Highly accurate diagnosis from Discord

"Wynncraft's mob design forces potspam/healing meta"
I have heard many complaints about Lightbender and Acolyte being overpowered. This, I think, explains the problem neatly.

To broadly summarise it, Wynncraft's damage is difficult to avoid, and the only good sources of healing are pots, Lightbender, and Acolyte. Lifesteal and health regen are both too weak, while enemies have too much ability to injure you - the post specifically calls out ranged mobs, especially burst mobs, and quick melee enemies, which often hit hard as well.

I think this neatly explains the issues that resulted in Lightbender dominance, but I don't have many ideas on how to fix the issue. I'd suggest giving some form of proper healing to all the classes, or buffing lifesteal and health regen, or making attacks more dodgeable, or reworking potions. Or perhaps this thread is wrong and the problem's overblown. But I do think that, at the very least, 2.1's difficulty increase should be coming from dodgeable attacks and not just increased numbers, although that requires a lot of dev time.

 

I think that it varies from enemy to enemy. IE, Greg and his hands have a pretty fast move speed. If you aren't fast enough or have some other way of evading attacks, then you will take a fair amount of damage if things are aggroed to you.

Also, another reason why LB mage is supper common is because they have arguablely the best movement spell in the game, teleport. It's safe and instant, letting them safely disengage and evade most things. Teleport, in combination with Heal, makes mage super survivable.

 

young man. that is something we are doing with all the new bosses. they all have telegraphs now instead of just a white circle.

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The idea is they hit harder but you can actually play around it, instead of just FLAMETHROWER HEAVY METEOR HEAVY WAVE PULL HEAVY FLAMETHROWER

 

The regular enemies should also have proper dodgeable attacks though. Most enemies are still very basic.

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Yeah, that's another fair point. Probably the reason why Acolyte isn't as dominant as LB. Teleport's really good and it keeps getting buffed. Only issue with it, IMO, is that it's not so good at vertical mobility, but it's still the best movement spell in the game.

I don't know how you'd fix that, though. Probably by making it less useful to disengage from combat? I don't know how you'd do that, either.

It's a tricky problem which I have no solutions for.

 

culpit is more likely to be referring to the obscene stats of world event mobs that still have burst range AI and super fast attack speeds (looking at you corkus)

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?
not so good at vertical? are you mistaking teleport for charge?

 

when i try to go up the big tree in eyeball forest i have to spiral around it because teleport has less vertical mobility than horizontal even if you point directly up

it's still better at vertical mobility than any other movement spell except escape tho i suppose

and haul too, possibly. i don't know how good haul is (do not play shaman)

 

It's kinda in an awkward place right now considering some bosses (ie, boss altars) have gotten buffed stats but not better telegraphs

It's almost absurd how much more easy world events are with a single other person to draw half the fire

 

default haul is next to useless
blood connection allows infinite flight
and frog dance is really fast

 

Yea life steal sucks... Like I tried making that the healing method for a quetz arcanist build and even though ive got good rolls and mythic life steal tomes its just not viable

 

i'll be honest

my gripe was normal cotl harpy archers, esp. burstrange normal mobs

it's just, like, regular mobs. they don't have intelligent attacks. melee mobs walk at you. ranged mobs throw tiny, fast projectiles that are difficult to predict or evade. burstranged is that but like 10x worse.

 

I'd like to add there's no Corkus world event mobs with burstranged AI

 

...i am not talking about world event mobs

i am talking about regular. boring. world mobs. that shoot you. in cotl.

 

okay fine they're RAPID RANGED
h215 war machines

 

the hpr identification. nerf that thing into the ground. the current meta is better than it was, but it's main problem is that it didn't go far enough. (lifesteal is sorta fine, at least lifesteal is active.)

the solution is to rapidly re-fill player hp outside of combat. i know that wynn has a way to check if you've been "in combat." doing this will compartmentalize fights. balance now only needs to be considered for a given player/group versus the given mob(s). you can safely tune down everyone's damage without worrying about longer-term d&d style resource management over an entire dungeon or "adventuring day" or whatever. because wynn doesn't have "adventuring days."

wynn isn't a souls game or any of the ttrpgs that the former was heavily inspired by, it's an mmo. it can't really afford the tight encounter / world design that let them get away with their "manage resources in between fights" style of challenge. maybe instanced content could, but you can't design your combat system only for dungeons and raids and the like. needs to work in the open world too.

telegaphed attacks is dumb outside of bosses and the occasional elite enemy out in the world. too much scope, if you want to make the attacks unique. too much shock and awe taken away from those elite challenges if you don't. the issue is that you want the mobs to be a threat while you're fighting, but you want to be able to maintain the occasional random encounter basically forever without forcing too much overhead resource management (see OP) or the player huddling in a corner for 5 minutes (see soul points). segregate the fights. rapidly regen hp outside of combat.

 

as hpr is a pretty essential part of tank build that can't rely on healing from spells, how would you fix that?

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Why not both out of combat recovery and hpr to build with

 

what if you changed healing potions to be singular items which recharge rather than a consumable you buy

so it works like estus flasks in dark souls idk i haven't played dark souls

and they recharge much faster outside of combat

 

0: hmtn did a wall of text again. what's the tl;dr?
everything's doing too much dmg. plus damage and defense numbers are a mess anyway. simple concept difficult execution: gather everything into a tighter band. and then cut damage by an order of magnitude. all endgame players having an ehp somewhere between 20k and 40k is fine. endgame player DPS ranging from ~30k up to 100k in perfect conditions is fine. heavily nerf mob damage as well, such that all fights now take longer to finish. Attacks everywhere is okay in isolation, Wynn's issue with them is that everything is glass cannons. and glass cannons just aren't sustainable (pun) without a good dodging system.

a good dodging system would be nice, but it'd require redesigning basically every single mob's mechanics. a damage nerf would still be a lot, but mob design doesn't have to change. just a numbers adjustment in the mob file. wynn's fight duration trends on the lower end of the industry standard anyway, so it can definitely afford to swing in the other direction without feeling overly slow.

onto the full reply. first and most importantly,

I: Sustain is Bad, Actually

despite the title, i'm not saying to remove hpr entirely. even where it is now is... ok, i guess. my issue with HPR is always that it's been passive. building is cool wynn has a strong contender for best build system in gaming (up there with PoE and the like), but the issue with classbuilding eating up so much game design space is that. well. the modern wynn combat system is played in wynnbuilder. you roll in with a good enough build and it plays the game for you.

again: it's good that the build system is so dense! figuring it out is really cool! but it's eating up a lot of space rn, and the result is that wynn's moment-to-moment combat has atrophied quit a bit. and it's developed some bad habits. like the idea that (passive) solo sustain is a good thing. this assumption is 90% of the problem in wynn's combat system, which tries to build around the poisonous thing and only succeeds in propping it up with more bad systems. see the recent meta for the festering horrors revealed when you take off the lid.

It's easy to create HPR identifications that give you a passive bonus. passive bonuses are what most IDs do. it's in, like, the definition of a build. this is part of why i'm much more okay with lifesteal. at least it's a bit more active. but there's a limit to passive bonuses. because they don't actually make your character or the game better. they're artificial. empty calories. one must never forget this.

RPGs have passive stat increases because humans like seeing number go up. in terms of actual player-vs.-mob passive power a level one character on the emerald trail is equal if not superior to a level cap player roaming SE in morph. again. really really wanna drive this one home. passive bonuses mean nothing. games are an illusion. to assign actual mechanical utility to cosmetic flair rewards is the game design version of drinking the kool-aid (also see mythics), and anything that dismantles this unhealthy habit can only be applauded.

i.e: any important health management system should be an active health management system. the player needs to make a trade, right there in the moment, sacrificing something (the usual answer is DPS potential, but in can vary) in favor of healing or losing less HP. those two things are basically the same.

this is why my tolerance for lifesteal drops a bit the more melee-focused the build is. if you're not giving up spell dps to regain health then it's just a passive bonus. it does help a bit that you need to go into more danger to regain health, though (the risk!), which is why the tolerance still exists.

conclusion: yeah HPR should not be strong. it should be a very tiny percentage bonus that makes you die just a bit slower during combat. or faster, if its negative. HPR is a reward for building well, but it shouldn't get in the way of properly rewarding good combat decisions, which it does in its current fanatic need to "properly sustain."

A good balanced goal for HP management is something closer to "making sure that it's difficult if not unreliable to let builds solo sustain hp during combat indefinitely." letting players do this makes them feel immortal and is the #1 fastest way to make your game feel super easy. bumping up enemy numbers to make the enemies feel lethal seems like a good solution, but it's what wynn's currently doing and it's a band-aid solution.

II: A World of Glass Cannons is a Failure of Game Design

most of the time that i die, i rarely know what actually took me out. this holds true for my glassiest of shamans through to my paladin. well, at least i know that the paladin was probably the raid boss. but i still barely registered the actual attack.

that's really really bad. it feels like i didn't make any choices that led to my death, like it was just a bad dice roll from an enemy i could not see. rocket-tag in wynn's current "attack spam" environment feels just as bad and unbalanced as everyone doing scratch damage to each other (see: solo paladin).

more telegraphing is a solution. it sure exists. but as i mentioned in the post above - if every mob telegraphs, then you've lost a valuable tool for making your elite mobs and bosses stand out. and if even trash mobs in packs of ten are telegraphing, that means the average player is going to have long ago learned to tune them out. after all, telegraphs don't mean too much 90% of the time, right? it's a problem.

the issue is the last section's sustain. in short: it is very difficult to force a modern wynn player with a decent build to occupy a low level of HP for any length of time. at least not without a constant spam of attacks. everyone having HPR forces constant and consistent DPS to be the name of the game, and even then if you let up for even a few seconds they'll regenerate half of it.

the solution? is it to nerf HPR across the board? well, yes. but is that the solution Wynn took? well, yes, but only as of late. maybe it should have gone further. but for the vast majority of the game's history, the solution that Wynn took was buffing damage. if they're going to regen, then you need to kill them in one shot. or at least keep up such a sustained bombardment that it overwhelms their HPR.

so you end up in the modern Wynnscape, where mobs do exactly that. they're either in groups launching 20 million attacks that take you to zero like a school of piranhas or straight up one-shotting you. or they don't do either of those strategies, at which point they're literally incapable of harming you.

now, this is for solo content. and despite the CT's downright impressive ability to put fingers in its collective ears, Wynn is a multiplayer game that allegedly hosts group content.

And it's less bad for a well-oiled party to sustain because the difficulty of group content comes from coordination. people don't have enough information and they're making much much worse moves than they would be if they were a hivemind. coordinating group content is like trying to play a fighting game drunk: good luck!

and this point on coordination goes back to the OP. at their core, the post was suggesting ways to increase the need for self-coordination. i.e. dodging, and more spaced out mob attacks to allow battlefield awareness. or, rather, to force the player to distract themselves with and be distracted from battlefield awareness. nobody can multitask, and forcing players to juggle multiple tasks like this is a decent emulation of that group challenge aspect.

as it is rn, though, wynn's rocket-tag combat doesn't even have the time to force players to coordinate or make any choices. it's just way too fast. everything is doing too much damage. nothing is in the same order of magnitude as anything else.

this whole thing about decisions. a huge amount of player satisfaction comes from the sense that their victory is a result of decisions that they made. rn wynn's combat system is such a dice-roll that the only satisfaction that's to be gained is from how good you've weighed the dice. i.e, circling back to the point that wynn's combat is done in wynnbuilder, not on the actual server.

III: I Write An Essay On Wynn's Tank Issues Every Other Month
ima put on my paladin main glasses for this. the general trend is the same as the last section. things need to get dialed down. our solo defense is too strong. under no circumstances should a solo tank be as beeefy as we are. even with a lightbender right there we still shouldn't be as beefy as we are. the title is dead serious btw i recently did another text-wall on another thread about paladin specifically. but this goes for any tank.

the tl;dr is that tank defence shouldn't actually be too high. it should be comparatively higher than other roles, but the actual percent difference should hover closer to class base defense values than the ehp i see on our tanks. tanks need to be beefy enough that, with outside healing, they're viable in pulling aggro away from other players. and not a single effective hit point higher.

it's also again important that tank defense be active, not passive. again, the player needs to be actually playing a game, here. the idea that you're actively blocking attacks and managing your HP feels much more rewarding in the long term than being a brick wall. even something as simple as 2-3 kinds of damage reduction whose cooldowns demand that you slowly stagger one after the other in a cycle is something. what's even better is giving the tank choices between cheaper and weaker DR versus stronger and more expensive DR based on the moment-to-moment situation.

even with active DR, a tank should not be immortal. esp. not solo. if a tank pulls a group of 15-20 mobs at their level in the open world and commits to fighting all of them nonstop with zero recovery. that tank should die. a solo tank should function nearly identically to a solo DPS. the tank's +def and -dps shouldn't be too high.

let's hammer in the main point again. builds not being able to sustain without a healer or a stack of consumables is good. if you want your game to feel challenging and rewarding, players should be incentivised to run away when their health is getting low. if they successfully flee, that's a failed fight without the player ending up dead, which makes the game feel tougher without actually inconveniencing said player. plus, it still gives the player an active tactical choice when the fight goes bad: do they think that they can stay and eliminate the mobs before they die? or do they fall back, regen, and try again? risk and reward. exhilarating stuff.

(and with fast regen out of combat, the 'survive killing these mobs with a sliver of hp' left is a victory. you haven't just poisoned your chances in the next fight, after all. everyone loves taking risks).

all of this is broadly applicable to non-tanks just as well as tanks. the distinctions between the roles are only important inside of group content. out solo, you want all the roles to function similarly enough. solo combat should be easier for players, but it's really hard to design a system where every character is similar enough to be funneled into similar experiences, yet also different enough to be funneled into slightly different ones. similar but not the same. that's game balance.

(and, remembering that a game is an illusion: you don't have to make the characters that much different. you just have to convince your players that you have. two different tasks).

Postscript: Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

:P this is just a character ability on a cooldown, but yeah, that could work. guild wars 2 has a similar system, where every single class receives some kind of self-healing ability. but GW2 doesn't have dedicated healers. the game was built from the ground up to try and break the trinity format, and the devs knew how and why the trinity worked, and they still didn't entirely succeed. but if wynn's serious about trying to break the trinity then yeah GW2 is a good study. and not just to be blindly copied (i'm still unhappy about the explanation for ability shards) but to actually be taken apart and understood. but GW2's systems are another 20 paragraphs of text that somebody's already written better than i could.

estus flasks are a tool designed to space out the player's HP bar so that they die more often. because this is dark souls and it's a very mean game.

it's about the opposite of what your OP wanted. you mentioned that you haven't played dark souls, so it makes complete sense to think that taking design nods from it might be a good idea. dark souls is, after all, a well-regarded rpg with a famously rewarding combat system. but when you break them down, the souls games are level-design encounter management CRPGs. they're not persistent. most of their difficulty comes not from coordination in actual combat system (souls enemy ai is famously trash) but from lack of information on enemy placement and behaviour.

souls games have been getting faster, but even the fastest souls games are still insanely slow compared to any MMORPG. in conclusion: dark souls is a completely different beasts from most MMORPGs, including Wynn. comparing the two is like apples and oranges. blindly copying its features without understanding them is a bad idea. the best-case scenario when you blindly copy is stuff like the very-much-useless ability shards.

worst-case scenario, you build a core game system that's in a fundamental conflict with itself, one that doesn't really know what it is or what it wants or how it even works. general heuristic, really: one shouldn't 'take inspiration' from something that they think is neat without understanding why they like it, or why it works. to do this is to guarantee that you'll miss the point completely in favor of surface aesthetics. none of us are free from doing this.