Game Mechanics (Sharpshooter) Focus is messy and needs a rework

This is my first thread so i'll try and make it as readable and concise as possible. It looks long but isn't exhaustive, goes straight to the point and is detailed. Thanks in advance for you read
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So, To put it simply: Focus is a good ability that in concept should reward reactive and precise aim, but in reality ends up being finicky, very unreliable, underwelming, and frustrating to use.
With it being the main selling point of the whole Sharpshooter archetype, I feel it's important to make sure it functions correctly and is fun to use

!also to clear things out: my build focuses on melee damage, no spells (no twain's arc or anything), just pure melee damage and +damage IDs, and i'm using double shot (boltslinger)​

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So my main gripe with focus is how uncredibly unreliable and situational is it to use: The way it works is you have to consistently land your shots to progressively build up focus at the rate of 1/s, and missing a shot results in a loss of focus (a rounded up half of your current focus: 5, 3, 2, 1, then 0 focus per arrow).

Now, this 'miss' mechanic already has some pretty significant issues (most of my issues actually) :​

The punish for missing makes the ability way to hard to sustain , as missing shots is pretty much inevitable, and results in the instant loss of most if not your whole stack: Take my build example: with double shot and a Super fast bow, I fire 8 -ish arrows per second. Going from 5 (or 7) focus all the way to 0 takes a whole 4 misses, which means that all it takes is 2 bow shots (4 arrows) for my focus stack to instantly desintegrate.

Considering i'll be firing 4 times a second, that's a mere 0,5 seconds of misses (or 0.25, depending on how you see it: 1st shot > 0.25s > 2nd shot) to fully deplete a focus stack. If that wasn't infuriating enough, focus itself takes a good while to charge up: at 1/s, that's 5 (or 7!) whole seconds of charging up, meaning whenever you miss, your DPS is brought down (to almost half) for a significant amount of time before climbing back up.

And to top it all off, missing, is fully up to RNG! There's just so many things that could happen that just magically wipe your stack... The mob you're firing at could use a Dash, or a teleport, and whoosh! back to zero. You got sent in the air or your camera started shaking from a multihit attack ? back to zero. You were spraying arrows at a mob and didn't instantly stop firing the moment it died ? The remaining arrows will simply just miss and yup, to back to zero... A random block in your arrows way ? a LAG SPIKE ?? back to zero, to slowly climb back up hoping none of the things above happen again within the 5 (or 7...) seconds it takes to max out again...


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See the issue ? And that's not even mentioning the 5 block distance thing that essentially makes focus fail in closed up areas and world events, all with restricted space, adding to the situational-ness and unreliability of it.

I mean frankly look at its mirror ability, the triple shot: you get 50% (65% on wynnbuilder ?) extra damage, all the time, free of charge, + you get 2 extra arrows for mob clearing, + it looks cool, and the only drawback is you gotta get closer to your target to fully profit off it (and homing exists), meanwhile I'd be happy to get 3 focus steadily, which still isn't as much damage as triple shot, and takes 3 seconds to build, everytime you lose it.

tl:dr : Focus is tedious, annoying, underpowered, clonky, and simply doesn't
work with wynncraft's fast paced hectic gameplay​

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Now, as to not sound like an angry freeloader, I thought of a few ways I think could fix it:


First of all the imbalances: a fast firing build is sevely disadvantaged compared to a slow firing one, since the amount of arrows only means you'll miss more often and more at once. You'll generally lose your entire stack at once. To fix this, the amount of focus deduced at each miss should be divided (or at least balanced around) by the attack speed: with normal attack speed losing the base 50% of focus per miss, super fast only losing ~15-20% ? , and super slow I don't think needs changes here.

Next, double shot and triple shot. Now I already see the responses being like 'well huh those are boltsliger abilities so it makes sense that they dont work together with focus' to which I am forced to say, stfu (sorry). To allow players to cross path ability trees is to allow them to be creative in their builds, I don't see the point in letting me put points in 2 things that can't coexist, and it's just more fun this way, especially when homing (sharpshooter) is already obligatory for triple shot (boltslinger). Now as for triple shot, i'm not really mad about this one being basically unusable since it'd be a little orverkill I guess ? But as for double shot, I really think it can and should work better.

The issue with double shot is that, again, the amount of arrows just makes missing more (way more) punishing, which i think should be reworked the same way as attack speed: by dividing the focus deduced by the number of arrows you fire (2). And if you think that's too strong, I'd think it'd be pretty balanced: Double shot, after all, is only a 20% (30% on wynnbuilder ??) damage boost, with the added drawback of having to manage 2 arrows at once, making it easier to miss. I think it's already pretty balanced, that would just make it more fair.


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Now for the actual core changes to the ability itself, 2 possibilities:

1 | The bandaid :

You don't want to bother reworking the entire ability but I also dont want to whine on forums about it: so instead you could make it more 'accessible', as in less tedious: change the delay between focus stacks to start off small and gradually increase as you go up in stacks e.g ~0.3 to ~0.6 seconds between stacks 0 to 3, then ~1.2 to ~1.5 seconds from 3 to 5 (or 7); that way you can more easily bounce back from losing your stacks, and unless you're drunk you're basically guaranteed damage on par to triple shot consistently, while the 2 last stacks require more time to build up to counterbalance it. Now, you're still one lag spike away from losing your stack, but it's way less significant and annoying, and keeps your from being stuck in a loop at 1~2 stacks getting supbar dps.

2 | Ability rework

To get back to the main issue: focus stacks are way too easy to lose, to the point a gust of wind could nuke your stack. Now, instead of awkwadly punishing inaccuracy, we instead reward accuracy, and base the given bonus off of the total arrows fired/arrows landed.
Think of it as a DPS meter: Miss no shots, you get 100% of your DPS potential. Only land half your shots ? that's 50% of your DPS instead.

So, say we count the amount of arrows fired for the past 5~10 seconds, then we use that to divide the amount of arrows landed in that same time frame, to get an accuracy value: that value will determine how much of the bonus we'll get. Land 75% of your shots, get 75% of the bonus, you get the point.
And if that sounds too strong like that, you can balance it out by making it a logarithmic formula, e.g it takes 75% accuracy to get 50% of your max focus, 90% accuracy for 75% of your max focus, and such all the way to 100%. No insta loss of your stack, no annoying timer, fun and fair.


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I genuinely think this would fix all that's to be fixed with the Focus ability, it would make it way simpler and friendly to the player, satisfying and fun to use, and it really doesn't look like it'd be that hard to implement. Idk how it would interact with twain's arc or crepuscular ray, but I think it'd be good still.

I hope this gets seen by the devs, thanks in advance, i hope i'm not being too entitled lol, and good night, i'm tired now
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Instead of a whole formula, the other fix would be making it so gaining and losing Focus run on the same cooldown. That way, you can play more like the other Archetypes do where you build and then "spend" Focus, just with the option of not losing Focus rapidly if you play optimally.

The more I think of this, the better it sounds, too: Trapper and Boltslinger by lategame both pick and choose how many "Misses" they can go for in a single Sharpshooter Focus cooldown. And you only have 45 AP, so even without Phantom Ray spoiling Bolt/Sharp hybrid's fun, you wouldn't really be breaking the game with slower decay on Focus due to the downtime and raw AP costs of getting them both.


Would this be unbalanced? Honestly, I don't really think so. Focus is one of the only mechanics in the game which don't function on instantly granting benefits, unlike with most other Archetypes where you hit the Spell input and get their effects immediately.

This isn't based on me being Midgame and not knowing Lategame - this is based on how Acolyte and Arcanist also function, too.

Personally, I'm a fan of having an Archer Archetype which revolves around high accuracy and instances of timing your shots precisely. (Server lag is a good point tho.) Focus is pretty fun, in my experience messing with it! (Level 60 Archer)

Dealing with Super Fast Bows and teleporting/dashing enemies is just...kind of a Wynncraft thing. Love it or hate it, I think the game is just designed around crap like this happening atp, and it being the player's job to counter-build and counter-play in anticipation of it. (See also: counterplay to Enemy Spells being unintuitive in general.)