Howdy! I've been collecting some rather small balance changes that I believe would be fairly easy to implement, and would greatly improve the experience of some characters, without breaking the game.
Some of these ideas are mine's, and others are from really good posts on the forums in the last months, so credits due to their respective owners.
WARLY
Warly is great in theory, but realistically he has an extremely hard and un-rewarding early game, making him quite unpopular, specially in public servers. I believe the changes he needs are not related to him, but are global changes needed to the world to make his early game life less miserable:
- Replace the random carrots that grow across the surface world, for all the existent vegetables you can crop, distributed randomly. This will make his early game, instead of desperately trying to establish a bunnymen farm for the meatystews, a more balanced experience scavenging different ingredients across the world. I'm not sure what is the respawn time of carrots currenty, maybe the random vegetables should spawn during spring and autumn.
- Make birds fed with a vegetable have a guaranteed drop of 2 seeds of such vegetable, and a random third seed which can be of the same vegetable as well, or a neutral seed: This will make not only Warly's life easier, but also Wormwoods, and Wickerbottom, and farming to become a more enjoyable process.
- OPTIONAL: make pigs villages tend to their crops, and have a small patch area with vegetables. If they catch you stealing they will punch you though (sort of like HAMLET). As long as the pigs exist in an area they will grow random 6-9 vegetables in that small patch.
WORMWOOD
Wormwood's unique crafting items are less than great and rarely used past early game, and I believe they could be given a small buff:
- Bramble husk currently does not fulfill what I believe its the intended usage, which is adding a small DPS when you get hit (besides picking cactii). I'd increase its durability from 262 (currently) to 315 (same durability as log suit). Optionally I'd make it a living plant, so it slowly restores its lost durability, and make it slow enough to not make it OP (at about 10% hp a day). It is expensive enough to make it worth it, specially in solo worlds where bones are harder to come by (unless you kill no-eyed deers every winter)
- Bramble trap: I'd increase its damage to be much closer to toothtraps (about 80 damage). So if you do have a wormwood in your team, it should be worth having a bramble trap field instead of tooth traps, or a mix of the 2.
- Compost wrap: given that they have a really long animation time, and that you can get healing items like poultices and salves with much less effort they are rarely made. My solution is that every time you craft a compost wrap, you get 2 of them, making it much more affordable and rewarding.
WORTOX
Wortox currently feels a bit broken for everyone, and I believe its related to his self-healing capabilities, and not to anything else. Also currently his healing heals slightly less, the more people you heal, which from a mathematic point of view it makes sense given the amount of HP spread, but from a psychological point of view in a coop game, it doesn't. I'll explain further below.
- Wortox should heal for 10 hp if he heals himself with a soul, but if he heals another person, that should increase to 15hp received each, and 20 hp received if he heals 2 other people. More than 2 people, it will always give 20 hp to everyone. This accomplishes that on one hand, Wortox solo players will have to spend more souls in order to do self healing, and on the other hand, it will have a psychological effect that you know that you get more rewarded if you actually heal others, so you'd naturally try to seek other players to heal them.
- Wortox overcharge should no longer heal himself (but should heal everyone eligible around him) so you actually take care of that, instead of going bananas fighting everything and not having a single care in the world.
- Wortox healing should affect ridden beefalos, and befriended pigs, spiders, catcoons, bunnymen and rock lobsters. Since most of these creatures hate Wortox and he can't befriend them in first place, this will mostly have a coop-effect.
WILLOW
I think we should get a way to summon BERNIE! in the lunar island. I don't know exactly how the enlightenment works lore wise, so I won't suggest how it should be done, if when we are fully enlightened, or when fully not enlightened. In any case, I'd like to be able to use BERNIE! up there.
If lore wise this is impossible due to Bernie being related to the shadow world, then I guess it's fair enough.
WEBBER
I won't talk much about non-reworked characters since Webber is still due for a change, but I think this little change would affect Wortox and the coop nature of Webber, in addition to whatever the devs have prepared for him:
- Let him craft the Shamlet mask, so in DST it has durability. The shamlet mask in DST won't overcome his penalty entirely, but more of make him neutral to pigs while he is wearing it. Pigs fed while wearing a shamlet mask could be suspicious enough, and instead of saying "YOU FRIEND" could say something like "YOU NICE, WEIRD PIG" and not befriend you.
The point of this is because in most public servers people tends to naturally keep pigs nearby, and sometimes even within the base, either for food, protection, lumbering, or pig skins. The mask would make both Wortox and Webber's life less miserable when walking around the public base, without giving them any special advantage over befriending pigs. Only Webber should be able to craft this.
The mask shouldn't work on other hostile creatures such as bunnymen (nobody wants bunnymen nearby because of the danger of accidentally picking meat).
Do you have any other "small" balance QOL ideas to share?