Info Item Team Update Thread - Latest Updates, Rebalance Changelogs & More - Update 28/6

https://wynndata.tk/s/9pcR23 two stat gigabyte what

(also what how is spell Alka so good?)

 

Idol has a higher attack speed for better spells and also contains up to 555 raw spell.
Also an Idol build will have a higher benefit from intelligence to water damage because 120+26 > 80 +13 unless you build your Tidebinder weirdly (it's defensive after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

But what makes me truly wonder is this

We know what else is a water mythic which has "underwhelming" damage per hit.


Idol's Bash deals about the damage of a Spring bomb, but can crit and has some more IDs.
And let's not forget what was said when Spring's max mana regen was increased

There are spears which do more damage per hit than Idol, yet Idol is a lot more spammier. There are bows which do more damage per hit than Spring, yet Spring is a lot more spammier.
Both of these can have incredible dps due to their spam capability.

And most importantly Idol apart from it's req (when very high req in intel can be achieved rather quickly) is just a stats stick. No niches unlike Lament (Not sure if Nirvana's weak melee as a spell dagger and the slight hp decrease can be considered a niche either), just a stats stick.

Mythics in form of stats sticks should not exist. Idol is certainly not a stats stick which performs poorly, even less so needing a buff.

Sorry if this may seem ignorant as it only focuses on one spear, I just do not think that Idol's purpose (Damage) is done poorly at all.

 

In my opinion, Idol is fine, at least as compared to Tidebinder and Water Hive Spear (it tops the latter by about 2k on uppercuts on my typical water build, 15.5k vs. 13.5k). Spring, however, can barely maintain higher damage with the same sustain vs. Water Hive Bow.

 

Hive Bow (or any Hive Weapon) can be close to a mythic only because they (hive) were poorly made balancing wise (2/4s in both mana stats, 20% in all elements, literally no requirements besides the quest to use, high attack speed, high base damage and 5 powder slots). I understand that quests should be rewarding, but they should not be giving blatantly powerful stat sticks. If you will nerf hive weapons, Spring will instantly reign overall supreme, however knowing what can be going on on wynn I do not count on Hive weapon nerfs.

Mythics which are stat sticks are not fine. Having such an item be of a mythic rarity (or any rarity really) will just render unlucky players underperforming, forcing them into hours of grind to get 1 item which does not even need to retain it's less or more reasoned power. People should not be punished as hard for lack of luck as they should be for poor builds. You almost cannot go wrong with a hive weapon.

Idol is rather fine, could deal less raw spell but I know that if it's mythic it must be powerful (unless it is a ~70 lvl mythic, in which case you can just add items that are the same except in endgame. Am I right, Slider, Divzer?)

Let me also analyze Spring and Hive bow on these builds. They use the same items except the bow and the bracelet (rip no hive limit)

https://wynndata.tk/s/MXP9BR Hive
https://wynndata.tk/s/lyEPXB Spring

Hive Bow -

More avg bomb dmg by 0.5k

Spring -

More hr (it makes more sense on archer than it does on warrior)
Ability to get max spell cost reduction
More flexible due to not consuming 1 hive limit
Up to 3 more mr potentially allowing to spam spells and use conc


The main difference between Hive and Spring is that Spring has more flexibility than Hive. And then if we assumed that you can only deal water damage or can benefit off an enemy's water weakness, you would do more with Spring on average (Hive bow's average bomb water damage would be 7887.5, while Spring's is 8682)

Neither hive weapons or mythics should exist the way they do right now, but considering how much do people rely on those and how much do they do for them nothing can be done really.

________________________________

I would assume it is because of Alka's high Strength you have while wielding it, the earth damage and the fact that it has 1700 average earth damage

 

Raw melee rebalancing has resulted in large buffs to a lot of items: https://www.wynndata.tk/changes/1.18.1 (these were pushed March 29th)

 

Base damage.
It element defense basically doesn't matter. Plus if you get close enough to another mob, due to it being super slow, Every time you cast a spell it also activates a melee hit.

 

So, uh, to kinda change the topic of discussion: one thing I've been very concerned about lately, as I'm sure many others have, is ingredient balancing. In my opinion, there's two major mistakes that the Item Team has been making that I really hope don't continue:


1. Having the mindset that creativity=good. Yes, I know the major reason why low-level 0 star ingredients like Wood Shavings were nerfed because stacking 6 of them is uncreative and too easy to get a good item, I get that. Here's the thing though: Crafted item recipes should be hard to get, not to come up with. As long as the ingredients used are hard enough to get (which, most 3-star ingredients are), I see no reason why said ingredients deserve a nerf. I'm specifically talking about Borange Fluff. Right now, it's a bad ingredient, or at least, it is considering its level and rarity. Saying an item/ingredient is the "antithesis" for creativity is no excuse to make it underpowered. Besides, I never really understood why people care about creativity in RPGs. Take a look at Pokemon for instance. In competitive battling, 80% of the eligible pokemon don't matter because everyone uses legendaries, pseudo-legends, pokemon with powerful mega evolutions, and other OP pokemon. Does that mean that every pokemon below OU on Smogon is bad? No, it just means that no one really uses them because they're overshadowed by more powerful pokemon. You can use less-known Pokemon with creative strategies if that's what you're into, but the people who want to win would naturally use the best pokemon without caring about creativity. And don't get me started on pokemon moves. The only ones that matter are two offensive moves for each type, one physical and one special, status moves, and a handful of other utility moves. When you add that up, that's probably around 50 moves. Out of 728 total. Yes, I know that Wynncraft isn't really a competitive game, but the same logic applies. Do you really think most people will care about creativity when most people only care about doing LI once or twice to get something they need? Moving on from my Pokemon rant, I believe Wynncraft should take the same approach. Keep the "boring" ingredients like borange good for people who want an easy-to-use good ingredient, but also have some wacky and hard-to-use ingredients like Major's Badge around for people who like to use them.



2. Removing professions from ingredients. This reminds me of before the item team was around and a lot of people were upset about item nerfs because of most good items only getting "nerfed" by getting higher sp requirements. People were upset because the nerf didn't make their builds weaker, it made them unusable. The same thing applies here. Removing professions from ingredients makes these already-crafted items unusable. This shouldn't be necessary. Crafted items are hard to make and making them unusable just like that is a giant middle finger. The fact that we're already 3 months into the update doesn't help either, because as we know, it wasn't like there was a beta to help fix broken ingredients, amirite? My point is, if these ingredients were so broken for certain professions that they had to be removed, it should've been done sooner so it would affect less people. I've never seen anyone complain about how broken pre-patch Pride of the Heights was, so something tells me this was done to encourage "creativity" which, if that's true, look above. One thing I liked about the boosting ingredients were that they were simple. Pride of the Heights could be used for all the crafted gear professions, sans jeweling, and Unicorn Horn could be used for all of them. Now, you gotta keep track between PotH, Unicorn Horn, and Lunar Charm to remember what ingredient can be used for what profession, and its just a pain in the ass.




TL;DR: Thinking that creativity=good and removing professions from ingredients is a mistake, the former because nobody cares about creativity in RPGSs and creativity shouldn't be an excuse to make ingredients bad, and the latter because it's unnecessary, insulting, and makes everything overcomplicated.

 

Thanks for taking the time to post here! We always appreciate feedback.
With regards to your feedback, I'll take some time to respond to each separately:

1) Our goal is not really to harm more generic builds, but to motivate, and by extension to reward exploring the item system. You may point out all the nerfs recently to more generic builds (Rainbow slap nerfs, and more topically, the morph nerf), but this is an issue with trying to avoid power creep. We try to encourage creative building, but sometimes the "generic" builds are too strong and need a nerf in themselves. With regards to your Pokémon metaphor, I'm not completely sure hats valid. Most Pokémon moves are comparable. An example is "Why would you ever use ember over flamethrower, the direct upgrade" this works fine for Pokémon, and works with its progression quite well. Wynn, while it also has comparable items (look at any lvl 3 vs lvl 30 item), most of the items at endgame are incomparable. This means that it is impossible to solidly define one move is stronger than another. Because of this there will naturally be more diversity in the endgame of wynn than the endgame of Pokémon.

2) With regards to the recent changes to professions with crafting, it does in fact tie into #1. Our goal with crafting is similar to the goal with full item builds. Encourage people to explore the system and be creative. This is the principle reasoning for the changes to these effectiveness ingredients. Before the job removal all recipes for all jobs were ghastly similar, and we would rather have there be some form of diversity between professions. With regards to why the change happened now instead of earlier is in truth because we didn't realize how systemic this issue would be. Nobody save @GlassJarss got to a remotely high level in crafting so it was difficult to see what the community would do with ingredients. Once we saw that this wasn't going away without intervention, we decided to step in.

 

And yet Borange Fluff is perfect when you have an ingredient slot that's empty but your durability is already at your limit, depending on your recipe. Borange Fluff isn't bad. After it was nerfed, I played around with some of the recipes and it turns out that it's still decent and with pre-nerf Borange Fluff it was really good and maybe borderline overpowered.

I still don't understand your claim of how Borange Fluff is bad; in my opinion it's the ultimate slappable ingredient as the situations Borange Fluff is detrimental are low; those situations are flipping (which is sort of silent after the Obelisk Core nerf but that's not the point)and working with sky-high requirements that you need to keep in check. Since you have the belief of "Borange Fluff sucks", I kindly ask for your evidence.

 

Eh, I generally agree that Borange Fluff is alright, but also think it's absurdly hard to get for relatively low reward. Effectiveness won't change of course, because it's right at that spot where it's strong without allowing for any gamebreaking recipes, but it's practically unused post-nerf.

 

That is exactly the point of it.

I wanted a faux-ultimate reward; since you already got all the cool weapons from Wybel I didn't want to add too many ingredient rewards, so I came up with Borange Fluff as a fake "best" ingredient, but apparently I made it actually too good to start with, so it's been hit with some nerfs since.

 

So it's Warchief?

(just a joke)

(buff Virgo)

 

Can we just put jadeite back up to 15% spell those were good times

 

those were good times indeed



nice accessories u got there mrglassjars

 

nerf incoming

 

Pretty sure that was a typo tho

 

Eh you can still get 25-35 spell damage with 5 jadeites and 1 lunar charm

 

New item changes when?

 

Now that walkspeed % will be nerfed on Corrupted Fragment, there are no more ways to make a proper walkspeed bow or wand with woodworking.
The highest useable walkspeed recipe I could find for crafted bows / wands would be the following:

[Corrupted fragment] [Pride of the Heights]
[Corrupted fragment] [Corrupted fragment]
[Corrupted fragment] [Pride of the Heights]
(You could also replace one Corrupted Fragment for another Pride if you want 40 durability with tier 3 materials...)

Before the nerf goes into effect this recipe would give:
39.6% to 52.8% walkspeed and would have roughly 104 durability when made with tier 3 materials at level 100. Which isn't that much higher than the 39% walkspeed Gale's force / cascade / eidolon have, but it would still be worth it for some players.

Now that Corrupted fragment will be nerfed to 4% to 6% walkspeed, the max walkspeed you would get from this recipe would be the following:
26.4% to 39.6%.

As you can see, that completely makes crafting walkspeed bows / wands not worthwhile at all, because you could just buy Gale's Force (if you are an archer) for a way lower price and still have the same or higher walkspeed than a crafted version could possibly get. (And you would have to repair your bow / wand each time after a while!)
(Same story for Cascade / eidolon if you are a mage.)

For this reason I would like to request a higher leveled, higher walkspeed % ingredient than corrupted fragment for woodworking. It is strange after all that a level 7 ingredient has the highest walkspeed.

 

As long as it's only for woodworking and maybe some random consumables I fully agree with this.