Game Design The Problem With Item Rarities.

The item rarity system worked really well before Gavel, when better items were objectively better. And I'd actually argue that it still works really well at lower levels, where you use almost any gear you can find, and don't try to get a perfect build.

So what's my problem? Well, allow me to introduce my friend, Mr. Aquamarine.



Mr. Aquamarine is a pretty darn good helmet, with some mana regen and some skill points, a bit of damage on the side and even some stealing for OKR meta or whatever. As a level 100 helmet, it's not likely that the player will find a better one for their build to repla-



Oh. Right. Yeah, that's kinda a deal breaker there. Sorry bud, maybe the item buyer wants you. While it can be argued that Aquamarine has advantages over Pisces, such as more skill points, or health regen, or stealing, the fact is that Pisces is gonna be used 9 times out of 10 for a water/earth build.

And this isn't some example I worked hard to find, this is legitimately one I found while trying to design an earth/water build with Aquamarine.

"Why not use Pisces?"

Oh.

Unless you really need the health regen or the skill points, there's no reason to not use Pisces, which offers massively more damage, more health and the same mana regen. It's easier and better to just find another item and slap it on to get those stats - ideally another legendary. Leaving these poor, innocent, perfectly valid uniques to rot. And it is for this reason that I dedicate this thread to Aquamarine, the little helmet that just couldn't because Pisces is better.

When they player reaches endgame, they don't have any reason to use whatever they find. Rather, they are encouraged to get the best items possible, which, with the current system, means mostly legendaries and a few rares. This causes two problems in my eyes. If your build doesn't have legendaries that support it, it tends to be objectively worse than a similar build with legendaries, which discourages people from using that particular build (the latest item changes help to fix this, but it still is an issue). This also means that unique items that are similar to legendaries are practically useless; it's just a worse version of the same. Even if it has a special gimmick, it's not generally worth using unless the gimmick is particularly good (the changes to make uniques more, well, unique in the latest patch also really help this, but it's definitely an issue). I do support having weaker and stronger items to allow the player to make the game easier or harder as they please (within the realm of reason), but they all need to be within a certain general range to prevent items that are entirely useless or brokenly overpowered. That said, I don't like the idea that being rich or lucky and getting a mythic is automatically easy mode, while simply not being either extremely lucky or extremely rich means that the game is harder for you, and I doubt many other people want that either.

The main issue, I think, is the standard baselines for power of each tier. The fact that legendaries are meant to be objectively better, but at the same time, not always supposed to cover the same builds puts certain builds and playstyles at a disadvantage if there isn't a legendary that fits it and encourages a smaller number of builds and playstyles. This could, in my opinion, be fixed in a couple of different ways.

The first is entirely doing away with rarities, which is a dumb idea and I won't bother wasting time on it.

The next is to make all power levels the same across tiers, so that uniques are just as strong as mythics. Imagine your 7/1000000 chance of getting a mythic gets you Bylvis' Pitchfork with a purple name. Yeah, okay, bad idea, let's move on.

The last idea I had seems more viable, decrease the average difference between tiers, so that legendaries aren't hugely stronger than uniques. This seems to be more in line with the design philosophy of this latest update, where a lot of uniques seemed comparatively stronger than before. This would provide a reason to want mythics besides the cool purple name, but wouldn't mean that using uniques nets you a far worse build. I think that this idea has potential, and it fits with what the item team seems to already be doing. This would also increase support for more builds and playstyles and make items that aren't used very often more common in builds. It would keep the current tier system, while simultaneously making uniques a bit more viable in every build and encouraging new, different builds that rely on uniques (or just a new meta, but look at it optimistically).

 

Finally! This issue has been bugging me for a while. I've been waiting for someone to articulate a good solution for this. I think this is the best solution we're gonna get.

 

Fun fact of the day - baseline differences have rares at 85% of legendaries and uniques at 77% of legendaries. The extremely large gaps likely contribute a lot to the problems.

 

TIL. So maybe reducing the gap to more like 10-15% rather than 23%, and slightly buffing rares to compensate, would make uniques at about the right spot for endgame viability without being too powerful.

 

me:

I struggle to see how all uniques could be viable. There have been unique only endgame builds, but I still wouldn't call them 'viable'. Maybe suicidal or clickbait

 

By buffing their relative power, it would make builds using them more like builds using legendaries. This would also mean that there would be no need for nearly identical items, so they would be free to shuffle uniques to less supported builds, making them more useful.

 

Yeah, I suspect a gap of legendary->rare->unique of around 6-8% would help keep them competitive.

 

I mean I like the idea and I think it mainly is a problem with weapons. Weapons of non legendary tier 9/10 times are bad. However with armor I don't know as I find alot of uniques tend to have really nice skill points and alot rares are basically legendaries but with less health. That said I do think there are alot of uniques that are quite under tuned when it comes to armor or especially accessories and weapons. I would like to see uniques made better and closer to rares and also set items meant to be between legendary and rare instead of rare and unique and see more sets in game so we can see those endgame.

 

Yeah, unique weapons in particular are in a bad spot. Unless you're using it with a very specific build that mainly relies on your armor/accessories, there are virtually no uniques worth using because even if an endgame legendary doesn't fit your build, a midgame one might and still is better than an endgame unique.

 

Agreed id say there are only like 5 viable unique weapons in my opinion and half of those are heavy melee or need a mythic to be used well... as for unique armor i mean there are actually alot of good unique armors but there's just alot more bad ones. however I would like to say that the difference in hp between the tiers needs to be decreased but also legendaries are meant to have more prominent ids and higher reqs than uniques which is part of what makes them weaker.

 

To be completely honest, I think it's fine as is. There are definitely Unique and Rare items that slot into builds way better than some Legendary items do. They're easier to find and more common, they should be less valuable and they shouldn't be as good.

I'll take a game like WoW for example, where you basically never have a build that contains Rare and Uncommon items for very late game raids or whatever else. Basically Unique and Rare in Wynncraft terms. The difference between Wynncraft and WoW is that instead of calling it "Rarity" in WoW, while it corresponds to the rarity, it's called "Quality" which makes a lot more sense. As Artifact, Legendary, and Epic items are much stronger than Rare, Uncommon, and Common, because they're of better quality.
If we take this and slap the word "Quality" onto Wynncraft, instead of "Rarity" it makes much more sense and is fine. Items that are harder to find should overall be of better quality, and that's really just the most logical. While some players have no issue finding Legendary items in Wynncraft, other players do not come across them that often and they still feel special to obtain. Their quality should be overall better, or else it just feels pretty poor. Just my own opinions, of course, and there's no right or wrong to it all

 

now ive not played WoW so I can't say this isn't the case for it but to me wynncraft is a game where lots of insane build combinations are encouraged which is why we have such a big item pool.

 

Wait but Aquamarine>Pisces because of rawspell and hpr patching up slayer's -hpr for pure builds... Not to mention the SP (which got nerfed because aquamarine is so good). Also, Pisces is often a no-go because of its higher strength req which requires more SP slap and weakens the overall build.

I wouldn't mind an aquamarine buff, but it's not weak. Terrible example.



Weapons are a much better example of rarity disparity. I'd love for a lot of lower rarity weapons to be viable, but they just aren't, because they're just worse clones of higher rarity ones.