SPOILER Tomes - More Powerful Than You Think (discussion)

So, there's something I want to bring to everyone's attention: Tomes are multiplicative (atleast weapon and armor ones are)

Why is this important?
Almost all damage calculation in Wynn is additive, meaning 50% fire damage and 50% spell damage on a pure fire weapon will equal +100% damage. Multiplicative damage is different in that it applies after all additive effects. 100% spell damage might turn 10k meteors into 15k meteors (just for speculations sake, 100% prolly isn't even that strong), whereas 100% multiplicative damage would turn those meteors from 10k into 20k which is absolutely crazy.

Well, lets take JUST the grootslang lvl 60 raid tomes for example. Max rolled legendary weapon mastery tomes can give 14% multiplicative damage boost each and you get two of them (fabled ones give 18%, and they're not even that rare either). This means with 2 common tomes you can get 1.28x damage with your weapons.
Those that are aware of baselines will be baffled by this as this effectively turns your legendary weapon into a mythic (mythics are 1.3x the baseline of legendaries).
And grootslang tomes, crazy as they already are, aren't even that crazy compared to the higher leveled ones. Canyon Collossus drops can give atleast 30% multiplicative damage boosts (and we don't even have max rolled ones yet), this means you could effectively get 60% damage boost just from tomes, which is 1.6x your damage, that's more than saviour's sacrifice and more than mythic baseline.

Armor Tomes
From the data we already have, legendary lvl 60 tomes give 24% damage reduction with 4 equipped (8% each), and lvl 80 legendary ones gives 14% each, for up to 56% damage reduction
How much is that you ask? Well, 24% damage reduction is around ~25 def, not too crazy really, but it's crazy when multiplied with your defense, remember, warrior defense bonus is only 20% base, and saviour's is a 50% increase.
Now, 56% damage reduction sounds like a lot already, but that is equivalent to ~75 defense (I would give exact numbers but wynndata is dying right now). You could run ETW Divzer in 1.20 with the same survivability, even more surivability, than standard Divzer builds in 1.19 which get around 58-80 defense. This boost is also more than saviour's sacrifice which doubles your EHP. And that's what tomes will do, they will double (more than double) your ehp in any build, regardless of how much EHP it has. You have a build with 40k EHP? Using tomes will get you to 87k EHP.

Tomes will make a 10k meteor build do 16k meteors. It'll turn 8k spins into 13k spins. They are ludicrously powerful, I daresay even overpowered

This thread has Salted's opinion on Tomes. I know I hyped Tomes up to be overpowered (and I believe they are), but the real question is whether it is ok that they are so powerful. Wynn is already laughably easy if you use potions, or even if you abuse powerful mechanics, like endurance and concentration or curse/courage stacking with time rift. Are tomes really going to be that bad? That's what I'm hoping the community will discuss on this thread.
It's also worth noting that players will have to complete raids to unlock these, and that casual players might not be interested/capable of such activities. So, it is unlikely for tomes to become standard.
EDIT:
Salted's opinion is basically that Tomes will add a form of linear progression to Wynncraft without messing with current building.
(I'm very sorry for misrepresenting his opinion, that was completely my fault for not reading carefully, thanks for catching that @JaydonTheWarrior)

TLDR:
Tomes are multiplicative, and exceedingly powerful, turning virtually any build into something more powerful than a mythic build without tomes.

As a note:
In their current state tomes are completely reqless

 

wall of text doesnt convince me until I see big damage picture

 

I would like the combat tomes to be just a tiny buff to customize playstyle a bit, like weaker accessories with no req and no sp bonus

 

holy shit

how naive of me to think champion would be the thing i complain about most in this update

 

Now, hear me out, unpopular opinion, might get me banned but....
Tomes maybe, kinda, should, most likey, very likely, get a rework.

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Or a nerf which ever comes first tbh

 

Do any of you mind if I drop in and give a hot take?

Tomes aren't powerful ENOUGH.

Raids are HARD dude. Maybe (probably) I'm just bad at videogames in general and Wynn by extension, but raids are HARD. I tested Grootslang with my test classes (morph - mythic. For warrior Collapse/Hero, assassin is Nirvana, shaman is Fantasia, archer is Freedom, mage is Singularity) and, while drinking potions, in a party with three other (lv 60-70) people, we failed the raid because I died once on each of three different runs.

IMHO tomes should be closer to a consumable. Laughably powerful for a short period of time.

I dunno.

 

Yeah, I was concerned about this when I first saw some of the numbers for them in the trailer. As someone with a build with ~20k meteors on my mage, I think it's safe to say that giving me a 60% damage increase (or more) would be, uh, brokenly, ridiculously, absurdly, utterly and whatever other good adjectives I might be forgetting overpowered. Like, a 20% multiplicative bonus there would be kinda iffy. And my build was made with relative tankiness in mind. I appreciate the chance to wield 1% of Salted's power, but I get the sense that it might be jus a tad, wee bit totally gamebreaking. Disclaimer: I have not used any yet since the majority of my experience with the beta has consisted of it crashing twice and then me leaving to do the dishes, which has been shockingly uninformative. It's entirely possible that they'll be fine and good and all and that their rarity might help to balance out some of their power. And it's also possible I'll get a mythic in my daily rewards every day for the rest of my time playing Wynncraft, and of the two, I'm not sure which one I'd pick as being more unlikely. I think they might wanna tweak that.

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS ALL ENTIRELY MY OPINION AND GUESSES SO PLEASE TREAT IT AS SUCH. THIS IS MY TAKE ON THE WORST CASE SCENARIO AND IS NOT, I REPEAT NOT A "THIS IS HOW IT WILL HAPPEN" PREDICTION. PLEASE DO NOT CALL ME AN IDIOT AND TELL ME I'M WRONG, I CRY EASILY (and also this is my guess at a worst case scenario, not necessarily what will happen). Thank you.
As for them being overpowered being okay, I'd say it is except for one thing. It's that they'll not become optional, any more than accessories or armor are now. And, naturally, players will min-max, get really powerful tomes, increase the strength of the average build. I think that it's pretty safe to say that this much at least is pretty much gospel, given everything that's happened so far with literally any game to ever have any sort of anything be better in any way than anything else class building in the community. This may then cause the devs to see that as a reason to buff all the new content -except that anyone who doesn't use an overpowered build with a tome will now get stuck on the new content, meaning that tomes are required to achieve the power level the devs assume the player as at a given point. This would make tomes a pretty normal part of every build. I'd say this is okay; it's expected to use all of the gear you have available now, except for one thing. The gap between mythic and obtainable -and I do think that this is a good term for them in this case- is much larger; a 20% increase in total damage (and I'm assuming this doesn't affect raw damage bonuses) is a lot more than a 20% damage id, or even a 40% damage id. Scaling everything around mythics is already a bad idea, and in this case, that may very well be the same as scaling everything around mythics now when everyone without one has to use commons.

Now, this is as I said entirely conjecture, and it's possible that this will not be the case for any number of reasons, but I see no reason to not at least consider the worst-case scenario when we're talking about this. It's possible they'll be fine and it's possible they'll be optional, but having seen how even slightly overpowered items get abused and how real power creep is in everything, I think it's fair to say that this is at least partially a likely scenario, and that they will either be heavily nerfed or there will be a ton more power creep in the future due to them, because if the average build suddenly enjoyed a trade-off-less 30% damage bonus right now, I think there'd be some rebalancing in the near future.

 

Raids are cheese-able with tanks and mage support, and morph is almost definitely able to beat tcc nopot without mythics (assuming good rng for raid buffs i suppose) but i feel like its less about the challenge matching the reward and more about having a smooth cap for power level

 

It does affect raw

Multiplicative damage literally just multiplies your final damage by whatever % multiplicative damage bonus you have.

 

That makes sense!

I think it might be more productive if the tomes were geared towards completing content *faster*. Like, you do TCC and it makes it faster to complete CotL content somehow in case there was an early quest in that area you forgot to do and just kind of haven't finished. I think if they were like that I'd play them a LOT more.

Maybe just a wacky idea.

 

Oh Sweet Baby Bovine. Okay yeah, gonna go with "oh dear" on this.

 

I mean yeah that sounds really op, but to me its just weird that this is the one time they made the damage multiplicative. Everything else incentivizes you to build tank and rely on base damage to hit high damage numbers. They even continue to force items into their etw fantasies and overbuff them just so they dont have to touch the way SPs work, but tomes is the one thing they're making multiplicative.

Also i dont think we have to cry about balance, as everybody that has played this game enough knows there is none. Except ofc for randomly changing SP reqs on armor once a year and expecting that to fix the underlying problems in Wynncrafts damage calculation.

 

What if they were just additive instead of multiplicative?

+30% (id) damage doesn't seem absolutely broken but does feel like a nice (very nice) "prestige" buff that min/maxing players would go after - its definitely significant but not overpowering like 1.3x is

 

In my opinion, make damage tomes additive and buff their dmg a little. If they remain multiplicative, I think they should have their damage values cut in half. As for armour tomes, making them additive would ofc make some people invincible, so keep them multiplicative. Just nerf their values. Not sure if this is possible but might be a good idea to add decimal places to values they can potentially have so smaller intervals can be used, considering we'll have 4 armour tome slots so by default they'd have much lower values than damage tomes. Might be good if they could be adjusted with more precision.

 

I don't really know why they were made so powerful. All they do is make the game easier, which wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't for one detail. Raids are difficult and take a lot of time. So what ends up happening is the game is made easier, but only for people with lots of time and skill, or people with good items already. I guess the only place it really makes sense is in wars, since those are apparently kind of difficult, at least to solo

 

Tomes are literally more broken than my heart rn. Keep in mind that a Level 60 player can already get tomes that can cause their legendaries to outrival mythics. Just imagine what players with mythic god builds can do.

Unless the other mobs in the game are buffed significantly (which I do not see happening) Tomes will be op

 

Some of us on the beta were using wynntils to look at the nbt data of the tomes and we figured out the base id values of all the tomes so far. The values in the OP were values that we had found by rerolling, but these are the actual numbers (as they are currently, they could be changed).

Level 60 Legendary Weapon Mastery I: base 12
Level 60 Legendary Armour Mastery I: base 7
Level 60 Fabled Weapon Mastery I: base 15
Level 80 Legendary Armour Mastery II: base 11
Level 100 Fabled Weapon Mastery III: base 26
Level 100 Mythic Weapon Mastery III: base 30

I might be missing Level 100 Legendary Weapon Mastery but I forget if we checked that one or not. Either way, you can multiply those bases by 1.3 and then round to the closest integer to get the max.

 

I hate to say this so bluntly, but this is just you being really bad at the game. Is this why everyone jokes about internal testing vastly overestimating the difficulty of everything?

Multiplicative damage boosts are insanely broken and I don't see a good argument for keeping them as is, much less making them... stronger...

Yes please, we know they're not going to become interesting tradeoffs so at least make them "balanced" like this
There is the issue of them not affecting raw-based builds but then you can just make tomes with raw!!!

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Feels like this is a personal rant without any basis, wynn is surprisingly balanced. There's only usually two or three blatantly broken items per update, which is amazing considering the size of the item pool. The "randomly changing SP reqs" actually have reason behind them. Sounds like you're just mad that your builds don't work anymore.

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TRUE

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agree

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now people are complaining that champ doesn't do enough for the money lmao

 

I think the reaction to this whole thing has been really interesting because I think there's been so much focus on how powerful they are without any real discussion of the fundamental reason behind it. Sure, you could take the 30% damage/defence increase or whatever it is and bump it down to 10% and most people will probably relax a little more about it, but I think the real issue is with how tomes work.

They give flat boosts with no real cost to usage and there's enough tome slots to use one of each which means there's no cost-benefit analysis involved since there's only one clear path forward for every build that ends once you reach the end. I said this across a couple other posts, but I think there are two really fun and interesting ways they could change tomes to make them more interesting. I probably don't need to say this, but I'm not much of a builder, so I can't really comment on what the outcome of this is going to be, but I think once a system is in place it can be balanced to work so I'm not too worried.

First, tomes could have been the way we get new spells in the game. Since tomes are specific to a class, they could have had major ID's which swap one spell for another allowing you to customize your spells to match your playstyle, so if you play a melee warrior for example, maybe you can change out all your other spells for mobility stuff to give your mana a better use or if you play a fast paced mage, maybe you could change meteor out for something weaker but faster. It would also allow for the elemental conversions of spells to be changed out so if you're playing a water mage, you don't need to worry about the fire/earth of meteor, you could spec into a water main DPS attack. By doing this, tomes would present the players with opportunities to play around with essentially new classes while also allowing for more builds to be made and more interesting combat, plus it would give us more spells which has been a very requested feature.

I think the other way to change tomes would be to make them essentially the same as raid buffs but cut down. In this system, you get 3 slots, 1 for each of the 3 levels and you can mix and match with the one rule being you can only have 1 of each level so even though there would only be 15(*3 = 45) tomes with 3 raids, the combination you use would be super dependent on the build you use, allowing for a fun progression of class building without needing to be overpowered to be interesting.

And I think that last line is really what the issue with tomes is. They're only interesting because they're busted. If tomes (as they are) get properly balanced to fit in with the rest of the game, they're basically going to need to be nerfed to the point where nobody actually cares about them. Will I run raids to get these silly items? Yes, but will I enjoy doing it? Probably at first but I think the devs need to remember that being completely OP is only fun for so long, and without a way to turn off or store tomes, they've created a system which actively discourages you from taking them off once they're equipped.

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I totally agree, it's kind of shocking actually, but I think the one catch to that is it's only balanced in PVE, PVP is the most broken unbalanced dumpster fire I've ever seen in a game for the sole reason that most builds can reasonably hit 10K DPS which would kill basically every other build in 2 seconds or less. 9/10 hunted encounters end with the first person to strike winning.

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We also have a consumable easy button called skill potions, if you can't beat something using morph and a full set of skill pots I think the problem here isn't really balance...

That said, raids should drop new ingredients for making consumables, that would be an awesome way to make them worth farming every once in a while.

 

Don't forget that we still have Dern coming out eventually, which will likely have super-strong bosses that need you to have tomes to defeat