Guide Ability Tree Questions Thread

When you proc violent vortex with an attack that hits multiple things for different damage, which hit is counted? Example, using backstab hitting two enemies, one facing you and one not. Is it the higher damage hit, a random hit, or the hit on the closest enemy closest to you (or something else)?

Second question: when multiple people have marked, how does the interaction work? Can you stack marked for someone else? What if one person has base marked and someone else has double upgraded marked? Are these interactions the same for other dubuff stacks like winded? In a similar vein, since satsujin is cooldown per target, can you put someone else's satsujin on cd?

 

can we get any info on the assassin changes? my biggest fear with it right now is trickster staying as a tanky/support style class which really was just a bad decision in the first place, it doesn't fit assassin's theme in the slightest and is what's holding it back the most I think. The only thing that's nice about it is the clones which are pretty cool, but again used poorly.

 

Does the uppercut that triggers armor breaker get the 30% buff too?
Are the Meteor mages going to get buffed? Right now riftwalker has nearly no purpose to get to timelocked unless you are a teleport mage/need manastorm, and both Arcanist and riftwalker completely rely on thunderstorm hits which are nearly impossible to hit.
Are the classes also going to be relatively balanced soon? Warrior and archer can easily hit millions of dps.

 

The idea behind the elemental masteries isn't to force certain elements with certain archetypes, it's more like a suggestion for newer players. For someone new to wynncraft, the ways that different archetypes play could be confusing or overwhelming; the tree has a ton of information that the player is exposed to all at once. The elemental masteries are easy for a new player to digest ("This archetype has the Earth Mastery, it must be damage focused!") and also are a very easy "puzzle" for them to solve early on if they are looking for direction with their ability points ("My weapon has water damage, maybe I'll try this one because it has water mastery?"). Obviously these things lose their impact when you've been around wynncraft for a while, are on a repeat playthrough, are building from an endgame perspective, etc, but the design behind elemental masteries isn't for us. They're meant to be minor enough upgrades that they don't make an impact later on beyond thematics, because yeah, archetypes being forced to use certain elements would suck and really limit space for interesting builds. If they are strong enough that having them be limited to certain archetypes is making a major impact on the effectiveness of certain builds, then I agree that is something we should look into.

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Adding more options for melee is absolutely something I want to work on! I agree that the limited melee support is a big downside of the current trees. I think it's very easy to overlook melee-centric builds when designing new abilities (spells provide a much more exciting foundation to build off of) but that doesn't mean melee should get shafted, and while I don't think melee builds will ever have the same amount of options on the tree as spell-centric builds, I hope we can at least provide an adequate amount of options for them in the future.

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Counter is triggered when Agility is triggered. This just shows me that the description should be more clear about this fact, and the same also goes for Parry.

 

Why is Ambidextrous only available for two classes? Side note: thank you for making awesome music.

 

This is definitely where I should mention that I might not have a satisfying answer for all of these questions. I didn't design these trees from the ground up and sometimes I need to make inferences and ask questions just like everyone else. So... I honestly don't know why there's a duration for Bak'al's Grasp. The total duration is 2400 ticks (2 minutes) which in most contexts isn't going to be too limiting, but I could definitely see it coming into play once or twice in long boss fights. It could be a case of "eventually the player has to interact with their health bar again even if they aren't getting hit", maybe it's there so a newbie doesn't afk with corrupted active, or there might not be a specific reason at all.

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Honestly, I don't have great answers to most of your questions, unfortunately. Manachism could definitely work just as well by restoring 10% of your mana instead of 10 raw. I imagine it was chosen to be raw either due to a dev or time constraint, or just because the alternative wasn't considered. I could definitely see changing it in the future to be a percentage instead, but no promises. This is definitely a case of "Could be improved a bit, but requires dev work, and the improvement/work ratio isn't great, so it's probably low priority."

The formula for mana costs is something I'd rather not have to interact with, lmao. I'd rather balance around how it currently works, so while changing the values on mana cost nodes isn't something I've put literally any thought into, it's not off the table for the same reason.

Spreading out the upgrades for various spells I imagine was done in an effort to give players a reason to interact with the entire kit of their class, rather than making it too easy to minmax for one-spell-fits-all. I agree with this philosophy, though if it's been executed in a way that doesn't feel lopsided is another conversation entirely. It's something I've thought about for a while, and I think there could be a better balance to strike with the positions of some of these nodes across all classes and not just within warrior, but I haven't committed to anything surrounding this yet. You're giving me great points to write down and look into later though, on the nights I feel like sitting down and hyperfixating on wynn for a while!

I apologize that these aren't the most conclusive or interesting responses, but I hope I could at least provide a little bit of insight.

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Macro layout decisions like center Light Bender, center Sharpshooter, etc, are hard to comment on because these aren't decisions that I made. From my perspective, I think having the trees not be overly flexible is way more interesting than having the strongest "free tree" combo also be extremely easy to make. Every ability tree will have unique decisions and trade-offs to make, whether it be as optimized as the standard Riftwalker+Light Bender tree, which needs to skip almost everything it can that isn't required in order to maximize damage (with only 3 AP left to spare), or as simple as not being able to use the best parts of two or three full archetypes at once. I'm of the position that large-scale tree revamps shouldn't happen at this point, but there are definitely some specific connections that could be adjusted to make things a bit more satisfying while still keeping these unique decisions. If I were to redesign the Mage tree to be as flexible as possible without completely reworking how trees function, I'd definitely put Riftwalker in the center, but I think you'd lose a lot of intrigue doing things that way, and could very easily end up in a situation where there is one objectively-best tree that takes things from all three archetypes instead of there being a multitude of options with their own individual strengths and weaknesses.

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I'm not skipping this one to ignore your question, by the way! Double and Triple totem are just really complex abilities, and Shaman is the class I have the least personal experience with on top of that. I'll come back to this one!

 

These are fantastic questions, I'm going to test these interactions right now!

Violent Vortex appears to base its damage off of whichever hit is calculated first, which appears to be essentially random if they happen simultaneously.

Marked only works for players who have unlocked Marked. Marks applied by one assassin will function for another assassin given they also have the ability unlocked. The damage boost you get from Marks depends on your own tree, and not the tree of whoever applied the marks. If an enemy has 1 Mark, and you have Marked, your attacks will do +8% damage. If you also have Better Marked, your attacks will do +12% damage. The origin of the marks does not matter. Winded works the same as this for its damage boosts.

Satsujin's cooldown seems to be tracked per player first. As in, every unique player can trigger Satsujin on every unique enemy once per 20 seconds. There isn't a cooldown on how often an enemy can be hit by Satsujin, the cooldown is just how often each player can trigger Satsujin on each enemy independently.

 

Gonna also chip in to say that, because melee is inherently a much more straightforward playstyle than spell, melee related abilities necessarily have to be more interesting to work; "do more melee damage" is exceedingly boring, and "do more melee damage when [x]" can work (see pyrokinesis) but has its limits. Because of this, truly good melee abilities (which we have discussed internally!) and hard to design and tend to be quite dev-heavy, so they take longer to come up with, balance, and push out.

 

this is a great idea for a thread, love the explanations Xavier!

 

The difficulty with talking about the planned changes to Assassin is that it's always a gamble to be transparent with things that aren't confirmed yet. I don't want to make any promises I can't keep whether it be because a change isn't possible, doesn't end up happening for the next patch, gets reworked into another idea, scrapped entirely, etc. There are a lot of hurdles to consider when the changes involve dev time that I want to be cognizant of and so I and many others on the team are careful to not say too much about these things. I promise we've spent a lot of time workshopping different solutions to the problems with the Assassin tree, I just don't want to get people's hopes up with anything specific in case the final product turns out to be different.

May I at least provide a small change that didn't require dev work in this trying time?

• Reduced Wall of Smoke’s damage decrease to Smoke Bomb (Neutral: -20 -> -5%)
  

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It does not.

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About Thunderstorm and the traditional meteor mage archetypes, I encourage you to read my answer to an earlier similar question here:

For Timelocked, we're aware that it and many other final red nodes are pretty underwhelming, and trust me, it's on our radar!

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We're trying, I promise

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This kind of question is the exact reason I wanted to make this thread. You're completely right; Ambidextrous used to be easily accessible for Paladin and Battle Monk, while being in an... okay spot for Fallen. The reason it was moved was to avoid Counter being a required ability for such a central position in the tree, since Counter only works with Agility. It was unnecessarily punishing to players that didn't use Agility to still force 3 AP of dead weight on opening up the tree more. However, Precise Strikes being in that spot doesn't even fix the issue, it just reduces it, and in my efforts to make Ambidextrous less restricting on the rest of the tree, I unintentionally made it more restricted for Paladin!

As soon as I read this question, I wrote down to move Ambidextrous into a better position that retains accessibility to all three archetypes without making it required, and I've also got a solution for moving Precise Strikes back to being optional as well! Precise Strikes was moved to where Ambidextrous used to be because we wanted to keep that position costing only 1 AP and there were no other good candidates to swap there, and even though Precise Strikes does nothing without Dexterity, at least it didn't force any previous nodes to be taken either.

However, has anyone noticed that Warrior is missing Cheaper War Scream I?

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Thank you, it means a lot! c:

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Thanks! I love being able to talk to the community about the game like this; It's super fun being able to provide insight into how things are going on our end, and what better way to improve issues with the tree than to ask people what bothers them the most? I'm a huge nerd about all this and love testing all these obscure interactions as well; I want to use my position to improve every aspect of the tree, not just balance but also clarity. I'm not going to get everything right the first time but I hope I can at least move things in the right direction, and provide reasons for changes that make sense even for people who have differing balance philosophies than us.

This is also super useful for me to find bugs, mistakes, or just unintended side-effects of changes that I would have missed otherwise, like @dreamer101's great point about Ambidextrous being way more restricted for Paladin than before, or @HowTpoTypo's question about Marked leading me to find and fix a multiplayer-exclusive bug with the new damage calculation for Breathless. I would probably have completely missed this bug had I not been prompted to test it by them, and now that bug got fixed before ever making it to the live servers!

If anyone is curious, the bug was as follows...
If one mage applied winded to an enemy, and then a second mage without Windsweeper unlocked cast Meteor on the enemy, it would hit twice: One hit would be the expected damage from Meteor, and the second hit would be an erroneous 100% neutral spell damage hit. Because of the way I had to implement Breathless having unique damage values for different combinations of abilities, you ended up with a situation where Breathless' damage value was undefined rather than zero before you unlocked Windsweeper, but would still be applied if an enemy was already winded by someone else. Whenever the damage can't be parsed correctly like this, it defaults to 100%, so that's where we ended up with this annoying edge case. It's fixed now though, thanks to you guys c:
And don't worry, this bug is not on the live servers either. I made sure to test there as well!

 

Honestly this is great. Now that there's more people than just salted and zeer working on the trees that's good. I can already see a better mindset to balancing and that's great. Just posting this here as a thanks.
(Ps where Greg theme)

 

I'm curious about the winded system.

Does it works similar to marked?

I mean, if A only unlocked Windsweeper+Breathless while B unlocked more to better winded ii(max 30 winded).
when B applied 30 winded on a mob, how many Breathless' damage will A do when A hits the mob with meteor? 10 winded or 30 winded?

 

30

 

Does this mean the end of precise strikes?
Also, are there going to be changes for arrow storm? Right now it deals lots of damage to big enemies like Greg.

 

why not ability tree TREE

 

Thank you very much for the information, the only thing I'd like to add honestly from someone who's been playing assassin for 5 years PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't keep the tank/support playstyle, it doesn't represent the class although the clones were a really cool idea, I think that's gonna hold assassin's viability and enjoyment back a lot.

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I trust you guys will do a good job, but I cannot emphasize trickster's biggest problem enough

 

Hi Xavier,

I don't have any questions.

Thanks,
Tealy

 

First of all, thanks for delirous gas clearification, I really needed that.
But question, why do lured enemies move faster? It's probably to make them get into your smoke faster, but it doesn't really do much. Assassin already suffers from low speed and short range.

 

Is it intentional that you can get Radiant Devotee from Uncontainable Corruption

But not the other way around?

The later is possible on wynnbuilder, but not in-game, I am not sure if this is a wynnbuilder bug or a wynncraft bug

Edit: just to clarify, in the second screenshot all the checks on Uncontainable Corruption are green

 

Nope, it's just returning to its old position from before the Blizzard Festival.

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Yeah, we're aware of how strong Boltslinger is right now and have a couple changes in mind!