Make naughty wortox have a lower naughtiness threshold.

[Jakepeng99]

It will take less naughtiness points for him to summon krampus.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

Sure, if it replaces the stupid self-heal nerf.

[Jakepeng99]

2 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Sure, if it replaces the stupid self-heal nerf.

It shouldnt.

[Echsrick]

1 minute ago, Jakepeng99 said:

It shouldnt.

but only if others get healed less aswell

[Jakepeng99]

1 minute ago, Echsrick said:

but only if others get healed less aswell

I agree.

[Y0sH]

6 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Sure, if it replaces the stupid self-heal nerf.

My pet peeve is this lessened self heal for naughty Wortox and NOT lessened team healing lol

[Steorra]

7 hours ago, Echsrick said:

but only if others get healed less aswell

I agree.

11 minutes ago, Y0sH said:

My pet peeve is this lessened self heal for naughty Wortox and NOT lessened team healing lol

 Both of them should be lessened.

[ApoIIo]

7 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Sure, if it replaces the stupid self-heal nerf.

I don't see why it's such a huge deal.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

6 hours ago, ApoIIo said:

I don't see why it's such a huge deal.

Because it's a terrible design choice that achieves no positive results, and I don't personally care for the taste of slop.

I've already made a thread talking about this. I don't see a point in repeating it here. But for relevance to this specific suggestion, adding another trait to Naughty Wortox would cause some especially weird asymmetrical bloat between the two inclinations, and I don't think that's the desirable outcome. If anything gets added to an inclination, it needs to be considered that it impacts the players choice between the two options. They're already mismatched as is, due to the heal nerf. I don't see who it serves to make that even worse.

If they want this, it should replace the least desirable trait (which is obviously the heal nerf), or Nice needs an added counterpart. The balance between the two matters, and it's already lopsided.

[Steorra]

42 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

 But for relevance to this specific suggestion, adding another trait to Naughty Wortox would cause some especially weird asymmetrical bloat between the two inclinations, and I don't think that's the desirable outcome. If anything gets added to an inclination, it needs to be considered that it impacts the players choice between the two options. They're already mismatched as is, due to the heal nerf. I don't see who it serves to make that even worse.

It's a bit unclear for me. Doesn't the situation you mentioned was here already from the very beginning?

Naughy inclination effect is never a thing comparing with Nice. Since the interest points of Naughy inclination were those Naughy skills but not the Naughy effect itself. Nice skills were obviously weaker than Naughy skills, that's the reason why Nice effect is better than Naught itself.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

3 hours ago, Steorra said:

It's a bit unclear for me. Doesn't the situation you mentioned was here already from the very beginning?

Naughy inclination effect is never a thing comparing with Nice. Since the interest points of Naughy inclination were those Naughy skills but not the Naughy effect itself. Nice skills were obviously weaker than Naughy skills, that's the reason why Nice effect is better than Naught itself.

I think what you say is true, that the imbalance actually comes from the weakness of the Nice skills, not the inclination itself, but these aren't desirable results, nor is this a good solution to the problem. It just works around the issue instead of actually solving it.

Personal anecdote below on the current state of balance between the two inclinations, specifically during late-game:

Spoiler

From my experience, if you're taking a balanced build that can readily make some adjustments to either become Nice or Naughty, Nice is the better option. I'm doing this, myself, on even my long-term solo world by electing to take Soul Bastion over Soul Pierce, because the latter doesn't provide me with any value anymore, nor does the overload protection, nor do the Neutral skills. I can just swap into Soul Pierce for Bee Queen/Fuelweaver whenever I want, and the day-to-day convenience of using Souls for sanity control is really nice to have instead of only being able to rely on food. I might also take it for Crab King farming, but need to find out of it's worth it, especially without a Pearl. While not game-changing, the doubled heal doesn't hurt, either, because it's less disruptive in combat to heal and ultimately reduces the frequency I need to refill my jars more than Pleasant Pastorale + Naughty inclination would. The only stinky thing is that I have to force a Nice inclination using my last point with a useless Soul Bastion II, instead of taking Impromptu Flautist for the reduced Green Gem consumption, but I'm not willing to drop Soul Decoy III or Overwhelming Greed. (Really wish I could skip Nabsacker, lol.)

I originally and mistakenly thought that Naughty would be objectively better to have in the long-run, both in group and solo play, but it's actually the opposite after loads of playtesting during this beta. I think others will eventually begin to realize this is the case, too, but it's not something I thought would happen before all of this experience. I might switch back to Naughty when I scale up my Soul farm, though, to make restocking Souls a little more convenient through overload protection, but I don't have to restock as often with my current setup, and I think I might be able to work around overloads when refilling later, anyways, without much effort. At that stage of the game, though, the benefits of the inclinations themselves begin to outweigh the skills associated with them, and I'd typically rather have the better heal and sanity control options over overload protection, which is really all that Naughty even offers. But it's just personal preference at that point. Both seem fine in the super-late-game, but Naughty often felt like a hindrance during progression, and is more clearly inferior in groups, as it can be disruptive to certain farms and Nice skills provide more value. In solo play, I've built some Soul Pierce-specific farms, but I haven't found anything that does the job notably better than catapults or other options would. The only highly efficient Soul Pierce farm I've discovered so far requires multiple players.

Basically TL;DR The choice you're presented with in the late-game is either convenient sanity control + improved healing, overload protection + Soul Pierce or Neutral skills, or Neutral skills + Neutral inclination. But Neutral skills and inclination are weak, and Soul Pierce is niche and sometimes even obnoxious, and I can just respec into Soul Pierce whenever it's especially useful. So when the choices are presented in a way that displays the overall results, solo Nice seems suddenly a lot more appealing.

To address the current asymmetry between inclinations, both in skills and the inclinations themselves, Soul Bastion needs to be reworked with Wortox in his current iteration to correct poor balance between both Inclinations' skills (and this is unfortunately just a negative side effect to the current implementation of Soul Jar, because both optional Nice skill branches have reduced value as a direct result of it.) It needs to provide more notable value and impact to gameplay than it currently does. Then, Nice and Naughty inclinations should be adjusted to provide similar value from upsides and downsides (which seems to have been the original intent, but got clobbered in December after wrongly reacting to the idea that Nice inclination is worse than Naughty on its own.) Replacing the reduced self-heal with a flavor-related trait like OP's suggestion would help, followed by a corresponding but also functionally unimportant trait being given to Nice inclination to maintain parity. It can even be something kinda stupid and ultimately trivial that makes Nice Wortox a little friendlier to new players, like increased sanity restoration when picking flowers. Before the self-heal nerf, the problem wasn't that Naughty is better than Nice inclination. Nice inclination was marginally better to begin with. The problem was that Soul Bastion doesn't do enough, and doesn't offer anything special to solo play other than reduced Soul costs on healing, which isn't important in any situational vacuum and achieving goals, only important over the long-term for the sake of time saving and convenience.

I also think there might be an inherent bias to the beta test that favors solo, short-term experimentation over both group and long-term play, that might have warped peoples' perception of the Nice vs. Naughty dichotomy a bit. I don't think anyone's really considered the way that influences feedback, even though it certainly does.

Sorry to derail this thread a little from whether or not the actual subject of the thread is good or not. It should probably try to stay more on the subject in specific, but I mostly wanted to point out that the symmetry between the inclinations matters here. Nice inclination has 2 traits, and Naughty has 3. Adding this without any corresponding Nice trait would make it a 2:4 ratio, and I think we should really consider the logistics of adding more traits to each Inclination, when we're proposing an addition. Bloating one Inclination more than the other is going to raise some eyebrows on release, and I think there's a need to suggest a corresponding trait for Nice when we're asking for one to be added to Naughty, because the actual ability to implement a change like this is important to make it worth consideration.

I think the suggestion itself is fine, though it's pretty inconsequential to gameplay. You can use Beefalo or a Pig farm with Soul Decoy to pretty easily spawn Krampus, but this is always going to be a lesser option to just killing Glommer daily with permanent full moons. Bunnymen could provide multiple Krampus spawns daily, I guess, though the current option in nightly Glommer requires no building, so... It obviously makes sense thematically, though. This isn't the first time this has been suggested, because it does seem kind of like a no-brainer. The problem is that room has to be deliberately made for it, and no solution is offered for that, yet, other than what I've said in this message.

[ApoIIo]

8 hours ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Because it's a terrible design choice that achieves no positive results, and I don't personally care for the taste of slop.

I still think it's blown out of proportion. Naughty side comes with so many perks to amass possibly hundreds of souls within seconds that each soul costing an extremely small amount less is just not a problem. It doesn't take up any time at all to make up for, it's just a cute little flavor downside that barely does anything detrimental.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

1 hour ago, ApoIIo said:

I still think it's blown out of proportion. Naughty side comes with so many perks to amass possibly hundreds of souls within seconds that each soul costing an extremely small amount less is just not a problem. It doesn't take up any time at all to make up for, it's just a cute little flavor downside that barely does anything detrimental.

Spoiler

What perks? Naughty is just a a downside (heal nerf) and large opportunity cost (complete loss of sanity control) for one pointless upside (no sanity loss when eating) and another upside that, while convenient, you can replicate by just paying attention to your inventory as you recharge (overload protection.) It's not a cute little flavor perk. It's a careless choice that exacerbates a problem instead of solves it. A cute flavor perk is what OP is suggesting, not a heal nerf.

As I've mentioned, I've literally switched to Nice for late-game. Solo. With Soul Bastion. That's how bad the Naughty inclination actually is, when given an environment where you're free to make a choice between the two. It just wastes your time, unless using certain jar refill methods that most people are not going to do (and I think you can still use them without overload protection, but I need to apply this idea to gameplay.) The heal nerf is part of the problem, and doesn't solve any issues. It just wastes more time, while Nice inclination allows for convenient management of all 3 of your stats instead of just 2. Sanity control is a really big deal for Wortox, because it's always been a weakness for him. But it's a viable tool that he gets access to with Nice, while Naughty just lets you be more aloof about your inventory management when charging jars. Naughty holds you back in some ways, and Nice is just bonuses and a meaningless downside (that can actually be kinda an upside, depending on your needs and stage of the game.) That's why it's making the problem worse, not better.

But I think you're also considering the Naughty skills, not the inclination itself. Both the skills and the Inclination perks should be worthwhile, not just one or the other. The whole skill tree is riddled with things that are powerful and things that are weak. It needs to be more level, across the board, than it currently is, because that's overall one of the core reasons people dislike certain parts about this tree and are requesting they be updated. It's fine to have some stronger skills and some weaker skills, but the degree to which it's happening on Wortox's tree is pretty suboptimal, especially considering the heavy Insight investment for two weaker skills (one of which is super weak.)

What problem do you believe the self-heal nerf solves, here? So far, you've only minimized its inconvenience, which is fair, because it seems small when we're managing such egregious amounts of Souls, but that does nothing to make it a good design choice, especially when it specifically targets solo play. What makes it a good design choice? If you were to suggest an alternative that you think would be better, what would it be? And, just wondering, do you only use one of the inclinations, or do you switch between them often depending on the needs of your world? It would be good to know more about the context of your experience during the beta here, but it sounds like you've been pretty consistent with your skill loadout based on a few of our conversations. I feel like this problem is, like, especially noticeable when Soul Pierce stops being of much benefit anymore in your playthrough, or you're willing to skip it entirely, because the skill tree opens up a lot without it.

I'd really rather take this conversation to the thread I made regarding this specific subject, though, if you'd like to keep talking about it. I don't want to hijack Jakepeng's thread. This is relevant to OP's post for the reasons I mentioned in my previous post, but it's getting too in-the-weeds, and isn't contributing anything anymore. That's why I apologized for derailing the thread, but it's going to continue happening if I keep getting prodded about this here, because I have poor self-moderation when my opinion is challenged and I think I can back it up lmao

It's pretty out of date with a few of the things I've suggested as other options, because I've spent a lot more time on both Inclinations both solo and multiplayer over the past month, and effectively doubled my beta playtime. Most of it still stands, though. But it now seems more clear to me why Nice feels so good to use, while Naughty is really just overload protection and downsides, and I think removing the self-heal nerf would go a long way to make them feel more equal to each other as opposing Inclinations (even if still imperfect, I could definitely live with it. And it would make more room to implement actual flavor suggestions like this, if Klei wants.)

[ApoIIo]

On 1/26/2025 at 11:35 PM, OMEGASCRUFF said:

  Reveal hidden contents

What perks? Naughty is just a a downside (heal nerf) and large opportunity cost (complete loss of sanity control) for one pointless upside (no sanity loss when eating) and another upside that, while convenient, you can replicate by just paying attention to your inventory as you recharge (overload protection.) It's not a cute little flavor perk. It's a careless choice that exacerbates a problem instead of solves it. A cute flavor perk is what OP is suggesting, not a heal nerf.

As I've mentioned, I've literally switched to Nice for late-game. Solo. With Soul Bastion. That's how bad the Naughty inclination actually is, when given an environment where you're free to make a choice between the two. It just wastes your time, unless using certain jar refill methods that most people are not going to do (and I think you can still use them without overload protection, but I need to apply this idea to gameplay.) The heal nerf is part of the problem, and doesn't solve any issues. It just wastes more time, while Nice inclination allows for convenient management of all 3 of your stats instead of just 2. Sanity control is a really big deal for Wortox, because it's always been a weakness for him. But it's a viable tool that he gets access to with Nice, while Naughty just lets you be more aloof about your inventory management when charging jars. Naughty holds you back in some ways, and Nice is just bonuses and a meaningless downside (that can actually be kinda an upside, depending on your needs and stage of the game.) That's why it's making the problem worse, not better.

But I think you're also considering the Naughty skills, not the inclination itself. Both the skills and the Inclination perks should be worthwhile, not just one or the other. The whole skill tree is riddled with things that are powerful and things that are weak. It needs to be more level, across the board, than it currently is, because that's overall one of the core reasons people dislike certain parts about this tree and are requesting they be updated. It's fine to have some stronger skills and some weaker skills, but the degree to which it's happening on Wortox's tree is pretty suboptimal, especially considering the heavy Insight investment for two weaker skills (one of which is super weak.)

What problem do you believe the self-heal nerf solves, here? So far, you've only minimized its inconvenience, which is fair, because it seems small when we're managing such egregious amounts of Souls, but that does nothing to make it a good design choice, especially when it specifically targets solo play. What makes it a good design choice? If you were to suggest an alternative that you think would be better, what would it be? And, just wondering, do you only use one of the inclinations, or do you switch between them often depending on the needs of your world? It would be good to know more about the context of your experience during the beta here, but it sounds like you've been pretty consistent with your skill loadout based on a few of our conversations. I feel like this problem is, like, especially noticeable when Soul Pierce stops being of much benefit anymore in your playthrough, or you're willing to skip it entirely, because the skill tree opens up a lot without it.

It's pretty out of date with a few of the things I've suggested as other options, because I've spent a lot more time on both Inclinations both solo and multiplayer over the past month, and effectively doubled my beta playtime. Most of it still stands, though. But it now seems more clear to me why Nice feels so good to use, while Naughty is really just overload protection and downsides, and I think removing the self-heal nerf would go a long way to make them feel more equal to each other as opposing Inclinations (even if still imperfect, I could definitely live with it. And it would make more room to implement actual flavor suggestions like this, if Klei wants.)

I actually found myself going absolutely insane irl in the absence of my naughty perks, while I ended up not missing them at all when it was time to swap to naughty from nice. I start nice because it's really useful to not have to pack sanity food during fuelweaver, but that's the only thing I like about it. Teleporting others is nice but it sees use thrice per world and in solo it does nothing. Unless I'm coping with severe ping(or to be fair even when I am), healing more is beyond worthless- "Wow, it now costs four souls per season to keep my health up instead of five!"