Item Rework

The Wynncraft endgame has a few problems:

Spoiler: Issue

1. Average Joes are not able to have a chance at endgame challenges.
   • By this I mean, If you're only playing Wynn max 1 hour a week, and you don't have the time or drive to go over to a build calculator, you're going to seriously struggle unlocking items like legendary island rewards or acquiring enough wealth to afford a mythic.
2. The best items are locked behind EITHER 1000s of hours OR obscene luck.
   • Mythic Items are wonderful at what they do, uniques are not. Why objectively better weapons are locked behind hours of boring playtime is beyond me.
3. It's complicated. No, seriously. To think about how much damage with a meteor I'm going to do with a thunder wand, I have to think about :
   1. Base Damage
      
   2. Powders
   3. Raw Spell damage
   4. Thunder damage %
   5. Spell damage %
   6. Dexterity Skill points
   7. Strength Skill points
   8. Tome multiplicative bonuses

As much as it feels good to be a part of a guild of wynncraft addicts who have all spent far too long figuring the system out and acquiring wealth, I just wish I could join a random TCC party and have confidence that their builds are going to be somewhat capable.

So what do I suggest?
I have two proposals:

1. Simplify the identification system
2. Remove the rarity-damage relationship

1. Simplify the identification system
The identification system is very convoluted right now. Here are my suggestions, in no particular order:

Spoiler: Spoiler for readability

1. Remove raw damage bonuses (Raw Spell and Raw Melee).
   • Adding raw damage is not a good way to balance items. There already is Spell% and Melee% to change melee and spell damage.
2. Adjust attack speed bonus so that dps stays the same whatever speed
   • This is how I first expected this ID to work. If I'm hitting you with a hammer with a good swing, it's gonna hurt. Now, if I hit you twice as fast, I'm only gonna have half the speed and do half the damage when I hit you.
3. Make powder specials and stealing work at the same rate for all attack speeds, and off spells as well.
   • I mean, why is this not a thing?
4. Remove Thorns and Reflection.
   • Thorns and Reflection could have some change to buff them, but right now they're a waste of space, and reading a long list of identifications is a bit confusing when you have useless IDs like this thrown in.
5. Remove Stealing
   • I get that it helps out a major ID to be useful, but in every other scenario, this ID is a waste of space.
6. Make elemental defenses percentage based
   • At the moment, if you hit something with 50 thunder defence twice with a 100 thunder damage wand or once with a 200 damage wand, the 2 hits will get 100 damage blocked while the 200 damage wand will only get 50 damage blocked.
   • This does not make items like Achilles useless. If your build is 100% resistant to one or two elements, while taking 300% damage from the others, I would call that balanced.
7. Remove Health Regen %
   • Seriously, a % that only acts on another id is a bit over the top. Surely an item would either add or remove Health Regen.

As a bonus, hopefully it will be easier for the item team to make and balance items when everything that convolutes the system is gone.

2. Remove the rarity-damage relationship
At the moment, If you want to do a lot of damage, you save up and buy a mythic. That's cool and all, but there isn't that wide of a range of mythics to choose from, and maybe I think a unique looks cool, it's just it's damage baseline is so low it's unusable in endgame. 90% of endgame weapons are not used simply because of badly thought out baselines.

Here I give two options: the one I want and the one people might agree to

The option I want

I would like to see all the item damage baselines be somewhat level, within a 5% range of each other if they are the same level. The difference between mythics and uniques would be that mythics would have more crazy IDs and fill more niche roles (See: Discoverer, Warchief, Warp, Weathered, Fatal, Collapse, Toxoplasmosis, Olympic (in terms of ids, not damage, it's dumb atm.)​

The option people might agree to

It could be more realistic to leave items as they are except add extra powder slots to lower tier items so that they can be used in endgame if the user thinks the item is worth the investment.​

 

2 Completely agree. I would definitely like to see rarity baselines be much closer together, so stuff besides the top tier is at least viable. The only reasons Fableds haven't already broken the entire system is because every Fabled item is practically specifically tailored not to do so.

1.1 There are many interesting gameplay and balancing purposes for raw damages, especially melee.
1.2 This needlessly makes building far less interesting. Just make dps clear to the player.
1.3 Mana Steal and Lifesteal already are even per unit time on constant melee across attack speeds. Regarding Atlas and the like, the decision space for steal efficiency is multivariate and it is literally impossible to remove this aspect of the mechanics so long as attack speeds and steals exist - it will always favor some speeds depending on the details of the variables, some of which are player-specific.
1.4 Yeah, I can't really think of any way to make thorns and reflection into a coherent playstyle. I can get behind this.
1.5 Same as above. I don't have a strong opinion on either of these though.
1.6 It could definitely be beneficial, but would necessitate a pretty big rebalancing across all items, as well as changes to mob damage balancing.
1.7 I can see the arguments for and against (personally I'm slightly in favor of it staying although not by much) but your argument is not one of the good arguments against it imo. It definitely serves a purpose, the question is whether that purpose allows for good balance.

 

Gonna respond to these in order:

1. Raw damage will have value at least as long as class baselines exist. Removing raw would disproportionately destroy mage and warrior damages while leaving archer/shaman relatively unaffected. Even ignoring class baseline, raw allows for interesting concepts like the nothing and pure to work so I still like it there. (not my strongest point. see druser above)
2. No. Definitely not. Not only would this basically make attack speed meaningless postpowder, it would also delete tstack, rawstack/hm depending, cstack, and fast hybrid in one blow.
3. Also no, if I'm reading this right. Steals and specials are all adjusted to take similar time to charge regardless of attack speed. Editing them to have the same rate per hit would make sfast attack speed basically the only worthwhile one.
4. lol, sure. Flavor stats rn
5. I think that greed is good for the game as diversifying sustain promotes build diversity. Beyond that, stealing + em pouches is probably decent passive income now.
6. Not gonna comment on this one bc i think someone else can say what i want to but better (maybe @Druser)
7. Again, I disagree. The interplay between raw and % hpr allows for one to cancel the other, which promotes build diversity in a low of ways. Without hpr%, gma building becomes "slap aquamarine + contrast, or play rage." -hpr melee items become "slap contrast, or suffer" especially without greed. The existence of hpr% on nether's scar/grip of the land type stuff (as well as a downside on bwash/paradox type items) creates much more build diversity than just having raw hpr would ever do.

So, overall, general disagreement from me. I think these ideas prioritize the ID system over having an actually interesting and well fleshed out build system, which defeats the purpose of IDs anyway—what's the point of gathering and IDing items if the build system behind it is so flawed?

 

Turns out I was wrong about how life/mana steal works and it's actually ok. editing thread now
(can't update poll tho oh well)

 

sigma grindset

fix baseline discrepancy: for sure. i hate it existing. prefer first option by far (it is better + funny as shit to see mythic abusers lose their mind over it) and second option either unfairly buffs fast weapons or is just really messy (messy either way, but having like anvil crawler or other ss uniques get twenty odd slots just seems scuffed—didn’t actually check math so probably closer to 30-40, idk). also second one power creeps faster, assuming baselines in first option are condensed towards the middle (all being brought down towards unique current baseline would be a cool way to make content more difficult, but whatever)

 

pretty sure there is a hard limit of 18 slots on items, which is why matroyshka went from 20 to 18. so idt option 2 even works.

 

oof.

 

1.1 Yes, they exist, but raw spell and melee have much different use and effect between classes or even between individual weapons, this split is essential for high or low damage weapons to actually work.
1.2 I can see where this is coming from but it would be such a devastatingly negative change I can't imagine even wanting this to happen. Attack speeds should ideally be more equal relative to eachother but making them effectively non-existent doesn't fix any inconsistencies, it doesn't remove redundancies, it apparently just serves to directly remove intricacies from the game which just sees like a strange move
1.3 For powder specials it's because they're all adjusted to have roughly the same charging speed, but that gets a little difficult to have exactly the same with the huge difference between attack speeds.
1.4 At most I can see the two IDs merging together, but removing them is once again just a strange decision that just removes depth for no reason.
1.5 idem
1.6 You Do Not Want Percent Mob Ele Defs (unless you're ready to pull a YY with seven different weapons in your hotbar at all times)
1.7 Once again removing any intricacies between hpr& and hpr- personally am a huge fan of both of the IDs existing as it actually makes health regen significantly different from life steal in building, use and effect, which would otherwise be lost.

2: Rare and unique shouldn't be as far below legendary as they are occasionally, but legendaries ought to still have the highest baselines, and mythics really should not ever be crossing over with other tiers of items in terms of sheer strength.

 

"Make powder specials and stealing work at the same rate for all attack speeds, and off spells as well." This is ridiculously unbalanced. Attack speeds are meant to determine chances for lifesteal and other effects, and a super fast weapon for stealing having the same effect as super slow makes Greed obscure on slow weapons. And in the name of the almighty sweet lord if arrowstorm procs stealing I am going to kill myself

 

That’s kind of the whole point of endgame challenges; to be a challenge for players who’ve experienced most of the game. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that. Most games have them. Wynncraft has a fairly casual/easy main game anyway, so making these challenges extremely easier would ruin the few places players can seek to find a challenge in the game.

Not saying to just Get Good; I can’t solo Qira or do LI. It’s just that I think people in a game should have access to optional hard challenges at the end of them. Especially when otherwise entails completely changing the item system for the worse imo.

 

I agree. It's good to have challenges that are challenging. The problem is is that they're not.

For wealthy people, the endgame challenges are made easy by mythics.
For people with plenty of time on their hands, the challenges are about right, but the builds they make are normally unintuitive or very dependent on certain items.

If you're playing an hour a week and want a good challenge, items and builds are too complex and unintuitive, mythics are unobtainable, and the challenges aren't really challenges if there's no chance of you doing them.

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I think you mininterpreted. At the moment, stealing very heavily favors slower attack speeds (https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...-i-am-like-99-sure-you-are-kinda-dumb.294139/), and I'm pretty sure powder specials charge faster at faster attack speeds (except very fast)(can't find the thread). I just want them to be normalized for the attack speed.

 

I agree with the stealing, but I'm not sure about the spells part and the powder specials. Spells that hit multiple times will proc stealing extremely easily, making it completely broken. As for the powders, the fast charge speed comes with a cost,, as it requires you constant meleeing the boss at a close range in order to charge the agro (unless archer gang)

 

Tone it down so stealing just works on the first or last hit, or it averages over all the hits then. Melee does more dps without powders too at the moment, and even if they didn't I still don't see that as a reason as to why spells don't charge powders specials right now.

 

plz vote guys