I'm nearing 600 hours of this game. I play with my friends exclusively. Most of the times I played Wickerbottom, I recognise she was overpowered when I started playing, which was before refreshes started to happen, but I liked that everyone had a role. Recently I've been playing with Warly and Wurt a lot, and I always had something that I can either do faster, or better. My impression on all the new characters and refreshes is that now everyone can do something better or faster.
I now decided to try out Walter. After about 40 days (granted, not much), I'm not impressed with him. He can collect more stuff when he ventures out (although he does need more food because of his low hunger for it), and he can get from point A to point B faster, but that's about all the upsides I found about him. I was hyped about using his slingshot, with or without Woby, but it's underwhelming even with Marble rounds. He is shooting so slowly I feel like it would just be better to use a hambat. Freezing rounds and slowdown rounds sound good, but not super useful in my opinion. I haven't used cursed rounds yet, but that doesn't sound too good either. I expected similar or better DPS if I invest in expensive ammo, but at this point I'd rather mass produce blowdart with any other character and play a better Walter that way. He doesn't even have sleep rounds to be useful against dragonfly.
Can he actually do anything way better than a Wilson can?