Asmuit, The End

Annihilation was a bit of a disappointment to me, and upon seeing Looni's "An Honest Review of Wynncraft" and trying to get back into Wynncraft, I came up with this idea. A single event that could test the waters with a new style of content that will be far more entertaining.

The name of the event is a work in progress, since I'm not good at naming things, but the theory is clear.

Have a boss fight, but have other things going on than just killing the boss.

I do the same thing in DND, and it works very well for improving the reception and quality of my boss fights.


To enter this Event, you need a specific key. You have a 1 in 7 chance of getting the Voidrift Key (Name up to change) from your Daily Loot starting at level 50 (also up to change, but mainly this level because there's a drawl in fun content around this point). As long as one of your characters is at level 50, you have the chance to get the key.

Every two hours, the event will be announced through every server to any player that's capable of having a key (has a character above level 50). The announcement will be in chat, sort of like a shout. At this point, the players must simply right click the key and they will get a popup on whether to join or not. If they select yes, they must keep the key in their inventory to be counted as involved. If the event isn't triggered within 30 minutes, the event is cancelled.

To trigger the event, there must be 4 servers involved, with a server being involved if they have 5 or more players (max of 10).

Upon triggering the event, a 5 minute countdown will begin. If the countdown ends with less than the previously specified requirements, the event is cancelled. Otherwise the involved players, across up to 10 servers, will be teleported to a new arena area. I have not come up with a name for this arena, but it houses Asmuit, an eldritch horror inspired boss that the players must defeat. The HP of this boss, and only the HP, is ported between servers. But this boss is not like Anni. He has Immunity to all damage while certain tasks have not been completed.

In each of the 4 cardinal directions is a required challenge. This can change and vary, between defeating a miniboss to solving a puzzle, and even a room where the rest of the party must protect one player who's solving the puzzle from various different monsters. These rooms can use a vast amount of creativity, but should try to emphasize things other than straight damage: these being Survivability, teamwork, support, mobility and strategy. Take inspiration from wherever you can, the more diversity in these challenges the better. No more of that DPS is best bull that gets so boring after all that repetition. These challenges need to also be easily understood as to not alienate players, so having a clear and concise narrator would be awesome. Completion of a cardinal direction challange will make the boss Vulnerable to being damaged for 1 or 2 minutes, depending on balance. 3 of the 4 must be completed before you can redo one you've already done.

In each of the 4 secondary directions (NW, NE, SW, SE) will be optional challenges. The Northern ones will grant Boons (like in Lootruns and Raids) to all involved across servers, giving a mighty good reason to do them. The Southern ones will instead increase the rewards granted at the end of the raid (not sure how that works but it's been done before in Lootrunning). The southern ones will be world - specific.

The entire fight should take 20 to 30 minutes, hopefully. There will be a damage cap on the vulnerability sections to ensure that no stupidly high DPS builds can just instakill it, but hitting the damage cap will open the next challenge sooner and therefore progress the fight faster.

At the end, the rewards need to be massive and make the entire fight feel more than worth it. Maybe even just give a random mythic if both of the Loot Bonus challenges were completed. I'll leave the rewards mainly up to the mods that will make it, but it needs to be good enough that people are genuinely excited for it and are motivated to complete the Loot Bonus Challanges.

Overall I want it to be between Anni and NOL in terms of Difficulty. I want players, using full morph and too broke for a mythic, to be able to complete the challenge, while the differing mechanics also prove a challenge to the highly - optimized endgame players with an entire page in their E chest of LE.

Also, player respawn should be a thing. After the Boons have been gotten from the optional challenges, they change to Respawn challenges, and upon completion they respawn that server's dead players. That way you don't have to sit in despair and watch as your party members carry for the next 10 minutes, increasing overall fun. The Loot Bonus Challanges will change to Other Server Respawn challenges that respawn the players in another server, and are only open if that other server has been wiped out.

Of course, this respawn mechanic means that the event looks much easier, but it actually just gives more room to really challenge the players and add more difficult trials and attacks. You can make this thing just as fearsome as Anni and it'll probably feel just right in terms of difficulty. The Server Respawn challenges also increase the feeling of community and the teamwork involved, giving the impression that it truly isn't just a bunch of separate parties.



As for some development notes:

The purpose behind the different servers thing is to help reduce the lag burden, along with the limits and the frequency.

The keys, being untradable and a fairly low chance from the chest, help reduce the number of players that will be swarming the event at once, further reducing the lag problem that plagues Anni.

The entire purpose is to break the repetitiveness the rest of the game falls into, which is why I aimed to open it up at around level 50, where I usually get the most bored. Don't get me wrong, I get quite bored at 40 too, it just doesn't make me want to quit yet at that point.

The goal is to complete these challenges WHILE the boss is attacking you, so they need to be understandable, and the boss should be launching (weaker) ranged attacks to slow them down.

Some ideas for challenges I had were Parkour, Puzzles, a miniboss with some special mechanic, escorting a player (like the tunnel rock room in Grootslangs, but hopefully more interesting for the player being escorted), a very intense game of freeze tag where spells and items are completely on the table (for player and mob alike), A puzzle room where you have to solve the puzzle while getting attacked by a horde of mobs (those mobs should attack both the players and the puzzle, messing up progress, as well as cast disruptive spells that move players around and such), an escape room, and whatever else you all think you can code in. The key here is diversity, and splitting up the party into different roles that each have their own job, avoiding the "DPS is the only criteria" problem seen too often in other content.

If something is wrong with part of it, feel free to alter or scrap it! The point of this is to add a new, diverse challenge that will keep players coming back. It doesn't necessarily need to be hard, and it certainly shouldn't be annoying. What it really needs to do, and what all of Wynncraft really needs, is to value things other than DPS and Invincibility glitches. Other parts of builds that aren't well explored or aren't well utilized, or simply undervalued.

Have fun with this concept, and remember, raw power shouldn't be the only valuable thing in a character build.

 

I think the overall concept is good, I just think that the initialization of the event can be improved and the rewards can be tuned.

First, I disagree with the keys taking players from multiple servers. I think a player with a key can control which server they spawn the portal in and who can join the event. This favors guild activity which is good for the community.

Also for the keys to spawn an event like this, they should be very rare and only drop from a specific event. (Raids, Chests, Daily Rewards, some sort of guild reward, whatever fits the lore). Since the event allows many players to join, the rewards should be enough to justify spending time preparing, gathering a large group of players together, and completing the event. However, the rewards can be difficult to manage with LE flooding the economy in different ways (Raids, Outer Void, Lootruns, etc) so players can be rewarded in different ways like exclusive items that don't necessarily have to be mythic (but still can be). All in all, the drop rate for a key shouldn't be common but instead rare enough so that 20 players won't be doing an event like this daily, more so on a weekly basis and the rewards should be justified in a way that isn't game breaking for the economy but is still worthwhile.

I think the exclusivity of the keys is important to encourage players to be well-prepared for fights like this even more so than anni.

 

Was this on the forums or discord? I can’t find it anywhere on the forums.

 

YouTube. Don’t watch past 5:47 if you like Wynn LOL

 

The solution is to change how Annihilation works to be better, not this

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I don't see why you shouldn't critique or acknowledge the shortcomings of stuff you love. Recognizing where Wynn falls short or could improve shouldn't make you stop liking Wynn, or be sad when someone points it out.
All of the things Looni brought up as criticisms are things we, internally, have criticized about our own project and wish to improve. This isn't some butchering of the server, it is - as it says on the tin - an honest review.

 

I appreciate the maturity and self awareness of the Wynncraft team.

 

my face when you criticise me making a joke that WYNNCRAFT ITSELF made in the comments of that video.
Literally the official Wynncraft Account made that same joke
You are insulting your boss.

 

The context of your post didn't lead me to believe it was a joke

 

Aight then. But consider being more lenient in posts that end with LOL