Game Mechanics Soulbound Mode

Intro
Soulbound Mode would be a brand new game mode unlike any other: a co-op mode. It would be unlocked after getting a level 50+ character like Ironman and Craftsman. To start this mode, one must create a new class and select the new Soulbound icon. You will then be directed to invite up to 4 players using the command /add sb [Player Name]. A request message would then be sent to the respective player who must be online in a world. Unlike the current friend system, the requested player can either accept or deny the request. If the player does accept the request, the player would be directed to the class creation screen and must create a new class with Soulbound activated to formally proceed. The requested player will then be teleported to the same world as the requesting player once the requesting player has made their Soulbound class.

Note: If the requested player has full class slots, both players will instead receive an error message along the lines of, "Player X has full class slots! Delete a class to free up a slot."

Main Features:

• The amount of combat XP required to level up is shared and scaled up among all Soulbound members. Any combat XP obtained by a player in the Soulbound group will therefore go towards the XP bar of everyone in the group. Ex: If a Soulbound group has 2 players, then both players have to obtain double the amount of combat XP needed to reach any given combat level. If 4 players, then all 4 players need to obtain quadruple the amount of combat XP needed to reach any given combat level.

• Health is shared among all active and online Soulbound members. This also means that any damage a player in the group takes the rest of the players in the group will take! Any player in the Soulbound group that disconnects or does /class or /lobby or logs onto a different world will not contribute their health to their group members. Ex: John, Dave, and Rubin are Soulbounded. They are all at level 100 and their individual gear gives them 10,000 HP each. Thus, whenever they are all on the same world with the Soulbounded class, they will all have 30,000 HP. However, if John disconnects, then Dave and Rubin will only have 20,000 HP each. Also, the percentage of full HP is conserved regardless of the number of players together in the group at a time. So if John, Dave, and Rubin were at half health right before John left (15,000 HP), then Dave and Rubin would both be at 10,000 HP after John leaves.

Healing items will work normally, while healing spells will be based on the total health per person instead of the actual total health. Ex: If the total health of the group of 4 is 20,000 HP out of 40,000 HP, whenever a mage in the group casts a heal spell, it would heal as much as if the mage individually had 5,000 HP out of 10,000 HP. And other Soulbounded members would still have to stand in the AoE of the healing if they want additional healing such as they would normally. That way healing doesn't become broken with one or more mages or shamans.

Oh yeah, and before you think you can just have 1 or 2 of your group members solo a boss with your combined HP while the rest of your group sits safely somewhere else, you'd be sorely mistaken: Any time a group member teleports, the rest of the group members in the same world will be teleported with them. If you are in the same world but on a class that is not in the Soulbound group, you will be unaffected.

On one hand, this will make sure that group members aren't left behind or become lost or separated from the group. On the other hand, you will need to make sure to cooperate more than ever and communicate which tasks to do. So you should probably think twice before using a bunch of teleportation scrolls or starting a long quest before consulting your group first.

Reasoning

Spoiler: Reasoning for Changes

The reasoning behind these changes are manifold. The ultimate goal of the game mode is to emphasize and rely on cooperation and teamwork without strictly requiring all team members being always online together. Everyone knows how difficult it can be to coordinate with others online and deal with latency issues out of their control. Especially when things irl come up suddenly or people drop off the face of the earth or refuse to play anymore. Hence why a player in a Soulbound group can play the game without any of their group members being online ever again. The downside, however, would be that he/she would have to grind double to quadruple the amount of combat xp by his/herself to reach a given level. So it would still be a significant challenge nonetheless.

The shared health and teleportation features are meant to force people to actually play the game together instead of doing things separately. It also makes sure that everyone in the group actually contributes and doesn't result in a player dying every time and being carried by the group. And making it so that if only one person dies, the whole group dies would be unfair and too challenging. It would make everyone in the group have the defense and HP of their weakest link and harder to see how much health everyone has at a given moment. Plus it would further compound the chance of dying from lag or latency issues for everyone, making Soulbound & Hardcore nearly impossible. So there isn’t any other better way imo. Everyone in the group will need to have enough skills and protect each other to make sure everyone survives.

The scaled combat xp requirement and shared health also discourage leeching and coasting by the game without any effort. If you don't help grind xp, dodge attacks, or attack, odds are sooner or later the people carrying you will stop playing with you or you'll be kicked out of the group outright.

Pros & Cons

Spoiler: Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Offers a completely new and unique gameplay experience based on co-op
• Incentives players to actually work together and try different play styles that reward teamwork
• Allows people to level up their Soulbound class without requiring their teammates to be online
• Trolling (such as spamming /kill) is limited since you can get rid of someone if they become way too problematic or have been inactive for a long time, albeit with the vote of other players in the group
• Being killed by latency/lag is less of an issue since your teammates can heal while you're stuck/lagging

Cons:

• Does allow some Soulbound members to skip parkour. Idk if it's possible to make only certain rooms disable the teleportation feature, though personally, I don't think it's that big of deal since you can only have your Soulbound members teleport you unlike the removed feature of players riding other players
• Doing Crop Failure, The Shadow of the Beast, Rise of Quartron, and any other quests that require profession levels will be a pain if not all members meet the required profession level of the same profession
• You will need to choose your Soulbound members VERY wisely or else you'll be stuck grinding a shit ton of XP, being teleported everywhere against your will, or losing the game mode entirely
• Soulbounded members cannot use tp scrolls, Grogwart tunnels, the Seaskipper, Deltas/Cinfras Airship, or any form of transportation that requires teleportation if they wish to accomplish tasks separately across different parts of the map simultaneously
• Players with inactive teammates can still be stuck grinding the extra combat XP by themselves

Miscellaneous:

Spoiler: Miscellaneous Features & Tips

-All Soulbound classes will always be directed to the same world of the online member that logged in first. Thus you will always be on the same world as your group members when you are using your respective Soulbound class.

-Players will need to still individually start and end quests. So if one happens to teleport into the middle of your teammate's quest, you'll need to still redo the whole quest and won't get any items or xp if you both finish your teammate's quest.

-Although Soulbound players in a group have similar features to parties, they are not technically in a party. Creating a party with your Soulbound members will only display your group's total health and the average health per player on the scoreboard since XP is already shared.

-Players can be kicked out of the game mode via all the other Soulbound members voting against you. Upon doing so, the kicked player will have their Soulbound icon turn gray and everyone's xp bar and health will be adjusted accordingly. Be mindful though that you cannot add Soulbound members to existing groups, and if you decide to kick a team member in a group of 2, you will also be kicked from the game mode and your Soulbound icon will turn gray as well.

-Profession levels and XP are unaffected (per player) because they're optional to progress through most of the game and otherwise would cause unneeded conflict between profession and non-profession players in a Soulbound group.

-Just like with the other game modes, players can choose whether to add multiple game modes together or none. This means that not all players in the Soulbound group have to add another game mode like Ironman if other players in the group decide to.

-Ironman players in a Soulbound group cannot trade with Soulbound only players, but can trade with Soulbound & Ironman players in their group. Ex: If Dave & Rubin decide to combine Soulbound and Ironman, but John doesn't, then John cannot trade with Dave or Rubin, but Dave and Rubin can only trade with each other.

-PvP between Hunted & Soulbound players in the same group is disabled.

-You'll receive a special achievement by completing all 5 game modes together or SHICH

Remember, this game mode is about teamwork and cooperation. You gonna have to get used to not solely relying on your own skills and knowledge or else you're gonna have a bad time. This mode isn't for everyone; not even for those that have beaten HICH because it relies on a different skill set. But that's part of what makes the mode so unique yet challenging. And hopefully, it can help build upon the multiplayer aspect that people complain Wynncraft is still lacking in. Overall, I hope you all would enjoy it and give any feedback or comments. Thank you all for reading!

 

Would be cool if it had interactions with other gamemodes too, like if you could trade with your teammates even in ironman, share gathering levels in crafted or couldn't hurt your soulmates in hunted. Love the idea, though I would definitely never play it.

Just thought of this too but it would probably need to lock you out of doing a lot of content without the full team, in the case of something like raids it would be weird if just one person went in, died and killed the rest of the team when they were just chilling.

 

It does! The details are under Miscellaneous:
-Just like with the other game modes, players can choose whether to add multiple game modes together or none. This means that not all players in the Soulbound group have to add another game mode like Ironman if other players in the group decide to.
-Ironman players in a Soulbound group cannot trade with Soulbound only players, but can trade with Soulbound & Ironman players in their group. Ex: If Dave & Rubin decide to combine Soulbound and Ironman, but John doesn't, then John cannot trade with Dave or Rubin, but Dave and Rubin can only trade with each other.
-PvP between Hunted & Soulbound players in the same group is disabled.

 

Ah, I didn't read misc so that makes a lot of sense, super cool idea!

 

Thanks! Any suggestions or improvements? Besides the parkour one, I cannot think of any other loopholes or exploits or something.

 

I'll give it some thought but I think you've definitely covered the most important bases, my biggest concern would probably be with mage/shaman healing since you would be able to get way more healing power than intended since you would get the number of people in the range times the amount that you should but beyond that I think it's solid :D

The health pool might also be too high, maybe some sort of diminishing return could be good as well, like when you have 3 people you only get 75% of the total or when you have 2 you only get 90%. I don't know what the best numbers would be but it would help discourage having a health bot on the team hiding in the corner nonstop casting heal.

 

Oh yeah; I think if I just have the heal amount be based on the total health per person it should be fine. So like if the total health of the group of 4 is 20,000 HP out of 40,000 HP, whenever a mage in the group casts a heal spell, it would heal as much as if the mage individually had 5,000 HP out of 10,000 HP. Or at least I think that should work. I'll add that to the suggestion, thanks again!

 

https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/coop-challenge-gamemode.296685/#post-3493116

 

Quests wouldn't be affected; it would be just as if you're playing normally and another player on the same world decides to do the same quest as you at the same time. If a Soulbound player drops in during the middle of their Soulbounded member's quest, they can still progress with the other member due to the aforementioned teleportation feature. The dropped-in Soulbound player just wouldn't receive any xp or quest rewards, but they could still help fight the boss or figure out a puzzle.

Does that make sense?

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What about it? That's a completely different suggestion since none of it includes any actual gameplay changes.

 

That's what the teleportation feature is for; as soon as one of the Soulbounded players gets teleported inside the Raid they'd all be teleported inside. I'll probably also need to clarify then how you would need all of your online Soulbounded members in the same group raid to start one.

I feel that might make the mode too hard though. Keep in mind that Soulbounded players in a group can receive significantly more damage than they could have otherwise than separately in a normal party due to the damage sharing. Say you had two groups of 4 people with the same total health and builds except one is Soulbounded and one isn't. In the normal group, if a player is at 1% health and then gets hit by a flamethrower or a multi-hit from a boss, then the player dies, but the rest of the damage from the hit is lost and the rest of the group's health is unaffected and it's still possible to win. Whereas under this same scenario with the Souldbounded group, ALL of the damage is absorbed until the whole group dies. So a single healing bot won't be able to out heal since more damage is being absorbed in general than would be otherwise.

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Also remember that if the healer is standing in a corner away from everyone else, the group as whole won't heal as much as even the normal group. Since in both cases the mage/shaman will only be healing as much as if it were only themselves. And given how much damage raids and LI can do, heals from only 1 player won't save the group if Tom won't get his ass out of the way of a flamethrower.

 

I like this idea

 

I like this comment

 

omg please.

 

Any tweaks or suggestions?

 

uhm. one thing though. it would be cool if theoretically ironman players in the same soulbound group could heal each other (and use scrolls, speed, all that)

i also feel like the shared hp pool will be pretty unbalanced, not gonna lie

 

I thought ironman players just couldn't use their bank or the trade market or trade with other players? Soulbounded players should still be able to use consumables and give each other status effects like mage's heal or archer's speed boost if they're within their range like how they would normally regardless if they are also ironman or not. Or at least in the suggestion then.

I was kinda having some doubts, but then you also got to take into account that you're also taking up to double to quadruple the amount of damage. I was thinking about having it to where if one of your teammates die, then you all die, but I think this would be too hard and unfair. Currently in group content like raids, if one person dies then it's still possible to win the raid. However, if all it took was just one person to die then it would be much harder for the group as a whole. Given how unforgiving endgame content can be at times like one shooting players in Orphion's raid or dying from a random glitch or mistake, the chances for stupid stuff like that to happen are compounded with each additional player. So overall you'd have a much higher risk of dying than normal, which would make Soulbound & Hardcore nearly impossible to do.

Additionally, it would also screw up a lot of team builds and diversity. Because everyone would be practically as killable as their weakest member in terms of bulk. So you'd have situations where 3 hyper warrior tanks in a group of 4 would each have the same risk of dying as a single ETW archer.

I'm not entirely against a scaling system for health if it ever does get implemented. I just simply don't have a way rn to do practice runs with a test group to see for sure how decent the HP sharing is or not.

 

The shared HP would be unbalanced if you had someone with a high HP build or someone decides to be funny and have a character with no armor, agility or defense.
As mentioned before, shared HP would make soulbound characters not suited for raids if the whole team has to complete it without getting a single death or suffer a total party wipe (unless there was one other person not in soulbound).
There are also class builds with armor granting different health de/buffs. I'm not a skilled coder by any means, but I don't see it easy having four different people with different builds being tied to a shared HP pool as something that would be easy to implement.

Edit: all of the points I made were just answered above

 

In that scenario you’d likely die bc you’d practically only have the HP of 1 person while taking more than twice the amount of damage you would otherwise (especially without any defense or agility). Imagine if you had the same pair but they had separate HP. If the naked person gets hit by a multi hit or flamethrower, then the naked person would die but the other person’s HP would be unaffected bc the damage is lost and they could still possibly win. Whereas under the same scenario with shared health, ALL of that damage is now being absorbed until both people die. And if both people get caught in the flamethrower, then they’ll definitely die if they share health whereas the tank might survive if they had separated health. So you can easily get killed by your teammates with lower defense if you’re not careful no matter how tanky you are bc it’s as if you have the lowest defense of your team.

It should definitely be possible to code. The damage everyone does is unaffected, the only major thing that would need to be adjusted is healing, which I covered already above. Though to recap, essentially all individual regen and healing would be based on as of every player had an average of the total health. So if a group of 4 has a combined HP of 20,000 HP out of 40,000, then the HPR on a warrior build would act as if the warrior had 5,000 HP out of 10,000 and a mage heal would act as if everyone had 5,000 HP out of 10,000 HP each.

 

@Sg_Voltage @Linnyflower
One more thing: when I said that XP levels were to be shared and scaled, I only had combat level XP in mind. And I’m not still sure how to handle profession XP.

Originally was I planning on leaving profession XP unaffected and this wouldn’t have been a problem b4 1.20, but a few quests now require profession levels. So you run into the same problem as if combat levels weren’t shared; the whole group either misses out on content or Soulbound members who don’t want to do professions will get dragged along in quests that they won’t get any reward from individually. And whole point of the mode is to be able to experience all content together. Although these quests are minor, they are still required for 100% completion.

However, if profession levels were scaled and shared like combat, you’ll run into scenarios where group members are stuck grinding the profession xp of members who don’t want to grind professions. Which is unique from combat levels since profession levels are optional to progress through most of the game. While I know prof tryhards would love to grind more, I think requiring twice to quadruple the amount of XP is WAY too excessive if only one person in the group wants to do professions. So this could lead to unneeded conflict between profession players and non-profession players in a Soulbound group unless your entire group is also doing Craftsman AND the same professions.

So do you both think that all other XP for professions should also be shared and scaled in the same way or no? Or is there an alternative? I asked Sg Voltage bc you brought up the shared crafting xp and Linny is very experienced in professions.

 

i think profs should be per character ngl