Wynncraft doesn’t feel fun anymore.

Hi.

I’m an old player who made a new forum account to type this thread, as I’d rather not get collectively cyberbullied for expressing my bottled-up grievances again.

As you can probably tell from that opening statement, this is going to be a rather depressing variation of one of those threads.

For those that instantly clicked out, fair enough, and to those who have chosen to hear me out a little, I apologize for my forcoming melancholy, but also... thanks.

That being said, I do not find Wynncraft fun anymore despite it being my ride-or-die Minecraft server through public school, high school and now the end of my college years now.

From my perspective, this is because of 2 reasons:
1. The game’s drastically increased difficulty over the years
2. The community’s harsh expectations of what a “good” or “bad” player is, and how they are treated in the community based on that criteria


To elaborate on point #1, in 2018 the hardest content that you could find on the server was LI, Qira, Orange Wybel, and maybe ToA Death, CoW or Bob attempted at Lvl 75. These bosses were considered pretty hard at the time, but they pale in terms of difficulty in comparison to today’s standards:
Eg. Counting different boss phases, even the tankiest boss’ HP was only somewhere around 1 million, (Qira and two others, from what I remember) yet those boss’ HP amounts were considered excessive and commonly complained about back then. In fairness, meager 8k damage bashes and 9k damage meteors were the baselines for good 2016-2018 builds though, and making a dent in 1 million HP with that was rough.

I believe that boss health amounts aren’t the best parameters to surmise the difficulty jump between then and now though, as the effective damage bosses did (factoring in the player’s past/present defensive capabilities) are much more significant parameters to compare.
Paladin is an outlier ok

Back then:
-Mage’s heal could be spammed
-Assassin lived in a constant state of invisibility and couldn’t get hit for crap (even more so than any point in shadestepper’s history) and it still did excellent burst damage for it’s time
-Shaman either didn’t exist or was immobile af, but still provided a relatively easy 2018 gameplay experience with the sheer power of totem healing
-Warrior sucked but only sucked in comparison to the other classes, it didn’t do damage but it was tanky
-Archer was arguably the best off, having crazy damage (again, for its time)

The 2016-2019 players had all these things going for them but they still died quite frequently; the game was not easy by no means at all. I actively sought out groups to help back then and enjoyed doing so to boot, so I’m confident in saying that the game was challenging for the average player.

Now:
-Defense and intelligence were nerfed to hell and back
-The player can do absurd damage with all classes, but imo it’s not enough to compensate as they can in turn be folded like a paper crane by the dps of mere mini bosses or major boss’ minions. Unless you’re running an optimized crafted build or good mythic build, you’ll notice that the damage you deal, despite on paper being insane, is not enough to deal with a boss before it causes you multiple deaths or gives you a very stressful fight.
-Small boss arenas are now a problem: you have nowhere near the survivability that you did against mobs in the past to make this a reasonably manageable factor. Micromovement and learning from continuous deaths is the standard now, more like Touhou or Dark Souls over Undertale. This is just my personal opinion, but learning from dying makes the fight not feel like a fight. You only truly fight a boss once, win or lose. After that it’s just a memorization game rather than an immersive adventure.

Players that aren’t the Dark Souls-like sweats are dying left and right. Even in groups, it went from one or two people getting murked because Bob targeted them for too long to 30 players getting squadwiped by Annie, or a player having to buy items for a build they aren’t comfortable with to have a chance against a specific boss because said boss not only made it stressful, but completely invalidated their previous build (Panic Zealot’s HP drain making tanks useless, Fool Eater’s speed and mana drain forcing players to invest in a walk speed build to whittle it down while running away as fast as they can for 30 minutes if they want to beat it for the tailored item that it drops)


This is dragging on so I’ll try to make this quick, even though I’d like to talk about this a bit more:

To elaborate on point #2, the more experienced Wynn players have always sung praises about difficult content, whilst belittling other players that did not find such joy in it, telling them “You’re bad”, “Git Gud”, “Skill issue” or that they should just play a different game if they don’t like it.

Yes, I’m seeing this from my perspective, but their words just felt so discriminatory and alienating… this is just supposed to be a game… I just want to have fun, and I’m just sharing that I did not enjoy the content’s difficulty so maybe something could be changed and I can have fun just like the rest of you.. I can’t just force myself to fit in and enjoy something if I truly do not.


As a final remark, I’d like to address the counterpoint of “Just play with a party/with friends”.

I despise when people make this point. 90%, formally 98% of this entire game is designed around the player trudging through the game solo. This is evident in the wording of nearly all the quests, with characters addressing you as “soldier” or “adventurer”. No plurals, just you and your story which allows a wonderful immersive experience. This is shattered by the involvement of others in your quest, most often the reason for their involvement is difficulty of an objective which shatters the immersion of the lone fruman soldier even more. I’m sure that some don’t mind this and just play to kill stuff no matter how they do it (which I totally get), but this is an MMORPG. The wonderfully-crafted story should be an alluring reason to play the game as well, but all that is just dropped like a rock on your foot if “you are not good enough” with the abrupt inclusion of other players that mind as well be clones of your character.

Immersion aside, some people just want to play the game solo. There are valid reasons for this like social anxiety and introversion, but the game fails to such accommodate players because the difficulty of some content may be a roadblock for them. The only solution that Wynn seems to offer is the cheap, water spillage flex-tape slap of “just play with a party”. It goes without saying that I am indeed a person of this anti-social category, and I find this absurd.


Well, that’s about it for now. Let me know what you think.

 

I’m just waiting for fruma so I can finally do all the endgame stuff solo 20 levels past where I was intended to

 

have you considered

getting good

where good is defined as "better friends who are not toxic, and the ability to take a break, and the understanding that your feelings are completely valid, and anyone bullying you is automatically not worth listening to <3"

 

The second issue can be mostly resolved by the existence of a lot of builds with sufficient EHP (50k etc.) I think guards like Big mac are lowkey also pretty good for this issue if you're dying a lot

 

missing from the poll: leveling Alts

 

The problem is that I do run builds that try to max out survivability. I like having 40 or 50k EHP+ with the bare minimum HP without factoring in agility being 25k.

 

Yeah basically agree with everything, Wynn's balance has just always been awful though, it just got worsened with 2.1

 

that is literally the point. It was designed to a hard challenge for a larger amount of players. I don't see why this is in any way surprising.

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Fool Eater is a secret niche boss. 99% of the playerbase will never fight Fool Eater, and is a boss that's designed with a specific playstyle in mind to counter it. It is also a boss that is completely avoidable if you don't trigger the ambush.
This is like complaining that The Dungeon Guardian in Terraria exists. Yes, it drops a reward exclusive to it, and it requires a specific approach, but you are by no means forced to do it as the item is incredibly niche (and the Lunge MID is planned to be applied on more items than just Fools Errand)

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And to address this, they really aren't. Players have hiccups with quest bosses or boss altars, like CoW, Reincarnation, or Qira Hive, but ... basically nobody is just dying in the overworld. There's a few mobs that can pose some threat, but they are oddballs in a sea of enemies most people kill almost unthinkingly.
The difficulty increase in mobs and bosses only came with us removing the punishment for a player dying. There isn't the worry of losing items or needing to forcibly take a break because you are low on soul points, and thus we adjusted the game to be a bit more how we wished it to be; requiring slightly more trial and error instead of being steamrolled. We want the player to need to take a few attempts on certain monumental bosses, and learn the attack patterns, and then come out on top. The difference between pre 2.1 and now is that we expect the player to die and expect them to use it as a learning moment and as a reason to bother getting better/different gear or engaging in the way a boss works.

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Panic Zealot is an optional, hard boss altar in an area nobody visits. It is out of the way. Yes, a tanky build would struggle, but it's ridiculous to expect that every build will simply excel in every field. We give you hundreds of items and the ability to change them as you please, if you're struggling with a specific build, you can always switch it to something else to better tackle it. You might say that "that's a lot of work"-- to which I agree it can be, but again, something like PZ, Fool Eater, or Orange Wybel is out of the way, hard side content. They were actually explicitly added BECAUSE players asked for harder side content. If it isn't for you, it just isn't for you— Same with any other optional piece of content, like Outer Void or Lootrunning or Raiding. You're not held at gunpoint being forced to do the hard bosses.
If you don't want to do Radiant HK bosses, or Daytime Empress of Light, or any other optional hard boss in a game, just don't, but trying to frame it as if it is detrimental because players who desire that sort of content get to have something they can enjoy is just closed-minded I feel.

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Tagging this post "trauma dump" also feels a bit ridiculous.

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I have critiqued this more than enough but I couldn't help but add that we intend for the player to approach certain challenges in multiplayer. We didnt add pfinder tags like 'quests' because we didn't want people to look for help from others.
Raids, world events, boss altars, legendary island, and other pieces of content are all designed to either be multiplayer compatible (with raids being mandatory) or were explicitly designed to be multiplayer (such as world events).
I get feeling socially anxious, because boy do I experience it myself, but this is an MMO. The social element is a large part of the entire genre.

 

40 to 50k ehp isn't that tanky.
I don't know what class you play, but I can make you an actually unkillable build for basically every class.
I do mean that by the way, I think there's maybe 2 attacks that can kill my Guardian warrior, and I do legit mean 2. (The sun exploding in Anni is one of them, and even then, I managed to survive that once, not sure how)

As stated above, it is an MMO, and one of the ways to modify difficulty is to have other players, and in the worst case you can ask for one other player to carry you really.
However, that's not the only way you can, skill point potions, mana potions, crafted potions, crafted scrolls, and crafted food, all act as temporary buffs.

 

The entirety of CotL disagrees.

Not for anyone who wants to use Furious Effigy in the endgame.

i feel like certain bosses are overtuned at times (take the Eye on Archer, especially considering how much content is locked up there), though I've had more fun playing the game since finding a build that can solo everything save Anni and raids.
I do think a lot of these things in the original post are problems, especially finding people to do things (especially EO). Though, I have actually experienced less toxicity since 2.1 in pfinder raids since it forces you into the raid without others being able to wynntils your build and then kick you out of the party.
Although most things in Wynn are theoretically solo, I think playing the game fully alone is kind of hard (except for pfinder parties), and nowadays finding a good community is generally a must.

There are a lot of issues right now, there always are, but as much as Wynn doesn't feel fun to you (and me, right now), I do think the CT are working to improve it (and it will get better when Fruma releases).

unkillable on archer?
lies/j

also what how did you survive sun attack?
and what's the other one?

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also i would say world events are definitely a reason why I play

 

For this one, I just wanted to say that I feel the opposite. I've only been playing for three years, so take my opinion with a brain of salt, but I feel like it has gotten easier. I remember my first character, a Mage, struggling to solo Witherhead because the only spell I had was heal (and it didn't help that I had just started playing and probably didn't understand how to get good gear). I then failed to solo the witch from Maltic's Well right after. Now-a-days, I did Maiden tower a couple months back and killed the boss with 1 spell. A higher level boss with better results. At any rate, that's just what I think, but I do think it has got easier, especially since Spellbound.

 

Still no idea, I only have guesses.
@Mimo was there for it, so she can attest it happened.

 

other one is probably canary, kroltron, or something else instakill

lol

 

This is kinda a git gud moment...
I don't think I can relate to your experience, like, at all. Get your head outta the gutter, and into the game, man.
Try getting a build with good movement, and cracked damage. Stop relying on health and defense, at all. It's, honestly, a bit of a crutch.
I won't say this is the weakest build ever, but I play Warpcanist, and having to prioritize dodging and dealing damage has vastly improved my experience.
If you need it, I will give you the emeralds needed for whatever build you decide on.
Switching topic a bit, this game is a war of attrition sometimes. Like Deusphage said, deaths are a lesson, and sometimes what it's teaching is that you just can't do it at the moment. Literally, go get some better gear, go do some other content, and then go back to it. A story of my own is that I couldn't do Lootrunning when I had a natural build (one from progression), so I went and chucked myself at NotG for hours, got the emeralds for a Fatal build, and actually managed to start Lootrunning. Fast foward a bit, I got a Warp, and now I'm here.

Oh, wait, something I just realized. Why are you mad that you're dying? If you play a game like Wynncraft, and never die, you're either cracked, or the game is badly designed. My personal experience is that dying happens a LOT, and getting stuck on it is useless. Try to think through why you died, and how you can negate it in the future.

One last thing, Wynncraft community, I'd kiss you if I weren't already married to the grind (my Sketch Thread), y'all are great. I dunno what this guy is talking about, but I've only ever gotten a jokey ez out of y'all. If he's getting toxicity out of y'all, he must be doing something crazy wrong.

Spoiler: Out-of-Place Nitpicking (Eek!)

Okay, look at me. Look me in the eyes. Panic Zealot? Panic Zealot barely deals damage. It just sets you at 1% health every few seconds. Just kill it before it kills you, and, seriously, DON'T PANIC! If you panic, you die. If you chill, it folds like a cheap suit.

Bringing up lore as an argument for game balance is HILARIOUS! You should really consider standup.
If you bite the bullet and start interacting with people (my Guild is open for recruits) it'll get exponentially easier.

Footnote: I'd love to hear more about your experience, so I can understand your situation better.

 

Quote #1:

Things can be hard, but they also have to be reasonable. This is a game. Something meant to take your mind off the already-pressing challenges of the world. The primary reason to play them is for fun. Something of Annie’s difficulty falls out of category of a game that can be played for fun.

Game design shouldn’t be about “how far we can push ____”, it should be about how enjoyable the player experience is, first and foremost.

Quote #2:

The Fool Eater is encounterable by everyone in the game. This is a game that happens to be about adventure, something that has a basis in curiosity.

What do you think would happen when an endgame player sees something they’ve never seen before, factoring in their completion of the game and probable boredom because of that?

By nature, players will make like moths to a flame and F.A.F.O.

Even if the pounce major ID is applied to other items, the Fool’s Errand helmet may have a collection of stats deemed desirable by others, yet the only way to get it is through a boss designed to be killed by specific playstyle that may require specific items in of itself.

Quote #3 first part:

You and I seem to have completely different points of view on this, not much to be said here.

I like helping out newer players with grinding, bosses and ???. As a result of this, I travel around the map a lot, and I do not mean just the hotspots (Wtf does that farmhouse you have to defend near a ragni mountain do).

I reiterate that I see plenty of players dying all the time, even in the overworld, and even in ways that you wouldn’t think was possible.

Quote #3 last part:

In doing this, you remove immersive/“real” fights from the game.

In a “real” fight, no party has experience fighting the other before they first encounter one another. This means that it isn’t just a rhythm game, but an interactive battle where those contending get surprised by the unknown and rewarded by their intuition; memory only plays a role in the midst of the fight, not after repeated attempts.

As it stands, you only get this experience once. Either you won, or you lost.

Spoiler

No, HICH doesn’t count or reset this. The moment you step into the boss arena, you’ll still remember remnants of your previous fight that you lost, I.e., not real.

This is just me speaking, but after you lost a fight fair and square, the point of a fight shifts from immersion and fun to progressively drab completionism with every death, and vanity.

Quote #4:

You can make the side-content boss argument if the boss was just there purely for the challenge, but putting any kind of item behind them voids this point.

In regards to changing your build to be more suitable for a certain boss, you’ll only know that your current build isn’t suitable for the boss only when you have died to it, or have struggled severely with it, in rare cases. See the last part of Quote #3 as to why this is a problem.

Quote #4.5:

Cyberbullying has occurred over “being bad” for many other than me, and I took it hard when I was younger. What are you implying by “ridiculous”?

Quote #5:

Yes, this is an MMO.

10 years ago, when all content was possible solo, (yes even Bob’s door, we used horses and spawnables) it was still an MMO, but it was also Minecraft. It felt more like Wynncraft than it does now.

A blend of a game about fantasy and adventure,

And a game where that adventure yours to choose.

Realistically, I do not see this changing unless Wynncraft has a significant amount of money to burn in an attempt to become a fully fledged MMORPG, and not end up like Hytale.


On the non-philosophical side of things, intrinsic issues like SAD, sociopathy and introversion aren’t things people can suck up and get over.

By the same vein, you can’t say “just be happy” to a person with depression, or “just stay focused” to a person with ASD or ADHD.

 

Yeah.. we’re not people that are going to see eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, even though I might hate your take on this, (no offense x_x) thank you for the diverse perspective.

Now onto the reply:

I have tried less tanky but more agile and damaging builds.. to even worse effect.

As for why I am opposed to learning through death, see the last part of Quote #3 on my previous reply.

In regards to what you said before the spoiler, I have a very different experience with the community. I’d like to comment on it, but I’m afraid that I’m going to get dogpiled for the 55th time.

My good social interactions with the members of Wynncraft’s community are as follows:
-Act dumb with my character’s body language in front of afk players for no apparent reason (rapid sneaking, climbing up to obscene heights and dying in front of them)
-Helping newer or lower level players with quests/grinding/bosses that I’m comfortable beating

The bad interactions are as follows:
-Verbally defending myself or my build when signing up for, dying, or not knowing what to do in a raid
-Verbally defending myself and my unique takes on the forums

Nitpicking point #1:

It’s ultra hard for me with any other class other than shaman and maybe mage. The thing set you to 1 HP and uses aoe attacks, a sadistic mf made that thing. This boss was a contender for the hardest boss in the game when I used to play more frequently, so I don’t think my concerns are unfounded. I own no weapon mythics, I prefer not to use them because they are a heavy investment, and that doesn’t bode well with what I generally like to do on Wynn: making and testing many class builds.

Nitpicking point #2:

Lore grants immersion. Wynncraft’s team made a beautiful story, and that’s a good chunk of the reason I play (Unlike some only wired to make their weapon go ding, ding, ding…). I feel that game balance and lore are crucial to an MMORPG, and both should be held in high regard and maintained.

In terms of “biting the bullet”, refer to what I said about statements along the lines of this under Quote #5 of my previous reply.

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I’m sorry I can’t reply to everyone ;-;

 

I can solo everything in the game (excluding annie) with 35k ehp while having a job and doing college work. It's easier than ever to get access to good builds since they are posted online on things like sugvon ultimate build guide.

I would agree with your point about the raids losing immersion by learning through deaths however I have some points about that

#1 I would argue that it already loses its immersion since you can get rewards regardless of dying if you get carried.
#2 Would be that raids are meant to be done over and over as the rewards (aspects) require being grinded and since aspects are a big buff it rewards players actually learning the boss fights.
#3 Since there is a grindable reward it would mean that the bosses need OP attacks or else the grind would be boring and everyone would 100% raid clear (ppl with good builds clear around 95% of the time anyway but atleast they have to be paying attention to dodge the boss 1 shot attacks)

If it was really about lore/immersion how can we take the parasite off Orphion 100 times by your logic it should only be doable once since that's how it would be in the lore.

My other contention would be that of course people are going to be angry at a bad build since good meta builds have less EHP (some people kill guild raids in literally 10-30 seconds) if you are on a build that does no damage and slowing the run down you are making it more likely for your high dps teammates to die since the boss is alive longer. So you are actively hurting the team (I dont agree with them flaming you of course) but its understandable that they are mad right ?

Sidenote* Alot of what you said about the old days is just nostalgia I remember people (including myself) clapping Qira and Legendary island with no difficulty and all those bosses pretty easily the only difference was how mythics were less common than now.

 

I've never died to any of those, or have gotten close to it. (As far as I remember)
The only other thing I've notice can kill me is the sun in the Realm of Light raid, and even then, it kinda requires you to stand still and attempt to afk in it.

 

Not polite

 

Just because some of the difficulty is at a level that you personally dislike, that does not go for everyone. I do not see how you make an argument like this with the recent release of Silksong and its difficulty - which can be inhospitable to new players - achieved overwhelming success and is thoroughly enjoyed by many, or - an example you seem interested in continually bringing up - Dark Souls. Dark Souls and Elden Ring are both incredibly incredibly popular, mainstream, beloved games, and both titles are hard as balls.
I hate to say "if it isn't for you, it isn't for you", but there's a point where we simply cannot pander the game to everyone. The overwhelming majority of feedback we received on increasing the game's difficulty was not just that it made everything more fun, but that it was practically necessary for the game's health.

Fool Eater is encounterable by anyone.... as is Panic Zealot... as is Orange Wybel... as is Legendary Island...
In fact, I designed Fool Eater to specifically exploit the player's curiosity. It's called "Fool Eater" because the players curiosity that compels them to follow some wretched, mangy, blue monster is what gets them killed.

But you don't need to defeat Fool Eater to advance the story. No quest stage demands it. And if you don't want to fight Fool Eater, all you have to do is the opposite of what every player does on their first encounter; walk away. When it runs away the third time, simply turn tail and leave.

Fool's Errand and Gruesome Carnassial were also both designed to be as niche as possible. If you look at Gruesome Carnassial for example, the best part of it is completely replicable by Vim Veins.
You might say that it's unfair for optional, hard content to have rewards at all, but the reason they have rewards is because players want there to be one to award their accomplishment. Imagine doing a Boss Altar - dying for a few attempts as you figure things out and eventually persevere - and then your reward is just a bunch of villagers clapping. For some challenges, that's enough, but more often than not, players will ask for something to gain.

I should've clarified I meant lategame. Earlygame the player a good handful of times, which is why we added Alekin and additional fast travels to it, so that they wouldn't have to worry about running back-- especially when their movement options are more limited.

... Thats what Wynncraft was to you. Nothing is more Wynncraft that Wynncraft itself, even if Wynncraft has grown and changed over the years. 10 years ago there was hardly a thought put into worldbuilding, or much of the storytelling, or the player experience, or all the things important to us today, because it was such a nascent project that it was more important to get the foot in the door -- and I doubt anyone working on it at the time would know it'd grow to the size it is today.
If you're looking for the exact same experience we offered a decade ago, you simply won't find it. I get the nostalgia making all of those days feel great, but the server wouldn't have survived as long as it has - much less grown - if things weren't constantly subjected to change and improvement.

Because your post simply is not a trauma dump. You mention cyberbullying and then briefly imply that you don't want to play with others because of social anxiety (understandable), but there is no trauma being dumped-- unless you're saying your experiencing encountering difficulty in Wynncraft is the trauma or something, which I doubt is what you mean.

This is where you lose me completely. How is any of this, at all relevant. Are you trying to compare someone effectively saying "you'll might have to practice the game a bit more" to someone invalidating, dismissing, and minimizing mental illness and disability???
You bringing this up at all is frankly strange, but the fact it seems like you intend to suggest my comments are at all alike to it is ... honestly I don't have the words to express how absurd that is?????

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Also, side note, it is actually almost impossible to die to the Canary. it does percent damage.... of your current hp. Meaning it'll initially do a scary amount of damage, but if you get low it'll do nothing more than tickle. It's meant to be over the top and scary to deal with but... a complete joke and actually utterly harmless after you realize whats going on.