So, in my opinion, WX is kinda both broken and underpowered, let me explain, he has only one downside that is insanely easy to counter, that is beeing hurt by rain, not only the damage from it is slow as hell, it can be tottaly ignored with eyebrella, he is kind of underpowered on solo, but hes extremely broken with wickerbottom, in conclusion, he is wilson, but with only upsides. This idea however will change WX not only to be balanced, but fun as well!
I will break that into segments, because there's multiple upsides of wx that needs rebalancing, here's my view on them:
- Upgrade system - now instead of eating gears, WX will have new tab, instead of ability to eat gears, from now on wx will be able to upgrade himself in a different ways, because let's be fair, 400hp is a wee bit too op, and also lost potential. The upgrades will rely on clockworks, because hell, why nobody have thought of that when they are the main source of gears, as the regular, they will consume 15 gears to fully upgrade, lets talk abut upgrades then:
1) Accordion extension - This is the equivalent of our good ol' knight, it will extend our reach in fighting also giving us knockback mechanic, don't think it will make us fine and dandy while fighting, because the arms will always be on the view and monsters can destroy them, if they do destroy them, you can't hold anything, and only other characters can fix you with this, so this is high risk, high reward upgrade (if you want to avoid the team thing, just kill and ressurect yourself), the extend will be small however, but enough for example hitting a hound without getting chomped back, and knockback mechanic will only work when you are very close to the enemy. It will cost 5 gears to get this upgrade.
2) legs o' rook - you guessed it, this is rook counterpart of the upgrade, this will allow you not to only do the moose like charge of woody, but if you hit something, you loose health instead of beeing slowed down, it also wont allow you to get past through enemy, it will just attack single one, but with high damage. not only that, you will be able to do forge wolfgang-like jump but you can do that once every 2 days and will not do as big areal damage to enemies (more like wormwood spiky vest), it will allow you to get past through gaps though,you will also be slowed down like a reversed walking cane. His upgrade will consume 8 gears and 3 cut stone
3) Idea bulb - and you can probably guess who is the last on this list, bishop, the upgrade will be most pricy one because you may use 2 gears for that, but in advance you need 2 purple gems and 5 moonglass. Said its pricey, but for the payoff, you will be able to do ranged attack as long as you dont get hit enough to get it destroyed, not wearing any hats (it will destroy hats a bit if trying to shoot in them), or get struck by lightning making it 'explode', bruh you have bulb on your head (though you can fix yourself with moonglass with the lightning one). The ranged attack will be somewhat simmiliar to bishop, but far weaker and less accurate, though you can point where you want to shoot, be wise with that, you need to charge yourself to shoot, and to charge yourself, you need a charged lightning rod and touch it (one charged lightning rod = 3 shots, you can stack up to 15, after that, your bulb head will explode, but with ability to fix it with moonglass) it deals 60 damage per hit, but you can aim anywhere instead of the need to point at enemy, so in this case, you need prediction more than ctrl+f.
ok, so the upgrade idea is done, all of them will give you small stat boost, idea bulb mostly in sanity, leg o'rook in health and accordion extension nothing much, just small all stats up, let's get to WX when he's overcharged
WX after beeing struck by lightning should chop, mine and pick things faster, but not beeing insanely fast, not only that, his overcharged meter should be visible, he can be charged by charged lightning rods (so as do math says, he have 150points in his charge meter from the bulb idea). The overcharge should not give you speed of beeing way faster than beefalo with a type of rider (he has 9 run speed points compared to rider beefalo 8), his speed should be reduced to beefalo rider speed and also ingoring every item that gives you bonus speed, so no roads and walking canes will give you unhealthy speed, it's maybe a party pooper idea, but combine walking cane, road, overcharged WX, magiluminescence and you have 9 run speed + 75% of it, tell me about beyond broken speed (at least roads and walking canes are easy to get, so its still 55%).
Also the perk of not beeing a picky eater should extend to eating monster meat, he's a robot, not a human, his health and sanity shouldn't go down after eating something what he shouldn't, same with red caps, it won't lover his hp, he has no digestive system to begin with, so also healing items besides salves and poultice won't heal him, but to make game harder, he still has to eat.
ok so we got 2 main upsides of WX, but where is his downside? his main one is a literal joke, let me tell you about something way more painful than beeing hurt 1 damage per year from rain:
- STUPID RUSTING GEARS - not only WX crafting will be an upgrade, he will be able to make oil from bone shards (aka fossil replacement) that he needs to apply every day at least once, that is if you don't oil yourself, you will be litteraly 'frozen' making you collapse on the ground and it will freeze you for 5 seconds, if you keep ignoring that, it will be up to 20 seconds, you will guess you're rusting by sounds of scrape of metal when walking, not only that, you will walk slower if you ignore that. that makes skeletons useful as hell for wx, but since we don't have infinite source of bones in don't starve, they should drop from eating raw meat, because you can literally see a bone sticking out from it, also it gives you a penalty of sanity, so it's not bad and is a not that broken-easy bone source. It'll ignore only first 7 days, then it will be your burden. Rain instead of hurting you, will speed up this process to 3 times faster thus you need good amount of bones, and it will surely affect you if you forget bones with eyebrella, making it truly a great, balanced and logical downside