Game Design Cci Is Not Accomplishing What It Meant To, And It May Completely Ruin The Game

1. An Introduction to CCI

CCI, or crowd-control immunity is a feature that has been implemented to many bosses that prevents them from being stunned, slowed, or knocked back. It was meant to be a simple way to increase the difficulty of many existing boss fights and to nerf shaman (and assassin) as they had ridiculous control over the boss. With cci implemented it basically killed the strategy of standing in a far corner of the arena and spamming aura or spamming spin attack so often that the enemy couldn’t do anything.

2. The problem

Although it worked in nerfing things, the implementation of CCI had a lot of unintended effects. Many of the spells used by other classes became practically worthless, mainly those that are primarily crowd-control spells (i.e. ice snake, uproot). On the flip side, some spells that had knockback as a soft cap for their damage (damage spells that knock the enemy out of reach and prevent spamming), got a quite ridiculous buff, as many of these spells had adjusted damage that still made them viable even with the soft cap (i.e. multihit, uppercut). In the end, CCI just brought much more imbalance to the game concerning boss fights than there was before. In the end, boss fights with CCI now favor “spray and pray” much more than they used to and are losing the interesting control aspect that I loved about Wynncraft. Only damage spells are viable now, making spell chaining a lot less interesting, really reducing the fun of boss fights, and taking away the reward of practicing effective spell chains. Included below is a chart that describes the effect that CCI had on each spell in the game (sometimes separated into aspects) and whether that change was good or not.

Spoiler: Chart

Spells in the center circle were essentially unaffected.

3. The solution

As shown by the chart, most of the problems caused by CCI are from spells that can crowd control and deal large amounts of damage at the same time. The crowd control from spells that are not designed to do damage already had the correct tradeoff, sacrificing damage for control. Those spells do not need to be changed dramatically. In order to re-balance the spells specific aspects of spells that ignore the tradeoff must be addressed. Some rules that should be implemented are:

Bosses cannot be stunned by the first or third spell. This includes spin attack, aura, and bash (if it wasn’t bugged)

Bosses take 50% reduced knockback from melee attacks (as a rule of thumb).

Bosses cannot be slowed past 30% slowness. This will affect smoke bomb, bomb arrow, and ice snake (however ice snake slows by 30% so it will not affect anything)

Multihit cannot be controlled by looking around on bosses, it will just hit them straight up.

Bosses’ momentum cannot be canceled by hitting them midair while in a charge.

Bosses will not take knockback from arrow storm whatsoever.

All other effects of spells are retained, such aura’s and uproot’s pull, haul’s stun, ice snake’s stun, teleport’s blindness, etc.

Accounting for the spells that needed a buff and got it because of CCI:

This is mostly just for warrior. I’ll just say it, warrior needs a buff in general, and changing the way a spell works won’t help very much. Since this thread is only about CCI, I’ll leave most of the balancing up to staff, but I do have one suggestion: Make warrior’s bash damage bonus stack with or take precedence over warscream. It’s just a bit strange that warscream would cancel out the greater buff, and I think this is something that needs an urgent fix.


Finally, staff, I understand that applying such a precise change to how the spells work on certain types of mobs is daunting, but I believe that this change is absolutely essential to the health of the game and the balance of boss fights. Please at least consider the above, or even better come up with another more innovative way to fix these problems, as your game knowledge is definitely better than mine.

 

what if we took the wynncraft spell political compass quiz-- wait that's a chart nvm

 

What was great about warrior is the uppercut could have the boss airborne, which allows you to either stay away from enemies or spell-comboing them while at least doing decent amount of damage. With cci I think it took away one of the purposes of using uppercut. The boss could run towards you as usual when what you did is only doing some damage to them.

 

Yeah, ice snake is now entirely useless in boss fights, and meteors is practically unusable against fast enemies. My level 105 mage nearly died to the Grootslang bossfight after my team died on me, because I couldn't freeze it or hit it, so I basically had to teleport around wildly and occasionally through sheer luck land a meteor. you can' t use spells defensively or tactically now to stop a boss hitting your ally or to stop a charge spell. I would disagree with most of the nerfs though; I think the only thing that really stood out as overpowered was aura and it's insane stunlock, but that still is an issue in all non-cci fights, so mainly this just nerfed other spells. I honestly think they should completely remove cci and instead target individual spells that need adjustments (by which I mean aura).

 

Warrior against CCI is a mixed bag, yes it disables uppercut stun and bash CC but it also ups warrior DPS significantly

Warrior (with mythic) 1.20 DPS is comparable to assassin (thrunda:weathered) not counting catac, so thats cool

and that isn't even rage hero

just my 15 cents

 

I know this is a bit late, but I've been doing some testing in my free time, and frankly, CCI may be the single worst feature they've ever added from a fun & balanced gameplay perspective. All crowd-control spells are now useless on bosses. You can't even capitalize on the no-knockback for increased dps, because bosses can now keep attaching you no matter what, requiring you to constantly be on the run. Any boss fight with an aggressive boss who is faster than you is now 100% based on your ability to tank their hits or kill them instantly, which is incredibly not fun. Assassin is no longer a fun combo-based class, because your combo no longer sets you up to flee and recover mana/ health and then atack again, it now opens you up for them to attack you. You can no longer use warscream or uppercut to give yourself a little space as warrior. Glass cannon builds now cannot stun bosses to avoid damage. Ice snake no longer is a functional spell in boss fights- it would literally be better if RRL was a second heal or meteor spell than a spell that has no effect and does very little damage. Arrow shield isn't useful to protect you, arrow storm cannot be used to guide bosses, spin attack and smoke bomb no longer blind mobs, etc. Effectively, the metric for how good all non-transport spells are has been reduced to how much damage they deal or heal, which, for a game with combat as complex and interesting as it was before, is honestly a tragedy.

 

Concur with above. CCI is probably the worst part of 1.20. Honestly it outcompetes even tomes for me.

 

i think another problem with CCI is how unintuitive it is for newer players who are on their first playthrough. CCI only really starts existing at around lvl 50 if i remember correctly, which means that for a large chunk of the game, youre not gonna encounter it at all, and then you suddenly encounter once you hit the lvl 50 range, which will definitely get players killed since their spells arent working like they believe they will. theres also the similar issue that not all bosses have it, so like, if youre playing the game relatively blind, youre bound to be caught off guard and killed because your spells stop working at what appear to be arbitrary points.


Hard agree btw that CCI is terrible, if the effected spells were so powerful they shouldve been rebalanced on a case by case or be reworked completely (ahem arrow shield). this blanket nerf just hurts the game tbh. like i get why certain enemies like orphion cant be thrown around with multihit, but cci in general is e

 

I think they should add CC resistance instead of flat out immunity and different bosses could have different levels (maybe a couple keep full immunity)

 

Yeah CCI is just god awful and it completely goes against the design philosophy of wynncraft's classes and only serves as artificial difficulty that is more of trying to fit a square into a circle-shaped hole more than anything. I'd be fine with mobs having differing degrees of resistance to CC or immunity to certain types of it (such as mobs being immune or more resistant to knockback but can still be effected by slowing/freezing/etc, and vice versa). I thought CCI was more intended to buff and allow for the use of unique stationary mobs in new content (such as the Colossus's body parts in TCC) rather than putting them on stratiformis-tier speed bosses like Orphion. I really hope this gets revisited in a future patch and gets seriously toned down.

 

Yes, CCI is broken, but removing it might be a bad idea in some places. Let's take the TCC bossfight for example. Without CCI, the Colossal Dukes would just fall into the barriers below, making it impossible for you to hit it unless you are archer/shaman/mage.

 

Making a mob unable to be moved is fine, if it's one that's required to be stationary. The Eye didn't need CCI to be kept in place. For stationary mobs however, the other aspects of CCI are still detrimental to gameplay and balance.

 

CCI bad i cri

 

I could see it as a fun gimmick for a really slow, hard-hitting boss where you have to keep moving in order to not get killed, but for a boss that's nearly as fast as or even faster than the player, it just doesn't work because it really becomes a "spam attack until one of you dies" game, without any way to strategically get some space.

 

The only thing CCI is good at is bullying us

 

All CCI does is remove one layer of depth and strategy out of a boss fight.

 

Remember when the corrupted of worlds existed as the first “major boss” of the game and was designed to teach the player how to use their control spells like ice snake/arrow shield etc as a way to stay alive in a cramped arena with a fast moving melee boss? I do. Now it’s a relic of a bygone era, whose original purpose is a gimmick now.