Since Soul Jars remove a HUGE downside of Wortox, how about this?

[Reiko24]

Each Soul Jar needs Wortox’s soul itself to be split, decreasing his max stats (or just health) by 5 or 10 for each of Soul Jars in his inventory.

 

if someone wants to have 5 soul jars, they would have the same health as Wilson. (They’ve got infinite healing anyways)

[Civecilim]

This seems not at all relevant unless people are using 20 jars and I didn't know. If you increase the health lost per jar, it might upset people. I'm not sure how workable this idea is.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

Just now, Civecilim said:

If you increase the health lost per jar, it might upset people.

This is a beta. Things are expected to change. It doesn't matter if the change is a nerf or a buff. It matters that the change is a good design choice for the end result.

Not saying I agree or disagree with OP's exact implementation, but I think the jars absolutely deserve some form of drawback so long as they stay in their current state. This a fine idea conceptually. The jars remove risk with Wortox, so add it back in a different way. Makes sense to me.

[Edible Coal]

1 hour ago, Reiko24 said:

Each Soul Jar needs Wortox’s soul itself to be split, decreasing his max stats (or just health) by 5 or 10 for each of Soul Jars in his inventory.

 

if someone wants to have 5 soul jars, they would have the same health as Wilson. (They’ve got infinite healing anyways)

didnt know wortox is secertly voldemort

he will now unable to die unless all soul are destory

[Reiko24]

1 hour ago, Edible Coal said:

didnt know wortox is secertly voldemort

he will now unable to die unless all soul are destory

blud now has horcruxes 

[Dingle]

You'd want to drop jars sometimes in that case, which would mess up Overwhelming Greed and be a nerf to Covetous and the Knabsack. They're all still highly connected.

Could have worked if this was implemented: 

 

Or could have worked with OMEGASCRUFFs idea of the entire skill tree being more designed around soul efficiency with a diminished emphasis on a now stand-alone Jar, instead of soul capacity over efficiency with everything tied to the Jar.

[asdsaax]

Armor would mitigate that weakness

even if his health dropped to 75 from the start, not much would change because it's easy to control your HP when you receive 8 damage tops and you have very reliable heal in your pocket

and healing in that game isn't really hard to access thanks to:

Blue Mushrooms, Pierogi, Trail mix, Tall bird eggs and so on

And even when your HP is technically infinite, people don't really want to tank due to how resource exhausting it is and majority of bosses are possible to beat on fair terms

Also I believe they didn't remove the soul limit for his healing, but so he can deliver on his main premise: teleportation

because healing was never the issue since Wortox had to catch bees for Ruins Rush... and others had to use a shovel in Bshroom biome which offers equivalent of 2 souls per item up to 40 if you fancy

Like sure, Wortox has infinite healing on paper, but others just gotta make an extra step when having power like Wolfgang, Maxwell, Wendy and etc. for similiar results

with main difference being that you have to be just a little smarter about your health

Tl;dr I think that nerf wouldn't balance out anything and is kinda unjustified by comparison in my opinion

[Reiko24]

2 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

Armor would mitigate that weakness

even if his health dropped to 75 from the start, not much would change because it's easy to control your HP when you receive 8 damage tops and you have very reliable heal in your pocket

and healing in that game isn't really hard to access thanks to:

Blue Mushrooms, Pierogi, Trail mix, Tall bird eggs and so on

And even when your HP is technically infinite, people don't really want to tank due to how resource exhausting it is and majority of bosses are possible to beat on fair terms

Also I believe they didn't remove the soul limit for his healing, but so he can deliver on his main premise: teleportation

because healing was never the issue since Wortox had to catch bees for Ruins Rush... and others had to use a shovel in Bshroom biome which offers equivalent of 2 souls per item up to 40 if you fancy

Like sure, Wortox has infinite healing on paper, but others just gotta make an extra step when having power like Wolfgang, Maxwell, Wendy and etc. for similiar results

with main difference being that you have to be just a little smarter about your health

Tl;dr I think that nerf wouldn't balance out anything and is kinda unjustified by comparison in my opinion

Not necessarily a HP reduction though. He could get different penalties. (Just not movement speed because it would make the game miserable)

[asdsaax]

5 minutes ago, Reiko24 said:

Not necessarily a HP reduction though. He could get different penalties. (Just not movement speed because it would make the game miserable)

If I were to nerf Wortox considering only his infinite healing then I would target armor efficiency, so he can mend his heart but not protect it

But that would make Bee Queen, Ruins and Pearled Crab King very miserable because they are health demanding fights

and we also have Wigfrid that heals for free and has built in damage and armor mults... I think it would take much more redesigning than just nerfing Wortox to establish certain power budget balance and trade offs

[salty_cookie]

I feel like each branch of the skilltree handles souls diferently. Nice one allows you to extract more use from a single soul. Naughty is built around getting way more souls, soul jars are made specificaly to hoard souls. If you make jars a pain to deal with, then people will just go back to the trusted blue caps early game and pierogi late game.

Do the jars remove a downside of wortox of having limited souls to work with? Yes. However, If we look at how the skilltree is built. Naughty is built around having large soul numbers. It has the AoE options for soul farming. It has the jars to store all the obtained souls. It has a skill that buffs your damage based on the amount of carried souls. I dont think just punishing you for carrying too many jars is a good gameplay design. As it would make overflowing greed and covetous collector kinda horrible options. With you unable to use jars in day to day gameplay it would make wortox way too annoying as you would have to refill on souls contantly. Which was an issue pre skilltree.

Finally lets look at the jar recipe: 1 red gem, 1 jar, 2 marble. Now where have we seen this combination before? Ageless watch! 1 red gem, 2 marble, 1 time pieces. I think klei are intending for jars to be wortox version of an ageless watch, and we all know what ageless watch is capable of when in large numbers.

Rebalancing jars to be good while not being spammable would require far too much effort from klei. I don't want klei to be forced to remake half of wortox tree because jars can be spammed. They already have to expand walter tree and [redacted]. Lets not make them remake wortox tree too or we might turn this 1 beta into a whole content arc.

Of course it is my opinion and therefore is not the objective fact.

[Steorra]

25 minutes ago, salty_cookie said:

Nice one allows you to extract more use from a single soul. Naughty is built around getting way more souls, soul jars are made specificaly to hoard souls.

I would take this logic. However, if we want this logic becomes meaningful, why Soul Jar could helps a lot to skills of Nice? How could I enjoying the privilege from both Soul Jar and Capricious Movement at the same time? They should be completely separate if the logic going here.

25 minutes ago, salty_cookie said:

Do the jars remove a downside of wortox of having limited souls to work with? Yes. However,

I'm sorry but I have no intention to offend you. This is extremely important for me. We might have completely different opinions and arguing heated, but the honest here is pretty worthy for appreciation... If considered how others attitude towards downside of Wortox before (most of them simply reject to admit that it's a downside when you asking a discussion for those downsides of Wortox has been fixed).

Spoiler

25 minutes ago, salty_cookie said:

Of course it is my opinion and therefore is not the objective fact.

I think I would like to learning to you... Secretly.

 

[Echsrick]

the downside is filling your inventory slots that could have been used to carry loot

[OMEGASCRUFF]

32 minutes ago, asdsaax said:

I think it would take much more redesigning than just nerfing Wortox to establish certain power budget balance and trade offs

Yeah, that's kinda the conclusion I've reached regarding the whole situation. I think something like what the OP has suggested is on the right track to help remedy the current situation a bit without much programming work, but the whole skill tree is such a mess in the way that the value of every skill is highly dependent on the Soul Jar, and feedback has been almost entirely ignored.

2 hours ago, Dingle said:

Or could have worked with OMEGASCRUFFs idea of the entire skill tree being more designed around soul efficiency with a diminished emphasis on a now stand-alone Jar, instead of soul capacity over efficiency with everything tied to the Jar.

I still have that draft of a complete outline of how I'd adjust the skill tree, without the Soul Jar, to achieve more cohesive results that still really open up his playstyle but keep/improve most existing features. It mostly just needs proofreading and some minor changes from what I learned during my most recent late-game solo world experience. I just have a lot of things I also need to put into practice and test, and there's only so much time I can dedicate to all of this. If I had a concrete timeline that would ensure I'd not be wasting all my effort, I'd literally program it all into the game, myself, and playtest it. Every change I proposed is light programming lift and super minor asset updates for icons, it's just a lot of small adjustments and it touches many different components. And testing is so incredibly important to being able to definitively say "These are good results." I'm not even a programmer — my specialty is product and quality. That's how simple all of the programming changes I'm considering are, because I know minimizing dev hours is directly correlated with the possibility of a task getting done. But they haven't given us any estimate for when the beta test is expected to close, and I really don't know that I can do all of this before time runs out. I don't even know that there's any value to it. It doesn't seem like anyone's listening.

I just really want the end product to be successful for Wortox, and what we have now just feels so out-of-touch. While it fixes many of his core problems he had without a skill tree (which I think why public reception has been... fine-ish?), it's over-corrected in some areas, and is incoherent and underdeveloped in others. Unity is ultimately what I really want out of the design behind his skill tree, but we haven't reached that goal at all. It's hard, because people have become accustomed to what we already have after two months, but I'd rather the hurdle of backlash be overcome during a beta test rather than post-release among the entire player base (or even worse, issues are never addressed at all.)

It's also just been incredibly exhausting to put in all of this unpaid time and effort into this, while the team has been incredibly unresponsive to not only my own feedback, but everyone else who seems to care. It feels like I'm screaming into the void. I immediately raised flags about the heavy handedness behind the Soul Jar's implementation when the beta came out, but there's been no acknowledgement that there's a problem at all. With anything. Not even just Soul Jars. Things like the Nabsack. Soul Bastion. Cloudy Carmine. Inclination. Everything, really. I don't know precisely what is going on over there (though I have a few guesses), but whatever it is, it's bleeding into their work so badly.

Also, TIL it's "Overflowing Greed", not "Overwhelming." Only took two months for me to notice. Lmao

[Dingle]

3 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Yeah, that's kinda the conclusion I've reached regarding the whole situation. I think something like what the OP has suggested is on the right track to help remedy the current situation a bit without much programming work, but the whole skill tree is such a mess in the way that the value of every skill is highly dependent on the Soul Jar, and feedback has been almost entirely ignored.

I still have that draft of a complete outline of how I'd adjust the skill tree, without the Soul Jar, to achieve more cohesive results that still really open up his playstyle but keep/improve most existing features. It mostly just needs proofreading and some minor changes from what I learned during my most recent late-game solo world experience. I just have a lot of things I also need to put into practice and test, and there's only so much time I can dedicate to all of this. If I had a concrete timeline that would ensure I'd not be wasting all my effort, I'd literally program it all into the game, myself, and playtest it. Every change I proposed is light programming lift and super minor asset updates for icons, it's just a lot of small adjustments and it touches many different components. And testing is so incredibly important to being able to definitively say "These are good results." I'm not even a programmer — my specialty is product and quality. That's how simple all of the programming changes I'm considering are, because I know minimizing dev hours is directly correlated with the possibility of a task getting done. But they haven't given us any estimate for when the beta test is expected to close, and I really don't know that I can do all of this before time runs out. I don't even know that there's any value to it. It doesn't seem like anyone's listening.

I just really want the end product to be successful for Wortox, and what we have now just feels so out-of-touch. While it fixes many of his core problems he had without a skill tree (which I think why public reception has been... fine-ish?), it's over-corrected in some areas, and is incoherent and underdeveloped in others. Unity is ultimately what I really want out of the design behind his skill tree, but we haven't reached that goal at all. It's hard, because people have become accustomed to what we already have after two months, but I'd rather the hurdle of backlash be overcome during a beta test rather than post-release among the entire player base (or even worse, issues are never addressed at all.)

It's also just been incredibly exhausting to put in all of this unpaid time and effort into this, while the team has been incredibly unresponsive to not only my own feedback, but everyone else who seems to care. It feels like I'm screaming into the void. I immediately raised flags about the heavy handedness behind the Soul Jar's implementation when the beta came out, but there's been no acknowledgement that there's a problem at all. With anything. Not even just Soul Jars. Things like the Nabsack. Soul Bastion. Cloudy Carmine. Inclination. Everything, really. I don't know precisely what is going on over there (though I have a few guesses), but whatever it is, it's bleeding into their work so badly.

Also, TIL it's "Overflowing Greed", not "Overwhelming." Only took two months for me to notice. Lmao

I haven't forgotten about Soul Bastion's problems, I just stopped bringing it up because I figure they saw the feedback, but rejected it.

Same for everything else. We'll see, I guess, but my prediction is we'll only know for sure when the beta is actually launched. Otherwise, silence is likely.

I'm pretty much just focusing on two things at this point: Cloudy Carmine, and untying Knabsack from being a weird knot tied into everything else. I figure maybe something will happen with one of those? Maybe?

A lot of it is just the curse of the original design of the Naughty tree. They can't seem to fully let go of it, so it lingers on. It's a stone around Wortox's neck. For all the skill trees thus far, they don't tend to vary much from the original concept on first day of beta.

11 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

Also, TIL it's "Overflowing Greed", not "Overwhelming." Only took two months for me to notice. Lmao

I refuse to acknowledge this.

[Y0sH]

3 hours ago, Dingle said:

I haven't forgotten about Soul Bastion's problems, I just stopped bringing it up because I figure they saw the feedback, but rejected it.

Same for everything else. We'll see, I guess, but my prediction is we'll only know for sure when the beta is actually launched. Otherwise, silence is likely.

I'm pretty much just focusing on two things at this point: Cloudy Carmine, and untying Knabsack from being a weird knot tied into everything else. I figure maybe something will happen with one of those? Maybe?

A lot of it is just the curse of the original design of the Naughty tree. They can't seem to fully let go of it, so it lingers on. It's a stone around Wortox's neck. For all the skill trees thus far, they don't tend to vary much from the original concept on first day of beta.

I refuse to acknowledge this.

The separation from Knabsack and soul Jar would open up builds so much more and I'm hopeful they'll do something about it. The Soul Jar "removing" a downside in my opinion just kind of traded a downside for another like mentioned Wanda can build unlimited clocks for health and can essentially gain the same results healing wise just without the farming. The downside just traded soul limitation with inventory management (which is personally one of the more annoying things to deal with in DST).

If decreasing stats based on number of jars held is direction they'll take then it'll probably just decrease Knabsack damage too for holding at least 3 (because it's linked) which doesn't quite fix the issue presented because you can still wear marble armor with a thul helm with a stack of souls and see little difference from combat before the Skilltree. This can also be done with just plain Wilson in the same armor and a stack of blue mushrooms. 

In all of my Naughty and Nice playthroughs I have never held more than 3 at a time and I can't even see any reason to carry more. If the Skilltree wasn't so seemingly filled with weak or "filler" skills, Soul Jars wouldn't be so much of a "must pick"  as it stands now. Unlinking Knabsack and Jar is definitely a great step in the right direction.

[tgoCS]

I think that if the hunger increases faster as the Soul Jars Wortox have would be a good downsize to this infinite health/hunger problem. 

[Kwaik]

How's this for a serious downside of soul jars, permenantly losing (at least) 4 inventory slots to a couple of jars that server virtually no purpose exceot increasing your stack size and knabsack/soul damage?