Guide Explaining Strength/dexterity Changes + Discussion

In this thread I'll explain what I think of the strength and dexterity changes and propose some sort of change while maintaining multiplicative damage, although I don't believe this change would be enough on its own.

Background:
Strength and dexterity are both different ways of accomplishing the same thing - a % damage boost. However, at no point did this % damage boost multiply your damage. Instead it was basically an extension of spell% and melee% damage. Now, however, it works the same as tome damage; your damage, including spell% and melee%, is now multiplied by a certain amount dictated by your dexterity, strength, or a combination of both. In builds with spell% and melee% buffs, this creates a much larger buff than before. Let's take a look at an example of how this changes things.

Suppose you are using a weapon which deals solely thunder damage and you have +100% thunder damage. You also have 100 dexterity, equivalent to a 65% critical hit chance. Previously, if you rolled a critical hit, it would have been equivalent to +100% spell damage and +100% melee damage. After the changes, your base damage (modified by the +100% thunder damage) is multiplied by two. Let's compare these.

Previous: 100% + 100% + 100% = 300% the damage you'd do with no skill point buffs, spell% buffs, melee% buffs or elemental buffs.

Current: (100% + 100%) * 2 = 400% the damage you'd do with no skill point buffs, spell% buffs, melee% buffs or elemental buffs.

This 33.3% damage increase is a rather mild example; the majority of thunder and earth builds have gotten larger buffs than this. Builds combining thunder and earth got buffed harder than builds using just one of those elements because the %damage buff from strength is effectively multiplied with that from dexterity. Builds with 68 dexterity and strength, for example, received damage buffs equivalent to 2.25x the damage they would get without skill points, and still much higher than in the previous system. Although I cannot give a specific value because there are variables changing this depending on the build, a lot of these builds now deal about 1.5x the damage they did before. People have made melee builds dealing hundreds of thousands of damage per second, while before it was rare to exceed 50,000 DPS.

Why this is a problem:
This change causes a shift in the meta and what is balanced/popular which has literally never been seen before in Wynn, and which would be incredibly rare for any game. Certain builds are incredibly overpowered now (rainbow...) while others, such as WFA, are falling behind. I should note that I was someone who thought tank builds were somewhat overpowered, so I can appreciate buffing earth and thunder, but not to this degree. While I believe dexterity and strength should have been made multiplicative in line with how defense and agility work, I believe this is the wrong way to go about it.

How can this be addressed:
I think a good way to keep things multiplicative while addressing a large part of this issue is to change how dexterity and strength work together. This would be done by making it so strength cannot activate when dexterity does, working similarly to how defense does not activate when agility does. This would also greatly limit average damage buffs, changing the damage cap from 3.25 times what damage would previously be ignoring skill points to 1.96 times this. In a build with +200% spell and melee combined, for example, this would change a 2x overall damage increase to a 1.27x damage buff factoring in previous skill point buffs.

Other people, such as Druser, have suggested reverting the changes entirely. I have stated that I support making damage multiplicative, but the new system was released too early, quite clearly. I've heard blame be pinned on different people, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that things are released fair and balanced, with adequate item changes if necessary. Because of this, reverting the changes entirely, for now at least, could be a good solution.

Final thoughts:
Sorry if this thread was a little disorganised, I wrote it quite late at night. I wanted it to be a good place to discuss these changes and to hear what people thought should be done. Also I understand some of my examples of having strength and dexterity both maxed are not realistic. I thought this was important to illustrate the point of just how overpowered some things are now. Mildly exaggerated examples make it easier to visualise this issue for someone who isn't really familiar with what's happening. Regardless, change must be made, but how that is done is the big question.

 

Bruh, this is like early tome balancing, but even more available and somehow more broken.

This was also put in a hotfix instead of a patch, so I’m suspicious on how much time was even spent thinking on this

 

I hear the idea of str and dex not stacking but there is a problem with this: the more dexterity you have the more that strength will become irrelevant. High dexterity builds such as cancelstack will diminish the effectiveness of strength skill points by a whopping 80%, making it so that you can only have one or the other, making ET builds irrelevant when you could easily select a different element and have basically the same damage. Instead, I feel like there shouldn't be two damage boost skill point assignments. Thunder should give a different stat boost that doesn't boost damage but does some other thing related to the element (and the same for agility). I have been thinking about this for a while, and I feel like it is a viable option, however it might be a bit drastic considering how much of a change this patch has made already
Something that could meet in the middle: The percent scaling of earth and thunder should be changed, at least earth. I was thinking it would apply to damage the way that air or fire would apply to ehp, growing in effectiveness the more you give. I'm not sure if there is a formula capable of doing this smoothly, but its just a thought.

 

this is awfull, I don't think you should be able to deal 1M damage in 10 seconds.

As soon as the patch dropped me and 4 other people went in EO and we dealt so much damage the eye rose up to 13M hp at a point

THE EYE LITTERALY NEEDED CHEAT CODES TO NOT DIE TOO FAST

here is the shitty fps, unedited, low res video

 

E/T builds are not the problem (well, they're part of it). Massive buffs to any build with Dex or Str is a problem. I am in favor of full reversion. And maybe I should go write a polemic about how the offense/defense tradeoff actually works...

 

Imagine if this was a hidden feature to balance strengh and dex now xd, suddenly tcc goes from having a total of 18 M hp to 72 M hp

 

Lemme just drop this here for big number visualization: https://forums.wynncraft.com/thread...2-runs-using-big-numbers.285493/#post-3388409

They really should have balanced all the items and such to account for this change instead of just releasing the change in damage calculation. This is just overkill.

 

is the eye the only boss that received hidden buffs, or did other bosses get hidden buffs also?

 

I don't think suddenly getting to 13M hp from like 2M is a hidden buff...

 

ok I figured why the Eye got 10m+ hp, someone in our party had a king of hearts, and apparently negative damage now heals mobs so...

 

Can't they reverse the buffs and just add them back after balancing items? These changes sounds rushed

 

Imo, str and dex didn’t need the buff to their behaviour. They’ve always been more of an investment for good items to me. If anything, the better buff to str and dex would be making them more worth the investment by adding/buffing ET type items. It annoys me to no end that the “base” desired damage for FA tris are the same for ET outside of ETW

 

I did consider the diminishing effectiveness of ET builds, but the idea I came up with was that the effectiveness of one is diminished at a lower amount using more realistic values for str and dex. For example, if you had 100str and 100dex, effectiveness of one of those would be diminished by 65%, which is still significant but not as bad. I think the "meet in the middle" solution you proposed makes sense, like if they cut buff values for dex and strength by half or something.

In the example I gave in the thread, I said that a buff of 2x in a particular situation would still be 1.27x after the proposed change, which is not low enough. I've seen people suggest straight up nerfing the % buff values for strength and dexterity, which while awkward, wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing imo. Would help ET builds maintain high damage relative to counterparts, while maybe not being super duper op. I am aware it's generally easier to gain ehp than it is to gain damage btw, if you were referring to that. Full reversion would be a good idea currently, at least until a new system can be worked out properly.

 

I think the changes are totally fine. Skill points should also be useful besides skill requirements, and even after the change, defense and agility still have an higher impact on your effective hp than strength and dexterity on your damage output. And yes, strength and dexterity should work together, because defense and agility do too, they are multiplicative as well.
In addition to improving the balancing in regards to skill points, the update also helps to flesh out differences between the different elements, an earth/dexterity build should do significantly more damage than a fire/air one. Elements should not just be enablers for different items pools, but actually feel distinct in their playstyles.
However, I do agree that many items might need some rebalancing and that they maybe should've released these alongside the skill point update, but I can also understant that it could make sense to wait how the changes really affect the meta and do the rebalancing with caution, instead of doing it all out of thin air and dropping everything in a single big update.

 

You are forgetting the fact that defense and agility stacked like this for forever, and the way that ehp is calculated makes it so that the more you have, the more effective it is, even including the way that the quartic function is set up. I was looking at a nulli build with 14k hp, and wynnbuilder said that it had 110k ehp. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!? That is more than a 7x increase, and people say that that's balanced! Now look at the current damage numbers, they rarely break 2x! This points us back to the actual problem, which is that the items were balanced for the previous weaker boost, and since the nerfs and buffs were not released at the same time, this pandemonium results. Give it time, it will make sense later.

 

Good points. I thought about it for a bit earlier and did some calculations for if dex/str were halved and that would yield damage results more balanced than what we have rn. I'm not a fan of the IMs having to change every item/nearly every item in response to this change. I just don't really see a point in them rebalancing a ton of stuff instead of just improving the system of how str/dex function while maintaining a multiplicative nature. Halving their values but maintaining how they interact would work quite well. The majority of builds using one of earth/thunder would receive damage buffs of 4-10%, while many builds using both would receive buffs of up to 20%-ish. I was suggesting something different earlier, but I tried to consider different options and I feel that would be the best option. What I had suggested before would result in buffs of 1.3x for some builds using one of thunder or earth which i feel isn't really justified