World [ready For Ct] Early Game Mage Change Megathread

I'm not frustrated with early game mage lol, I just thinking your making a mountain out of a pebble. And I say pebble because it isn't even a problem. I mean the strongest enemy on the Emerald Trail is a lvl 7 with 60 HP

Your starting weapon if I'm not mistaken is:
"Oak Wood Stick" AS: Normal DAM: 2-4 LVL: 1

So minimally you'd have to hit this lvl 7 enemy as a level 1 15 times if your damage hit high the whole time. If not 30 times, But unlike Archer and Like Shaman, your hits go through mobs so you can damage multiple enemies with one attack. Also with heal you can actually take on stronger mobs that are still close enough that XP decay won't affect them.

And just a note on your slow attack speed idea, you can get a Stone-hewn Stick in about 9 seconds of combat.

I think I've finished paving this road, anything else would just seem mean spirited. As I said I like that you are trying to improve Wynncraft, I love it when people do, but this suggestion just feels, "Teach the player they must play meta" instead of "Let the player findout whats fun for them"

 

I don't see why Mage should be pressured into purely building for heavy melee/poison when people may not enjoy that. Even if it has the most damage for the toolkit Mage has pre-Meteor, it shouldn't be favored for them because "the game knows the best playstyle for you" is not exactly something you want to do, especially for one class alone. Imagine if there was defined "suggested builds" for all classes:

"Like how new players look at the help>classes section of the Wynn website but only really look at the ones they're interested in, new mages would look at the playstyles that are marked "for them" - heavy melee poison if the CT doesn't change gear."​

It doesn't seem like many other people find early-game content that challenging as Mage either, looking at this thread and the discord, so that doesn't seem very concerning as the thread makes it out to be. The early game is meant to be pretty doable for all classes.

If anything I would be more focused on giving Mage the diversity other classes have, i.e. being able to cast meaningful spells. swap ice snake and heal slots pls

 

Actually this could work...

 

Purple Pope, thanks for replying a lot and helping me touch-up this thread.

I understand that you don't think early game mage is all that bad. I disagree, but I respect that opinion.

I agree that early game mage should be balanced for multiple play-styles - for example, early game mages shouldn't be restricted to melee and should also have an attack spell. Right now, it isn't balanced for multiple play-styles, in my opinion. Early game mages only have melee attacks, with slow attack speed + poison being the meta. Test it!

I also agree that heavy poison melee weapons and armor do exist - if this gear didn't exist, then this thread couldn't be written. They are 100% obtainable and it doesn't take long to get them. However, I think there isn't enough.
According to Wynndata, less than 26% of wands are slow or slower. Less than 3% of armor and accessories give poison. That statistic should be higher, to make this build/meta easier; right now, early game mage item progression is harder because there isn't that much heavy poison melee gear.

Finally, I think it's stupid that early game mages don't know the meta, because there shouldn't be one -> Read: Early game mages should have more than one viable play style.

I think it's a big problem that mages are forced to melee. I also think it's a big problem that heavy poison melee is better than normal/fast attack speed + no poison melee. I think the biggest problem is that early game mages don't know this.
As stated before, there are two fixes: 1) Rework most if not all mage gear and spells, or 2) Make more poison gear and more slow attack speed wands, and get the player to understand that they shouldn't just look at attack speed when picking a wand.

This thread focuses on "fix #2" (it's more of a bandaid than a fix, really). I think that without some sort of fix, early game mage is hard enough to deter lots of potential wynncraft players.

If you don't like "fix #2" (it's more of a bandaid than a fix, really), then try fix #1; go make a thread reworking most or all mage gear/spells.


Hey Frozen Earth!

I think it's pretty hard for new players. Ya know, the ones who just picked up mc (or a pc) for the first time, and the ones who don't know stuff like kiting and taking advantage of pierce attacks.

I disagree because I think Wynn should make early game mage as straight-forward and easy to learn as possible. However, I think you'd agree that heavy poison/melee shouldn't be overpowered, as it is right now. Towards the end of the post, you mentioned some possible changes to give early game mage more variety. That's great! This thread is for making mage less complicated, and I think making your own thread where you discuss gear/spell balance changes would be awesome. I'm not good enough to do that, so I'm sticking to suggesting ideas to make mage less complicated.

Thanks everyone

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also btw sorry for late response, didn't know there was a second page

 

i wholeheartedly agree that earlygame mage sucks a lot, but i don't particularly like this solution and i think it fails at actually solving the problem at hand. earlygame mage isn't particularly viable, but the solution shouldn't be to highlight the viable archetype(s) and try to funnel players into one playstyle; it should be to actually make more playstyles viable. that's a huge part of wynn, after all, and why i personally love the item system we have.

you mentioned this, of course:

i don't think this is necessary, though. all that needs to be done is change the class itself to give it some (hopefully multiple) strong points earlygame. here's my take on it, posted during that discussion in #constructive_feedback:

"i think the problems with earlygame mage are:
- low base damage on wands
- heal is not very effective until later on
- heal costs 8 mana
what i think could actually change without making it unbalanced:
- increasing grade i heal to 20%
* even though this is the same as the other upgrades, grade iii gives some pretty big buffs besides the extra 5%, and grade ii is still pretty decent
- decreasing mana cost of grade i heal to 7
* same case with point 1: the buff for iii is pretty sizeable
* int also makes the difference in spellcost ridiculous, so i think this should happen anyway
- giving heal some sort of "minimum heal," just something like 3hp or something so it doesn't suck that much for the first few levels
* heal literally gives 1hp at level 1 right now, which is ridiculous"

@_FrozenEarth_ and i also discussed swapping ice snake and heal and (hopefully) giving it some new powerful mechanic, which would also give the class some strong points.
mage just needs something to make it easily viable earlygame, because right now its damage and utility both suck and it doesn't excel in anything.

 

Again, as you'll see further down in this response, this thread is about coping with the current meta, while you're proposing changes to the meta. I think that proposing changes to the meta is better, but it's harder.

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I decided that telling early game mage players to play the game a certain way is bad, so I removed #3.

Everyone was bringing up good points and I could only say "but that's how it is!"

A more subtle approach is required, or early game mages might quit because they won't feel like they have freedom

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okay wait I feel hypocritical now

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I'm suggesting to add more poison and slow attack speed stuff but

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I'm also saying mage gear shouldn't be changed much

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frick this I'll turn this into a early game mage change megathread

 

alright should be pretty much ready for people to start adding and criticizing ideas here

 

No, because Heal is given to the player instantly to show them early on that they are the healer.

The lack of a damaging spell until the level 20s is to encourage the player to seek allies to team up with.

 

Did I sufficiently represent this concern in the "cons" section? Also, I'd like Frozen Earth's opinion on this

 

I don’t think pigeonholing Mage as a pure healer is beneficial here, especially when it can do so much other things than just heal other players. Introducing the damage early on would bring that agency to the player to show them that, like other classes, there are offensive options and spells to aim at your enemies rather than just being a heal slave.

Heal isn’t even a very necessary spell for the early game where content is non-challenging and potions are cheap, compared to being unlocked at level 31 where you’ll be facing gear checks like the Mummy’s Tomb or Canyon Condor.

 

Well one thing I’d say is that the first spell says a lot about the class. For example, archer has arrow storm with its amazing dmg, as it’s the best dps. Shaman has totem cause, well, totem. Assassin has spin which shows off it’s good combos (with stun) and very small range.

Mage is the healer, so it gets a heal spell. I just don’t feel that ice snake portrays mage nearly as well as heal does. Heal is kinda the staple of mage.

 

It's definitely well-known for Mage, but patterns like "first spell defines the class" doesn't excuse it being introduced at such a less useful time and hinder the class when it could be thought of more practically. Moving it to be unlocked later doesn't remove it from the class either.

 

what about adding more early game wands that lower first spell (heal) cost?

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or unlocking both ice snake and heal at the same time?

 

This is a good idea, but without the +9999 meteor cost, having that on every early game wand is just silly and would be really confusing for new players who've barely even figured out what an ID is. It also screws up normal items since they can't have IDs. I would say, just give wands lv 1-20 around the same DPS as the daggers at that level, but with higher attack speed. Then make wands from 21-30 have slightly less damage but still have higher attack speed so that they can more easily hitstun mobs into their meteor's radius since meteor takes 15 years to fall, (some wands would still probably have high melee damage, melee mage should always be an option, even in the later game, but spell damage should begin becoming viable around lv 21.) this isn't necessary at lv 31 and onwards because they can use ice snake to do pretty much the same thing. Wands 31+ would be mostly the same, except melee should be much more viable, maybe EFA mage could even be a thing, of course that'll never happen but we can dream.

I honestly don't mind having mage focus on a melee playstyle in the early game, as long as that melee playstyle is as good as the playstyles of other classes at the same level. It gives the feeling of being a low level recruit who's barely learned any magic yet and has to resort to whacking people with sticks, before they finally start learning a more elegant way of fighting once they're more experienced.

 

My look on things:
Spells basically aren't viable for any clas early game, but least so for mage. More equally supported playstyles would be nice. Currently heavy poison is without a doubt the best supported playstyle for early game mage. Two things can be done to incentivise people into different playstyles: Nerf heavy poison or buff other playstyles. The other playstyles for mage lack in comparison to the same playstyles for other classes, so I think we should buff other playstyles instead.

Since spell builds aren't gonna be a thing for early mage, the standard build types for melee playstyles would be:
Heavy melee
(heavy) Poison
fast raw melee
cancel/tierstack

Poison is already good enough and cancel/tierstack isn't gonna happen because early game items can't really have huge drawbacks and attack speed bonus is so good it'd disincentivise people from switching their gear for a lot of levels, and heavy melee is an option in my eyes but would need alot of support and has the problem that if you don't completely build around it, it's kinda bad.

Quite some early armor pieces, notably Thoraic (from a quest) and the bear set (no need to rely on drops), as well as accessories that give raw melee damage. I propose adding in two super fast wands to better capitalise on those raw melee items. One around the level of thoraic and one around the level of the bear set. Something like:

 

ok sorry yesterday was really hectic couldn't update this

looks like good ideas, tried adding them

realized I can do a cool link thingy to forum acc, maybe I'll add more of that

I hate bullet points

 

I think we're almost done, right? We just need Sam's approval or rebuttal to changing base damage in a different way, and perhaps some criticism of adding wands that reduce spell cost (my suggestion), right?

 

So basically I still stand by my point that Mage is perfectly fine in the early game.

My idea for a +999999 3rd spell cost on early game wands was no good because some people like to use early wands for challenges, and another idea I had was to weaken items as you level up (also bad for the same reason)

That's when I concluded that there's no way to make early mage DPS better without messing something up, and realised that Mage never does much damage anyway

But honestly adding some better wands would be a nice idea, at least for the people who know about them. The way I see it, builds should NOT be rammed down new players throats, especially not so early in the game, but adding better wands to pair with good matching armor pieces (as @creature suggested) would be excellent for the more dedicated players who are replaying mage and want to have an easier time in the early game, despite it being easy already. This means that new players who choose mage will be told by the gameplay that they are the healer, while dedicated players who already know this can simply skip past the spamclicking stage easily.

 

alright, I think we're basically done; tried to combine your (plural) work into this:

also I don't think it's worth proving why heavy poison melee is the best right now, it's pretty obvious

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lmk if I'm missing something big

can't wait to change this to [DONE] Early Game Mage Megathread or whatever the title is