Globally nerf max player power

My goodness, Wynn has been in a real mess for a hot while. Unbalanced class viability, raids, centralizing items and Mythics, CCI. One-by-one I've seen many suggestions to fix all these things, but I've come to an ultimatum which I believe can fix all these things. You may not like it, but I think it will make the game not die under its own feature creep.

Globally nerf the max potential power of players

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I can see you there, about to post the mundane game design youtube video essay parroting on how buffing is better than nerfing. And yes... It's usually true. But let's be real, Wynn has gone past the point of no return, it has dug itself into a hole.

The power difference between players and mobs has grown to such a sickening degree, to where there is nothing good you can do for mobs anymore. Improve the mob AI? I doubt that can happen. Buff the mob's stats? As a former GM, that would be a lot of work, and would be devastating for players with weaker items, and would impact the rich players way less, I.E. the "problematic" players.

And do realize that Wynn has attempted to give mobs features before. This has resulted in the additions of CCI and raids in their current state.

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Wynn has only worsened itself with trying to fix this giant problem when the root of it has been in front of them: Players. Specifically, the max potential they can reach.

There are 2 primary aspects of players I want to address: Player Spells and Item Power.

For player spells, I think the actual base damage is mostly fine. No, I'm referring to stuff like the extreme kb of spells like Arrow shield, or the stunlocking of spells with blindness. All this time, you have really decided to create more problems like CCI's current state instead of actually tackling the root of stunlocking? No more excuses. Fix them.


Now for item power. Good old Mythics, such a rotten mistake they are. But I'm not looking to destroy the worth of your little virtual bank, not today anyway. I will let the below image describe my ideal solution.


Now I don't know the exact numbers, but the difference in power between item tiers is just too much. It doesn't need to be that much. Doesn't help that the strongest one is also the rarest one, but you already knew that. One of the few good things about tomes is that there's not a huge difference between the tiers (I think).

By lowering the curve, you lessen the damaging, gambling presence of items like mythics and make the game more based on skill, than luck. While still allowing Mythics to be a bit stronger than everything else, unless we want to scrutinize that further, but I don't feel like it. Sorry IMs, this means you'd have to do the dirty work, I can only apologize.

What's that? You just want the player to feel good about themselves getting so lucky? They're not gonna be feeling so good when the game trips and dies under all this unbalance. At this point, I no longer care about the players, but keeping the game alive.

And yes class builders, I know the balance of other features like skill points have problems too but I don't feel like being here all day. I have games to play where the concept of MMO stains like a virtual economy are irrelevant.

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The Important Part

This is where it gets interesting. By fixing the root issues of player spells and item power creep, it will begin a process of de-escalation.
Think about it, by fixing player spells being able to kb/stunlock, features like CCI won't have to be as necessary and apparent. And by fixing item tiers to not be so different, damage numbers in endgame content don't have to be so goddamn inflated just because 5% of the playerbase have rarer items. Wynn will no longer have to rely solely on fake difficulty.
I think it would be a win/win situation. The core fun aspects of the game like spellcasting would still be present.


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Clarifications


"But I spent so much on this build with Mythics and legendaries! Won't nerfing make it all worthless?"
Are the numbers all that you care about? Despite the fact that said item tiers will still be the overall best? You would still be on the higher end of player power. If you cannot handle being lowered to a more even-playing field, it all seems entitled to me. It would be funny to see rich, stacked players struggle because such items carried their lack of skill. I am openly pro to destroying the trade market community.
And this is coming from someone who's been through many endgame builds with a mythic weapon and various rares/legendaries, and with a few stacks of LE. I no longer care about this wealth. I will consider these kinds of responses irrelevant unless they are substantiated and offer an interesting perspective.

"The change is too drastic! Many players will leave out of rage!"
This ain't my server, I don't gotta worry about the finances hahaha. But really, I've come to despise the idea of players who act so childish because of numbers, and this is coming from a number-obsessed clown.

I'll be real, if you are so worried that your playerbase will leave, that you are not willing to address what is possibly the game's biggest problems- that is cowardly. And personally, if it means that irritating players are replaced by nice, new players, I'm all for it. It would be sad to remember Wynn as a textbook misuse of game design dopamine.
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Wynn team, if you read this, I'm sorry for all the abrasive-ness. It's just fun to me you know. I still like you all. I just like to have some fun. I just want the game to be better, but we've gotta start pushing. Little nudges of suggestions won't push you out of a slippery slope. If you're not careful, Wynn will soon die of feature creep of more features of similar quality to tomes.

 

Seeing how much people already reacted so badly to the str/dex baselines changes this is going to be pretty funny, a little bit of trolling even

 

There is no such thing as a bad Cruuk suggestion.

 

My perspective is of someone who is relatively "new" to the game- I played back in 2014 for a while, quit for about 7 years, and joined back in May of this year. For the record, I mostly agree with what you're saying but have some additional points to make

Buff the mob stats? I mean, why not? Most mobs don't do nearly enough damage and aren't nearly hard enough to kill, I don't see why an across-the-board buff would be bad. I remember how difficult things were back in 2014, I don't have an issue with bringing back that level of challenge again.

Agreed, fix spells being disgusting without CCI and there will no longer exist a need for band-aid patches like CCI which fuck up classes like Shaman.

I would disagree with this. If anything, the difference in power is not pronounced enough between the lower tiers (non-mythic). While I agree that mythics are in a really bad spot right now since they are so incredible powerful, I can pretty confidently say that basically every fabled weapon and most fabled armors are complete dogshit, legendaries are a toss-up of either being mythics in disguise (e.g: Orange Lily) or so worthless that there's no point to using them apart from some very very niche situations (what is the purpose of Ivory?). I would love to see fabled weapons being, you know, actually worth using, and legendaries generally being more consistent in terms of usefulness.

Mythics themselves are also just rough as hell right now. You have some which are good to the point of being disgusting (grandmother and its 2+ million burst dps), while others are arguably worse than crafted alternatives (Spring), and some just being straight up not that great (Inferno). There was an old adage that "any mythic, even the worst one, is better than a non-mythic" but I'm really not sure that's true anymore if you factor in the cost to upgrade.

Basically, what I'm trying to get at is not that mythics as a group of items are the issue here, but rather that individual things need to be tweaked and fixed to match the power level more evenly. Sweeping mythic nerfs aren't going to solve anything, because not every mythic is worth spending time trying to get. Could I get more damage with Spring than Orange Lily? Probably, but is it worth the extra amount I'd have to pay for a slight buff? Personally, I wouldn't say so. Nerf some things, buff others, but don't knock all mythics down a peg because the vast disparity between godly and awful mythics is going to stay there unless the gap is closed first. Even if you, say, slashed all mythic damage or whatever by say 50%, cataclysm is still going to be broken as all hell, and inferno is still going to fucking suck. Unless that's addressed, I fail to see how any overall reduction would help the game's health as a whole. All you'd really do is just make them slightly weaker, which is fine I guess but then the power gap still exists.

The issue with this "burn it all to the ground" approach, as with its application in any other context, is that you're always going to be harming far more than you think. I understand the frustration- it's hard to tell my newer guildmates that no matter how hard they try, unless they get a decent mythic weapon they're always going to be doing shit damage (relatively speaking anyways). However, this sort of slash and burn tactic will catch plenty of less wealthy people in the crossfire as well. Building wealth in Wynncraft is a snowballing effect- as you accumulate more money, you can spend more to make even more (case in point: Discoverer). If, because mythics don't become as strong anymore, the calculus changes and prices change to a point where they fit a more linear power curve, the relative value of mythics is going to tumble to shit. Right now, Wynn's economy is going through a deflationary period, meaning mythics are cheaper, but basically so is everything else.

For wealthier players, I'd argue that your proposed changes don't really mean much. Everything would go down in relative value, so the overall value of their collections won't actually change that much. Relative value doesn't really matter if they have plenty of raw, if they have other assets they can liquidate, or if they straight up just don't need more stuff, so this is a non-issue as far as I can see. For a less wealthy player that happens to own a couple mythics, however, this could be devastating. Right now, my average mythic Divzer is probably worth at least a few hundred legendary Clusters. This makes it so that if I want to switch builds and try something new, I can easily do so without sacrificing too much value, since I can just buy a cluster and still have enough money for hundreds more (or equivalent pieces of gear, you get the point). However, imagine if prices fell more in line with relative power, as time has proven they will (look at gma prices pre- and post-buff, for example). The relative purchasing power of my divzer would be fucking obliterated, which means the hours I spent grinding out enough money to get something I coveted would be effectively wiped. I view my small collection of mostly-cheap mythics not just as an armory, but as a relatively reliable store of value. It is not uncommon for me to decide "hey, fuck this mythic, I'm gonna sell it to buy gear for a legendary weapon build"- you can see the proof of that on my YouTube channel.

To be fair, the rarity of mythics will ensure that there will always a pretty solid price. gap between even the best legendary and a mythic, but the fact remains that relative prices will fall, and the economic power of less wealthy players will fall accordingly. You clearly don't give a shit about wealthier players and I'm honestly agnostic on the issue since I don't fall into either the category of very wealthy or very poor, but there will be repercussions for everybody, and I believe that it will be felt the hardest at the lower ends of the wealth spectrum. Now, you could say this is a worthwhile price to pay for game balance, but I really think you're letting the fact that you despise the existing "elite" cloud the greater picture, which is that the majority of the burden of economic shocks are always, and I mean always, going to be borne the hardest by lower-class people (remember 2008?)- that is, unless you abolish markets and currency entirely, but good luck getting that to happen in Wynn.

TL;DR: I think mythics being a lot better isn't necessarily a bad thing or even the biggest issue at hand, we should be making the game harder in general by rewarding smart plays and more heavily punishing bad ones instead of nerfing expensive items in a fashion that will likely more disproportionately hurt poorer people than those who already have everything they want and need

 

the problem isn't that the curve is too steep. it's that it's one of the only relevant curves in the game. boosters that are more native to offensive builds, like damage ids, stack poorly, whilst abundant elephants in the room like cursestack, endurance, intelligence and attack tiers are widely available to defense. strdex is nice on paper, but their diminishing returns jeopardise their efficacy as a solution. a baseline change might be necessary in theory, but the overarching problem remains in the scaling of other damage sources.

 

Thank you for the fat response. You must be careful though, long internet posts are fragile in the face of concise posts with fewer words. I won't let that happen here, you seem nice.

>Buff the mob stats? I mean, why not?
I've been playing since 2013, normal mobs were never hard, even when I was less-skilled back then. But maybe that's for the best, you want to focus the hard part on what counts, the dungeons and all that stuff. Time and time again, from back then to now, Wynn teased a boss as being un-soloable. And then when it releases, it's instantly soloed. These numbers have gotten crazy. There is a theme perpetuating through this whole thing: Make number go down. Buffing mob stats will not make number go down. The numbers mean nothing anymore if players can always out-overpower them, and if they can just inflate the numbers to crazy degrees in those raids.

And again I speak as a former GM, imagine being the poor guy that gets told "ok dude buff all the mob stats" only for it to mean nothing other than the mob spending 5 more seconds alive while stunlocked. I tried my best to make my damage numbers challenging, but sensible and fun for the mobs I made. I could've done better, I spent too long obsessing over numbers, after I left CT I have tried improving this habit.


>I would disagree with this. If anything, the difference in power is not pronounced enough between the lower tiers (non-mythic)
Yes, I am fully aware of many of the specific per-item problems, but I'm not going to spend all day listing all of them and become dizzy in numbers, when you already get the idea: Make number go down (for higher end stuff). These "orange lilies" and "grandmas" are their own problems, as long as the item tiers are this different in power, Wynn will be incapable of making balanced and challenging endgame content in the first place. These problematic items are noticeable in the first place because the item tiers scale this high, so maybe we should thank it for this 1 good deed of bringing attention to it. Thank you, but now it's time to fix.

If you design your entire item tiering around rarity and gambling, instead of making players solely work for them, it would be wise to lessen the requirement of said "rarer" items for builds, and let skill prevail. If I could dive into 1 specific balancing indulgence, I would have dungeon items/boss drops be less impacted by such a sweeping change. That's all.

>The issue with this "burn it all to the ground" approach
I fully know every single consequence, and I'm sticking with it because it's fun and would be a great way to refresh the community. Hmm hmm, maybe we should wait for the server to die, secretly make these changes, and then bring it back in like 6 years to take advantage of nostalgia haha.

You are dealing with someone who has become anti-MMO. I just see more fun things about singleplayer/non-MMO multiplayer games, but I still see potential in MMOs like these. What you argue is an economy I no longer see value in. Even if this whole change happened, mythics and other items are still the best, the idea is still there, case closed. Asking for that idea to grow more seems a little gluttonous, just a little though, don't worry now. I would say that the action of players pricing mythics this high in the first place is of their own volition, but it seems the artificial rarity and damage scaling has greatly influenced this. Oh well.

And all these economic intricacies? It got to this point in the first place? My apathy only grows. When I work for something in games, I've come to value the journey almost as much as the destination. Even for the items I've worked for here.

I hate the elite? But I'm friends with some of them, they are nice people. I just don't care about the economy.

 

I can agree that CCI is a big issue here, but "not hard enough in terms of damage/health" is still an issue when basically any build (regardless of weapon tier) with two seconds of thought put into it can beat any combat content in the game, solo. Of course, mobs need new mechanics too, but I think the most obvious and simple change that can be done right now is to simply make fights longer and punish players more for getting hit at all.

I don't think I made this point clear enough, but what I'm saying is that I believe some mythics are already in a good place. For example, a weapon like inferno isn't going to be hitting insane damage, but it offers enough of a defensive upgrade that it's worth using over some lower tier options. In terms of relative power, it's not actually, in my view, that much higher than a legendary dagger. Essentially, I think that grouping all the mythics together into this monolithic category of "too strong nerf to shit" is too sweeping of a view, and ignores the fact that there is essentially a greater power difference between a higher tier mythic and a lower tier one than there is between a lower tier mythic and a regular legendary. If you were to balance mythics such that the relative power of each one was similar to the lower-end mythics, then I think the problem would already be more or less fixed, give or take a few stat rebalances.

I am not going to spend that much time talking about the economy, since I doubt anything will change your mind on this point. You obviously know the consequences of a massive economic shock, and don't really care which I mean is fair I guess. I would like to see these changes implemented, albeit over a more gradual period and with plenty of warning/playtesting so that people know exactly what's coming, so the shock is lessened, and so people can make more informed decisions about what to do with their time.

 

I see no need to change mob numbers, when you can achieve these same results of hard-ness by reducing player power and fixing player stunlocking. Remember, I am making problematic numbers smaller, not the other way around- Wynn's numbers have gotten to a point where the better approach is to nerf than buff. There are a lot more mobs than items in this game, it would take longer to change mobs.
And yes, how problematic that any build can beat anything, almost as if mob numbers don't matter in the face of insane player numbers and stunlock mechanics. I don't think CT will have a good time making endgame content if they have to balance around such obscene numbers. Such insane damage numbers will only serve as a catalyst for more potential sources of fake difficulty to be added. It would be nice if mobs got nice new things, but that's all hypothetical. Make number smaller.

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And let me make myself clear. Yes, I will group all mythics into a monolithic category, because the idea of "rarest item is strongest" is still there. I'm not concerned about this mythic that's too weak, or this mythic that's way too strong, or this mythic that's balanced just right. They're their own problems, guess they should've been balanced better. The lack of care for all these crazy specific numbers is what's allowed me to develop this worldview in the first place.
As long as Wynn's item tiers are mainly based on rarity and not earned through challenges, I ask that the difference between the item tiers are smaller. Those sweet, precious, perfectly balanced mythics will still be perfectly balanced, but will be a bit closer to the other tiers by virtue of average number values being lowered.

 

The problem with mobs being too easy is primarily due to varying player skill. Mobs can't just be made harder without making the game intolerable for the majority of players.

 

I don't know if you're talking to me or the other guy, but I no longer have issue with most mobs being easy. Intrinsic and Extrinsic difficulty, I get those words mixed up a lot. It's about making the difficulty count in the real places, the endgame content. I just don't like the wild differences in player power from item tiers and stunlocking. No need to touch mobs and painfully balance them at all if players weren't so fickle in power. Hypothetically, the only reason you'd touch mobs is to reduce the presence of features like CCI if these changes were perfectly implemented, since they wouldn't be so "needed" anymore.

 

Well, I can definitely agree with pulling the item tier baselines closer together. Currently they're 1.0 1.1 1.3 .15 .17 for Unique->Mythic which is needlessly wide differences that render lower tiers basically obsolete in the face of similar higher tiers.

 

mythics would become more common than actual fableds and thats not the point

 

My point is that a few mythics are already at that "balance" point in my view. I know you don't care about numbers, because otherwise you could easily look at the existing values and easily deduce that "hey, some of these things are already only slightly better than legendary or lower tier alternatives".

You keep proposing that some ephemeral "power level" be slashed to bring it more in line with your vision of balance. What does this mean? Across the board reductions? I'm fine with that, but as I pointed out, there's still gonna be a massive fucking discrepancy between mythics. You cannot fix balance issues without both considering the macro-level tier power issues and the micro-level item specific problems. To hand wave off concerns about intra-tier concerns as "lol I don't care" is very narrow-minded, and doesn't actually solve any issues. I get you're tired of shitty balance, we all are, but I don't see how ignoring the minutiae is going to fix anything either.

Since we're on the topic, why not ask that better items be tied to harder content, if we're going to be in the business of complete overhauls? I've played plenty of other MMORPGs (RotMG, Maplestory, even RS to a certain extent) where the best gear is tied to being able to clear the hardest dungeons/raids, and it works just fine there. There is luck involved in getting the drop, but otherwise it's fairly consistent in that you know about where and when you'll get it.

 

Those mythics are pretty silly then. My other options are nerfing the Mythic baseline to just being legends/fableds with different gimmicks, or removing the mistake they are entirely, even the very one I own. But I know not everyone has the same dry apathy towards these things as I do, so I chose the selfless option.

You have been right the whole time, and those suggestions sound nice. But I'll let other people make those kinds of suggestions, I'm too uncaring for all of it now to that extent, I wouldn't be fit for it. The best kinds of suggestions are the ones that get an idea across, and it seems I did a pretty good job with this one. I have deliberately hand-waved all these concerns, as suggested examples would have a lower chance of happening than this already extreme scenario, not the best use of time for me. It is rational to leave these extraneous cases solely to the people (hopefully) more capable and passionate, I'm no class builder, I just like to spark these things.
Detailed, specific, verbose suggestions never happen, and if they do it's because there was a nebulous good idea in them. I say this from experience across various scenarios as a suggestor and suggestee. I made this in the first place because it's the culmination of months of observation and revelation, also I'm in a good mood because I still like this server damn it. Wouldn't want feature creep to change that.

 

Well if your goal was to start a conversation, well done. Agree with your ideas, don't like the lack of details, but overall good work

 

Do people still bump