Game Design Invincibility Frames And The Threat To Build Diversity

Note: before I begin, I would like to point out that I have never been in a war before. However, I feel like a lot of the faults of invincibility frames only require a logical approach to understand instead of experience.

So. Invincibility frames. Where do I start. I guess with a quick overview on what they are and why they’re here.

Invincibility frames are basically frames immediately after you attack an enemy in which they cannot be attacked again. The only (known) place in which they are present in wynncraft is on the tower that you fight in guild wars, and they last for around half a second after every hit.
NOTE: this is up for debate. When asking about invincibility frames 0.5 seconds was the figure that came up the most, but if anyone has a more accurate value let me know. For now the arguments presented will assume 0.5.


The reason why they are on guild towers is up for speculation, but there are a few educated guesses we can make based on how they work on specific attacks.

Spoiler: Why are they here?

One of the most plausible reasons is because of warscream. It actually does quite a bit of damage, however it is almost never used because of the fact that it heavily pushes back the targeted enemy, leaving them far away and keeping you from dealing additional damage. It doesn’t push back stationary mobs or mobs with cci, however this means that the attack will blow right past them and only deal a small amount of damage. The problem arrives when you get a stationary enemy with a hit box as big as the guild tower. All you have to do is look almost straight up and cast warscream while hugging the tower and all of warscream’s hits will land dealing massive damage. This same reasoning can be applied to arrow storm.

Another less plausible reason is that the hit box of the guild tower is made up of hundreds of armor stands, making piercing or aoe attacks deal damage several times in one hit. The invincibility frames guarantee that only one of the hit boxes will register the attack and the others will become immune, preventing the damage stack from happening.

Now onto how this is bad.

Spoiler: The problem

Invincibility frames are a massive, inconsistent nerf to basically every playstyle besides poison, heavy melee, and heavy spell (heavy spell lmao). Fast melee builds get throttled by more than half. Smaller attacks like arrow storm completely cancel any other attacks you may have in your cycle. And don’t even get me started on shaman melee. Since only one beam can hit at a time, that nerfs your dps by two thirds on top of the loss because of attack speed, as well as reducing your stealing chances by two thirds. In terms of spell builds, invincibility frames punish better players. 6 cps is the optimal cps for wars because it hits directly in like with the invincibility frames, but heaven forbid if your cps increases to 6.1 and you lose half of your dps. This is complete bs.


The reason I'm ranting about this is because of how it completely ruined the prospect of wars in my vision. I was excited to try wars, I love games that are team based. I made a couple builds for my higher level classes in preparation, and joined a guild. However, I eventually learned more about the problems of wars. How there were random one shot invisible attacks, how the tower dealt true damage (which may or may not me completely broken because of class base defense, I may make a rant on that later), and finally how towers have invincibility frames. The invincibility frame was the anvil that broke the camels back, as all the builds that I made were fast melee. My main class is a level 104 shaman, making it even worse. I'm worrying about the people that just jump into wars without knowing about this information, which is perfectly normal, and then suffer through the arduous process of trying to figure out why their lumina tier stack build is only doing 5k dps (not an exaggeration).

Now, how can this be fixed?

Spoiler: Solution

My favorite solution can be justified with one of the new bosses, the canyon colossus. The colossus is in concept a very similar enemy to the guild tower in that it is very large. However, the colossus only has small specific hitboxes like the eye, while the guild tower has one gigantic hitbox. You might be able to see where I'm going here. The tower hitbox should be reduced to 4-8 separate hitboxes positioned around the tower, and invincibility frames are removed. The exact number isn't very important and can be changed, but in doing this you solve both the problem of hitting multiple hitboxes and the problem of certain spells being abused. Even better, this style of boss has also proven itself to be stable and enjoyable in the tcc raid. This solution takes advantage of the fact that people don't aim at the top of the tower. For many classes, it's basically impossible to do so, so the entire upper portion of the hitbox can be eliminated. As for the hp of the tower, as there are more targets and no iframes it should be increased, determining the amount requires testing. If it’s possible, it would also be nice to connect the health of all the hitboxes as the tower is a single target.

I really hope something that was mentioned here can make it into the game, and if you read through the entire post, thank you very much.

TL;DR: Invincibility frames are bad as they give massive nerfs to multiple types of builds that didn’t need them and weren’t associated with the problem, and this can be fixed by making the tower fight similar to how the TCC bossfight works, with single hitboxes at different points along the structure.

If there is something that I missed or got completely wrong, please tell me.