Game Mechanics How To Improve/fix Hunted Mode (thoughts Of Someone Who Has Spent 1000+ Hours Playing It)

Everyone knows that Hunted Mode has some major flaws that make the gamemode relatively hard to play. I would say the biggest problem is that almost nobody uses it to have fun with PvP, but other than that it is extremely hard to fight back when you don't have the upper hand, some builds are quite unbalanced, defense only approaches the base class defense instead of actually working, and agility can be extremely frustrating at times.

In addition to this, when all goes well and you do actually get someone to fight, said fights are very often anticlimactic. Few builds go well with fighting each other, and adding on the rampant bugs that exist in hunted mode such as player outlines and full invisibility, it's just pretty frustrating. Wynncraft PvP as a whole is very fast paced, which is fine, I guess, but it would also be very cool if you were able to fight back against the people hunting you (they can infinitely respawn and come back to fight) or at least not die instantly when you get jumped. Here's an example of what a

Spoiler: pretty average mid level hunted mode fight

looks like (it's pretty scuffed but i don't have too much recorded gameplay because I use a macbook primarily)

It's fine and everything right, but if the Seaskipper interface didn't interfere I would have killed Rene's hardcore instantly without anything he could've done about it. He still didn't have the time to turn around and get off a spell before he died. People combat this by stacking agility. This makes the resulting fights very highly RNG reliant and even less fun to do. For example, here's me fighting someone using Toxoplasmosis.

As you can see, neither of us are trying very hard. Most of the video is just me waiting for his invincibility timer to run out so I can fight again. But it shows a lot of the problems with Hunted mode. 150 Agi, Untradable gear that never drops, flawed system etc. The one time I died I lost probably around 1le in stuff, whereas the hunter can just keep coming back indefinitely. That's another problem with Hunted mode.

...but it isn't too bad.
All these things are really not hard to make changes for and balance, with further tweaks as needed. I think that once the base gameplay of PvP is more polished and not in its current broken state, more people will be willing to have fun with/use it. In addition to that, more systems can be added on top of the PvP that would make it more fun, and I'll get into that later.

For starters, though, here's a few of the changes that I think would be needed to balance Hunted mode.
1. Nerf Defense and Agility to a maximum of 68 points, as well as fixing the Defense stat to actually work instead of approaching the 100% damage baseline (if you assign defense on a Warrior and get into a PvP encounter, it actually makes you less defensive)
2. Nerf the Heal spell and natural HPR by 75%, in addition to giving potions a 10/15 sec cooldown - mage's heal and HPR tank builds would be nigh unkillable with an actual defense system in play where people don't get oneshot super easily.
3. Nerf Poison to 1/2 the original values in combat, nerf Courage by 50%, and nerf Reflection/Thorns by 1/3 or so. This is also just another common sense change. A Courage buffed Toxoplasmosis build will get at a maximum ~25k poison ticks (I think). With these changes it would get about 6k poison ticks- still extremely high, just not unbeatable.
4. Reduce the 60 second combat timer to ~30 seconds. This is just more of a QOL change as there isn't really a reason to have it be 60 seconds. 30 would serve the purpose just fine. I've had a lot of fights become pretty awkward by someone being on a combat timer accidentally (or intentionally D:)
5. Remove the boosts gained from Hunted and add them back through the same gamemode in another way (points based system, LE risk etc.)

Honestly, these suggestions probably won't work. But I'm sure that some balance can relatively easily be reached by tweaking around values to the point where fights aren't just about getting lucky or getting the drop on the other person. It's really, really rare that agility RNG plays out in a satisfying way and usually more of "just keep fucking hitting them until they die or you do"

In addition to this, after you die in Hunted mode, you should go back to being outside of PvP for 5-10 minutes. This prevents people in full untradable gear from returning over and over, and encourages some sort of tradable gear risk to give you more of an edge in a fight that won't just end in you dying eventually, even if you kill your adversary 5/6 of the time.

Now, let's talk about some of the things that would be fun to add to Hunted mode after the main PvP is fixed. A couple things I can rattle off the top of my head would be something like a player tracker, and a bounty system, though some kind of point based system would also work well in addition to this maybe.

The player tracker would, in theory, replace your compass when you toggle Hunted Mode. It will track another random Hunted player (including HICH players), and for three minutes that player cannot use scrolls/enter a town/class et cetera. They will also know they are being tracked by another player. During this time, the other player uses their compass which will be accurate to within 100 blocks or something of the other player. Then you'll fight. This system assumes that both people in hunted mode want to fight and are willing to risk dying instead of just using the mode for a boost. The victorious player (or maybe just the one who dealt most damage) could maybe get some sort of point based reward that could go towards some Hunted reward shop or a leaderboard of player kills/unique player kills.

The bounty system would work as follows: You place a bounty of LE on your own head, and then go out and fight. Other players would only be able to claim your bounty if they also had a similar bounty over their heads, and in the process would be risking something for both people to profit from. This could also be worked to give a point based reward.

A point reward shop for Hunted would probably be different kinds of timed boosts while still having Hunted toggled on, or something. Of course, the possibilities are endless with reward systems and extra stuff to add to Hunted once the base gameplay of Wynncraft PvP is a more balanced and fun interaction. Thanks for reading, and I might add more to the suggestion later after going through more stuff about Hunted Mode/thoughts on the topic etc.

(oh, also I really want some kind of player kill tracker if you have Hardcore mode enabled on the class you killed someone on. that'd be really cool thanks-)

oh oh also this document is pretty cool if you want to read more
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j-kp_MoNMC_ucEe77xNA3Qse0uxt-XLxzDeBQ56RMm4

 

bro agility is cracked always wdym hunted issue
salted please remove the ability to stand still and take no damage 8/10 times without sacrificing anything, that is just stupid

jokes aside, to nerf defense wouldn't it need to work first, but as for HPR I feel it is mostly ok since you do almost no damage with the really good hpr builds

 

I'm personally against Hunted for reasons rather unrelated to the subject of this thread, but from what I've seen you post in other places this does seem like a step in the right direction. Would be nice if these things could get tested more but this is funnily enough the only part of the game where there's an actual risk to testing.

 

Fix def, change agi in general, rework heal, make poison not deal true damage, change how hunted affects item drops.

Even something as simple as making mythics have a 0.5% chance to drop will instantly fix half of lvl 100+ encounters since people will think twice before roaming with their 13000 poison toxo while wearing a squishy build which dies in one hit (when they get hit that is >.>)

 

another incredibly cool linnyforumspost

 

holy shit linny hunted thread
big fan of a lot of things,

and this sums up the overall issues super well i think.



Onto the stuff I can talk about because I'm not a hunted player
(yooo @NagisaStreams we talked about this a lot)
Regardless of hunted, def/agi and healing are really, really problematic in the game, period. 80/80 damage reduction/dodge chance and insane sustain makes it IMPOSSIBLE to balance challenging content in an engaging and fun way, leading to "unfair" damage spam, oneshots, etc.

This is what I responded with to @EpsilonDown's agi falloff suggestion, because it seems like such a good idea on the surface but only shows how much we're used to the absurdity of wynn.

Not actually a big fan of a timer-based agi, but it would be WAY better than our current system. Low bar and all that.

Def/Agi should increase your EHP by 1.8x at the very most, not 5x. It's just not fair to str/dex, even if they were multiplicative. @JaydonTheWarrior's talk about unkillability in wynncraft was a bit ahead of its time- people responded to it with statements about how **current** content didn't favor hypertank when the real point was that it being impossible to die thanks to sustain and ehp was a problem that would lead to bad boss design to attempt to kill you -> which is happening as we speak.

Until Salted realizes this issue, the game will continue to be more and more broken as new enemies are added. And of course, def actually has to work in hunted and both defensive skillpoints need aforementioned changes for hunted to actually be interactive, I guess.

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this seems a bit like a tangent but the point is that these issues are in no way hunted exclusive (definitely shown by it to an extreme though) and there are many other reasons for changes that would help hunted

 

o yeah also you'd probably just have to take a chunk out of damage dealt in general maybe,

 

And the other time you get melted by Bob's reincarnation.

 

hi thread bump (this post is cool)