Game Design Why 2.0 broke Wynncraft for me (and why it's been broken the entire time)

Pretty sure i'm going to be hated. I don't care either way. I'm not looking forward to replying to counter arguments or editing this post to be more accurate, this is a dump of my thoughts and of my own experiences. I know this game still has potential, but i'm not sure i'll ever gonna be playing it again.

First off, i wanna say that i respect the hard work behind this game's development, but the issues that i've noticed just couldn't go unspoken. Most of what you'll see here will be my own opinion - it may have been subject to an internal "echo chamber", it may be wrong or incomplete, but i wanna share my thoughts here; see if you can relate.

When you come around searching for minecraft MMOs, you have to choose two of the three: obsolesence, imbalance, indifference. There is never a server to do everything right, and there's rarely one to succeed. Wynncraft rests upon the first two pillars here, with obsolesence growing slowly over time and imbalance getting way higher with the release of 2.0.

So let's start with the obsolesence. For as long as I've been familiar with it, Wynncraft's been full of small bugs, annoyances, inconsistencies, with all them combined halfway ruining my experience. (rant below)

Spoiler: rant

For example, you can't pick up items if you have all slots in your inventory taken up, but still have space for the item in a non-full stack; same goes for buying items from NPCs. This same little detail is why /itemlock can (or could) delete your items if you had a full inventory. Many quests can have you get stuck if you leave at a wrong point, be that in quest progression or below the map - thought you were smart by using a tp scroll to get out of the island you were supposed to carefully search for resources? too bad, the whole quest is now softlocked, and you can never access Galleon's Graveyard on this class! You died to the final boss in All Roads to Peace? Well screw you, you can't get to the place of the quest anymore, there is no quest marker or any inidcation at all of where the orcs' outpost is! Many quests are still using command blocks, and you still have a command blocker application form.

I could probably list more issues, but let's get to the main point. Why 2.0 ruined it for me.
TLDR: instead of letting me more freedom in how i want to play, it's taken away that freedom.

For context: before the update, I had a Dex/Str mage build, focusing on the two stats and putting little into the rest, choosing equipment increasing main attack damage, mana steal/regen, and focusing of fast attack speed. Gameplay was active and risky, usually dealing a lot of damage really fast to a group of enemies with the main attack, supporting it with a downpour of meteor and heal spells. That was the playstyle I was happy with and which i found best for me. When they started teasing the community with 2.0 and presented a few archetypes, I knew i was going with the Arcane archetype.

Too bad it turned out to be nowhere close to what i wanted. Not only was it complicated to play as, it also focused heavily on the fire element, which i didn't wanna use. It completely eradicated any potential for quick healing, which i used to rely on. It was absolutely not quite right for me to play. I wanted neither of the other archetypes, too. The only archetype to provide proper healing capabilities was Light Bender, which used all the completely wrong attacking methods and felt really wrong to choose. Riftwalker made too heavy use of the Ice Snake spell, a water-element spell, which felt really wrong for me to use. On top of that, all of the archetypes were overly complex to play as.

My point is that before 2.0 you had infinite possible playstyles through different gear combinations and skill point allocations. Now there are 3. With only one of them being viable. The idea of archetypes and classes having different difficuty levels is atrocious to imagine from any game design standpoint. What's the point of having those 3 archetypes even if one of them is superior? And they admit to it, and it's intended.

If you're ever progressing through this skill tree, you're inevitably finding yourself locking yourself out of some of the archetypes and having to stick with mostly one - mixing is barely existent here. And in order to be efficent in this archetype, you have to play along with its spell and element choices, dropping the number of possible playstyles to a single digit number.

I simply couldn't find myself a place anymore. None of the three paths really fit. I'm glad if you enjoyed the update, but I could simply not adapt, there not being a good place for my playstyle anymore. It's ironic how the update designed to diversify people's gameplay made it way harder for one to be their own thing.

To summarize: there is little mixing between archetypes - you pretty much can only choose one, each one needs you to go into very specific elements and equipment in order to be efficent, and if you wanna use a differently balanced build and go into a different set of elements which none of the avaivable archetypes cover, there is no place for you. That all limits the previously unlimited routes in how you built your character to 3-6 possible combinations.

So what went wrong with the skill tree? The red abilities. It would have been so much better to have the skill tree as a side progression system that'd enhance, not overshadow the rest of your playstyle-building.

And that's all I have to say.

 

hey im not mad at you. yes i love wynncraft and i wish everyone else did too everything you said here i can agree with. the amount of quest problems people experience (but somehow not me) especially things like qira vouchers is stupid and honestly i think smaller, quality of life changes should be a hire priority rather than only making massive changes to the game. Im hoping the next few updates will help but idrk

DISCLAIMER: im not trying to downplay anyones work and honestly i probably couldnt have made something like this but here are just some thoughts

on the imbalance: WHY IS MAGE SO BORING. yes i agree, back in 1.20 playing mage you could play hybrid, poison, heavy melee, tierstack, spellspam or even spellsteal with lunar spine. but now arcanist is unplayable for non mythic or crafted users, riftwalker is the only class i will say to the developers face is uncool and boring (besides of course paladin) and lightbender is hard to aim and even with massive healing, in the end game all that matters is damage which lightbender doesnt have, even with winded. (this is of course assuming your non mythic)

honestly ive been slowing down on wynncraft, over the past few months ive been wanting to start a wynn yt but im slowly doubting if its a good idea.

________________________________

all in all we love wynncraft but with so many problems (and balance isnt only bad for mage obviously, whenever i play tna even with new balance patch my acro or shade seems to do nothing) im not sure i can call it my favourite game

 

I feel like much of this could be fixed by just having more than 3 archetypes, in addition to that I do think that archetypes should be easier to combine with one another, the current skill trees are all really restrictive (it's even worse on some other classes) and there's not enough niche abilities that aren't central to an archetype but are still useful in builds. I think this is less an issue with the content team having the wrong idea and more with ability trees being incomplete, they really do feel bare bones to me at least right now.

(The second half of this paragraph I specifically disagree with. The point of archetypes that are more difficult is that people who want the game to be harder (like me sometimes) will use them. It's definitely reasonable for there to be somewhat of a spectrum of difficulty between the archetypes; some archetypes will have a higher skill floor but be more fun to play, some will have a higher skill floor but get better DPS if you can get good at using them (like fallen). This only really becomes an issue when the aforementioned problem of the restrictive ability trees gets factored in, because then about a third of the playstyles that existed in 1.20 for a certain class might just become worse without good reason.)


As a side note, this was a pretty nice post for you to make, I honestly think a lot of people will relate to a lot of these problems (I certainly do) and it's nice to have someone just lay out all the complaints in one thread. It'd be kind of silly for anyone to get mad about this anyways even if they don't agree since more information is pretty much always a good thing in this context.

 

Really? Tierstack mage has been always dead except that sigularity tstack with crafted rings, and heavy melee stays almost the same (nobody used it before as well).

Poison is dead but is it really worth calling fun playstyle.

Spellsteal mage is still good, it's just lunar spine that got worse.

I think it's just fundamental flaw of mage. Its base damage is too low even considering its healing ability.

 

whomp whomp

 

this
this one little bug
continually makes me want to throw a rock at my monitor
it's just SO ANNOYING AAAA

 

Minecraft is a really hard game to work with, even Hypixel which has dozens of full time admins has a lot of minor bugs. I've worked with Minecraft a bit and it's insane how easily bugs can appear out of nowhere, with no easy fix.
The devs have also fixed a lot of the soft locks, in fact I've never encountered one in my 4+ playthroughs (that I can remember).

This is fine game design, having a archetype be more difficult but more rewarding is good because then more skilled players can play the harder archetypes and less skilled players can play the easier archetypes. If they were all the same difficulty people would just flood to a single archetype. The problem comes when a harder archetype is worse than an easier one (which is the case with some archetypes (Shadestepper moment)).

Mixing is actually quite prevalent in most builds, in fact many of the most powerful builds are a mix of two archetypes. There are a few that lock you out of a specific archetype though like arcanist and light bender, or sharpshooter and boltslinger.

You still have infinite possible playstyles, items have remained the same. Now it is infinite playstyles x 3. Before, you had spellspam mage. Now, you can have spellspam riftwalker, lightbender or arcanist or a mix between the 3.
Sure, melee arcanist or heavy spell riftwalker won't be the greatest but damage isn't the only thing that makes an archetype fun.
If you want to run TNA with a bunch of sweats getting a 'viable' build is more important but even then you have a lot of freedom.

 

Honestly, I get what you’re saying, and I do think that 2.0’s biggest issue is that it lacks real support for melee/hybrid builds in terms of archetypes, but I’m… kind of struggling to see why you don’t use Riftwalker if you just want a playstyle that's the same or similar to 1.20 mage. You say that you don’t like it because it’s ice snake heavy but realistically speaking you don’t really need to use ice snake at all on it once you unlock breathless, and since you seem to be running a more melee oriented hybrid a riftwalker or rift/lightbender would fit pretty well with the playstyle you seem to want. Like, this ability tree has a lot of complex stuff in it but realistically speaking it plays pretty much the same as a 1.20 hybrid mage, just with more damage for your spells and a nerfed heal (which was honestly a deserved nerf).

It depends on the tree, but this isn't really true; Warrior and Shaman can both mix trees pretty liberally, to the point where their hybrids are usually stronger than going full into one archetype, Mage can mix riftwalker and light bender pretty easily, archer can mix trees but doesn't get much benefit from doing so (outside of guardian bow and mana trap shenanigans), and assassin is usually the most restrictive.

You really don't; I do think that it's dumb that elemental masteries exist but you can just ignore them, and honestly most people kind of do from what I've seen.

That's just... objectively incorrect. Having a wide variety of options that take varying degrees of skill is usually healthy for most RPGs (and a lot of other genres like MOBAs or hero shooters); it allows for a wider variety of players to be able to play the game, as it gives a path for players to learn more complex options after they get the basics of the game down if they want to while not forcing people who don't want to out of the game. Also, the classes already had some pretty varied skill levels back in 1.20; assassin was a far more combo-focused class with a higher skill ceiling than something like mage or shaman, and spell spam assassin was more complex than heavy melee assassin.

That's a balance issue caused by the fact that the archetype system is new, not really a foundational flaw with the system. Like, intelligence used to be the best stat in the game, and defense used to only apply to neutral damage. We've been here before; it just takes time to sort these things out.

 

Yeah, a big factor that drove me away from Wynncraft was the abandonment of the old Classes. It's a shame that we don't even get the option to use the old Spell sets; we didn't realize how fun they were until we lost them.

One big suggestion idea that I've gotten back to working on is having two Sub-Archetypes per Archetype to fix the issue of each Archetype having one set-in-stone playstyle, in addition to adding 2 more Archetypes to each Class which are designed to support the Class' base or pre-2.0 design. 2 of the 5 Archetypes don't have a pair of Sub-Archetypes.

For example, here's my idea for the Assassin's current Archetypes:

Spoiler

1A) Traceless Shadestepper: The current form of Shadestepper, which is certainly not for everyone, but also really fun to kill enemies with! (Also, Backstab is being promoted to Headstab so you can strike from just about any angle you please!)

1B) Reaping Shadestepper: Pops in and out of Vanish to land strikes, sowing chaos to reap the rewards! Very reminiscent of the pre-2.0 Assassin, minus the Speed V.

2A) Heartless Lovestar: Lure in enemies from afar with a lovely facade and stack a lot of damage-increasing debuffs onto them. Once they've gotten close, substitute your "Cease Horny" Bat with a Dagger for nasty bursts of damage!

2B) Intimate Lovestar: Seduce enemies with Smoke Perfumes to debuff their damage output, then heal up at close range by soaking yourself in their bloodily - I mean, bodily fluids! Trades Sprint and some damage output for greater survivability.

3A) Bounty Trickster: Summon unstoppable clones when casting Spin Attack and Uppercut to chase after and stab your enemies! Sure, they dissipate after striking, but that also leaves fewer traces (something which certain Archetypes can't do because they're too busy abusing Wynncraft's lack of an age rating.)

3B) Showman Trickster: The 2.0 Trickster kept intact under a new name. As far as I know, there's nothing wrong with it...I think.

4) Bladestormer: Whose idea was it to give Assassin Speed V?...Because Bladestormer's bringing that back! Be the ever-so-slightly less stealthy, Dagger-driving, Mach 4 glass cannon and Melee up some crimson messes!

5A) Parkour Acrobat: Does various things to make a more accessible form of Acrobat. For one, it lets you wall jump with Dashes to stay airborne!

5B) Reckless Arcobat: 2.0 Acrobat with a few buffs to make it even more fun to ricochet around the map with Spells and Abilities. Still incredibly hard to use, but much more worth the aristhritis.

Is this a bit of a half-baked ideas dump? Yes, but it's fun to share them! (And trust me, they've been in the oven for months now.)

 

tldr
i agree with uzbuz