Game Design The Three Big Issues I Have With Wynncraft Right Now

Ok so there are 3 things I have a few things to say about

• Bosses

The problems I have with bosses are:
They are uninteresting in its majority, most of them are just normal enemies but with maybe too much health, and with sometimes an excessive amount of damage
I can accept this kind of bosses for the less important ones, but I don't like how important fights like Bob or Qira, pretty much the final bosses of each province, are nothing but damage sponges

Bob isn't even that hard to get ideas for, he is essentially a guy who mastered all 4 classes and can use them to a level no player can reach right? then do exactly for that for his fight, get an spell of each class and buff it to make it look like one of these spells he uses in the cutscene at Nivla Forest, make him feel like you're fighting a player that is above everyone else

It's just not fun to see how the final bosses of the game are nothing but damage sponges with fancy battle themes, the most important bosses (Qira, Bob, CoW, Dr. Legendary, Wybel or the dungeon bosses) should get better boss fights, it doesn't feel right that a literal final boss is as interesting as the Lv. 1 Zombie you fought at the beginning of the game

• Professions

Ok so let me get this... Everyone is saying grinding sucks and it is really boring because of the lack of things to do in order to gain experience... And the best thing you come up with is literally grinding that rewards you with faster yet longer periods of grinding...? Why? Literally nobody likes the idea of farming the same thing for 2 hours just for a single level yet you guys took an entire year to deliver about 12 paths of that exact idea?
The main problem with professions is: At first it is fun because you level up at a relatively acceptable pace + around level 20 you get the privilege of chopping down all of Nivla in one swing, but after level 30 it becomes excessively slow and boring
Also Mythics get backslash in the sense they are excessively rare, and then the best thing you come up with in order to give this any use is to literally make 3 star materials an RNG fest? Why is it every time you make a mistake you manage to repeat it again? This also kind of happened with the weapon skins and crate items, Godly tier had complaints about repeated items not being scrappable, and you add a last tier for that, the Black Market one... Which is unscrappable, just like old Godly tier... Why?

To resume the problems with professions:
-Too much RNG
-Just a grindfest
-Repeats a mistake that the team supposedly aknowledged already

• Mythic Items

Ok the problem here is not the concept of a last tier of items that is soo powerful it leaves to shame about 90% of the game's items, the problem here is the way they are obtained
The real problem with mythics is that they are obtained through grinding and lootrunning, except the chances of finding one are soo low it feels like you are going on a shiny hunt on Pokémon but only catching every 5th shiny you find
My ideas to fix this are:

• Mythical Challenges

Some sort of challenge related to the item's idea, with a really hard difficulty (Dark Souls/Touhou Lunatic Mode/Sekiro difficulty if needed) that when completed, you obtain the item, It could be anything, from a boss fight to parkour to puzzles, anything, the challenges could be themed around the lore of the items too, allowing for a lore that makes more sense (because I'm pretty sure it is really anticlimatic that a weapon soo powerful only a really important character had it is dropped by Generic_Ice_Dude_23482)

• Ehm... Actually I have no other ideas for this so...
• Yeah...

Mythics just feel like Legendary Cards felt in old Clash Royale or like shinies in the Pokémon games, and I think we can all agree nobody likes seeing their fates be decided purely by RNG

Also wew that shine effect I tried to do for the titles turned out pretty well very nice

 

Honsetly, while I agree with some bosses being similar. Most of the time, they're just have the same streagy of walking to you, and and being damage sponges, and chances are, you can walk circles around them, that or teleport/charge often that's it's really drags out the fight. However, I feel what makes bosses unique, is their environment/assistants, such as Death summoning other bosses, Bob's elemental blades, Qira'sminions can overrun you while webbed, Wybel's pressure plates, etc. that can all have different effects or change the way you fight. However, most other bosses's "uniqueness" are often bad, as with Amadel's three forms, TOA's floor 6 boss of self-destructing if you don't spam attack, and in the Eye of the Storm quest, Nagarath, having both teleporting and blinding spells, with 2 phases, are all how uniqueness of a boss can really ruin a battle.

 

Yeah but normal mobs are also like that, my problem is that they feel like normal mobs because that's what they are

 

Some bosses are kind of bland (Bob being one of the biggest examples imo) but Dr. Legendary and Qira both feel suitably unique to me. Bob is honestly just super easy, he has very few spell combos (literally Heavy Charge and maybe Multihit are the only threatening ones), just kind of runs around like a typical melee mob, and the swords are laughably glassy and inconsequential, except occasionally when the Fire Sword in LI throws out Heavy Flamethrower.

It would be pretty neat if Bob cycled through phases for each of the four classes...

 

I find very few bosses in wynncraft interesting tbh, and the ones that shouldn't be important and are fun little side bosses have more depth and challenging play styles then actual serious bosses, one of my favourite of which is Psychomancer , I love this boss for the simple reason that it is NOT just a huge wall of hp it is a enemy that has if I recall has just 100k which your supposed to fight around level 80-84 which by this point you can deal a significant amount of damage so what makes the fight difficult is not endurance, its skill to avoid his devastating burst fire attacks, dodging his teleport blind spells and tracking him down when he's in vanish. It is a test of avoiding desperation. Not to mention that his dialogue is genuinely kind of funny as well.

Another not necessarily important boss but definitely a more interesting one is Theorick and his Corrupted counterpart, the guy literally causes the floor to launch physical ice spikes to damage player altering the environment around him while he does it and he sticks in my head as an interesting boss because he is one of the only enemies in the game that can cause the area to change significantly, his backstory is also a lot more tragic and belongs in a grey zone unlike some bosses I know (Or at least, you know until frostbite threw that idea out the window and ruined it for me personally).

And then we have Revenant of Skien who pretty much represents the player the first time they played the game in terms of how they fight, he is confident and challenging at first hand but slowly but surely resorts to desperation as soon as he realises he is actually losing and resorts to panicking causing him to fail, not to mention that the 2nd arena you fight him in is absolutely beautiful and is one of my personal favourites.
Skien is also one of those characters I actually had a bit of sympathy for as well, this is a character who drove himself into madness believing that the villagers had malicious intent and was working to serve as an outpost to take back wynn from them. But even when you think you have killed him, his spirit shows true dedication to live on until wynn is back in human hands when he fights you again with all his strength and dedication being visible as the fight progresses until you beat him

Also can I just give huge props to Corpe_ and their fantastically well composed custom boss theme for Skien labelled A Renegade's Retribution, in my opinion it suits the fight really well.


I cannot understand why the developers give more depth, entropy and in general development towards sub-bosses than main bosses though and Garareth is a prime example of this mostly just consisting of easy parkour and a lazily designed bacteria mob as a real enemy to fight as the final boss of Dwarves and Doguns which was really anti-climatic for me and I hope to see it remade in the future. I'll give it props for at least trying to use a couple of unique features like freezing the hearts of Garareth even if they didn't work out too well.

 

I haven't fought Dr. Legendary yet so I can't judge him
Qira however, she is just Arakadicus but with ranged attacks and 3 health bars

Another idea for him would be giving him 4 phases, each one with the 4 spells of each class, that would work too

 

Qira really shines with the minions, I think. Spell combos are well-designed (Web + Flamethrower is a good example). Not to mention the arena and music is awesome.

That's what I meant for Bob, guess I didn't convey it well enough.

 

Yeah... I know this is just my opinion but her minions kinda suck, specially when she said she wanted to come and take you down herself right after blasting through all of her army

 

I do agree to an extent that bosses in wynncraft can be boring. Most bosses in quests and some in dungeons can be meh to fight and could be improved, but I do not think this is always the case. There are some good quest bosses, and boss alters are almost always fun and unique, but not in a very flashy way. The problem is there are only a few attack spells right now. So no mob has any unique spells. This meaning the only way to make a mob unique is to do this round about way of messing with its AI and other stats to make it unique. This is a much less flashy way to show uniqueness, and this can make a mob feel quite boring even if it is unique in concept. I feel it is not crazy to say that the CT and the community want more mob spells and more ways to edit mobs to make them unique, but as of right now we do not have that capability. This is not to say we can not improve without these new spells, we defiantly could. It's just that it is difficult the way it is now.

Tl;dr: Wynn does not have a lot of ways to give bosses flashy unique gimmicks, but I feel that it still has some cool bosses, and also some damage sponge bosses could be improved.

 

no

Bobs fight makes sense since youre supposed to be dueling him, but I agree that bossfights are pretty boring and bland

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also, some people (like me) enjoy the RNG aspect of Mythics and it adds an extra challenge for when the peeps are getting bored of other parts of the game, making a rarity for challenges and such would be cool, but why tf do we need to change Mythics? ):

 

Because having an op item because rng was merciful on you isn't fun at all, mythics are very powerful items obtained in a way where the game simply says "yes you here have a free 6 stacks of LE ticket, ew you suck go fuck yourself" and I don't support that
Those who defend this system have either too much free time or too much luck either were too lucky or had too much free time to grind them out

Also the way you obtain them does not make sense at all lorewise (An ice golem drops one of the most powerful items in the game, not Qira or Bob or anyone with serious prestige, but an ice golem that was just wandering around, the hell is that weak monster doing with one of the strongest weapons ever created?)

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Yeah... 5 swords and a stupid as fuck tanky dude (6 total enemies) doesn't look like a duel to me...

Also wouldn't it be better if he fought you using spells similar to yours but buffed to the extreme like in these cool cutscenes like I mentioned? It would also make more sense with the lore and all that, you vs you except you broke the game and went 7 tiers above everyone

Y tho

 

Legit, Mythics arent OP, and getting rich is not hard without them, new trade market means more selling, you can also sell ingrediants, if you actually try to make money you should be making multiple stacks a month and in all lickelyness you will have found a Mythic by then, and you will certanly be able to afford one, as for the mobs that drop Mythics, this can be said about anything, why would a mob in freezing heights be able to drop anything fire related, like Ignition? Why would anything in the Sky Islands drop anything earth related, like Bethrudan? This problem is not isolated to Mythics

 

Mythics in all reality don't seem that op according to me either, they only allow for different play styles, some of which are in all regards inferior to a crafted weapon, a specific example being lament which can easily be outclassed by none other than glacial anomaly and pride of the heights let alone all the other broken ingredients you can stuff into it, and while I do want to agree with the idea that specific mobs should drop certain weapons I don't think the community has considered the repercussions of it.

I personally believe it could be really difficult to execute as the builders would have to create individual areas for all 5 elements + Neutral and this would have to occur on more than a single occasion in EACH level boundary from levels 1-5, 6-10, 11-15 etc. which for areas like the wynn plains and ocean that's all fine and good but what about Molten Heights or the nessak forest? Where environments are extreme to the point that elements like earth or fire shouldn't really be there in the slightest and wouldn't make sense. Furthermore I dread to think of the pain that the builders would have to go through making over 200 elemental areas just so that specific gear can occur in those places , only for the wynncraft map to look like it has caught a fever of rainbow chicken pox when the builders could instead work on refining old quests which need updating (Yeah that EotS question was a joke earlier lol) and developing more on the Road to Dern update which was tossed out the window because someone on the CT thought a better update would be for us to left click crops for 80 hours instead of a gigantic area with new and fascinating lore (Priority 100)

 

danmaku boss on wynn plz

 

Wait he has dialogue

 

Hive bosses all got starting and finishing dialogue in 1.18. (you'll need a new class to see them)

 

Because Mythics are the most powerful items in the game and locking them behind either RNG or 100+ hours of grinding and selling (to get the money for one) isn’t fun or rewarding? And because making a new rarity would either be largely pointless to those who already have mythics while making legendaries obsolete, or make both mythics and legendaries obsolete, and either of those would be hell on the economy and probably cause a shitstorm on the level of the level 101 outcry?

Except they kind of are. For example, weathered, a mythic, does 4815 damage per spin on an attack by itself while slider, a drop from one of the hardest bosses in the game does 3136 with the same agility and full t6 air powders for both weapons. That’s almost 1.5x the damage.

Now, you could argue that Slider has other stats to consider, but many of those are either inconsistent (mana steal), don’t matter (stealing), are on Weathered (agility and walk speed), or are actually drawbacks (-Dexterity and melee damage). Meanwhile, the only drawback weathered has is -exploding, which is basically one of the worst IDs in the game. And while, yes, a build can help mitigate some of the damage loss, It’s still a free 1600 damage per spin that you would otherwise lose, and potentially more considering Weathered’s dexterity boost. And not only that, but even considering skill point requirements, Weathered still is much easier to use in most builds, and much better in TWA based builds due to Slider’s Dexterity penalty.

It’s also worth noting that the damage per spin of Silver, a rare air dagger, is 2720 with the same parameters as Slider and Weathered. That means slider only deals 1.15x the damage of an average rare item, meaning an item that drops from an endgame boss is closer to a rare item in damage than a mythic, because the gap between mythics and legendaries is so wide.

This is not only completely dumb, it also makes it harder to balance the game, as if you balance it around people with mythics, the game will be too difficult for an average player, while if you balance the game around the average player, as it seems to be currently, the game becomes too easy for mythic wielders. Buffing legendaries also wouldn’t work because that causes some major power creep issues.

Is broken

Lets say it takes ten minutes to find an obelisk of inversion. There’s also a 20% chance of getting an obelisk core from it. That means 1 drop every 50 minutes. This means if I play for 40 hours a week I’d get 48 drops. Lets say I sell them for 2500 emeralds. That’s roughly 29.4 LE a week. In a month I’d make 1.83 Stacks. However, there are two problems with that. First, that’s almost 6 months of work to buy a weathered at its lowest price, and possibly more considering inflation. Second, and much more importantly, that’s not fun. 40 hours a week on a tedius grind is a job. I do not play this game to have a job, I play it because I want to have fun. I, and most other people, do not have the time or the willpower to play 40 hours a week.

Likewise, assuming it takes, on average, two hours to level up a gathering profession once after level 50, that’s 80 hours to be able to gather the highest level items for one profession without the use of bombs, and 20 assuming you do. For one profession. You need two to get into a crafting profession, so that’s 1-4 weeks depending on bombs assuming a 40 hour week, which most people can’t do. And that’s after level 50; including all levels below would probably add another 20 hours for each profession, or another 40 hour week. All of this is just a barrier to entry; to create and sell items, you either need to spend more time gathering and crafting, or more money buying ingredients. Either way, you lose more time trying to craft items to sell.

ALL of this is for a single item, mind you. It’s tedius, time consuming, and unhealthy for both the game and the consumer to force that much effort for so little reward. It’s also not fun, which is the reason I play this game. I want to use mythics, not play the lottery or a second job.

To put it in perspective, I’ll use Destiny 2 as an example, since it’s the closest game to Wynn that I play a lot. In D2, I get from random drops, on average, two exotics a week just from playing 20 hours a week. Most don’t even require you to actively grind for them, and the ones that do don’t require RNG for the most part. Exotics are essentially as powerful as mythics, and potentially more so, since they don’t come with randomly rolled stats and are thus guaranteed to be at its most powerful. And not only are there guaranteed ways to obtain some exotics, but it’s relatively easy to obtain all of them, even the ones that do drop randomly, because the developers recognize that using exotics and experimenting freely with them is more fun than trying to grind for them for weeks on end.

Except we already have this in at least some form; Dungeon and Boss altar items don’t drop anywhere else in the game, and are guaranteed or extremely common drops from their respective areas.

Mythics, in fact, are the ONLY item tier that doesn’t have this sort of pathway to obtain them, besides the mythical armor, which actively encourages mindless grinding of chests instead of playing the game. It’s not fun for the player to lock the most powerful gear behind a .0007% chance without giving any pathway to obtain them besides “click on chest or resource node for six months to maybe get one”. It’s not difficult or engaging, and doesn’t make me want to play more or drive me to succeed like, say, Destiny 2’s exotic quests, which usually require both a grind and a completion of a challenging activity without any RNG. It’s just tedius, and actively pushes both me and other players away from the game because chances are only the players who act like this game is their second job have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a mythic from the slot machine.

Can there be mythics that just drop randomly in the loot pool? Sure. But that shouldn’t be the ONLY way to obtain Mythics, as it is currently, because that’s just not fun.

 

I agree with basically everything you said.

 

i agree

 

i agree with all of this