The Most Prominent Build Types And What Could Be Done

It's rare to see a discussion on the state of balance in wynn, so I'm making this post to promote discussion and present a few solutions.

Multiplicative Boosts: Tier Stacking and Mana Regen/Intelligence
These are the centerpiece of the meta, and builds that do not focus on these can rarely keep up in this meta (one exception is super slow quake).

Tier boost, no matter effort is put into balancing, will always be attractive to put on items with slow speeds. This is because each tier increases attack speed in a multiplicative manner (the multiplier isn't constant, however). Many tier boost items have negative melee damage to discourage stacking, however this isn't nearly enough to balance, because each tier grants a multiplier to damage while negative ids only subtract from the base.

Spoiler: Intermediate Tiers

At the moment, there are 7 attack speeds, listed below.

Super Slow (0.51 attacks per second)
Very Slow(0.83 attacks per second)
Slow (1.5 attacks per second)
Normal (2.05 attacks per second)
Fast (2.5 attacks per second)
Very Fast (3.1 attacks per second)
Super Fast (4.3 attacks per second)

Comparing the increase from Fast to Very Fast (*1.24) and Very Slow to Slow (*1.81) we notice a trend: the multiplicative boost that attack speed grants melee is stronger at lower tiers. Considering that builds that use tier boosting rarely use faster weapons, it may be enough to normalize this multiplier by introducing "Intermediate Tiers", which would be placed between two tiers with a particularly large multipler to level the strength of the boost to match the higher tiers. Proposal below:

Super Slow (0.51 attacks per second)
Super Slow +1 (0.65 attacks per second)
Very Slow(0.83 attacks per second)
Very Slow +1 (1.13 attacks per second)
Slow (1.5 attacks per second)
Normal (2.05 attacks per second)
Fast (2.5 attacks per second)
Very Fast (3.1 attacks per second)
Super Fast (4.3 attacks per second)
Edit: Super Fast +1 is a terrible idea as it allows items balanced around slow speed tier boost to be even more powerful. As well, it does not seem like the most effective solution. Tier boost could be altered to be +20% speed every tier, but I feel that would be too much a change to the nature of the id.

Each tier would allow you to hit about 1.3 times quicker.

Anyone who's tried playing without intelligence or mana regen would believe spells to be useful, but not a major component of damage and something used more as a crutch. Even builds that use one or the other would not see what the big deal is. However, these two stats affect each other multiplicatively.

Spoiler: Fractional Mana/General Mana Regen Id Reduction

As both of them are multiplicatively connected, either could be cut back, but it is difficult to see intelligence being nerfed due to the patterns that appear within it and other stats. If the base unit of mana was 1/10th of a mana thingy, this would allow many items with mana regen/mana steal to have their values reduced. Surely Aquarius, with its 7 mr wasn't intended to double damage output from spells? This would be done in addition to treating mana regen/mana steal as the multiplicative boost that it is (especially in high amounts), and items with it would suffer similar penatlies to tier boost items.

 

It's worth noting that despite Aquarius' mana regen being extremely powerful, it doesn't actually see too much use because it has plenty of downsides relative to other items.

I feel like Capricorn's overpoweredness (if it even is overpowered, I'm not covinced) could be solved if there was a way to have 2 mr max.

 

I do not believe this would be enough, and I believe it is an issue linked to how mana items are balanced. Capricorn would still have 2 mana regen and 1 mana steal to use, giving about 3 mana every 4 seconds. That may not seem like much, but it is a 60% increase to the base mana regen. On top of that, it has 20% maximum spell damage! This is an immense amount of power on an item already, more than can be obtained from almost any spell item.Then add walk speed and skill points. When you look through this lens at not just Aquarius, not just Capricorn, but most mana items through this lens it becomes apparent that mana regen is grossly mistreated.

Aquarius is not popular, true. I do not think it is due to lack of pwoer, but how much intelligence it requires combined with all of the mana regen it gives. The only thing keeping intelligence builds from going over the edge is the limit to how many spells a player can cast. Intelligence items themselves have an abundance of mana regen, meaning this limit can be reached and more powerful damage boosting items can be used. If mana regen were cut back on items, I believe that two things would happen. Firstly, the amount of intelligence in builds would need to increase greatly to get the same performance as current spell builds, limiting items that could be used together with them. These builds would also not be able to use as many damage boosting items, as more of their build would need to be composed of mana regen. I fear that this may create a dominance of int-agi builds, but from calculations in this post on the same topic ( https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...changelog-and-more.238791/page-7#post-2977195 ) spell damage does not drastically outperform melee even with max int, so as long as the benefits that spell damage provides are watched to more closely match melee, it will not completely overrule other archetypes.