Soulbound Mode Revived (2.1+)

Awhile ago, I suggested a new gamemode called Soulbound Mode. Since my last suggestion wasn’t my best and I recently came across other suggestions for new game modes, I thought it was time to reintroduce and update it (again).

What exactly is Soulbound Mode? It would be a gamemode like no other: co-op mode. The goal of the mode is to emphasize teamwork and cooperation with a challenging twist, but without requiring all team members to be always online together. The mode supports up to 4 players.

Main Features
1. The amount of combat XP required to level up is shared and scaled up among all Soulbound members. Any combat XP obtained by a player in the Soulbound group will go towards the XP bar of everyone in the group. Example: If a Soulbound group has 2 players, then both players have to obtain double the amount of combat XP needed to reach any given combat level. If 4 players, then all 4 players need to obtain quadruple the amount of combat XP needed to reach any given combat level.

2. Health is shared among all active and online Soulbound members. This also means that any damage a player in the group takes the rest of the players in the group will take!

Example: Amy, John, and Bob each have 10k HP. In a Soulbound group, each person will share a health pool of 30k HP. If Amy then takes 500 damage, John and Bob will also take 500 damage each, reducing the shared HP pool to 28,500 HP.

Healing from spells, health regen from IDs, and natural health regen still heal the same amount as they would individually by using their original individual’s base health in their calculations. Any calculations and triggers (such as Warrior's Enraged Blow) that use health % will use the party's combined health %.

The best way to think about the shared health and damage mechanics is that the group shares an average of the combined HP of all of its members. Note that defenses are NOT shared; the damage that gets distributed to all of the group members is the damage the hit player receives AFTER factoring in his or her defenses (Defense, Agility, base class defense, elemental defense, etc.). The distributed damage is also affected by the other group member's defenses. For example, you have a group of 4, each with 10k HP and a net Defense of 25% (no Agility or elemental defenses). A player gets hit with 2000 damage, which gets reduced to 1500 damage before being distributed to the other players. Each of the rest of the players reduces that 1500 damage by another 25%, with each only receiving 1,125 damage. In total, the group took 4,875 damage.

3. Any time a group member activates a teleport in a boss altar, dungeon, raid, world event, or for a major boss room, the rest of the group members will be teleported to them. In addition, Soulbound players are able to teleport to any one of their group members with a command. These features only apply if you are in a Soulbound class of the group. All Soulbound classes will always be directed to the same world as the online member who logged in first. Thus you will always be in the same world as your group members when you are using your respective Soulbound class. All other instances of teleportation such as class spells, lootruns, mini-games, housing plots, caves, secret discoveries, teleport scrolls, the Seaskipper, and other transportation methods don't trigger this effect.

4. Whenever multiple Soulbound teammates are in the same world and active, they will automatically form a party. The first player who joined will be the party owner. Other players outside of the Soulbound group can be added as well. Kicking or banning players in your Soulbound group from your party will not kick them from the Soulbound group, but it will prevent them from using the perks of the party like the party chat and the shared XP bonus. The 20% shared XP bonus still has the same conditions as before, so Soulbound members still need to be close to each other and kill mobs to receive it.

Spoiler: Reasoning

The reasoning behind these changes is manifold. For the first feature, it was to incentivize people to play together without strictly requiring it. Everyone knows how difficult it can be to coordinate with others online and deal with latency issues. Especially when things irl come up suddenly or people drop off the face of the earth or refuse to play anymore. Hence why a player in a Soulbound group can play the game without any of their group members being online ever again. The downside, however, would be that he/she would have to grind double to quadruple the amount of combat XP by himself or herself to reach a given level! So it would still be a significant challenge nonetheless.

The second feature is to make sure that everyone in the group contributes and prevents players from being carried by the group. Which is why I didn't want to go with the death system of raids. However, making it so that if only one person dies, the whole group dies would be unfair. It would make everyone as strong as their weakest link and further compound the chance of dying from lag or latency issues, making Soulbound & Hardcore nearly impossible. So at least this way the group's health is more manageable (such as healing when his or her group mate is lagging in a fight) while preventing groups from staying away from the fight while one of their members fights with the group's combined health. Everyone in the group will need to have enough skills and protect each other more than ever to survive. Be extremely careful taking hits; damage will stack much more easily than normally!

To give a quick example, say everyone in a regular group of 4 has 10k HP, 0 net Defense, 0 Agility, no elemental defenses, and receives 1k damage from an AoE spell. Everyone then will have 9k HP left, with the group having a total HP of 36k. If this was a Soulbound group under the same scenario, each member would lose 4k HP EACH, bringing the total group HP to 24k.

The third feature is meant to ensure group members don't cheese combat situations and that they actually do activities together. Therefore, you will need to make sure to cooperate and communicate with your teammates which tasks to do more than ever. So you should think twice before starting an activity before consulting your group first.

The fourth feature is to incentive players to play together and save the group the hassle of forming a party every time they play together. While still also allowing other groups to forgo the XP bonus to make the challenge harder.

All of these features also discourage leeching. If you don't help grind XP, dodge attacks, communicate, or attack, odds are sooner or later the people carrying you will stop playing with you or you'll be kicked out of the group outright.

Spoiler: How to Unlock

Soulbound mode is unlocked after getting a level 50+ character like Ironman and Craftsman. To start this mode, one must create a new class and select the new Soulbound icon. You will then be directed to invite up to 3 other players using the command /add sb [Player Name]. A request message would then be sent to the respective player who must be online. If the player accepts the request, the player will be directed to the class creation screen and must create a Soulbound class. The requested player will then be teleported to the same world as the requesting player once the requesting player has made their Soulbound class.

Note: If the requested player has full class slots, both players will instead receive an error message along the lines of, "Player X's class slots are full!" and the player will either have to reject the invitation or delete a class to free up a slot.

Spoiler: Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Offers a completely new and unique gameplay experience based on co-op
• Incentives players to work together and try different play styles that reward teamwork
• Allows people to level up their Soulbound class without requiring their teammates to be online
• Trolling (such as spamming /kill) is limited since you can get rid of any group member, albeit only with the vote of other players in the group
• Being killed by latency/lag is less of an issue since your teammates can heal while you're stuck/lagging

Cons:

• Allows some Soulbound members to skip parkour. I don't think it's that big of a deal since you can only have your Soulbound members teleport you unlike the removed feature of players riding other players
• Doing quests that require profession levels will be a pain if not all members meet the required profession level of the same profession
• You will need to choose your Soulbound members VERY wisely or else you'll be stuck grinding a ton of XP, teleported against your will, or killed often

Spoiler: Miscellaneous Features & Tips

-Players still need to individually start and end quests. So if one happens to teleport into the middle of your teammate's quest, you'll need to still redo the whole quest to get any rewards.

-Soulbound players can only enter raids if all of their active Soulbound teammates have the appropriate runes. The Party Finder handles active Soulbound groups as it does with parties, regardless if everyone in the Soulbound group is in a party or not. If one or more Soulbound players are already in a raid queue, and another Soulbound player in the group comes online but doesn't have the rune, the Soulbound players in the raid queue will be kicked from the queue. Raid experience is not shared between the group.

-Certain glassy archetypes like Fallen Warrior and Acolyte Shaman aren't recommended for this game mode due to health being shared and how much more damage the group takes than normal. All group members lose the ability to heal when any group player becomes Corrupted. Acolyte's Sacrificial Shrine siphons 2% of the group's combined health every 0.4s, not the individual Acolyte's original health.

-Players can be kicked out of the game mode via all the other Soulbound members voting against you. Upon doing so, the kicked player will have their Soulbound icon turn gray and everyone's XP bar and health will be adjusted accordingly. Be mindful though that you cannot add Soulbound members to existing groups. If you decide to kick a team member in a group of 2, you will also be kicked from the game mode and your Soulbound icon will turn gray as well.

-Profession levels and XP are unaffected (per player) because they're optional to progress through most of the game and otherwise would cause unneeded conflict between profession and non-profession players in a Soulbound group.

-During loot runs, a Soulbound player is considered inactive and thus his or her health won’t be shared with the group. Loot run division levels and XP are never shared. Unless loot runs become available for co-op in the future, Soulbound mode won’t affect loot runs for now beyond having combat XP scaling and sharing.

-Just like with the other game modes, players can add multiple game modes together. Not all players in the Soulbound group have to add another game mode like Ironman if other players in the group decide to.

-Ironman players in a Soulbound group can only trade with Ironman players in their group. Ultimate Ironman players in a Soulbound group cannot trade at all.

-PvP between Hunted & Soulbound players in the same group is disabled.

-You'll receive a special achievement by completing all 5 game modes together or SHUICH

Remember, this game mode is about teamwork and cooperation. You gonna have to get used to not solely relying on your skills and doing things your way or else you're gonna have a bad time. This mode isn't for everyone, but that's what makes the mode so unique yet challenging. Hopefully, it can help build upon the multiplayer aspect that people complain Wynncraft is still lacking in. I hope you all enjoy it and give any feedback or comments. Thank you all for reading!

Spoiler: Changelog

22-May-2025:
-Quests now only forcibly teleport the Soulbound group when you get teleported to major boss room like Qira.
-Added section to Misc. Features & Tips about Raid queues.
-You will automatically form a party when multiple Soulbound teammates are active.
-Moved some misc. features to Main Feature #3.

 

i still dont love the teleportation section. The tpa command, and to a lesser extent, the content teleports, feel off to me. I love the rest of the suggestion, and i dont rly know how to fix the tp problem, but its not right now

 

The best I can do is have the teleport activate right before bosses in certain quests instead of for all teleports in all quests like the Qira Hive or Reincarnation. Beyond that, getting rid of the teleport entirely allows players to cheese content by allowing healers to be away from the battle entirely and spam heals constantly. So until I resolve that healing issue, it needs to stay for balance reasons.

I thought about making healing dependent on distances between the players instead of just individual health, but I’ll have to think about that more because doing it by distance will always be somewhat arbitrary and could really mess up combat.

The teleport command is more so to throw a bone to players to make it easier to coordinate with their teammates and to give a custom perk like Ironman’s ingredient pouch perk.

 

that makes more sense but still needs work

 

wynncraft: the soulbound guild

okay so basically crokee's co-op mode suggestion

double life

nvm this is complex
so instead of a glass cannon ruining the party's chances, the tank just shrugs it off and everyone with a shred of defense lives through it.

hmmm
so this means if a player starts a quest and teleports through the quest, a bunch of people who may or may not have started or completed get teleported there! Apart from quests, this seems pretty decent. (Except, when do World Events EVER teleport? Like ever?)

(I also dislike the teleport command thing.)

Overall, I think I like Crokee's suggestion for this more (and that's mostly for fleshing out mechanical interactions (especially hardcore)), but this one just has less natural player interaction (the shared player bank) and a lot more forced interaction. (perfect for those who want to play Wynn joined at the hip. though of course I assume this is for balancing the double life feature, because... well I'll get there.) I will say that the Double Life feature adds in its own interesting "downside" (whereas crokee's was downside-less apart from the XP, but there were buffs for those), however, you can also do things like caves so that you just have a lightbender spamming heal or guardian paladin w/ massive hpr in a safe zone, just regening the damage. This suggestion definitely gets the creativity award though.

Very cool.

 

I wouldn't say shrugs it off since it's still a lot of damage involved, but more so mitigated. I did this to give players more individual control and so that glass cannon builds didn't completely invalidate tanks in the group.

Yes, originally every time a player gets teleported in a quest, everyone else would get teleported with them. I’ll modify the suggestion then to only limit that to when you get teleported to a major boss in certain quests instead like Qira or Reincarnation; you won’t get teleported by force if you’re facing off say the Corrupted Farmer in Poisoning the Pest. World Events always teleport you to a separate server/instance when you start them. That’s why items on the ground disappear as soon as the world event starts even though it doesn’t seem like you actually moved.

Originally I posted this about 2 years before crokee's suggestion. Though it didn't have the forced teleport command or the teleport command (that's why I'm surprised others don't like the command because I added that in from someone's feedback lol). And the shared health feature was a bit different.

I can see that since crokee's suggestion is more meant to be more of a party system and less challenging overall. I did rethink that about caves, but most caves only have teleports at the very end and they're meant to be quick, bite-sized challenges involving mostly cannon-fodder mobs. It's basically the equivalent of a teammate standing in Ragni spamming heal while the others just kill zombies on the Emerald trail. You can do it, but it's really not necessary to begin with, the stakes aren't very high, and it would get boring fast. Plus the player spamming heal would miss out on the loot they could have gotten otherwise if they had just tagged along with the others. It would also severely hamper the team's ability to split up and explore the map.

Yeah, I can see why people are a bit iffy about teleportation when it comes to forced interaction, and that's why it wasn't originally in the suggestion. But at the end of the day I want people to play with others by giving them a unique game mechanic to experience. I just hope it's flexible enough.

Thanks for the feedback btw! If you have any suggestions to replace the teleport feature with another mechanic, I would be interested in hearing it.

 

Huh. Always thought it was more like making you on a different layer because of how seamless it was.

Wasn't a forumer back in 2021. Had barely started Wynn back then.

It feels weird and jarring. I'd personally recommend increased tp scroll charges or something if travel is the issue.

Agree that it's not very optimal, however still possible (and I understand why all bossfights should be done together.)

Okay. Ping-pong feedback time! What if it's like this: Both players stand in a town, send out some kind of request and confirm. Then, there's a scroll like sequence, it uses a scroll charge, but doesn't require the scroll or the teleporting player having visited the city before. I think that would be less jarring then "Oh, and you can just randomly tp to your teammates/your teammates can just randomly tp you to them"

 

Oh yeah that's okay lol. It was only open for a few months anyway.

I do get it is a bit out of place. The point of the feature is more so if you or your teammates are lost and need to find each other. The forced teleportation feature already mitigates this to an extent, but not so much if say you and your teammates are exploring separately. That's why I'm a bit iffy only restricting it to towns, because towns are a lot easier to find and already have tp scrolls or other methods of transportation like the Juggler in Cinfras. The restriction wouldn't help in scenarios that would use the command the most like being stuck in places like the Canyon of the Lost or in a forest. Hence if it's just too weird or OP, I would just remove it outright. I appreciate the feedback though.

Also as a sidenote, I just added a new feature to the main suggestion. Your Souldbound group will automatically create a party when mutliple members are in the same world and active. Though Soulbound players in the group can still leave or get kicked out of the party without leaving the Soulbound group itself. Hopefully this incentives players to play together and make interactions less forced like you said.

 

ohhh
I thought the feature was meant to be substitute for scrolls in some way
Okay. I just think it should have a distance limit in that case, and still be request-accept

i likey

 

Monthly bump