A Look At All Of The Classes

Right.

First Disclaimer: This was originally going to be a comment on @JaydonTheWarrior 's class thread, but it’s kind of spiralled out of hand.

Second Disclaimer: I wrote this all in one night, so beware of spelling issues and poor explanations.

Third Disclaimer: this isn’t really much of a concrete solutions thread and more of a general feedback thread


Before I talk about the classes, I’d like to bring up another game, because I’m going to be using it to compare the classes and their roles. So let’s talk about Overwatch.


In Overwatch, there’s three broad roles for all of the different Heroes, and each role has two different unofficial sub-roles. The three roles are Damage, which is basically the DPS, Tank, which...yeah, and Support, which is also self explanatory.


Damagers tend to be divided into Offensive and Defensive heroes. Offensive heroes focus on high mobility and focused damage, while Defensive heroes tend to focus on AoE and area denial. In Wynn terms, Offensive builds are the boss DPS, while Defensive builds are ad clearers.


Supports are divided into main and secondary healers. Main healers tend to be the heavy lifters in a fight; they tend to sacrifice extra DPS in favor of higher, more focused heals, and they can’t really win a gunfight on their own without a major skill advantage. Secondary healers are a lot more varied. They tend to have more utility and combat ability at the cost of focused heals per second. They can often hold their own in gunfights, and some of them (Lucio) can, in the hands of a skilled player, be downright pseudo-attackers in their playstyle.


Tanks are the most important for this conversation, though. They’re divided into anchor tanks and peel tanks. Anchor tanks are basically the rallying force of the team. They’re the ones that the rest of the team fall behind, and tend to dictate the flow of the battle. They decide where the battle takes place. Wherever they are, you follow or die. Peel tanks, on the other hand, tend to focus on drawing enemy fire. They tend to get up close and personal with the enemy to do this rather than sticking close to their team, either by charging into the opponents or pulling the opponents to you. Either way, you’re going to shoot a peel tank, and only them, instead of their teammates.


Why am I telling you all of this? Because it becomes a lot easier to see the problems with the current classes through this lens, with just two pictures.


Generally speaking, this is how things should be:

Spoiler

So far, so good. While there is some overlap between all of the classes, especially in the Damage Category (I am so sorry by the way), Archer and Assassin are still largely the kings of that category, with the best overall damage output for both single targets and crowds. The rest of the classes, meanwhile, don’t necessarily match the two ‘A’ classes in damage, but they still do decently at it while providing their own niches to build with. But remember; this is how it SHOULD be.

Here’s what the current class roles actually look like, in my opinion:

Spoiler

Oh boy. Ohhhhh, boy.

So let's talk about the two classes that I think are largely fine first, just to get them out of the way.


Archer:

Archer is fun, and it's fine. it's got good range and damage, with a few close range combos for the higher skilled risk-takers. It's flexible in play style, although melee can be a bit touchy just because archer's melee has the worst crowd control capabilities, meaning group combat with melee is kind of touch-and-go. Not too much to say here. It’s the single target ranged class, and it works great as it.


Archer's major ID is Hawkeye, which I really like. It completely changes arrow storm but still keeps the core of it (lots of arrows at once), making Arrow Storm much more usable at range.


Assassin:

Assassin is my main for a reason. GODDAMN it is fun to play. great combo capabilities, high mobility, good defensive capabilities. The only two hurdles to using assassin is its steep learning curve (which has led to so many threads) and close range. Once you get it down, however, you can tear through crowds and bosses.


Assassin's major ID is Roving Assassin, which needs to be put on something besides Weathered ffs. Other than that, it seems alright, not a game changer, but I can't back this up because I don't have a mythic.


These classes are the golden standard for Wynn; all of their spells have widely applicable uses in their playstyle, their class-specific major IDs are great to good, and they’re flexible to build with. Not only that, but their spells aren’t entirely useless in melee builds; they give damage boosts or defensive utility to add an extra dimension to their melee spam. They know their roles, and they fill them.


Now for the problem children. First, the weird one: Shaman.


Shaman is a tank. You heard me.


Or, more accurately, Shaman’s Totem is a tank. Shaman, as a class, is really a dynamic duo of an anchor tank and a glass cannon. Remember how earlier I was talking about how anchor tanks are supposed to dictate where a battle takes place? Well the Totem and Aura spells tend to be REALLY FUCKING good at that. Because of Aura’s prison mechanic, and totem’s everything, pretty much any battle with a shaman in it is going to revolve around shaman’s totem. Mobs are going to group up on your totem because of aura, while players are going to group up on your totem because A. free heals and damage boosts, and B. all the mobs are on your totem. Seriously, ask yourself this: if you increased Shaman’s base defense enough, and made all of its spells revolve around the shaman itself rather than its totem, what would you get? You’d have a short-mid range class with lower mobility, but multiple spells designed to group up both enemies and allies around you. In other words, an anchor tank.


Personally, I think Shaman is mostly fine, and honestly pretty well-designed as an anchor tank. It’s weird, sure, that the class designed specifically to be a squishy damage dealer ended up being one of the best tanks, but I’m generally fine with it. The class itself is largely fine; it’s very versatile, build-wise, with even some less traditional builds synergizing uncannily well with it (poison and greed shamans, specifically). My main problem is with uproot; it’s largely useless outside of resetting totem timers. Beyond that, the problem with Shaman’s role isn’t so much with Shaman itself, but rather the class it replaces (we’ll get to it).


Next, Mage.


First off, let me preface this by saying that Mage is, strictly speaking, balanced. As a whole, it’s neither overpowered or underpowered. It could be left alone, and be largely okay. However, Mage still has two major problems: First, pretty much all of its power is concentrated in Heal. Second, and I’m surprised no one really talks about this, Meteor is the only spell on the class that is actually kind of balanced with mage’s low base damage in mind.


First, Heal. Heal has too much power weighted towards the base spell, and not enough power in the way to boost it. What do I mean by this? Well, you can naturally boost heal’s power with water damage, right? But since it’s power is only boosted by .5% for every 1% of water damage you have, it generally is just… not worth boosting heal. It’s already powerful enough at base to act as a main healer in most circumstances. You don’t need to specifically build towards having powerful heals; it’s built into the class itself. Hell, mages are pretty much the best tanks and solo classes SOLELY because of heal. Hell, you know how a shaman totem is a good anchor tank? Well, so is a healspamming mage, except mages also have the advantage of being able to walk. Sure, they don’t have the crowd control abilities of shaman, but that doesn’t matter when you can make everyone in a five meter radius practically invincible without needing to even make a build to do it.


The second problem is that none of the spell multipliers in Mage’s repertoire of spells are actually balanced around mage’s base damage, besides meteor. The best way I can demonstrate this is by looking at uproot and ice snake. Both are designed to be low damage utility spells (and both currently don’t provide enough utility to be worth that damage penalty). However, Uproot has a 75% spell multiplier while ice snake has a 70% multiplier. That’s really bad, especially considering Uproot is a spell on shaman, the class with the highest base damage, while Ice Snake is on mage, the class with the lowest base damage. Teleport faces a similar problem compared to other movement spells; all of them have a 100% multiplier, which in reality just means mage has the worst damaging movement spell (besides vanish).


In my opinion, Heal needs to be rebalanced: Nerf the base heal amount, but make heal boosted by health regen, or at the very least seriously boost water damage’s effect on heal to make it worth investing in. Personally, I think making it based on health regen would be better to differentiate clerical and DPS builds. Speaking of DPS, buff the spell multipliers on ice snake and teleport. Mages shouldn’t just be relegated to spamming heal and meteor; they’re freaking MAGES. They should be raising hell with every tool in their belt, not just spamming R-L-R and casting R-L-L once every second or so.


Right, now let’s touch on the biggest problem. Warrior.


Warrior is… sad. It’s like that forty-year-old unshaved divorced dad with a beer belly, living off of unemployment benefits in a run-down truck trailer. It’s ugly, purposeless, and definitely not winning any battles anytimes soon. There are so, SO many problems with warrior that have been touched on before and will be touched on again, but for now I want to focus on the identity crisis of warrior overall. Remember how, way back up at the top of the thread, I showed two graphs? Well, right now is where that becomes relevant again.


See, what warrior WANTS to be is a versatile mix of Anchor tank, Pull tank, and Defensive DPS. you can see that pretty clearly with how the class is designed. The clearest example is how Guardian is designed, as well as Taunt, both of which being major IDs focused on the two types of tank. Guardian is supposed to make you an anchor tank, where you absorb the damage from nearby players in order to encourage them to stay close to you. Taunt, meanwhile, is supposed to encourage a peel tank playstyle, encouraging you to use war scream to pull enemy fire off of your teammates.


However, both of these run into problems REALLY quickly. With Guardian, there’s no visual indication of the ID’s AoE on either the tank or the teammate’s side, so neither you nor your teammates actually know where you should be positioned. Also, the larger the group, the more danger the warrior ends up in, which is a pretty major issue, especially since warrior tends to lack any form of sustain besides life steal. Speaking of which, having to rely on life steal to survive makes warrior REALLY bad as an anchor tank in general. Why? Because it means that where a fight takes place isn't dependent on you: it’s dependent on where the enemy is. Your ability to tank, and by extension the flow of the fight, ends up depending on whether you can regen health at a fast enough pace to survive, especially in longer fights, where sustained damage is more important than burst damage.


Taunt, meanwhile, faces two even bigger problems: inconsistency and game design. First, anyone who’s used taunt can probably testify that it kind of sucks ass; it’s too inconsistent without absolutely spamming war scream. Second, though, pretty much every enemy spell in the game is an AoE, so even if you DO pull aggro, chances are unless you manage to get far enough from your teammates, they’re still at risk of getting hit, which means you physically CAN’T do your job in some arenas. The Orange Wybel and The Eye are probably the biggest offenders. Wybel’s meteor and charge spam, along with the flamethrowing pull robots basically means no one is safe anywhere. Meanwhile, literally none of the Eye’s unique spells target people based on aggro. The magma cube train and eye-chomp always target the same location, the exploding runes are AoE and target everyone, and the nuke hits everyone, and as a bonus, it also ignores defense. Not to mention the arena funnels you towards the eye, so you can’t pull AoEs away from your teammates.


Both of these issues don’t just plague the major IDs but warrior as a whole; war scream not only sucks as a taunt spell naturally (Jaydon can attest), but fails to actually anchor the team at your position, since the defense bonus lasts for three full minutes. Not to mention that at this point, the attack bonus is actively detrimental to your team since assassin and shaman both have better strength boosts. Uppercut seems designed to be a peel spell, but it just… sucks at that, and also harms your team by cutting off DPS.


I could go on, but honestly, I think Jaydon’s covered it better, from the point of view of a warrior main. Check out his thread.


In any case, I think I’m done talking for now. If you have an opinion, feel free to share it; I know that a lot of people are probably going to disagree with my assessment of mage. Anyways, I'm off to bed. I'll see if this thread's burned down tomorrow.

 

I read through this and I can't quite understand what it's meant to be suggesting. I feel like it'd be better fit in feedback, it's just criticisms of the classes in their current state comparing them to overwatch a lot. that aside, I agree a ton with archer and assassin, with the current state of combat they're perfectly fine as classes.

 

What you said was good on paper, until you realize the difference between overwatch and wynncraft.

Wynncraft player bases are mainly solo, and that most content in the game can be done solo. Also, wynncraft is balanced around PVE and not PVP. Lastly, wynncraft has no cooldown and heavily relies on an outdated mana system.

Now let's get that out of the way, it is pretty clear that most players will be building towards damage. Since, you know group plays doesn't really exists and when they do exists they are too easy to the point there is no need for a tank or a support. Everyone can be a DPS and win without any consequences. That is why no one likes or have to play support or tank, while in overwatch 6 DPS comps will be demolished in mere seconds.

Another reason for tanks and supports not existing is that wynncraft bosses has base regen. If you build tank or support, sure you and your team are harder to kill but you may not out damage the regen of bosses. Even if you do, it takes too long to do so. That is why mages, shaman and warrior are so problematic, it is because their purpose and aim of the class: Tank and support doesn't really have a place.

Therefore, mages and shamans are now building DPS and still are tanks since there is no cooldown on their healing abilities. With enough mana regen and intelligence they can be self-sustaining machines. While on the other hand, the supposed-to-be-tank has nothing within its kit to self sustain, which makes warrior kind of squishy since tank stats in wynncraft (health and elemental resist) are underpowered.

The point of the reply is that wynncraft will never achieve a state of balance between DPS , tanks and supports as the game mechanics are not well defined enough to. Unless cooldowns or other IDs are added in the game, I cannot see how people will build tanks or supports in the near future.

 

Honestly, I pretty much agree with this, which is why this is more of a feedback piece than a suggestion one. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two best classes right now are the ones that are focus specifically on damage; because that’s what wynn’s systems support best

 

Personally I think mage heal is fine. I feel if ice snake got reworked the class would be fine and ideally less boring.

Warrior though... Man do I agree with this. Warrior is sad, very very sad. I keep advocating for making war scream give a few seconds of hp Regen so you actually have some form of survivability. The only build in my opinion that warrior does better than any other class is w/f/a tank. Outside of that I really think every other build type another class does better which is really freaking sad.

Also might I add that ignis archer does a better job at non heal spamming support tank that guardian ever will.

 

Honestly, this was my initial reaction to reading this post too- I'd say a better comparason between wynncraft and another game would be Warframe, which, unsurprisingly, also suffers from having damage-based characters demolish the meta, while tanking and supporting is more of a secondary role (although even then it doesn't suffer as much as it does in Wynncraft, since there's at least matchmaking there).


Anyways onto my thoughts:
Analysis of Shaman/Mage/Assassin/Archer is valid, but those classes are relatively balanced anyways, so that's usually what everyone covers just out of necessity while covering all the classes.

A bit too much emphasis on major ids; there will absolutely be more added in the future, and basing the opinion of a class on the literal gameplay feature that tries to provide an interesting playstyle change is... dangerous. At the moment, all class-specific major ids just emphasize a feature of the class so it's not too far off, but who knows what we'll get in the future.

And some more thoughts on warrior:
Even if taunt worked properly, even if guardian's major id was just a base feature of the class, warrior would still suffer as a tank, more than any other class. See, the ability to tank isn't only about having a big chonky effective health pool (which warrior has, I'll give it that). It's about crowd control, self-sustain, and damage mitigation. Now, every single other class in the game has these in spades:

Archer has shield and a very fast movement spell, along with the ability to stay way out of harm's reach if need be
Assassin has crowd control on basically all of its abilities, not to mention the incredible infinite ehp given from vanish (can't take damage if you can't be targeted)
Mage has the ability to get nearly as much ehp as warrior, while also providing an innate ability to take infinite chip damage and heal it up without the need for potions (which have cooldowns, albeit short ones)
Shaman also has heal, as well as the ability to just... leave, and let the totem do the rest of the work, while they just kite around and put the effort of aiming into proper movement.

Warrior has none of this. The spells have little to no CC, there's a requirement to be up close, there's no way of regaining lost health except with potions or lifesteal or greed, all of which can be used on other classes to much greater effect.

Even in tanking, the primary theme of warrior, it can't hold a candle to the more offensively-oriented classes.

And then there's damage, but I think we've already lampooned warrior enough for being subpar there.