Posting this here for visibility.
Where to begin, where to begin...
Well, let's split up all the parts of Woodie and take a look at them, then examine how they could be better.
1. Woodie Himself
Certainly the most boring of his parts conceptually, but the most effective overall. Woodie without his log meter means he gets to keep all of his product without the log meter, so he basically got buffed pretty nicely. But without the downside of eating wood, Woodie has officially become better Wilson. Congratulations Woodie! But yes, there's literally nothing else to say here, as Woodie himself is just Wilson that chops trees really fast, which is boring. Now, onto the semi-optional debuffs!
2. Goose Form
Literally useless. Being able to move around as fast as a hound for less than a minute at best at the cost of all your hunger + the sanity and health cost of using a totem is such an awful tradeoff. It doesn't even swim, which I find incredibly ridiculous, I mean, both beavers and moose are known for swimming, but if anyone should've been able to swim, it should've been the goose. But no, instead it does nothing but move fast for a very short amount of time. Overall, goose is pointless, avoid it always.
3. Beaver Form
The best combatant out of the three, what Werebeaver makes up for not being able to hit hard, his slightly above average speed and much faster attack speed make him suitable for usage in close-range fights against weaker opponents. His harvesting skills are pretty good, but the amount of time you get to use it for, along with the full hunger drain and health and sanity costs basically makes it not worth using at all. Woodie already chops down trees plenty fast, and since beaver got nothing new in his kit this update except not being able to extend his transformation time, the already mediocre Werebeaver got nerfed. Sad!
4. Moose Form
The second best combatant of the three transformations by proxy of being 1 of 2 able to fight at all, the moose form is based around fighting. However, due to short performance time, the moose is better off avoided. Sure, you can use it to tank a hard-hitting enemy, but once you go through that nice transformation back to Woodie very shortly, whatever you were fighting will take that sweet animation time to kill you, so no worries if you were concerned with surviving. Even if you do survive the initial turn back, the grogginess applied to you should let the big boss whack you once or twice more, so you should be dead by then. This also hasn't mentioned that you'll lose all your hunger as well, so you'll be taking damage until you can get away from your target to eat food, not also mentioning getting your armor back on and dealing with grogginess as well. In total, avoid this one too!
5. Woodie as a Whole
Woodie is faster-woodcutting Wilson with a permanent tier 2 beard, a permenant axe, and the ability to befriend useless animalmen for slightly longer. In order to balance this straight upgrade from Wilson out, Klei nerfed one and made 2 new were-forms Woodie would be tempted to use for the possibility of "fun" and "utility", but each one is a trap to bait Woodie into losing his all hunger and some health and sanity, along with giving no satisfaction at all for using them. Therefore, if Woodie doesn't want to drain his food supplies (possibly shared with teammates), keep losing health and sanity, and wasting some random ingredients he could use elsewhere, Woodie must stay away from using his wereforms. While this is unavoidable on a full moon, you just sort of deal with it, and that's that.
6. Where Did It Go Wrong?
Oh god, this is the hard part. Then again, a harder question would be "Where did it go right?", because the answer to the former is all of it. Woodie's previous problem is that his DST counterpart paled in comparison to DS Woodie. DS Woodie had an excellent beaver mode, which provided locomotion, attack strength, and harvesting ability, along with weather resistance and night vision. Woodie in DST, on the other hand, had a ****ty beaver, and was compensated marginally with planting pine cone sanity and slightly longer befriending times. The issue here primarily was that he was depthless; Werebeaver was something you got out of immediately to avoid punishment, and everything else was just being a better Wilson overall. As a Woodie main myself, I wanted the beaver to be more useful while adding more depth to using it since the beaver had no threats outside of no healing, temperature and nightmare creatures, but such threats were annoying and not fun to deal with in the slightest. Instead, Klei made the beaver even more useless while adding 2 more useless transformations on top of it all, but removed the log meter.
So, the whole "Avoid the beaver" thing is more extreme than before, and it's also easier to do so. I guess the only people who won with this update were those who enjoyed solely playing as Woodie.
7. How Do We (Klei) Salvage This?
I'm just going to make a bulletpoint list of things which might make this more fun in the slightest.
- Let us extend the timer further for the transformations. My idea is that certain actions in a wereform let you regain amounts of meter while also making the meter drain slower. Therefore, it is up to the player to make sure they're able to keep the transformation up for as long as they need, while also not overextending it too much where turning back becomes a problem. If they want to stay as a were-animal, they shouldn't be directly punished if the forms are designed well-enough, as there should be some weakness to each one. I also personally don't think said weakness should be being unable to heal, as there's no working around that, and no room to grow in skill, it's just a mindless limit.
- The forms need more. Werebeaver isn't in a good spot but is in the best spot. Goose needs a lot more (let it swim and attack, preferably at the same time) Moose could be okay if you could extend the timer like above, as it's combat style might have some sort of skill-based factor to it. I couldn't tell you right now, because the transformation doesn't last long enough to test it out.
- Woodie himself needs a downside outside the forms. Right now, always being regular Woodie has no downsides and is an upgrade to Wilson, which is very poor game design.
- Alternatively, scrap the the two new forms and just work on getting Werebeaver right. If you're really proactive, you can add the other forms back some other time.
This list is a very basic starting point to work off of, to get something really good would require more time investment.
8. Ending Thoughts
I've been waiting for this rework for 3 or 4 years, I don't remember anymore. I was excited when they started, because I was finally going to get what I've been asking for for a very long time now. People warned me it wasn't going to be good, but I put good faith in Klei to deliver on this one thing. However, as of now, I'm not playing this character ever again until it gets fixed. Woodie was my main, but now he's either a boring, better Wilson or a food-draining nightmare, and I'm certainly not playing that. Overall, I'm starting to doubt if Klei has the capability to put out quality content nowadays, as everything they've done since porting ROG to DST outside of the events has felt lackluster.