Talent System

Evening everyone. I'm FancyFedora a "veteran" player on this server starting way back at 2014. If you'll check my profile you can see that I have 5 level 100+ characters which have their own unique build. I love making builds and I have always hoped wynncraft can improve upon making builds better and more interesting. So, this brings us to the creation of this idea:

A full on working talent system

Talent's will replace the already existing spell upgrades with something more interesting, without completely removing them (the current upgrades will appear as talents)

Now, I'll have to apologize. Due to my inability of creating custom chests/inventories/whatever etc and cause it can be more informative this way, I'll showcase my thoughts through paint. Please bare with me.

With that said, how will the system work?
Well just like it is currently with the upgrade system, once a player hits level 16 instead of getting an upgrade to their first spell upgrade, they will unlock accessability to the talent "roots" located in the character info compass!



The item that gives access will say [Required level 16], will make an anvil sound if you try to activate it beforehand with the message "You need level 16 to access the Talent System!" appearing on your chat and will function like skill points, meaning you can click it without getting dismounted!

Once the player reaches level 16 they will obtain 2 "Talent Points" working as the "currency spend to obtain talents! Player's will also get 1 Talent Point everytime 2 levels until level 100 totalling the amount to 43 Talent Points for a single character! (If we count out the already existing upgrades to abilities, which will be 0/1 talents, there are 35 talent points you can spend!)

The talent system itself will look somewhat like this:


With it differing in shape and size for every class.

Of course, those 2 factors depend on how many talents the balancing team wants to include, but in my opinion, it should have 5-6 more talents than the picture above (P.S I will refer to inventory spaces as boxes, for everyone's convinience)

The box with the red x will work as our quit button for the menu, and will work as the exit button for the system. While hovering above it with your cursor the message "Press here to exit." will appear.

The box with what looks like an arrow will work as our "next page" button (although it's more like going downwards) it will be there if the menu is too small to display every talent and will continue to the next set of talents.

The boxes marked green will be the unlocked talents, and will be dispalyed as light green stained glass.
At the start, the first 3 (or more) talents will be unlocked instantly, leaving it up for the player to decide which one they want. Genuinelly, these talents will be pretty generic, for example:



Pretty generic as you can see.
However, the more downwards you go, the more special talents are.

Each talent will have a title, followed by its description.
You may have noticed the little numbers next to each talent's description. This is how many Talent Points can be spend on each talent, in that example 3 points can be spend on the left and right talent, while 2 can be spend on the middle one. When the Talent Points on a talent are capped, it will become locked and will turn into green stained glass meaning no more talent points can be spend on it

Coming back to our original drawing, you will see that certain boxes are connected to others via vertical lines. That is because the bottom talents require maxing out the top talents they're connected to.
For example:



Talents that depend on other talents to be maxed out to be accessible will often, but not neccessarly, be special talents needing 1 Talent Point (0/1)

To balance things a little bit, you will have to spend a total amount of Talent Points in one row to advance to the next one. For example, you will have to spend a total amount of 5 Talent Points on the first row in order to advance to the second one. To advance to the third row however, you'll need to spend a total amount of 15 Talent Points from both the first and second row of talents collectively. If we say we had 6 rows of talents then the requirment for Talent Points would go simularly to this:

5 > 15 > 25 > 35 > 42

But wait, why does it stop at 42? Well it's because the boxes marked with red are the final tier talents and the most powerful ones for each class. Therefore you'll only be able to access one of them. Red talent boxes are hidden completely from you, until you have accessibility for them, meaning they won't have a description until unlocked. This is to spice things up and to make reaching level 100 even more exciting! (although they will be inevitably posted on a random forum thread)

So, what are the pros and cons of this system. Well the pros are very self explainatory:

1)Make end-game builds feel more unique
2)Add more special spell upgrades and making spells less blunt
3)Give full customizability to the player
4)Balance classes better

We can even go further and add talents that completely change abilities, like make warrior's bash gather mobs in its center instead of shoving them back or make mage's meteor an ice meteor that deals less damage and lands slightly slower but instead freeze mobs when it lands

So what are the cons?

1)Well for starters, it will take quite a long time to make something of this scale
2)Talents need balancing themselves
3)Might be confusing for new players

I might even add some talent roots myself, of how I would expect them to be!


Phew, that was a long wall of text. I do not know if this (or simular) idea(s) has been brought up before. Nevertheless thanks to those who took the time to read this and for those who just skipped straight to the end, tl;dr I don't like the current upgrade system and think it should be more customizable and creative. That said, I took a huge inspiration for WoW Classic's talent system and how it works, with a few fresh ideas. The question is what do YOU think? Should I rework some stuff ? Should wynn keep the current upgrades and have talents be more generic? Should talents even be added in wynn? Let me know!

Edit 1: Made the pictures more night mode friendly and changed some stuff around them. Also seeing as people liked this idea, here is the full talent menu for warrior as how I would imagine it (also night mode friendly)! The lines were made to showcase which talent belongs to which row (Sorry if I triggered any ptsd's due to the lines not being flat)


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I can't read it in dark mode, but other than that love it!

 

At first look (11pm) looks really good. However I can't see any balance to it. Like if you spend talent point on "Subtletly" to get +1s on Vanish you should get a minor penalty.
I can't wait to see it expanded even further!

 

This sounds pretty cool! I think what would be better in terms of balance is allowing you to pick the Grade IV or even Grade V upgrades. You can choose between a few upgrades, and once you choose one, you're locked in unless you want to pay to switch.
Depending on what the upgrades are, it seems like a cool idea. I do feel like it would kind of go a bit to waste if it was just minor stat upgrades.

 

From the bits that I read this seems like a good suggestion, but it isn't dark mode friendly so I am not bothered to read all of it lmfao
+ 1 though

 

This is litteraly just ripped straight from world of Warcraft. (Didn't read the last part of the thread before I posted this)

That being said, I personally have something against suggestions that feel like they get another games system, and slap it into wynncraft without much thought. This however, does have more thought then then most suggestions of this type, so let me actually give some reasons.

(I'm assuming your goal is to make the spell upgrades more interesting and customizable.

The World of Warcraft system is fundamentally designed to divied each class into different playstyles, for example: Warrior being either tank or duel wielding dps. Wynncraft already has this taken care of with its system, via builds. I say this, becuase designing our system from the grounds up that we made specifically to fit into Wynncraft would work much better.

Another issue is of course every class is very specifically designed for each spell to kind of work together. Sadly for this reason, alot of the spell changes would have to be more minor then you may think when it comes to how much they can change spells around.

Finally, alot of this change would honestly just be small buffs to the character, like World of Warcraft, which honestly, the game is fairly easy as it is.

My vision on this would be we cut out the buffs, allow players to pick between the different spell upgrades, maybe the different spell upgrades are even divided into elements, or basic play style like "Dps, tank, and support" maybe even incould melee options.

(I'm going to come back to edit this later to make it more clear.)

 

why i feel like i am the only one who uses the light mode here

 

I also do agree that ripping out WoW's talent design and just pasting it into wynncraft wouldn't work (different weapon specialization, class specializations, new abilities as talents etc). However I do think there is a way to implement talents in wynn and have people decide what they want as upgrades for their spells. Perhaps a menu with upgrades for every class spell with 5 - 7 different upgrades, while being able to select only 2 - 3 of them would also work (kinda like diablo 3)?

 

Looks pretty cool. I might get the latest wynnpack and try to recreate this in wynncraft quality. Will post my results if i do them.

Working on them now but i cannot emulate the light green stained glass part because that is already used in the wynnpack for a necklace texture

 

Maybe because no one else has said they are in light mode (although it seems the original poster is). Personally I use the default mode (dark mode on Discord, Battery Saver on Slack, Journey (Light Theme) here, etc.).

 

Yep! Isn’t this basically a skill tree? Where you have to unlock things one by one and gets more costly to upgrade and some will need 2 different routes?

+1

 

So essentially a skill tree. I would love this!

 

Alright, it is done. I have created your vision in the actual wynncraft format. I couldn't find the red cross anywhere in the creative menu so I used a structure void instead. Hope you don't mind.

 

It’s the barrier block. It’s also kind of hard to do it on a GUI because there is a lot of talents to put on the GUI.. I would do something more different because the GUI scale. Unless they add a scroll thing or next page thing. Or if there is even gonna be this many talents.

 

Thanks. I forgot to put the barrier block in my saved toolbars but the feature seems to be glitched and i can't add it to my toolbars. I should probably have checked.

 

obviously would need balancing, i didn't really read through all of it because it is not dark theme friendly, but it seems cool i guess

but please, when making threads, use text color "none" instead of black, as none will appear black on light theme, but white on dark theme

 

Love it! It's about the same structure as I had invisioned while making this, really good job!

Just now I've edited the thread making black colored letters into the none ones (sounds really racist but w/e). I'll also take note of this as I'm gonna be making another suggestion about improving the current upgrade system and not overhauling it completely. Thanks!

 

i... i do not think that you succeeded

 

I'll try changing the whole text to none one and then just recoloring the colored once, see if that works

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Ok some of the sentences just refused to change in color when selecting "none" so I just made everything that wasn't colored gray. Should be good for both light and dark mode.

 

Hey! This suggestion looks pretty cool, and I would love to see something like this enter Wynncraft, even if it's ripped off another game. I also feel like some of the cons could be fixed by making this less large-scale.

The Warrior example you gave was good, but it was absolutely COLOSSAL. That in the game for all five classes would be monstrous, for both new players and the staff tasked with developing it. I was thinking like maybe around twenty in total, where they were all similar to the already-implemented skill upgrades. Like your example, you could have bash cluster mobs together instead of doing tons of knockback. Or, War Scream could buff you slightly more. Uppercut launching enemies backward instead of downward. Charge letting you go upwards. Stuff like that. Strong Wind is a good example.

I was envisioning fun little choices for the skill buffs, not passives and others like Last Stand. May I add that doing stuff like Furious (+1 attack speed) is a HUGE no-no. I don't want something like this potentially changing the item meta.

I also think a really cool thing to mess around with would be the elemental percentages of the spells. When you said it would allow for extra build customization, my mind went DIRECTLY to this. And I do believe that if they implement this, they really should add editing of elemental percentages. Or not, if it's too difficult for them. It was too difficult for me. Balancing is hard, and I wouldn't blame them.

So here's my proposition: you have, like, 7-12 talent points, in total. Each one is used to unlock one skill upgrade. There are still branches, and some skills are mutually exclusive to each other. Skill Grades are still a thing, and you can only get up to 3 upgrades per skill. Also, some skills are automatically unlocked, because not having them would offset the balance of the entire skill. These upgrades would still be locked behind a level cap, it's just that I don't know what is reasonable, and I don't want to put in the effort right now.

Spoiler: So yeah, here's Warrior:

Bash Upgrades (you can only choose 3)
Double Explosion (automatic) (Level 16): Bash now has a second explosion that doubles damage.
Earthquake: Bash breaks legs and slows enemies.
Further Bashing: Bash now has, like, four blocks of extra range.
Cluster: Bash now clusters your opponents together instead of scattering them, but still knocks them all generally backward.

Charge Upgrades (you can only choose 3)
Inspire: Gain +50% damage resistance when hitting enemies with Charge. Lasts longer the more enemies you hit.
Aerodynamics (automatic) (level 26 or 46): You can control yourself while charging.
Pitch: You now can slightly control your vertical direction when charging.
Glide: It sends you a couple blocks further and gives you a speed boost?
Powerful Landing(idk): Stuns targets affected by the explosion when you land at the end of the spell.

Uppercut Upgrades (you can only choose 3)
Fireworks (automatic) (level 36): Your opponent will explode midair, hurting them again for 75% damage
Comet: Your opponent will crash into the ground after the fireworks effect, hurting them again for 25% damage. Cannot be used with Launch.
Launch: Your opponent is launched backwards after the fireworks effect, hurting them again for 25% damage. Cannot be used with Comet.
Unforgiving: Your uppercut affects a larger area. It could change the range, too, to make it have a more conical or beam-like range. Maybe there could be many different range-affecting upgrades, that are all exclusive to each other (see AS and PS below).

War Scream Upgrades (you can only choose 3)
Air Shout (automatic) (level 46): Throw the projectile, et cetera, you already know this one
Strength: Gives 10% more damage for duration.
Vitality: Gives 10-50% more health regen for duration. I don't know what would be good. As said before, I'm terrible at balancing. (DOES NOT AFFECT IDs, affecting IDs in these won't be good)
Piercing Shout: The Air Shout and initial scream does 50% more damage to enemies. Cannot be used with AS.
Area Shout: The Air Shout is less of a projectile but more of an explosion around you, if that makes sense? Anyway, the point is that it knocks enemies away in a circle around you. Cannot be used with PS.
Falloff: Defense buff is larger but lasts for a significantly reduced duration. (Requires you to spam War Scream more frequently.) Maybe +25% defense buff but -2m duration.

That's just what I thought of, in like, 20 minutes. I'm sure if I pored over stats and stuff I could make something much more comprehensive and balanced, and assign level requirements for each of the upgrades. Keep in mind, though, that I put the skills in the general order that I want them to be unlocked/used.

With this new system, I'm thinking it would be easier to implement, and simpler for new players. So, what you intended in the first place, without the cons. Nice!

Also, something you didn't even mention in the original post, after unlocking all of the skill buffs, there's nothing of that sort after level 66. With this, I was thinking stuff like Falloff, Cluster, and Powerful Landing could be unlocked at levels like late 70 to late eighty, maybe Falloff even early ninety, and shifting everything up a bit early on (since you level quicker early in the game) could leave stuff for even late level ninety players to look forward too.

So yeah. That's it