Game Mechanics Soulbound Mode Revived

Awhile ago, I suggested a new gamemode called Soulbound Mode. After seeing similar suggestions pop up recently, I thought it was time to reintroduce and update it.

What exactly is Soulbound Mode? It would be a gamemode like no other: co-op mode. The goal of the mode is to emphasize teamwork and cooperation with a challenging twist, but without requiring all team members to be always online together.

Main Features​

1. 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 go towards the XP bar of everyone in the group. Example: 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.

2. Any time a group member starts a quest, dungeon, or raid, the rest of the group members will be teleported to them. In addition, Soulbound players are able to teleport to any one of their group members with just a command. If you are in the same world but on a class that is not in the Soulbound group, you will be unaffected and your group members will be unable to teleport to you and vice-a-versa. Class spells like teleport, lootruns, mini-games, housing plots, caves, secret discoveries, teleport scrolls, the Seaskipper, and other transportation methods don't trigger this effect.

3. 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!

Example: Amy, John, and Bob each have 10k HP. In a Soulbound group, each person will share a health pool of 30k HP. If Amy then takes 500 damage, John and Bob will also take 500 damage each, reducing the shared HP pool to 28,500 HP.

Healing items will work normally, while healing spells, health regen from IDs, and natural health regen still heal the same amount as they would individually by using their original individual’s base health in their calculations. Any calculations and triggers (such as Warrior's Enraged Blow) that use health % will use the party's combined health %.

The best way to think about the shared health and damage mechanics is that the group shares an average of the combined HP of all of its members. Note that defenses are NOT shared; the damage that gets distributed to all of the group members is the damage the hit player receives AFTER factoring in his or her defenses (Defense, Agility, base class defense, elemental defense, etc.). The distributed damage is also affected by the other group member's defenses. For example, you have a group of 4, each with 10k HP and a net Defense of 25% (no Agility or elemental defenses). A player gets hit with 2000 damage, which gets reduced to 1500 damage before being distributed to the other players. Each of the rest of the players reduces that 1500 damage by another 25%, with each only receiving 1,125 damage. In total, the group took 4,875 damage.

Spoiler: Reasoning

The reasoning behind these changes is manifold. For the first feature, it was to incentivize people to play together without strictly requiring it. Everyone knows how difficult it can be to coordinate with others online and deal with latency issues. 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 himself or herself to reach a given level! So it would still be a significant challenge nonetheless.

The second feature is meant to ensure group members don't become lost or separated from the group and that they actually do activities together. Therefore, you will need to make sure to cooperate and communicate which tasks to do more than ever. So you should probably think twice before starting a long quest before consulting your group first.

The third feature is to make sure that everyone in the group contributes and prevents players from being carried by the group. Which is why I didn't want to go with the death system of raids. However, making it so that if only one person dies, the whole group dies would be unfair. It would make everyone as strong as their weakest link and further compound the chance of dying from lag or latency issues, making Soulbound & Hardcore nearly impossible. So at least this way the group's health is more manageable (such as healing when his or her group mate is lagging in a fight) while preventing groups from staying away from the fight while one of their members fights with the group's combined health. Everyone in the group will need to have enough skills and protect each other more than ever to survive. Be extremely careful taking hits; damage will stack much more easily than if you were playing in a group regularly!

To give a quick example, say everyone in a regular group of 4 has 10k HP, 0 net Defense, 0 Agility, no elemental defenses, and receives 1k damage from an AoE spell. Everyone then will have 9k HP left, with the group having a total HP of 36k. If this was a Soulbound group under the same scenario, each member would lose 4k HP EACH, bringing the total group HP to 24k.

All of these features also discourage leeching. If you don't help grind XP, dodge attacks, communicate, 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.

Spoiler: How to Unlock

Soulbound mode is 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. The requested player can either accept or deny the request. If the player does accept the request, the player will 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's class slots are full!" and the player will either have to reject the invitation or delete a class to free up a slot.

Spoiler: Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Offers a completely new and unique gameplay experience based on co-op
• Incentives players to 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 any group member, albeit only 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:

• Allows some Soulbound members to skip parkour. I don't think it's that big of a deal since you can only have your Soulbound members teleport you unlike the removed feature of players riding other players
• Doing 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 ton of XP, teleported against your will, or killed often

Spoiler: Miscellaneous Features & Tips

-All Soulbound classes will always be directed to the same world as the online member who logged in first. Thus you will always be in 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 and/or other players will still display the original individual health values of each group member. When player in the party who is not in the Soulbound group receives XP from killing a mob, the XP is shared as normally amongst all party members. However, when a player in the party who is in the Soulbound group does so, only players within the party who are NOT in the Soulbound group receive any shared XP. This is to make the game mode harder, but less annoying by not punishing players for forgetting to create a party every time they play with their Soulbound group.

-Certain glassy archetypes like Fallen Warrior and Acolyte Shaman aren't recommended for this game mode due to health being shared and how much more damage the group takes than normal. All group members lose the ability to heal when any group player becomes Corrupted. Acolyte's Sacrificial Shrine siphons 2% of the group's combined health every 0.4s, not the individual Acolyte's original health.

-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. 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.

-During loot runs, a Soulbound player is considered inactive and thus his or her health won’t be shared with the group. Loot run division levels and XP are never shared. Unless loot runs become available for co-op in the future, Soulbound mode won’t affect loot runs for now beyond having combat XP scaling and sharing.

-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 can only trade with Ironman players in their group. Ultimate Ironman players in a Soulbound group cannot trade at all.

-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 SHUICH

Remember, this game mode is about teamwork and cooperation. You gonna have to get used to not solely relying on your skills and doing things your way or else you're gonna have a bad time. This mode isn't for everyone, but that's what makes the mode so unique yet challenging. Hopefully, it can help build upon the multiplayer aspect that people complain Wynncraft is still lacking in. I hope you all enjoy it and give any feedback or comments. Thank you all for reading!

 

Nice idea, although seems very buggy to code, and that tp mechanic is nonsense, that makes any individual playing completely impossible and is just so annoying.

 

The point of the tp mechanic is to make sure your group actually plays and sticks together. Not just because it's supposed to change your playstyle by fighting together, but also to make the group function better. The group wouldn't function as well if you were minding your own business in a town sorting your bank when all of a sudden you die because your teammate died while fighting a boss 10 miles away. As long as you all communicate what to do next, there shouldn't be much of an issue.

Plus you can always just loot run or play a mini-game if you don't want to deal with the shared teleportation, health, and damage mechanics while on that Soulbound class and your group members are online.

 

Honestly, I'm going to agree with Tzel here. Maybe we should add a feature like-
*begins choking*
like
like H-Hypixel Skyblock's Friend Teleport feature
where the game offers you the option to teleport to wherever your Soulbound members are going
instead of forcing them to teleport with you
a message would show up in chat like "[x soulbound member] is teleporting to Lutho. Would you like to be teleported as well?" and then if you click on it it teleports you

 

/warp ragni when?

 

The problem with that is that feature then becomes an advantage, allowing people to teleport for free. Sure, it may still be weaker than a /warp command, but it still gives an advantage over regular play. Which would be odd given that this mode is supposed to be harder than a regular playthrough, not the other way around.

I do though want people to enjoy the mode with friends, so if it is that big of a barrier I wouldn't lose sleep if it was removed entirely.

Also, on an unrelated note, do you think the shared damage system is a bit too harsh? I am debating about whether distributed damage should also be affected by individual defenses or not. For comparison, under the new scenario, you have a group of 4, each with 10k HP and a net Defense of 25% (no Agility, elemental defenses). A player gets hit with 2000 damage, which gets reduced to 1500 damage before being distributed to the other players. Each of the rest of the players reduces that 1500 by another 25%, with each only receiving 1,125 damage. In total, the group took 4,875 damage. Whereas in the current suggestion, the group would take 6,000 damage in total.

So either way, you'll still take a lot more damage than normal, but at least it won't be as punishing and you'll have more control over the damage you take by adjusting your defenses. I'm just worried that having 4 people practically share the same HP as 1 person would be too much in endgame challenges like raids.

 

I think that'd actually work pretty well

 

Bumping this.

 

Sounds like a great idea that I would play, except for the teleport system. Being forced to tp whenever your group members do sounds really annoying, and I don’t see a reason why you should be forced to always do the same thing at the same time. You can still be cooperating if you, say, have each person grinding a different material you need in different areas and then joining together after
I think if this happened only during quests and dungeons and raids (as those should be done together) that makes more sense, as that way members can’t get stuck behind during quests and stuff and they can still cooperate
Only other solution could be getting a prompt when they go somewhere or being able to type a command to tp to your coop member. Tho if ur scared of ppl getting free tps, you could just make it cost like soul points or smth like normal warps to make it balanced, as that way people don’t have to be together if they’re not in like raids or dungeons or smth, but they can still join up to work together whenever they want. Though, seeing the emphasis on cooperation, I don’t personally see anything wrong with being able to always tp to your coop members when u want, as making it free encourages joining up and working together without having to spend time trying to figure out where everyone is.

 

Fair enough; I’ll change the teleport mechanic. I wanted to see if more people felt the same b4 I changed it. Especially since no one on Discord mentioned it being an issue.

I’m just gonna remove it besides for quests, raids, and dungeons and add the ability to teleport to any online Soulbound group member for free. Soul points should be removed anyway, so I don’t mind there not being a cost.

 

I changed my mind and added that feature. As long as people can’t just camp outside main content and spam healing spells while one person does the actual quest or dungeon or raid, it shouldn’t be abusable then.

 

Early bump.