Game Mechanics Please See This Devs! Classes, Abilities And Combat Design!

*Disclaimer* I love wynncraft and have sunk many hours into it. This is just one of the problems and I will be posting another half of this about questing and story. Both of these parts were originally posted as a whole by me on the wynncraft subreddit.

To put it simply, I feel like Wynncraft combat gets incredibly boring. Its always the same four abilities, the same attack (though sometimes faster or slower), and the same strategy. I feel like it has such a good base that could be improved on so much, and I have some possible ideas.

The abilities are stale as hell. Sure, you can make a new character or play a different class, but who would want to restart on a character that they have spent so much time grinding on, just to go back to level one. I know for a fact I wouldn't, though I'm sure some people wouldn't mind at all, especially if you like replaying early levels.

I have a solution in mind. One way to help with this is to completely revamp the class system. instead of choosing a class on character creation, have new players start off with no class and only basic abilities. Then, once they reach a certain level (10 imo) they will go to a certain npc, whether it is one to talk to to choose your class or if there is one per class and you go and talk to the corresponding NPC for the class you want, I don't know, but in any case you talk to an npc who gives you a class (also there could be a class hideout/base, which could be a city or place of interest which sells special class specific items and/or could be a gathering place for same class group activities.) you could then continue to level up, unlocking spells as you go.

The difference here is that you can unlock many more than just four spells, and could continue to as you level up all the way to endgame. The way the spells would work is that Wynncraft would keep the right-and-left- click cast system, but instead of having static spell equipped to each combo, you could pick and choose one spell for each slot. Whether each spell will be only able to fit into one slot (far easier to balance imo), or just have anything go anywhere, I don't know. This system would, of course, replace the spells-upgrade-at-certain-levels system, but I think that it would make combat, and therefore the game, way more enjoyable, as it really feels like you are in control of how you play instead of playing a locked down character like something out of Overwatch (bad comparison I know, but they also do that) or really any game that doesn't have a lot of gameplay customization.

TLDR; class and ability systems need revamps: start classless and unlock it at lvl 10 while unlocking many spells as you level up and equipping them to the different mouse button combos, instead of static abilities that can't be changed.


Thanks for reading, and devs if you see this, please, it would be a dream come true if anything like this was implemented into the game. Keep up the good work, and I'm off to play some Wynncraft.

 

If you unlock more than four spells how will you cast them? The current click combos only have space for four.

 

Add a poll please

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I'm pretty sure he said that there are four slots for spells, but you can unlock more than four

 

oh I missed that.

 

This is only vaguely the case. Every class has a ton of palystyles it can choose from, and even in things like spell there are so many options. Sure, there may only be 4 spells, but you can choose what spell cycle you want to use, which there are at least 5 for each class. Also will you use the main attack? Will that be super slow or will you go fast hybrid? And there's also major ids that are changing how spells work, which is actually kind of similar to what you seem to want, nighthawk, cherry bombs, entropy, sorcery, madness, roving assassin, furious and peaceful effigy, taunt, plague, rally, saviours sacrifice, guardian, cavalryman, and transcendence. There's also powder specials, which are another attack or playstyle that can be easily accessed by anyone with a small bit of money. So sure, there's only 4 spells, but there are a ton of palystyles.

I also will point out that you seem to be only lvl 40. This is ok, it's fine to have some complaints at the beginning of a game. Personally, I think that the items at lower levels can be really dull to build with sometimes, since some of my favourite styles are nearly impossible to do. But you haven't yet seen how diverse the endgame item system is.

One final note. I agree that having more spells would be nice, but I feel that this system is too complicated and not really the way this game works. However, I feel like as I have mentioned before, Major IDs might be the answer. These can modify how spells work, and can turn them into whatever you want really, although they usually stick to something similar to the original. I also was going to suggest tomes except those actually got introduced as a completely different thing.

 

I don't see what the point of playing multiple levels before choosing a class would be. It doesn't really let you grasp what the class is like to play, it just means you don't have any spells until level 10 or whatever, which would make the gameplay a lot more dull for new players.

 

I really want to agree with this statement, but I unfortunately can't. Wynncraft's Spells simply aren't versatile enough to work. The fact that each Class has a mobility Spell, instead of some kind of distinct/noticeable mobility incorporated into their moveset, really says a lot about the design philosophy of Wynncraft's base. First Spells define first impressions of the Class and how it'll play (usually), the Second Spell's for mobility, the Third Spell is your high-cost, high-damage, and Fourth Spell is utility and/or crowd control.

Having very few weapons, attacks, and/or Spells in a game necessitates that they're really good. Otherwise, they stale really fast. Take TF2's Stickybomb Launcher for example: It only has Left Click to shoot and Right Click to detonate, but it can be used for mobility, setting traps for enemies to be instantaneously obliterated by, mid to long-range combat, and even launching away enemies if you detonate a Stickybomb at their feet!

Now, let's take a look at the Meteor Spell. It hits hard, but that's about it. No ability to become a meteor yourself and crash down where you want to go, no launching yourself by standing where it could blow you sky-high, and nothing except what it's intended to be: A high-cost, high-damage Spell.

Again, let me reiterate: Having only a few tools to pick from necessitates that they're high quality, or that they're individually interesting when used for at least a few hours by themselves. MMORPGs usually solve this issue of singular Spells staling by having a lot of different Spells which do different things, allowing you to pick from a huge variety of different fun buttons. Wynncraft, however, only really has 5 fun buttons to click, and they're both simple and, as we all know, prone to staling.

 

I have to agree with this, the spells themselves really only have one or two uses. What I was trying to say was more about how the combat system is more than individual spells, and is really about spell cycling, but yeah. It would be cool if spells had more ways they could be used. Like, for meteor I'd like to see burning ground actually be useful and be a damage over time thing instead of a minor 125% damage tick that doesn't proc if you actually are good at casting spells. I still don't think the system suggested in this thread is good though, since it overcomplicates things and would be super difficult to balance.

 

To me, I feel like for the classes and spells we have now already do an good job rn. A lot of them involves thinking of know when to use them optimally, and how you would design a build around them. You can't just go through Wynncraft with spamming your 1st/Bread and Butter Spell, you have to work around your spells to use them optimally with your "limited" selection of spells and use the world of customizability to tinker with them to your tastes. Tho, having more opinions with more spells might be good in diversifying your opinions more and more, I feel like it with would kinda take away from the aspect of customizing your build around your class and spells, and it would turn mid players to customize your spells around what makes you more powerful with less incentive on equipping good gear and would make certain spells thrown into the waste side. I think it would just be preferable to have alternate versions of your core spells, since it won't take away the heart/main aspect of the spell, but give the player a bit more flair and customizability. i.e., look at https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...ts-fix-that-93-1-approval-189-support.257599/'s Fixing War Scream for another take on War Scream, if the normal War Scream doesn't suit to your taste.

 

exactly

 

A different order of spells doesn't necessarily make a new play style. Going from repeating: meteor meteor heal to meteor meteor meteor heal is not an entirely new, exciting, and unique playstyle. A different play style is going from sniping the boss from afar while using movement abilities to avoid attacks to standing right in the boss's face, tanking most of the damage, and casting combos of spells that compliment/buff each other to dish out damage. Also, major IDs, at least with how lackluster they are currently, are the solution. Entropy is helpful, I can be more precise with my meteors, but that's a stat boost. That's not a unique playstyle. If I don't like using ice snake and I want a different spell, an instant ice snake is completely useless. Major IDs can be a great supplement, I truly do like the option of slightly reworking spells, but they are still the same spell at heart. I'm sure we can agree that making meteor travel faster is not at all akin to letting me create a wall of homing magically projectiles. The point is that I, as the player, should be able to make significant choices about the mechanics of my character, not just choosing which stats I want to stack. In WOW, each class has three specializations, each with a completely different play style. Even on the same class, the same playthrough, I can go from a leader of an army of minions, to stacking insane ailments and debuffs on my enemies, depending on which specialization I choose. From there, I still have many different choices on how I want to stack stats, like wynncraft has, but what should come first is the playstyle/mechanics, then the stacking of stats. Only having 4 spells to play with for each character for 8 years is, frankly, a joke. While I don't agree with split aether that there should be an NPC the lets us choose a class at level 10, I think swappable spells will do the job, I do agree that we need more ways to make mechanics-based decisions on our characters.

 

I can tell you from experience that there is more to spell cycling than meteor-meteor-heal vs meteor-meteor-meteor-heal.

For example, I have recently gotten into fast hybrid. Granted, fast hybrid pretty much can do any playstyle (except spellsteal, which is possible but unreliable without a huge crowd), so it's a particularly varied playstyle. When at high health, I usually stay at a medium distance and spam meteor and teleport, with main attack and ice snake mixed in. This is a very offensive playstyle, and I need to be careful. If I do get hit, I can go into a more defensive playstyle, going fully melee for damage and using icesnake, heal, and tp to regen and dodge attacks. I can also go into a very offensive mode by casting curse then chaining around 6-7 meteors during it's duration, dealing nearly 30k dps.

As an other example, assassin is really good example of how spell cycles can lead do a variety of very unique playstyles. Spell assassin has 3 damage spells it can choose from, spin attack, multihit, and smoke bomb. Spin attack can deal some damage, or it can be used as a stunning attack. Multi Hit deals a lot of damage, and can be spammed but not as much as spin attack. Smoke bomb deals a ton of damage, but over a long time, making it more heavy than multi hit. By changing the combination of vanish+these spells, you can change from a fast spell spam playstyle, to a more heavy playstyle that casts multi hit and smoke bomb on occasion.

Archer honestly isn't that good though, and I will not comment much on spell warrior and spell shaman, since those should really be changed (also I don't have much experience in them). I believe though, that these can, should, and will be changed to be more varied without completely reworking the combat and spell system.

There also are a ton of major ids that are not a stat boost as you say, along with gimmicks that are made using stats that end up completely changing the playstyle. Entropy may be a bad example, but I really doubt you could argue that madness is simply a stat boost, or sorcery is just a stat boost, or any of the other major ids really, except maybe nighthawk, which really is just a dps increase at the cost of more mana usage. And sometimes just stat boosts can be interesting. Lunar spine's gimmick is purely ms and mr, but completely changes how you play to the point where some people almost worship it.



Despite all of this, there are a few problems:
1. Not all classes have super varied or well designed spells.
2. The building system is actually really complex and diverse, but this is hidden by needing to have a large amount of knowledge on the item pool, so most people need to learn from others in order to make their own builds.
3. The early game items have very little variety, and only the people who make it to lvl 100 really manage to see how much better the endgame items are.
4. Various balance issues and bugs, along with some badly designed spells. Not to mention CCI.

Personally, I feel that these issues should be considered and fixed first, before completely changing how the spell system works. As Acadee said, another alternative would be to make the limited set of tools high quality and versatile, and personally I feel that this is a much better idea.

Minecraft tends to be very limiting, and requires people to be very creative and use things in a variety of ways. Since wynncraft is set in Minecraft, it inherits these limitations and this is something I really like. I really feel that being given a limited set of tools and having to use them in different ways is really cool, and I feel that wynncraft is making good progress in this direction, but there is still things that need to be changed. I don't think that changing this philosophy is necessary, and honestly would make this game a lot less interesting to me and probably a lot of the build community.

 

Yes, I was exaggerating to make a point multiple times, and I'm sure there are more possibilities of builds I'm not familiar with, but I don't see anywhere where you are opposed to swappable spells. (I think we both don't like all of what Aether suggested.) I think we are getting stuck on the semantics, here. So my question to you is are you or are you not in favor of letting the player choose between 2 or more options of spells to have in each slot (utility, damage, mobility, other)?

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I really like AcadeeAlkana's ideas on this topic, and if I understand what you said correctly, you do too. I think we agree on much more than it seems, here, we just are splitting hairs.

 

Yeah, I think we agree on a lot of the stuff, just the detail about whether or not being able to select spells is a good idea. I still think that major IDs are a good system for this, they just need to be good ones that add new things or change how they work, like cherry bombs and taunt, both of which greatly change how the spell works or add new stuff. Major IDs also allow for things like sorcery and madness, which wouldn't be possible with adding more spells, although I guess there's no reason why both systems couldn't exist at the same time. Although I think that since major IDs are already implemented and pretty stable, there's no reason to change how the class system works. My only problem is that major ids are locked behind having to wear an item, which might limit what people can do with it. I would have liked tomes to be a solution for this, but the current way you obtain tomes would be terrible for this.

 

Here's the meat of our "argument" (I use quotes because arguments have a negative connotation to them, but really they are just what you call 2+ people rationalizing their positions and having a conversation over the best ways to move forward, a great thing for society). There are reasons that swappable spells are almost necessary for this game.

1. Making decisions about which abilities your character can use, and trying to line them up with whatever build you are trying to create adds a new and amazingly fun layer of depth to play around with. Every other game like this does this. WOW has specializations, Diablo 3 has swappable spells and let you pick from a handful of modifiers for each spell (which are basically the equivalent of major IDs), Destiny 2 has swappable subclasses each with swappable movement, grenade, class abilities, and nodes which change how the subclass plays.
2. When there is a spell that you don't like to use, for me it's Uproot, it really puts a damper on the player's experience because there are only four to begin with. You just lost 25% of what you can do with the character. If swappable spells are added, I could chuck Uproot to the trash can and play with a spell I actually find fun and impactful.
3. Swappable spells breathe new life into all current classes. I may be tired of warrior now, but with a few new spells to experiment with, there are exponentially more versions of a warrior that I have yet to try. Just adding one spell that can be put in slot #4 means that there are two versions of warriors, twice what we can play with now. If that one new spell could be put in any slot, not just one, then there would be five versions. Occasionally adding new spells to each class means that there are frequently more reasons for players to level up classes they have already "completed" because it is a slightly different experience.
4a. This gets much more bang for the developers' buck. They could put four new spells on a new class, one new playthrough for the players, or they could put one new spell on four existing classes, four or 16 new playthroughs for players.
4b. Another way that swappable spells are more cost-efficient than making new classes is that new classes require completely new loot pools for new weapons spread throughout the entire game. That's a lot of items that need to be made.
4c. The new spells could be modified versions of things that are already in-game, meaning it takes less time and money than making spells for new classes, which by definition have to be fairly unique. The Archer's Arrow Bomb is great, and with a bit of touch up on the particle effects and stats, you can copy and paste that onto the Mage and call it a fireball. Bam! New spell for minimal work.
5.For almost a decade, we have only gotten a 25% increase in spells and classes to use (Shaman was added), while other parts of the game have grown immensely. The map size over tripled, quests and NPCs compounded even more, and completely new systems were put in place, like crafting/professions, raids, discoveries, and housing. Classes and spells are lagging far behind, and adding classes, as stated earlier, is much more work for much less worth.
6. More spells inadvertently help out balance between the characters. One damage spell may be better than another, but with swappable spells, only one has to be on par, the devs have multiple chances.
7. At least based on how I think the spell system works, this wouldn't be very difficult to add. I assume that the devs run a chain of command blocks whenever the player does certain combinations of right and left clicks, so to add a new spell that can trigger based on the same clicks, just add an if gate that leads to one or the other chain of command blocks, casting one or the other spell. You can keep track of which spell is equipped with a variable, and if the variable is 1, cast the original spell, but if it's 2, cast the new spell.