WX enthusiast's skill tree thoughts

[Baark0]

Whoever decided to give wx a god damn shield generator is awesome. I'm pretty sure its bugged currently though, as you heal to full in about half a second after waiting about 10 seconds. Even without this bug, it's still insanely good, as its a 25 shield that regenerates over time, and also blocks all damage past the shield threshold. What this means is that if you were to take 100 damage but you only had a shield of 25, the shield would break and negate the other 75 damage. On top of that, it scales with any health circuits you might have installed, up to a maximum of 85 shield with 2 super hardy circuits. The fact that these don't compete with speed/night vision is just the cherry on top.

I'm not too sure how to feel about the illumination circuit changes. Overall I think it's an improvement, though having less range directly around yourself and having most of the light be direction based seems like it might be a little jank at times. The super illumination circuit could probably do with giving a little extra light directly around wx, but it seems like a genuine competitor to the night vision circuit since you can run 3 speed circuits alongside it.

The rangebooster circuit is kinda weird? I assume it must increase the range you can control drones at, since getting a little extra vision range, while helpful, is a little odd. The range boost also seems to have diminishing returns, with the 7th one outright doing nothing. Here's what 6 rangebooster circuits looks like:

The storage circuit seems like it could be pretty good, but it costs infused moon glass which makes it obtainable pretty late into the game. If it was just regular moon glass, then I could maybe see it being a helpful tool, however the items inside these slots don't count towards items in your inventory, meaning you can't craft with items in these expansion slots. Even if these 2 things were changed, I could see spatializer circuits being a niche item, but probably not super useful since them items in these slots can only be accessed after performing an animation.

Speaking of, I adore the idea of having multiple circuit types, as it actually gives a use to circuits like the beanbooster. I'm also especially grateful that klei decided to give us +1 circuit slot, as this will do so much for build diversity, especially with all the new 1 slot circuits. The night vision circuit might be bugged right now too, as I don't get the night vision effect when its equipped. I do wonder if changing the temperature circuits to be alpha instead of beta would be better, since as it stands the alpha circuits are pretty much just stat boosts, which while appreciated, are a little boring (not the shield generator, that one is genuinely so cool and i hope it doesnt get nerfed too hard because i want to use this so badly).

The new bodies are neat, hopefully the teleport sticks around because I'd love to be able to play wx without having to use the super expensive telelocators to fast travel around the map. Hopefully you can have a different amount of bodies in the caves and in the surface so that you arent limited to 4 teleport locations in total.

Fine motor control, watts up, right to modify, and hot swap can probably be compressed into 2 skills. They seem like nice qol stuff but I'd much rather spend my skill points on the fun and unique perks, unless they get compressed together, in which case it'd be a lot easier to justify.

The zaptrocuter feels a bit clunky, and its not exactly obvious how youre meant to activate it, but being able to drone strike things is really cool.

The mapper drone seems incredibly useful early game, especially for finding the lunar island. Not much more to add on that, its a good perk, cant wait to use it.

The transporter drone also seems very helpful for playing with others or even as a means to send some items away, such as thulecite and ruins gems during a ruins clear.

Overall I'm very happy with this, and I'm excited to see what the omega circuits and affinity skills have to offer. All I hope is that klei doesn't do anything weird like make circuits drain in durability over time while in use, as that'd lose a lot of the appeal of the character for me.