Weekly Community Discussion (11/10/2019) - Tiers And Mana

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Hey there guys! Today we’re going on to our third weekly discussion about particular topics relating to items, ingredients and gameplay. We want to emphasize this won’t be a one-sided conversation but rather a constructive discussion between the community and the item team. We’ll be sure to keep up with your guys’ posts and respond regularly. As mentioned on our thread here, we’ll be doing this weekly but if there is enough interest and conversation ongoing as the week draws to a close, we’ll roll it over to the next week. If not, this thread will be locked and we’ll move onto a new discussion.

For reference, the previous thread’s discussion was on Set Item Changes, and can be found here.

This Week’s Topic: Attack Speed Tiers and Mana

Unlike the previous two discussion threads, this one is an overflow from the previous thread, where the discussion evolved away from the topic and into this.

Last week’s thread saw heated discussion over attack speed as a reaction to one of the set changes. With the value of a tier of attack speed under question, we have decided to get a conclusive answer with help from the community in order to properly balance sensitive identifications like attack speed tiers later on in the future. We also want to do the same with balancing mana, as the previous attempt to balance mana in the element revamp was quite unpopular, yet we feel it's a sensitive topic that needs to be addressed, given how mana is a very dominant identification that affects how players make spell-oriented builds. Unlike the other two topics, this discussion does not revolve around any changes we have specifically planned. Also note that the ideas that blossom out of this discussion will be applied to ingredients later down the line.

How do you feel about our current approach to balance attack speed and mana at the moment? Do you feel that some controversial items with these IDs were simply flukes, or do you think there is anything that needs to be adjusted to our balance philosophy around attack speed and mana?

With that being said, by releasing this thread we will be actively listening to what the community has to say about this topic, and we will all go from there.

Thank you for reading,

The Item Team
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So my personal stand point on Mana, specifically intelligence, and Attack Speed is that fact that Intelligence is just much more powerful than Attack Speed, or melee in general, will ever will be.

I'm actually specialized into Melee more than spells because personally I find Melee to be more fun gameplay wise over spell spam gameplay (Idk, I guess I like pressing left click a lot). I even have a pretty good Slayer to use (338 Melee Damage). Even with that, I can never outdamage my friend Archer who is spec'd fully into both water damage and intelligence (Archer, which is probably why) because the spell spam that he can produce is ridiculous.

I also know a friend who personally never decides to not put 100 Intelligence because spell spam is so ridiculously strong as of right now. I'm sure with even the most powerful melee set you can acquire you wouldn't be able to outmatch someone with just ludicrous amounts of Mana Regen/Steal and Intelligence. (I'm not an expert class builder and don't know the highest amount of Melee power/damage you can get so someone verify me on that please)

So in my opinion, in order to balance them out, one of these has to occur:
1. Nerf Intelligence, Mana, or Spells. In my opinion this is fairly difficult because Wynncraft revolves around a no-cooldown environment and it's hard to balance spells and mana costs around that.
2. Buff Melee overall or give it some unique use. I.E. Make some mobs/bosses more vulnerable to taking damage from melee hits than spell hits, and vise versa. This would introduce some reason to go melee or bring in someone who is more spec'd into melee.
3. Reduce the amount of Intelligence-based or Mana-based items or nerf them. Probably an unpopular one as it would break a lot of builds (I'm not all in for it either).
4. Change the Spell System overall. Add more spells and/or cooldowns. This would be my personal choice as I've always wanted to see a more complex spell system in Wynncraft.

With how Wynncraft's Spell System works right now, it's fairly hard to balance spell spam to not be the DPS meta. Hopefully the CT can come to a good consensus on this topic.

That's my two cents right there.

 

I feel like the reason mana regen is so desired and the changes to mana regen were so unpopular is that it’s the only consistent way of having more mana. Mana steal is janky, inconsistent, and requires melee hits, which means most people who use it are forced to use slower attack speeds to minimize the time and RNG inherent in trying to regen mana that way. Mana regen and intelligence, on the other hand, are both passive and guarantee being able to cast more spells

In my opinion, the best way to change the spell metagame is to nerf mana regen overall, but also decouple it from intelligence, nerf intelligence overall, and add IDs, both minor and major, that reward skill based spell usage, in order to offset the nerfs.

In Destiny 2 (yes, I’m going there again, but goddamnit they do so much about combat right), one of the best trees in the game is the middle tree void titan. The basic premise of this class is that abilities attach sticky grenades to enemies, and those sticky grenades explode after you deal enough damage to the enemy. When they explode, however, they also attach more sticky grenades to any enemy hit by the blast, and refund ability energy. You can chain explosion after explosion while having a near 100% ability uptime. But the catch is, this only works IF you play well. You need to know when to use your abilities, leveraging enemy numbers and health, or else you’ll be punished. I think a similar system would be wonderful in Wynn.

For example, there could be a major ID that reduces the cost of your next Meteor based on the number of enemies you hit with ice snake, or one that refunds mana whenever you kill an enemy inside a smoke bomb. It would add incentives to combo spells, reward good spell usage, and make builds to focus on specific spells, rather than just having generic wanton spell spam builds, and would make builds a lot more unique overall rather than just focusing on having the highest spell/mana bonuses. It would also specialize a lot of the DPS builds; rather than being able to do it all, some builds would work a lot better at clearing mobs while others would have weaker crowd control but better boss burning abilities.

In addition, make make mana steal a cooldown based system, where every four seconds your next hit is guaranteed to regen mana, rather than leaving it up to chance.

 

(Disclaimer: not a (good) build maker)
I don’t know about tier, but mana is way too easy to get. Slap on two or three items from a list, boom almost unlimited mana. I rarely run dry (even with the stupidest builds, like Earth-Water Nepta Hybrid)

I’d like it if those few items (memetoes, more than two but less than four eyes, a specific hive plate that will soon be a pretty crown) actually had some competion. Right now I don’t see that much.

Dex-agi-int builds can swap memetoes for... steamjet for damages? But the choices feel limited, and slapping third eye and memetoes is just so much easier, and often more effective. This does have a benefit though, as you don’t have to worry about mana while building the rest of the build.

Still, it feels like getting 8 mana regen is just the same as slapping on one (aquarius) or two items, so there’s no resource managment, something that seems to be a goal of the system.

My idea? Split magic items into two main types (and the unique ones):
”Mana generators” and ”Mana consumers”
Generators are you mementoes and third eyes, but they aren’t all that great apart from making lots of mana.

Consumers are the ones that give you great buffs to damages, defences and other neat stuff, at the cost of passive -MR.

With hybrid builds, mana steal could replace mana generators and make it so they don’t have to worry about mana logistics much, but in pure spell builds, this would hopefully add a new factor: Do you add that cool high-damage item at the price of having to replace another item with a generator?

If succesful, this would make the process more intresting and since the concept of generating and consuming mana is simple, it would allow you to categorize items easier and make building an original build more intutive. Plus, existing builds would likely barely notice a diferrence! And there would be a problem of ”not enough mana” for the first time in, well, ever!

And if it fails, it would at least give the items slightly more identity. Though that probably won’t compensate for the chaos caused.

But hey, I’m sure there’s a lot wrong with this idea I came up with while typing stuff on mobile and falling asleep. But you asked for my opinion, and here it is.

Edit: Woke up and some of you seem to agree with this. Huh, neat.

 

Dammit, I just became a set item but sadly missed being able to post that on the Set Items thread... anyway I probably won't get to this thread until later this weekend, unless I'm lucky. I do have stuff to say though, and I don't think my take is very typical.

 

Intelligence is as strong as it is right now because other element combos are being penalised for being used with each other the game design inherently forces other element combos to be weaker [edit: I didn't know what I was talking about]. This person made a similar point some time ago, and I thought his discussion would be relevant here.

I think going through with this suggestion is a viable option. If that's outside of the item team's ability, then I'd go look at other ideas on this thread.

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There's this stupid move you can do where you can approach 50k melee dps using a +tier consumable, but outside of that melee is noticeably weaker than spell. Crediting @789poiu3 here.

 

Definitely this. This will make bosses more interesting instead of just relying on spell spam. Though this is sort of out of the scope of the thread. I agree with slightly buffing melee overall.

Everything in this, especially the "mana consumers." There are not enough items that give -mr in general, and in especially water builds, you often get way too much mr.

 

Ok, so fundamentally it feels like the comments so far are interpreting this post much differently than how it looks like it was intended.

Mana
Really, I think the mana problem comes down to philosophy. Right now, if you can use 19 mana regen, and sometimes even 19 mana regen plus a bunch of mana steal too it's often much more effective in terms of damage to just take that high mana regen and trade off the damage, because you're usually nearly doubling your dps versus a typical ~10 mana regen build*. If this is the intent (since it takes a lot of skill to use that much mana effectively**) then overall I think mana regen on armors doesn't have a problem. You can get a lot of mana, but outside of going for very high mana (which is hard to use) it's not generally unbalanced.

*Part of this is Aquarius and Memento being extremely powerful, but even if those were nerfed in the manner I talk about below, you'd still gain about 40-60% extra dps.
**Major made an argument to this effect about spell vs. melee - while I don't agree with that argument because I don't think melee takes a lot less skill to play than spell, I do think it's a useful way of looking at things.

A few items I do think are too powerful, regardless, since they are almost always an improvement over similar-styled builds that don't use them - Aquarius and Memento in particular come to mind. In many cases, Memento is both the best mana option for boots, and very close to or sometimes even the best damage option for boots as well. Aquarius likewise gives a lot of mana, which imo is not inherently a problem, but also gives a not-insignificant damage boost. Compare this to a typical pure damage booster, with 60-80% boost (or equivalent), and you'll notice that you're getting a lot out of Aquarius. (incidentally, for the last month or so, every time I made an Aquarius build I checked what it would look like with 30% less spell damage, and that generally seemed more in line with other builds of that type, which is why I've been recommending Aquarius' spell damage be flipped in recent weeks). Likewise for Memento, which is the best mana regen boots, the best raw spell boots (although imo this is because other raw spell boots are too weak), and also a pretty good spell damage percent option. Imo, the damages should be nerfed (but not removed entirely). I don't think Third Eye is too strong - it's more about the fact that it's literally the only item in it's niche (4 mr and skill points). Many times I've used Third Eye where it felt like it should be suboptimal but there was just nothing else. Kind of like Soul Signal or Memento's uses in raw spell, actually. For a time, Moonbeam kind of fit this role in revamp.

I think the reaction to balancing of mana in revamp had to do with the fact that on items like the above, the mana was nerfed instead of the other aspects. Sure, people might complain a bit about damage nerfs on Aquarius and Memento, but it doesn't mess around with item values anywhere near as much. More importantly in my opinion - nerfing mana makes spells less fun to play, while nerfing damage generally does not do that to such an extent.

The only place where I think mana is broadly speaking too powerful is on accessories. Again, I recommend increasing the power of damage accessories rather than decreasing the power of mana accessories, situationally of course. Because, lowered ability to spellspam makes the game much less fun to play, while lowered damage is not nearly as discouraging.

Additionally (and I've already expressed this with IMs listening) Mage's effective cap on mana usage is a big limiter on both the skill level required, and its power at high-skilled play, which is likely why warrers look down on spell mage so much. A second damage option - say, ~300% spell multiplier on Teleport, or alternatively ~200% spell multiplier on Ice Snake if using Teleport as a damage spell feels weird - would likely fix this, and also bring Spell Mage's relative dps vs. Melee Mage more in line with the other classes (excepting Archer of course, but that's a different problem).

TL;DR there is no large-scale problem with current mana, if the philosophy I outlined is the intent. If the intent is for mana quantity and per-spell damage to balance out at a certain point significantly below maxing out, then mana is too strong relative to damage options - but I suspect this is not the case.

Intelligence
I don't think there is a problem with Intelligence. Fundamentally, the value of offensive power versus defensive power (which is generally the major tradeoff you're making by investing in more Intelligence) is inherently subjective, and will change as the meta changes. We have already seen these kinds of shifts happen - how long has it been since you've seen a primarily spell-based build with 68 Intelligence? I do think it would be nice if base mana costs were more spread-out, so that there were a larger number of mana thresholds that each grant a bit less. I could also envision a system where the values in-between current thresholds interact with how your mana cost increases as you repeat a spell, but that's more complicated and would probably warrant its own post. Really, Strength and Dexterity are the skills that are losing out - everything else is pretty evenly useful imo.

Attack Speed Tier
Attack Speed Tier reducing items should be more common. The problem is not that Atlas is too strong - before Atlas, hybrid was effectively nonviable outside of a couple of niche cases (and Black because of the massive damage - oddly enough, Black was kind of balanced before Atlas). The problem is that Atlas is often the only choice for -tier. Making -tier uncoupled from a particular element or combination, and more widely available, would fix this - in exactly the same way that the addition of a second +tier chestplate fixed CoI always being used, or the addition of more big raw melee -tier items would fix Taurus being a necessity for any heavy melee build, or the addition of more raw spell boots and chestplates would fix Soul Signal and Memento almost always being needed for raw spell-oriented builds.

As for Attack Speed Tier boosting items, Gigavern and I had a very long discussion that spent quite some time on this as well. Under the current system, I don't think +tier should be tied too much to a particular set of elements. I do like the revamp idea of splitting EFA and ETA, but in that situation I think +tier items should be relatively common in both - however, the particular items tied to each of those two playstyles should orient themselves differently, with regard to the amount of damage and other benefits they bring. Items with larger damages should have a Def penalty to discourage use in EFA, while items will smaller damages are naturally limited from ETA due to not having as much damage. This reduces the current reliance on quad for melee, which is mostly done because there's just no other way to get enough +tier items otherwise. If there were options with various reqs but they targeted different kinds of playstyles using their other stats, we'd stop seeing the same setup for just about every tierstack build.

TL;DR attack speed items should be more common.


Wow I didn't expect to get to this today.

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Also I didn't talk about ingredients at all, but the balancing of ingredients is so different from the balancing of spells that it's kind of strange to talk about them together.

 

DPS Stuff
Regarding dps on various classes, here are some pretty typical numbers for endgame builds with no mythics. I've determined the spell numbers through setting up spell cycles and testing their viability for various speeds of casting and other factors. It's not nearly as rigorous as I'd like it to be unfortunately, but it should be pretty accurate overall. The range accounts for approximations I made, and also for the differences between tankier and glassier builds - e.g. for spells, the range is roughly the difference between builds with about 40-60 defensive sp, and builds with about 90-120 defensive sp. I used mana regen-based builds for this because it was simpler, so obviously the analysis is not complete (not to mention completely unrepresented playstyles like heavy melee), but it's better than just guessing entirely.

So, grain of salt, but probably pretty indicative, generally speaking.

Fast Melee Mage - 6-12k nominal* dps
Fast Melee Warrior - 7-15k nominal dps
Fast Melee Assassin - 8-17k nominal dps
Fast Melee Archer - 9-20k nominal dps (not that it matters because it's single-target)
Spell Mage, medium skill - 6-9k dps (7-8 mana regen 129 Int, or 9-10 mana regen, 105 Int, average about 2.5 Meteors per cycle, and the occasional improper aim)
Spell Mage, high skill - 9-13k dps (9-10 mana regen 129 Int, or 11-13 mana regen 105 Int, very accurate timing and aim on Meteors at nearly 4 per cycle)
Spell Warrior, medium skill - 6-9k dps (8-10 mana regen, 114 Int, generally can't/don't interrupt spells, but pretty efficient at following up quickly, dps can go higher if there's a very low ceiling)
Spell Warrior, high skill - 10-16k dps (ideal handling of mob knockback and perfect Uppercut canceling, 17-19 mana regen 114 Int)
Spell Assassin, medium skill - 12-16k dps (10-12 mana regen, 105 Int, 5 or 6 spell cycle, little to no handling of Multihit knockback)
Spell Assassin, high skill - 20-30k dps (17-19 mana regen, 105 Int, 9+ spells per cycle, ideal handling of Multihit knockback. If you're extremely skilled you can actually go higher than this with careful use of mana steal on top of the maxed out mana regen, in theory, but that's hard to actually produce in a build)
Spell Archer, medium skill - 12-20k dps (midrange safe-ish play with either mainly Bombs for the lower end, or Bombs and Storms for the higher end)
Spell Archer, high skill - 25-40k dps (point-blank range with careful stunlocks and Arrow Storm priority, I'm calling this high skill because while most players can do this on occasion to exploit gaps in a mob's spells or whatnot, it takes a pretty skilled player to maintain this playstyle constantly without dying somewhat often)

*High skill players can come very close to 100% of nominal dps on any attack speed. A medium skill player will generally reach about 70-80% of nominal dps on Super Fast, and higher percentages on slower attack speeds.

 

My take on the topic of mana is that mr/ms is undervalued on items compared to damage ids, leading to the complete dominance of spell-spam builds. A very simplified measure of spell damage output is mana*damage. This is very shallow but it isn't outright wrong and captures what I'm trying to show.

https://www.wynndata.tk/i/third+eye
https://www.wynndata.tk/i/water+sanctuary

Third Eye is entirely focused on mana, and int - while Water Sanctuary is focused entirely on damage. One way to look at the damage potential of items is to look at how their boosts compare to the player's initial stats. This has a flaw - items do not actually function alone and each stat is the other stats' multiplier. This is why damage-based items see the use they do. Nonetheless this can be used to show some advantages.

The player has 5/4 mr and 100% damage multiplier, but that's actually not true. Investments in a specific skill like agility or intelligence increases the power of their respective elements, increasing the effective element's damage output. Even with 68 in your choice of attacking element, perhaps defense (not using strength or dex as an example as they have an additional damage boost specific to the skill itself), the player's base fire damage is is 150%. This detail in particular gives mana its overwhelming advantage in damage potential more than anything else. Even disregarding Third Eye's other advantages, it increases a player's spell damage output by 80% while water sanc increases all water damage by 56.67%.

Note how I said "spell damage". I haven't even compared spell damage to melee damage. This is modified directly by intelligence. The more you have, the cheaper spells are and the more favorable spells become compared to melee. At 68, a common benchmark for spell builds, this doesn't provide a huge advantage. I want to provide an example, so lets use spin attack even though spell damage varies widely and interactions between spells complicate this number greatly. Spin attacking whenever its available in a fight provides 83.33% of melee dps (a 200% damage spell performed every 2.4 seconds. This number increases quickly, capping out at over 200% of melee dps at 150. Of course spell cost increases as you use more spells, making the effect of int decrease as the spell cost increase is bigger in proportion with higher int compared to base, and as you have more mana you can use more spells, but this doesn't really offset the benefit much, especially with optimal spell use.

The last, and in my opinion the most important reason spells are valued is the extreme amount of utility they provide. With a spell build, even one that isn't focused on spam, you have a significant amount of utility at your hand. Wynncraft is much harder in my opinion without high mana/int as bosses have far more control over fights. And with spell builds you can perform stunlocks, blow enemies away, and evade easily, all while having mana to spare. I believe this is why 8-10 mana and 68 int became the standard, you have just enough utility to play the game without having to consider timing your spells to stay safe from enemies.

This is all very theoretical because it ignores the practical limitations of spellcasting, but this is why I believe spellspam is so dominant. I do like the take @Druser has on this topic, that spells should have the edge over melee as spellspam requires high mechanical skill past a certain point. I find myself agreeing with this point, but I don't think the difference should be so large especially considering the increased utility spells provide. At what point does every enemy become a walking sandbag where your goal is to do the most damage to it.

I think that treating mana as a more powerful id than it is now is a great step towards dialing back spells. This doesn't mean every item would have less mana, it could manifest itself as items with mana having fewer ids, especially damage ids. Or it could work in tandem with an intelligence nerf, but due to the complexities of spell damage I don't have any ideas what that would be like.

 

Agree on the utility. Playing Assassin melee has been quite challenging because of this.

I'd like to note that the opinion on spells taking more skill is Major's opinion (from Discord) - I don't think the difference in skill is as large as stated. It's easy to know when you're messing up spells, but harder to know exactly how much melee damage you're missing out on due to the timing of your clicks.

 

Depending on how you use war screams, you can get more than this.
You can war scream when they reach the top of an uppercut to deal more DPS.
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Sorry for the random message, I feel like I need to slowly teach people how to warrior.

 

super slow: .51 per second
very slow: .83 per second
slow: 1.5 per second
normal: 2.05 per second
fast: 2.5 per second
very fast: 3.1 per second
super fast: 4.3 per second

super slow -> very slow: 63% increase
very slow -> slow: 81% increase
slow -> normal: 37% increase
normal -> fast: 22% increase
fast -> very fast: 24% increase
very fast -> super fast: 39% increase


don't get me wrong--it's perfectly fine for the difference between the attack speeds to be varied. it's just, i've always thought it's a bit much, y'know?

such a large difference in ratios can make it kinda hard to balance melee and stuff, i'd imagine. also, a little minor thing is that it makes it harder to balance the time it takes to charge powder specials. it's a small difference, but i think it's just worth mentioning.


this leads to my main point: attack tier by itself, is NOT an unbalanced stat, but the way lots of things around it tend to function make it to be a rather difficult thing to balance.

because of how ls/ms works, it's often overwhelmingly preferable to drive your attack speed into the ground for hybrids (rather than boost it for an equal melee-spell hybrid) because it becomes more consistent with slower speeds. at the same time, because of the large difference in hits per second at slower speeds, it's hardly a difficult choice whether to stack raw melee on a fast weapon or to tierstack a slow one.

everything around it is influenced so strongly by it that regardless of whether it's positive or negative, the effect of it on a build will undoubtedly be one of the largest, and as a result, it overshadows a lot of other things that would otherwise see some use.


since i'm lazy, i think i'm gonna end it here. i'll probably add a few more things if i think of anything though.

 

I tried some cycles like that but couldn't get it to work, could you post a cycle and the number of warscream hits you can get?

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Giga and I have been talking about "what will it take to make fast hybrid viable?" So when I find time, I'll put together a theoretical stat pool for viable fast hybrid, with the appropriate calculations to show that it does comparable dps.

 

A lot of discussion from the post over estimate mana and spell right now. I really think that the problem is archer spells. They deal ridiculous anounts of damage, outsurpassing any other playstyle by a significant margin. (maybe hybrid archer is close)

So I don't think spells and mana as a whole should be nerfed, but really archer should be kept under control. It's laughable that mage, a spell oriented class has significantly lower spell damage than archer and even assassin.

So yes, nerf archer.

 

How many I can get to hit is another question.
Depends on the hitbox of the mob, and how close I am to being under them, closer I manage to get, the more that hit.
That doesn't usually happen.

And yeah, I can do a few test runs to try and see how many I get on average.
Note: I don't normally play int builds, so I don't do this often.
__

I'm getting like 5 hits on avarage, but its hard to know the exact number.
It's a lot harder now with the new war scream, but I can still do it.

Here's a video.

 

bUT mAgE haVE hEAl aNd tAnKieR tHaN tHoSe cLaSS!!1!111
jk buff mage's dmg and heal

 

No

 

I think mana steal should be more powerful than mana regen cos you have to take a risk by going close to the mobs to get mana, unless of course you're super tanky. As for tanky builds with mana steal... ah well I think it'll work out cos even if a tanky build had spammability rivaling spellspam builds, damage per spell would have to be sacrificed in order to become that tanky - so the idea of sacrificing dmg to become tanky would still be in place, but it would just be less significant. I feel like everybody says that mana steal would be too op if it was 100% consistent, but in reality it would be the excat same as mana regen except you'd have to hit enemies to get the mana.

Also ty for making this discussion thread, these debates are kinda cool

 

There is the fact that melee can (except Archer) hit multiple mobs at once, so in practice mana steal already does have that extra power in many situations.