I'm still mad about Tunnel Trouble

The crux of my issue is that Tunnel Trouble had an interesting and memorable stealth section, which has been replaced with a generic boss fight. This was done because Salted thinks new players to Wynn in the early levels will want to be constantly testing new combat abilities they gain as they level. (For some reason, he forgot Tunnel Trouble already has a combat section and doesn't need a second one.)

I don't like this.

So here's my solution.

Step 1: Lower XP in the low levels. XP gain is way too high in the earlygame (and too low in the endgame but that's not important), meaning that you can easily blow through ten levels just by killing mobs, ignoring the quests. Since players will be less exposed to quests, the primary source of combat challenges, in the early levels due to this issue, I suggest either slashing mob XP rewards or raising the XP to next level very high - with the result that you will want to do quests to gain new levels (or you'll run into Secret Discoveries while looking for more XP).

Step 2: More quests. This is just an add content suggestion, but if you need more combat challenges in the earlygame, then... add more combat challenges. Don't butcher quests which are good because you need more combat. I'd suggest adding a good few quests which are short, and mostly center around bossfights or cave clearing. Taking the Tower is a good example of this, even though I don't really like the earlygame questline.

Step 3: Add some quest classification. If a new player really wants to try fighting, they should be directed to combat quests. I'd suggest adding, as new information for a player, notes on the content of a quest (Combat, Puzzle, Story, or Mixed*) and perhaps cave as well (Combat, Boss, Parkour, or Mixed), along with information on the XP and Emerald rewards for the quest.

*Would like to hear suggestions on more quest classifications.

And, of course, Step 4: Revert Tunnel Trouble. Because it bad now.

 

Yeah. Not everyone likes combat that much, and having every single early game quest just be the same thing might make people think that all quests are just combat sequences. Someone joining Wynn because of the advertised story and lore and who isn’t that interested in fighting might be disappointed to find out that they have to grind through 20 or more levels of pure combat related quests before they can get to the stuff that they actually want to do. Of course, it’s an mmorpg, and combat is inevitable. But it doesn’t have to be shoehorned into every early game quest. You can have early quests that appeal to a wider variety of players, and they don’t have to be the same generic combat for people to stay interested. Plus, it’s not like someone who just unlocked a new ability is gonna be like “great, now let’s go do a quest.” No, they are going to go beat up some zombies. The point of quests is the story, the uniqueness. If someone wants to test new abilities and bully some mobs, they can go do that. That’s why we have caves, grind spots, and the thousands of mobs that wander around the world.

That said, I don’t at all think that quests should avoid having any combat. Your suggestion for quests labels would be great honestly, so people who are interested in combat can do their thing and people who prefer other types of quests can too. But please, not everything has to be combat related in the early game. All that does is take away from the variety and uniqueness of the quests and in no way makes the game better or more enjoyable.

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also add a poll

 

Done

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Yeah, I think it's just bad. Variety is the spice of life. Some of the stuff modern Wynn's doing - ostensibly to appeal to new players - just seems regressive to me. And sometimes, just completely stupid. Like the new spell icons, which are mouses. Which makes no sense. Terrible idea. Who greenlit that UI change?

 

I don't mind the idea of the mouse button icons but it feels weird to cast spells with compared to the usual R/L/R. It feels strangely delayed, but I can't pinpoint why.

 

I voted no because I'm actually fine with the change they made. The stealth section always felt really barebones and often glitched out for me, with the farmer catching me at random even if he was looking away. While players are still adjusting to a server that's radically different from vanilla minecraft, I think it's good to just focus on combat since it truly makes up the core of Wynncraft.

 

The reason it was made combat is because it was felt that it was too early out of the blue to introduce a weird stealth part, or something like that. Lex had a far better explanation than I could muster

 

here's my take
It was a good thing they removed the puzzle from tunnel trouble.
But if you 'isolate the variables', it may seem like it was better to keep the old one.
See, fighting a golem is less fun than doing cow ninja shenanigans. While it was glitchy, and at times frustrating, many people liked it, myself included. I don't actually think that it's better because 'it's another opportunity to put in a combat section'... after the entire quest up to that point was just zombies. Fighting zombies. In a tunnel.

However, if this quest wasn't required, for, oh, I don't know, the one of the most important fast-travels in the game and definitely the most early-game:
I would agree with the OP.

However, it is.
Which means that in order to unlock a fast-travel that allows you to skip Emerald Trail, Nivla, and the entire Detlas Suburbs, you needed to do a glitchy puzzle/stealth section. That can be frustrating at times even when it's not glitching.

Had Tunnel Trouble just been a weird side-quest of randomness, and Not Extremely Required To Save Large Amounts Of Time, I would say: "There are already zombies, give us back the stealth section." However, for player retention, it's probably a much better idea in the long run to save frustrating stealth quests for later.

 

Is this the time to suggest a Seaskipper for the provinces of Gavel and/or Wynn? Carriages could fit pretty well. Granted, less well in 2.1 with the TP scroll rework (pre-rework a carriage could make total sense if it had higher prices than scrolls and couldn't run you to places you haven't visited yet).

It just seems like a good idea to me. Gate the carriage behind completion of a major quest in the area, give it a significant price, it would do fine. Remove the need for Tunnel Trouble, make the carriage connect Maltic, Ragni, Detlas, Alekin, and Nemract, and you've just made all of Wynncraft into a giant fast-travel net, albeit a circuitous one that ignores the Light and Dark Forests. (Troms-Ragni-Nemract-Selchar-Corkus-Kandon-Beda would get you from the jungle to TCC with the only use of money being the hypothetical Ragni-Nemract Landskipper carriage.)

Which would in turn suggest another carriage for Gavel that covers those areas (Lexdale, Gelibord, Olux, Efilim, and Cinfras) or an expansion of the Juggler.

 

What ...?

 

Guess it's not the time to suggest more fast travel, then.

 

Look at the jugular tavern. What about something similar in deltas which would still encourage scrolls when not inside cinfrass or deltas

 

carry around 1 nemract scroll, 1 cinfras scroll. you can literally go almost anywhere incredibly quickly.
connecting detlas to nemract would allow the Land/Air Network and Ocean Network to be connected in ways that shouldnt be connected for the sake of balance

 

It's cheaper to keep a Detlas scroll than a Cinfras scroll.

 

Time to post a different argument from everyone else here, because I want to stand out.
Removal of the stealth section doesn't mean you have to add a generic boss fight.
You could have replaced that with any number of things that could have been fairly interesting, from parcore, to a puzzle, or even just an escape scene.

If I'm honest, and this may sound harsh, Wynncraft feels like it's beginning to suffer from Gavel boss fight syndrome, which, for those of you unaware, was a time in which Wynn felt the need to add a (crap) boss fight to the end of every quest it could, the most infamous example being Memory Paranoia, which had a random fight at the end. (It's been replaced with a cut-scene now)
I'm not just saying this because of this quest, another example is Infested plants, which suddenly requires you to kill a slightly stronger spider at the end in order to proceed, and even the tutorial, which suddenly requires you to kill a boss in it. (Now the tutorial boss isn't terrible, but that's a topic for a different rant.)

If you over use bosses, then they stop feeling special.

 

Also the golem is kinda boring, and very hard for mages, who have to line up the teleport-meteor (I have only done it on mage btw)
I think the idea was it is surprising to FIGHT a golem, when they have just been helpers the whole game, but Iron Heart does that better anyway.

 

Honestly, if it weren't so heavily tied to the area, I'd say Iron Heart's reveal would work better at a later level. You could have iron golems be more heavily used as more than a background element beforehand - but maybe fighting one isn't so good.

I wasn't aware of Gavel Boss Fight Syndrome, but now that I think about it... a lot of the quests end in boss fights. Which is kind of concerning honestly, because like Jay says, they get stale if you overuse them.

I'm tempted to redo my Entire Quests Review (on Discord) except it's targeting boss fights and combat in quests, but don't have any time left today to do that. What has just stuck to me is that Infested Plants is a bad quest and should be removed outright - it's been grandfathered into the earlygame questline (which is... not good, IMO), as far as I can tell. There really are a lot of iffy boss fights.

Do we need to fight a Fleris at the end of From the Mountains? Suddenly not very sure, especially since the preceding combat segment can be skipped with a horse. Does there need to be a boss at the top of Mt. Wynn? Probably not... although I don't think there's too much issue with that. I don't think the Golem's good because Tunnel Trouble doesn't need another combat segment, Maltic's Well probably doesn't need to have the Well Witch fight (its plot can be resolved without killing the witch, and honestly it's more interesting if she turns out to be good without a negative twist that makes you kill her), and Underice even having a boss is news to me. Poisoning the Pest, probly fine. A lot of the random boss fights are fine. Some aren't.

If I can remember, I'll try to review the bosses in 2.1 along an Assassin playthrough. A lot of the gripes you could have with samey bosses and bloat would be addressed, hopefully, with 2.1 correcting that, although there might still be boss bloat which I would then campaign against. Hard to tell when you can't play the beta.

Something that might help with Salted's clear and stated desire for more boss fights is to specifically mark some quests as Boss Quests (in tandem with a system I've suggested up above, where quests are given flags so players can tell what kind of content they center around), which are basically just plot build up to a pseudo-dungeon or a straight boss fight. Some examples of such quests would be Canyon Condor, Wrath of the Mummy, Grave Digger, Tempo Town Trouble, Poisoning the Pest, Temple of the Legends (centers around its boss but long combat leadup), WynnEx Site D (same deal), Reincarnation, Hunter's Calling ofc...

...Okay I'm not listing off all the quests which center around bosses. Upon second thought, that's a bad idea.

 

wait you have a full quest review? i LOVE reading all quest reviews! Please post here

 

I don't really feel like copying and pasting all that text into a Forums post so here's the Discord thread. Second thread I posted (once I'd posted enough to be able to attach links) was a list of every suggestion I made on Discord, laboriously copied to Forums. If you want to read that, here's the link to it. (If you do end up looking at that, you may see why I keep posting threads like this.)

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It's not formatted the best in the thread, though. I'll probably just redo it once 2.1 drops.

 

i definitely read your all suggestions thread, As a notorious forums lurker the day you joined was the most activity in a long time.

 

Excellent. I wouldn't have it any other way.