Game Design My Issues With Wynn, Pt. 2 (teamwork)

This is part 2 of my series of threads. Part 1 is Here

Teamwork is pointless​

The Aggro system renders tanks useless: The way aggro works now, choosing based on who hits the mob more, renders tanks pointless. You can’t draw enemy fire; so why bother building based on the expectation of taking the brunt of the damage? This problem in turn, makes the one-shotting situations mentioned in part one a lot less bearable, especially in lower level content. At least if there was a much better way to gain aggro, the one-shotting damage wouldn't be flung randomly and would be focused at the person who is actually able to take it. The addition of Major IDs does at least seem like it’d help; Guardian’s ability gives you a reason to spec into health and defense as much as possible. However, I also have another potential solution I’ll go into later.


Health potions and ally spell effects render supports useless: Having spells naturally give people bonuses (IE. Escape’s speed boost) removes the need for a support-focused build. Potions are just as good as heal spells, so why use a mage to heal? I’ve already talked about how I would deal with potions, but as for the spells’ potion effects, I’d make it so they naturally only affect the player using the spell, and make the support utility of them part of a Major ID. They’d still give its effects to the player casting them, just not the people around them.

As for Heal itself, I'd weaken it and back load the brunt of the healing, and/or give it a cooldown (gasp) to discourage spamming it. I'd also tie it to health regen instead of water damage.

The lack of tanks and supports renders glass cannons useless: Why would you run Dune Storm if Pride of the Aerie guarantees you won’t get one-shot? Why run Liektriech Makani if you could use Dark Channeler, or Physalis? If no one’s taking the aggro off mobs, the most likely person to die in a fight would be you, so what’s the point in running a glass cannon?


Poor IDs dance on the grave of glass cannons: The other problem with Glass cannons is that the IDs given don’t justify the glassiness of said items. If I’m dropping a third of my health to run Dune Storm or Tesla, I damn well want it to be worth the bonuses. I’m talking like 100% elemental damage buffs, enough walk speed to make your head spin, the whole 9 yards. The term is glass cannon, not wet paper bag. I’ll probably get into this later, as well.


Dying permanently boots you out of your team: Just got to Robob with your 3 man army? Well, too bad, because you died and therefore get nothing (good DAY, sir), and have to wait for your team to get through anll the other encounters or die trying before you can attempt it again with them! Give us a revive feature, and make respawning at a town something that has to be manually activated, and/or on a timer. Getting knocked out would still take away soul points, but it wouldn’t immediately screw you over.


For example, make the revive feature take like 5 seconds and a full potion of the highest usable level. Also, limit the amount of times one can revive in harder activities (IE. each person can only revive once until hitting a certain checkpoint.)


The item drop system actively harms tanks and supports: By forcing players to hit the 15% damage cap to receive mob drops, Wynn kills the usability of lower DPS builds in endgame and team content, especially on teams with more players. Because of this, and the aforementioned constant one shots, the only good builds in said content are the “no-man’s land” builds; not focusing on either damage or tankiness, but instead being average at both. The system also hurts non-mythic users a lot as well, since they naturally have lower damage (like only 2/3s of the damage of mythics, which is a pretty big gap) that they need to compensate for in a team setting.




To fix this and the uselessness of tanks, I propose a new aggro system for bosses, wherein each player is assigned a certain integer based on the actions they perform against or near the boss:

• Melee and spell attacks add 2 levels of taunt for 10 seconds (while you’re attacking the boss you have a taunt level of 2. It doesn’t add 2 levels per attack because that would be ridiculous)
  
  
• Powder specials add 3 levels for 10 seconds
  
  
• Heal and support based spells add 5 levels for 5 seconds
  
  
• War scream adds 8 levels of taunts for 15 seconds
  
  
• Taunt is added as a new minor ID, that adds and removes levels of taunt to your spells and melee. However, you cannot reach a taunt level of 0 using these IDs.
  
  
• If you’re at least 20 combat levels below a boss, you’ll automatically be assigned a taunt value of 0, with the exception of level 95+ players.

Every few seconds, the boss pools the taunt integers and picks its target randomly from that pool. For example, if I have a taunt level of 7 when the boss does his aggro check, while Joe has a taunt level of 2 and Susie has a taunt level of 1, there’s a 70% chance the boss aggroes on me, a 20% chance he aggroes on Joe, and a 10% chance he aggros on Susie. Tanks would want to get as high of a taunt level as possible to maximize their success, while supports and DPS would want to do the opposite. Minions and Ads would still utilize the old system (partially because I'm legitimately not sure if the server would be able to handle keeping aggro information on literal dozens of mobs at once, and constantly updating it all), so clearing them is still a priority.


Once the boss is killed, his drops are given to anyone with a taunt value of at least one. This would prevent people carrying lower level players through things like LI, without being nearly as restricting on builds. Would it make the game a lot easier when playing with a team? Yes; that’s the point of having a team.


In addition, I’d add major IDs for support items. I’ll split my personal suggestions up based on class.

Class Neutral (armor):

• Killing enemies grants a 7% damage reduction, stacking up to 5 times and lasting for 8 seconds, to all allies in a 10 meter radius
  
  
• Reviving now takes 2.5 seconds instead of 5
  
  
• Kills grant allies within 10 meters a 20% charge to their powder specials

Assassin

• Smoke Bomb grants Allies inside it a 20% damage and speed III boost
  
  
• Spin Attack deals 25% less damage, but makes hit enemies take 30% more damage from all sources for a short time
  
  
• Vanish turns all allies in a 2 meter radius invisible for 3 seconds, and heals them for 25% of their health

Warrior

• War scream grants resistance and strength to all nearby players (it’s the current effect War Scream has)
  
  
• War scream creates a firewall around you. This is a circular area with a five meter radius that knocks enemies back out of it, and grants allies inside an overshield equivalent to 30% of their current health
  
  
• Upon casting, Charge grants a 20% damage buff for 15 seconds to all players within 10 meters

Mage

• Melee attacks heal allies for (20%/attack speed multiplier) health
  
  
• Ice Snake grants all allies hit by it a 30% overshield
  
  
• Meteor’s burning ground gives all allies a speed III boost for 12 seconds

Archer

• Arrow shield is granted to all players within 10 meters upon cast, and grants them a 20% damage reduction until the shield dissipates or is triggered.
  
  
• Escape now gives allies speed II (it’s escape’s current effect, but weakened to account for lasting 3 minutes)
  
  
• Arrow storm grants allies a 2.5% damage bonus per arrow that hits them. This effect lasts for 8 seconds.

Keep in mind that these aren't definitive and are moreso just examples.

Finally, Give pinnacle activities their own servers, a la Wars, but with an interface like picking a server normally so you can join other players of your own accord. The server would close when the activity starts, and would have a player cap depending on the activity (IE Legendary Island can have a max of three players, ETC), so you wouldn’t just be able to, say, grab 30 people and run LI over and over again as an EXP farm. What are pinnacle activities? I’ll go into that later.

Part 3 is out now (9/14/19). Link

 

I disagree with ally effects rendering other stuff useless. I'd say they give a good reason to have players of multiple classes (after all, without Heal you'd never run a Mage in a party, and honestly probably the same for Warrior).

I really like your idea of tying Heal boost to hpr. I'd say it should be tied to hpr %, so you can still have weapons and such that increase/decrease Heal without having to give -hpr penalties that have other annoying effects.

Fundamentally, natural health sustain on builds is far too low to allow for non-potion play. It needs massive buffs to make that work.

Strong agree. Tesla I think is fine, but Dune Storm, Conflagrate, and to a lesser extent Anamnesis are all-near impossible to use because you don't actually get that much from them. Conflagrate's 65% damage boost is nice and all, but for the amount of damage you lose it's just not worth it most of the time (Conflagrate basically only works on melee Inferno). Dune Storm just has mediocre stats all-around for the big health penalty - likewise for LM.

Overall I really like this taunt system, but I think the taunt value of 0 for lower-level players is a problem I regularly go through the game facing bosses 20 levels higher than me, after all - this makes it impossible to do low-level soloes.

I doubt there will be a problem with being able to store the taunt data. Honestly, it's a relatively small memory load, even with a hundred mobs.

Still need to read the Major IDs section.

 

How about something where if there's no other players with a taunt on the enemy you get assigned a taunt level of 1 regardless of level? the taunt system is largely for team play and shouldn't affect solo play so that would be ideal

 

Hm, I'd say make this 20 levels difference in taunt. That way, you can still have a bunch of level 55 players fighting a level 70 boss, with all of them aggroing normally. However, a joining level 34 player won't apply any taunt as long as a player with level 55 already has taunt on that mob. I actually think 20 levels is too much (I think it should be 10 or 15), but that's an unimportant point overall.

I'd also say, a mob's default targeting within its sight range should be a taunt of 1 and last for a longer amount of time (say, 10 seconds). However, any other type of taunt should remove targeting taunt (to prevent carrying). That way you can't try to carry a low-level player by letting all taunt lapse when a boss is about to die, have the boss aggro someone you're carrying, and have the carryer kill them while the sight taunt is still active.

It would probably be better to just multiply all taunt values by 10, since this gives taunt IDs some more nuance (considering the base 2 problem and all).

You should put up a suggestion about the taunt thing.

 

shit, that's actually a really good idea.

 

Would the escape spell still grant speed 3 to the one who cast the spell?

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Would the taunt system still be in effect while fighting bosses like Bob, CoW, or Death at their recommended levels, while also playing as part of a group?

 

Yes and yes

 

Bump. Part three is Here