A suggestion for WX shadow affinity : reintroducing the Living Artifact

[Tentsuki]

Hi y'all, with WX skill tree finally out and the shadow affinity still held for a bit longer, I figured it would be better to suggest changes now than never. As many stated out already, I share the sentiment that the current shadow affinity feels a bit out of place with what WX is supposed to offer. First time ever posting here so bear with me if I make mistakes haha.

My idea is the following : why not reintroduce the living artifact from Hamlet's DLC as the core concept of the shadow affinity ? The lunar affinity already addresses the drone-like aspect, although I think it would be cool if they had a lil bit more synergy with the other drone perks but that's beside the point.

Through the living artifact, I was thinking of strengthening WX's circuits through a temporary mean. Much like Hamlet, it'd replace your equipment except this one shouldn't make you straight up invincible but take your actual stats (and plugged in circuits) into account. I've seen a few posts already suggesting that WX could plug in dreadstone or pure horror. You could consider that the living artifact would replace WX's weapon and armor and allow him to stuff dreadstone or other rocks into this item to increase its stats. This is to make it both accessible early game (imagine a recipe with scraps and gears, plug in some marble for armor) and keep it relevant late-game with dreadstone.

Circuit-wise, the thing that bothers me the most is that the current affinity is as someone already suggested a "delta circuit". Having a drain of resources instead, be it your battery bar or a new fuel gauge, would not only allow for stronger short-term buffs but also make it more involved throughout a playthrough. If battery is used, WX would need to maintain his circuits active with minimal charges so the artifact is not clunky to use (then allow battery refill with pure horror for example).

Lastly, since we're talking about an iron-man suit, it could give further gimmicks to WX circuits. Among the few ideas I had, you could think of :

• Make thermals and electric circuits enable a range ability. Damage could scale on the living artifact's inner materials and the projectile's elemental effect would be determined by your circuit.
• Spin circuit could enable a drill so you can mine and chop resources while wearing the armor. After all, the durability of the armor and how using it as a weapon affects it remains to be discussed.
• The block circuit could straight-up give you a bone armor effect in exchange of battery charges.
• If you wanted DR or extra planar defense THAT badly, why not put it here ? Depending on how easy it is to maintain the artifact stats should vary accordingly.
• The rangebooster circuit could increase your attack range by a small bit and further scale with more circuits plugged in.

The goal being to make WX more interactive with the circuits. Now that'd be a lot of work to add that so I doubt it ever happens, but I was wondering what you all were thinking about that concept. Thanks for reading !

[Kvetevk]

I agree and I like the idea, but I doubt that Klei will remake the whole affinity when the update is already out and mostly complete.
If these ideas were brought to light, I would like to see gems implemented in some way, maybe in the early-game gems could be used to power the circuits (for example: red for alphas, blue for betas, yellow for gammas or it would depend on the color of each circuit like hardy -> red) and in the late game, we could use dreadstone + pure horror and so on.
I hope that Klei will revisit Wx78 sometimes (or remake it now) and implement some synergy between skills and affinites.

Edited Sunday at 05:42 AM by Kvetevk

[Dr.Webber]

I like that idea I wish the affinities involved in Jimmy though also I think that lunar affinity should allow WX to craft gyroscopic transduction cores