite you get from a sunken chest is a piece of thulecite you don't have to get from a statue. Every cut stone you get from it, the same resource that you're complaining about needing to spend longer obtaining, is a cut stone you don't need to get from a boulder.

Yes, those were assumptions based on personal experience. The way you value Sunken Chests seems very particular, personally the process of going there and getting the treasure is time consuming enough that I have a hard time considering the extra loot a benefit and not just clutter that came with what I want, I respect your playstyle and can see it being more useful if you're someone that spends more time on the ocean. However, I think that makes you a minority of a minority (person that makes boat bases and plays Wes, again, another personal assumption), my concept was made with what I judged be the majority in mind and therefore affects your playstyle in a negative way.

9 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The loot stash is the same. You complain about boss fights taking 33% longer, yet want to remove a chance to remove 100% of the duration of a boss fight. If Klaus drops a BQ crown and a bundling wrap blueprint, you can completely skip that fight without missing out on much. If he drops the toadstool thing you're needing that toadstool didn't drop, you can completely skip the toadstool rematch. These are all huge time investments that are way bigger than the ones created by the minor work speed penalty, and again unlike the work speed penalty, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't open the chest differently to get better rewards, you just get crap.

Correct me if I am wrong (and I might be wrong since I am bad at math), but the probability of getting both crown and bundling wrap blueprint is 1.1%, and the Toadstool example would take longer on average to get from Klaus than from Toadstool rematches, no? Skipping 100% of a boss fight is not something I would want to do anyway, it is true I don't find it fun to do things slower without any benefit in compensation, but I dislike not getting to do the things even more.

9 hours ago, Cheggf said:

The idea of a skill tree with drawbacks that can be utilized to your advantage is what I have always wanted for Wes, but you have not done that here. At least not with the skills I've criticized. These perks are nothing but slowing the game down with no way to counteract it, unlike the way that his work speed penalty slows the game down (by a far smaller amount) with the ability to counteract it by harvesting with other sources than an axe or a pickaxe. You have even directly slowed down the harvesting rate you're complaining about and made the game even more stagnant with your sunken chest nerf. If you need a lot of stone for whatever reason, maybe you're making lots of cobblestone, you could be searching for sunken chests to try to get all their loot including the seeds that you're happy about, and while you're doing that you'd be getting a good amount of cut stone. And here you're seeing that Wes is using creativity and ingenuity to tackle two birds with one stone, and saying "Stop that! You're supposed to be the slow character who spends more time grinding things!".

I get you're saying I get a lot more from chests than just what I personally value, but even if I try to value the other loot I just can't, if I want any specific loot the chest can give me I can spend the same amount of time I would spend getting chests to get the specific loot in many many times the amount they could give me in that time-frame. Outside of an ocean-centric playstyle, the chests lose a lot of value.

I realize I might give a "as long as it isn't my playstyle that is being affected, it's fine" impression, but if I were to consider fully every playstyle one can have while making every perk, I probably wouldn't have ever came out with the concept, or end up generalizing so much that it would get too watered down and uninteresting (skill issue confirmed?). My previous answer was with the intention of sharing the perspective I had while making the perks because I wasn't able to parse exactly what you meant, in no way I meant to say what I perceive as fact but I can see it coming across that way (as it often does when autism proccs, I can't always overanalyze what I typed to make sure I avoid sounding like that). So thank you for sharing your perspective, hopefully Klei can come up with a skilltree that can please us both.

[Cheggf]

After thinking about it for longer I've changed my mind on a few of these things. Poisson D'Avril and Clown to Earth are fine. But I still don't like Clown Jewels and No Dice, and I'm not 100% on if I like Wes being unable to get LGAs from graves. I think it seems a bit redundant because one of his other perks prevents him from using LGAs. I would personally remove that part of Clown to Earth, and also allow Mime, Body, and Soul to let you revive via Meat Effigies since they're far more expensive and less powerful than LGAs. It should really just block LGAs. 

23 minutes ago, Pruinae said:

I get you're saying I get a lot more from chests than just what I personally value, but even if I try to value the other loot I just can't, if I want any specific loot the chest can give me I can spend the same amount of time I would spend getting chests to get the specific loot in many many times the amount they could give me in that time-frame. Outside of an ocean-centric playstyle, the chests lose a lot of value.

I realize I might give a "as long as it isn't my playstyle that is being affected, it's fine" impression, but if I were to consider fully every playstyle one can have while making every perk, I probably wouldn't have ever came out with the concept, or end up generalizing so much that it would get too watered down and uninteresting (skill issue confirmed?). My previous answer was with the intention of sharing the perspective I had while making the perks because I wasn't able to parse exactly what you meant, in no way I meant to say what I perceive as fact but I can see it coming across that way (as it often does when autism proccs, I can't always overanalyze what I typed to make sure I avoid sounding like that). So thank you for sharing your perspective, hopefully Klei can come up with a skilltree that can please us both.

Obviously the chest is not the fastest way to get the loot in the chest, but the chest is not only giving that loot. You say you go for chests when you want to get canes and seeds, and while you're doing that you're getting other resources. I've had times where I was very lucky with chests and I got 2 stacks of cut stone from only a handful of chests, each chest can give up to 6. I see no reason to lower the amount of resources you get from the chest when all it does is lengthen the time you spend getting them from other more efficient sources. Why nerf the inefficient way to be even weaker? Even if you wanted to make Wes harder in a time spent doing things way, that doesn't seem like the way to go about it. The way you talk about the chest and how the bonus loot is "just clutter" it sounds like you wouldn't even think of this as a drawback and it wouldn't affect you at all. How is that an impactful and fun drawback for the character to play around, if you think of the items as garbage anyways? You get a coin for picking the perk, so shouldn't it be negatively impacting you?

I think the skill tree would be a lot better if these perks were more like Evil Eye, Hapless Hunter, Dramaturgy, and Magnetic Personality. Those perks actively make the game harder for you, but they all either help other players automatically just by making it harder for you instead of them, or can be turned around to be beneficial to yourself with a little ingenuity. They're all much more interesting than just getting less rewards from stuff. Those are what I've always wanted a Wes skill tree to be like.

I reread my comments and I came off as a hater, but that's just because being a hater is in my bones. I can't help it. I actually like the tree overall, I just dislike that one aspect about it.

[GamePlayer42]

On 1/17/2025 at 4:04 AM, Pruinae said:

 

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It is mostly here to allow solo players

to benefit from his luck perks. But the justice of making Wes' favorite food actually useful for him is also sweet. Maybe the benefits should be extended to every butter crockpot food? He is French after all.

 

I like how th skill interacts with wes, but outside of character swapping, how is a solo wes gonna get the crepes?

[gaymime]

1 hour ago, GamePlayer42 said:

I like how th skill interacts with wes, but outside of character swapping, how is a solo wes gonna get the crepes?

well the whole skilltree is designed around the idea that you'd never actually play by yourself. i think there is the expectation that you'd probably come by at least one warly at some point or might even choose servers that have a warly in them already

[Curly Bill]

The invisible wall parry and utilizing the stage play setpiece, as well as being able to mimic other character's traits sounds really freaking cool. I hope they add some fun stuff like this. I really hope at the very least the parry gets added. High skill, neat reward thing i think can work okay with him.

[Dr.Webber]

I like how you think would you be open to helping me make some edits to this tree: 

Here’s the previous versions incase you want bring back old skills/abilities :

 

[chenxx]

I just wanted to share some of my casual thoughts on the Wes skill tree. 

[Hollow soul 3]

A skill that makes food slip out of his hands occasionally