Wynncrafts Best And Worse Updates

Charms are a cool idea, too bad the only way to get them is through raids :/

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Every time I saw the notification I felt dirty, I'm not sure if there's a way to turn it off :(
Not sure they can remove it since people did pay for it, but I would give it up in a heartbeat.

 

Apparently there is, but that still doesn't change the fact that Champions literally have an advantage over every other player when it comes to bombs.

It's ironic that the Wynntils devs were told specifically not to add a bomb tracker feature because it would be unfair to people that didn't have Wynntils, and yet the devs here think that a bomb tracker is okay just because it's behind a paywall. It doesn't even matter that there's a random delay, the very existence of a bomb tracker, especially when combined with reserved slots + /switch (which I'm aware is not Champion-exclusive), makes it broken.

It's just so tiring trying to get into prof worlds and looking at the list of players in that world and seeing that they're just full of players I recognise as Champions. It seems like you have to buy Champion to get into these worlds, or just buy your own bombs.

 

Okay I guess a better analogy would be saying an appetizer is better than the main course. Or that a patch was better than a whole update. It's just not accurate or representative to compare them because they're widely different and have different purposes. And even if that was the case, the original Gavel update wait was even longer than the 1.20 wait and was way, WAY less polished. So either way 1.20 should not be last.

Yes it does; it's like saying the resource tunnel added in 1.19 in Molten Heights was as important as the Road to Dern or even the Eldritch Outlook. The trade market was a positive addition to the game and much needed one yes. But it just made trading easier in-game; something that you've could've managed with the forum account previously. Whereas you couldn't do professions or a certain quest or dungeon before the update came out, and most importantly, the later is actual content of the game. Wynncraft isn't a trading simulator. Which is why the latter outweighs the former. The total world rebuild beyond the purpose of adapting for professions was entirely cosmetic though. So it adds nothing to acutal content or lore or even gameplay. Personally I didn't like some the newer builds like Nivla Forest and Nessak. Which I know some people don't agree with, but that just goes to show how subjective and flimsy it is. What isn't subjective though is that people mostly play when there's new content; not only when the map is revamped without new content. Simply put, those 2 do not outweigh or are equivalent to actual content or gameplay.

Like you said, 1.18 was about professions, so it's not equivalent to not talking about Corkus in 1.16 or Gavel in 1.14. And I already mentioned D&D and other features so I'm not ignoring them.

See this is what annoys the living crap out of me; people acknowledge professions are majorly flawed in the sense that they're not enjoyable for most people. But instead of actually wanting to fix them people just say, "Don't play them." You yourself acknowledged how frustrating it is to wait for an update, so I don't know why people keep thinking, "It's bad but then just don't play it" is a valid response. Just because something is optionable doesn't make it good or that it shouldn't change. Dungeons and quests and raids are optionable, but it would be insulting if the CT just said not to play them because they refused to change them. And even though they're optionable, they're still a huge part of the game in the sense that they had to revamp the map for them, replace every tree, redo every mob loot pool, and pushed back better content like the RtD. And they do impact the game balance as well, especially when it comes to consumables and crafted water bows. Being able to buy crafted items doesn't absolve professions of any of its issues either because you can get on fine without them and it's a bitch an half to have someone else craft the item you want. And it still doesn't do anything about how professions work or gets rid of the toxic mentality that only a few people should be able to enjoy them.

Going off of this guide, you'd need stacks of ingredients and hundreds of crafts WITH bombs to level up your crafting levels for each consumable up to level 90. You've admitted that they're not for everyone so I don't know why you're trying to say they're not that bad grind-wise. Especially if you're point is that people like them because they're grindy. The fact that you admit that consumables are better than other professions shows how unbalanced they are. Just because you've done them up to a point without bombs doesn't say anything about how long it actually does to do it or if that is a reasonable amount of time and effort for most players. Which again, given that you've said they're not for everyone I'm inclined to believe that it's the latter.

 

The Trade Market is not Jesus. Simply put. Again, it was a good addition, but it's not actual content like dungeons, guilds, raids, quests, or even discoveries.

BOI! It's one thing to say a raid isn't good as X; it's another to say 1.20 barely added any content compared to 1.18, 1.19, or 1.16. 1.18 only had 1 new dungeon, not 2. Not to mention that the only unique dungeons were FF and EO bc of corrupted dungeons, so it's really less than 1 dungeon per update than anything. And say what you want about raids, but they're not the same as a typical dungeon content-wise and actually involve teamwork. So it's extremely misleading to cast 3 whole unique raids as the same as corrupted dungeons. Especially Orphion's out of all of them.

And no 1.20 isn't even comparable to the others quest-wise either. 1.19 had 8 new ones, 1.18 had 7 reworked and 4 new ones, and 1.16 had 5 new ones and 3 reworked ones. 1.20 had 13 reworked quests and 3 new ones. So it's nearly double to nearly 50% more quests than what they had. Don't even get me started on the number of discoveries. You're also ignoring housing, which again, you might not like it but it is content. Minecraft is a game about building after all; especially if you're gonna say that the 1.18 cosmetic map revamp was as important as professions. And hey, at least housing is a lot more accessible and player-friendly than say *cough* professions *cough*.

I think you're being unnecessarily negative about 1.20 from that comment.

 

It's fine if you think 1.20 shoudn't be last, but nothing you said is good enough to convince me that it's better then any other update, more specifically 1.15. This is an ordered list, something needs to be at the bottom, and in this case it's 1.20. That doesn't mean 1.20 is a bad update, it just means I think every other update is better.

And no, it really doesn't. The fact that SE was about the SE doesn't mean the only thing I should consider when judging it is how good the road to Dern is, you need to consider how good all the additions to the game in the update were. 1.20 was about Gavel so does that mean I shouldn't count, or at least discount the Corkus quests because they're not part of Gavel? No, of course not, that would be silly. I'm not ranking how well each update fits their theme, I'm ranking how good I think each update is and to me, the trade market is enough to bring 1.18 to the top without question. I'm not going to ignore the single greatest addition because some people don't like professions, that would be dumb.

As for the world rebuild being entirely cosmetic, yeah, of course they are, I never claimed the rebuild was anything more. Wynn was always a nice looking world but it was wildly inconsistent and 1.18's rebuilds brought the whole world up to one standard which is something I highly value. Again, if you're focusing on 1.18, I've made it extremely clear the trade market is my selling point there, if nothing else shipped with the update it would still be at the top of the list, if you want me to convince me 1.18 should be lower that's the only point of attack, that goes for professions too. I don't care if people don't like them, most peoples issue with them is that they can't do them quickly, but that was the entire point. The only reason why I've played Wynn for the past two years was to finish that grind, the fact that they gave me two years of content is more then I can say about any other update on that list. I also never claimed professions were good, but there's nothing wrong with saying if you don't like it don't play it. There are plenty of quests that I refuse to do any more because I don't like them, there are plenty of dungeons I don't run any more because I don't find them fun. The whole point of having a lot of content is so you can pick and chose what you want to do.

Next, I don't see it as a bad grind because it's not a grind to me. I worked on leveling on and off for two full years. If you were doing professions every day for hours until you hit 100, yeah, that would be a grind, but that's not how they're designed to work. I leveled up once, maybe twice per day in the gathering professions in between running dungeons and leveling up other characters, I only put in real hours during double xp weekends where my time counted for more. That guide is also wildly misleading, with loot bonus you can easily get 6-8 stacks of any one resource in an hour. It also doesn't account for the fact that mobs drop more then one item so if you do multiple profs it becomes easier or the fact that using 3* ingredients you can get from various sources really speed up the leveling speed. He also didn't use the best item route for time efficiency, he literally used 36 stacks of royal bug blood and a metric shit ton of golier iron for no reason, there's better stuff out there which is just as easy to get at higher levels.

Finally I don't care if the professions aren't balanced among themselves either, there's no reality where some professions weren't going to be better then others. I got into it because I wanted to make LI runs easier and I was able to start making extremely useful potions at alchemy level 75. If you want good loot running gear, you need armoring and tailoring at 103, if you want good food, you can do that at level 50ish and if all you want is XP scrolls for dungeon runs, I'm like 99% sure you can do that super early on. Each profession has a point where it becomes good, the higher that point the more the items you craft will be worth, it's all about balance. I said this before, but it's worth repeating, I would take professions over raids any day of the week.

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If you can say professions aren't content because you don't like them, I can say the same about raids. Also, raids are in fact, typical dungeon content. They have token rooms, they have parkour and best of all, they have survival. There isn't a single room in any of the raids we have now which couldn't be adapted into rooms in dungeons in some capacity. As far as I'm concerned, raids are just party dungeons which is something the game has had before (looking at you, animal dungeon). Raids do nothing to distinguish themselves from dungeons in any meaningful way to me, if you want to elaborate on why you think they're different I would love to hear it but just saying they're different isn't exactly compelling evidence.

The trade market is actually Jesus reincarnated. Why he chose to become an NPC in some random block game is beyond me, I guess it's true he works in mysterious ways, but that's him alright.

I can't even begin to quantify how much time the trade market has saved me and the fact that people were panicking for a month when it went down is a sign that it's a critical feature. If you want to argue about it's value, please bring a talking point with some depth.

For that last part, I count FF and CSST's remakes as a half each for a grand total of 2. If you don't want to count them that way, that's fine, but CSST (and SST) was also almost a total remake from start to end so I'm almost inclined to consider that an entire dungeon too. No other dungeon has had such drastic changes made to it, UG was kind of close I guess but even then most of the rooms were the same, the only carryover from old SST was the first room, part of the second room, the last room and the boss. 2/3rds of SST any given run was totally new, if you count all the extra rooms which are randomly chosen that goes up to about 9/10ths.

Also, at what point am I crossing the threshold between necessarily negative and unnecessarily negative, I would really love to know for future reference. In my review of 1.20 I went out of my way to be as fair as possible and represent it positively, I also directly state that the review is fairly important to read for my fair view on the update.

The reality is, I'm not being negative, I'm losing patience for people telling me that my opinions are wrong for arbitrary reasons like "1.20 is better then 1.15 because it has more stuff" or "1.18 is bad because professions". If you can't see 1.18 as anything beyond the profession update, I have no obligation to see 1.20 as anything but the update that made guilds worse or the update that somehow messed up something as basic as tomes.

 

going to split my personal list a little differently than all of the ones I've seen as I don't think rankings actually convey the message I wish to send with them:

updates i actually enjoyed:
- 1.14ish Gavel + Gameplay Update
Gavel is sick as is most of it's content, and even if both it itself (prior to 1.20) was extremely dated and the gameplay system is too now, it was incredible at the time and a fantastic experience.

updates i don't care about:
- 1.17 Dungeons and Discoveries Update
yeah discoveries are pretty cool as are dungeons, just never found this update to be super significant but not bad either, nice qol i guess
- 1.15 Wynnter Fair Update
this sure existed

updates i dislike the majority of the content of:
- 1.18 Economy Update
profs, at launch, were fucking garbage, the trade market hardly functioned and remains the most bug filled and fucked system in the game (DESPITE guilds existing) and i personally don't care about the challenge modes but i at least can see their value. also, completely awful launch that pissed a huge amount of the playerbase of unlike even what 1.20 has done
- 1.16 Corkus Update
god why is corkus in the game why did they spend over a year of development time on a meme idea why why why
at least it has kinda cool magic i guess
and a furry icon now let's fucking go
- 1.19 Road to Dern
pretty unpopular opinion probably but SE is imo the worst looking area in the game. outside of that, this update shoehorned the funny gigantic cutscene system for quests which, while cool, lacked any inclusion of SKIPPING said cutscenes, making basically all quests past this point insanely painful to do more than once. EO is super bland for a dungeon and probably one of the worst designed outside of the eye itself, but the eye gets super stale very quick because it's just super early beta test raid boss without any of the epic raid mechanic and with the giant hp sponge part. but! we got shaman which is sick even though it broke the game so some points go there
also hunted lmao
- 1.20 Gavel Reborn
awful launch that barely was executed better than 1.18! as for the actual content, housing is really the only part that isn't completely fucking broken and super rushed, and even housing has some of that, just less so. the new quests are centered around basically a universally hated NPC by the playerbase, raids are too broken to actually run consistently but when they work it feels very just hp wall like the eye but bigger, and guilds are a shitshow that i can't even begin to describe in one little paragraph
additionally, champion! bomb bell ruined Prof parties as it's now basically required to have the extremely expensive rank to get in worlds (less so for normal bomb parties, but it's there) and gonna be real the yellow color absolutely sucks imo however i can't fault them too much as the color choice is limited

yeah so overall quite like wynn maybe they should rollback like five years but otherwise pretty satisfied good stuff

 

Just wanted to start by saying that I'm a huge fan of this take, I don't agree with it, but it's bold beyond my wildest beliefs so thanks for putting that out there.

Anyways, that was a roller coaster to read, not totally sure that your description of Corkus matches where it's placed, feels more like an I don't care about it to me, but I'm sure you have your reasons (beyond what you wrote). I also didn't really think much about the unskipable cutscenes, I didn't really know why I didn't like some of the new quests but that's probably why, would be great if they added skip cutscene buttons or had a command to do that like they have for the tutorial. As for Shaman, he's not doing so hot right now so that kinda sucks. Still a cool class though.

Not totally sure how I feel about rolling back the past 5 years, I really love having bank pages and a not shit quest book, but you have some good points, there's definitely some stuff that needs work :(

Anyways, I think the main takeaway here is that 1.21 should be the Bloomi update and take 4 years to release :P

 

ive thought about it a bit

gonna just do all five two hour total length realm of light escapades to fight orphion on all 14 classes

then be excited to do every other endgame quest in the game

there's a good reason i do not play anymore i assure you

 

Oh, then sorry for misintepreting.

But I think 1.18 suffers from the same problem you pointed out in 1.20: it's all bark, no bite. While the TM's a great addition, proffesions suffer from grindiness, and lets face it, they can't be better than mythics, like Salted promised.

 

first impressions matter a lot, 1.18 is the only update i didnt play because the content wasnt interesting so its basically a void in my memory but its still 100% the worst update to me because of the shitshow that are professions
like theyre so bad they bring the update as a whole way down
i think gavel reborn suffers from the same problem where the side content (boss altar, new builds, all the discoveries and quests reworks) is so much better than the main content (raids, rol questline, guilds)

Spoiler: my list

updates i didnt like/dont have enough content to be worth caring about:

economy: literally the only update that didnt make me want to play once
wynnter: nothing update, wynnter is really fun but thats it
dungeons and discoveries: nothing update, but discoveries are cool and permanent
gavel reborn: couldve been the best update if it was well executed. too bad raids suck, rol questline is highly debatable in how well it works as the main storyline of wynn and guilds are guilds
in no particular order except economy is at the very bottom

cool updates:

3. corkus: very little content but it was pretty cool
2. rtd: i dont even like half the silent expanse quests but its still one of my favourite updates. also literally the only time the lore actively advanced without raising 500 new questions, looking at you realm of "find out next time on wynncraft" light
1. gavel: the item system is theoretically an unlimited amount of content, and the 3k hours we were promised in the economy update pales in comparison to gavel. gameplay alone tops all other updates so pairing it with gavel is just unfair lol

 

I think ranking the updates can be really difficult as there's so much good and (sadly) a few negatives in each update too. So to rank them, I'm going to focus on the best of each update, judging it by how many good features there were as well as how good those features were:

Preliminary judgement:

Gavel Update: The landmass and the quests (Yes, this is extremely general, but until this point in Wynncraft, there genuinely wasn't a great deal to do, Gavel fixed this by adding a MASSIVE area to explore and plenty of quests to do as well).

Gameplay Update: The Seaskipper (Anyone remember life before Seaskipper? It was horrible, this addition was (and still is) one of the best QoL features in the game). So many QoL additions, I don't know where to start. Sprint bar. Dungeons revamps. Powders getting uses.

Wynnter Update: The songs (They were amazing, enough said).

Corkus Update: Fallen Factory dungeon and Legendary Island (These were both fun additions. Fallen Factory is widely considered the best-written and a highly enjoyable dungeon. LI was a much-needed endgame challenge with actually decent rewards). Plus a fun new area.

Dungeons and Discoveries Update: ...This a tricky one for me. Discoveries were nice, but weren't actually a particularly useful/impressive feature. There were lots of QoL additions, but again, nothing special. I guess the addition of black market items was useful as so many godly items existed, but this is just another decent QoL change. I hate to say this about any update, but this one was just disappointing.

Economy Update: Trade market was amazing. Armour-stand models were epic. Revamped areas were gorgeous. (Professions are something to talk about in a full review of 1.18, I won't go into a detailed discussion about them here).

The Silent Expanse: Shaman class was awesome. The mob health bar was PERFECT - it had been needed for so long (I can't think how we all survived with the old one xD). Major ID's were really cool. Fabled items were an amazing way to bridge the gap from legendary to mythic (although the amount of them in-game was disappointing). Ingredient pouch was brilliant. Profession changes were necessary. (I won't mention the landmass as, and I hate to say it, it's horribly designed, like 60% of the area is inaccessible walls and spikes)

Gavel Reborn: Raids are great fun (whilst glitchy). The amount of lore and discoveries is beyond impressive. The new quests are (generally) incredibly fun or at least of a really high quality. Sadly, I can't talk about guilds as (even though there's loads of new stuff) they don't interest me. Finally, forgery chest!

Ranking time:

8th: Dungeons and Discoveries - 3/10
7th: Wynnter Update - 3.5/10
6th: Corkus - 5.5/10
5th: Gavel - 6.5/10
4th: Gavel Reborn - 7/10
3rd: Silent Expanse - 7.5/10
2nd: Gameplay Update - 8/10
1st: Economy Update - 8.5/10

Obviously, this is all just my opinion.
There are, of course, plenty of issues with updates which I haven't really addresses, but like I said, I'm trying to focus on the positives of each update (although I had to mention SE's awful design).

 

Ok, I guess it's fair to say you personally don't care about quests and such, but considering they are essentially the main content of the game and 16 of them were fully revamped or added in 1.20, it easily added more content in general than other updates. (Also, quest reworks are definitely important, especially for newer players first experiencing the game doing quests as the main content. They're also very repeatable, seeing as they all got reset for everyone who had already done them.) I also can't really speak for how good the 1.18 rebuilds were, seeing as I've only played 1.19 and 1.20, but from what I've seen more was rebuilt in 1.18, so if you only care about rebuilds and not quests or discoveries, I can see how 1.18 would be better in that regard. However, it's still not fair to say that 1.20 added less content than other updates just because you personally don't care about the type of content it added, as you do right here:

1.16 LI is absolutely not harder. If anything, the mere fact that you need to have a specific build and playstyle that apparently only you and few others have successfully used makes it a lot harder. When I tried the build I used for getting a medallion in 1.19 LI on TCC, the boss phase shredded me. You could say that that's just because it's the wrong build type (which it was), but unless TCC builds somehow can't do LI easily as well, TCC is still harder. I don't have much experience with 1.20 LI, but you'd have a really hard time convincing me that any build that can handle TCC easily couldn't manage with 1.19 LI.

My point wasn't that it had more content, it was that it had at least 4 times as much content. (Since it took 4 times as long to make.) This is getting back into personal content preferences again, but as I said before, 1.20 added a lot more content than 1.15, and you personally not caring about it doesn't change that. This is your subjective listing, of course, but you've already said you want people to argue about it, and I personally find quests and discoveries to be the most important content in the game so far.

Ok, I do see where this argument comes from, but I will remind you that you said here that you would think an update with a 2 year wait containing only the trade market would be the best update, by far, in Wynn.
I know this is all subjective, but such an update could literally kill the server by making everyone wait 2 years for a single (albeit important) QOL improvement.

(Also, if you think 1.20 should have something like that, try suggesting it, it may be added. I know you said earlier that you don't want to join CT because of the way the game's being run, but if you think a change would single-handedly move 1.20 from last to second, it seems kind of spiteful to not at least suggest it and try to help improve the game.)

Raids have a reason to run them multiple times. Aside from getting more or better tomes, a lot of people just find them fun endgame content. I'm not going to try to defend housing or pets really, but raids have been pretty meta-defining (even your argument that certain builds can do them a lot easier than others just means that TCC has made those builds the meta, hence them being meta-defining). They also can definitely be improved upon, both the existing ones and future raids have the potential to be really good if more time is spent on them. (Profs, on the other hand, have been "worked on over time" for 2 full updates and are still mindless grinds that almost no one wants to do.)
Also, 1.20 had WAY more than the next closest in terms of reworked quests. It had 3 new quests, 15 full revamps, and 12 minor reworks. 1.19 had 6 new quests and 2 full reworks, 1.18 had 4 new quests, 7 full revamps, and 14 minor reworks (the closest to 1.20, but still very far away with half the number of full revamps), 1.17 had 8 new quests and 4 full reworks, etc.
If we count full reworks and new quests as the same, and disregard minor reworks, 1.20 had 18, 1.19 had 8, 1.18 had 11, 1.17 had 12, 1.16 had 8, 1.15 had 1, and 1.14 had 50+.
In order, from most to least, that's 1.14 (50+) -> 1.20 (18) -> 1.17 (12) -> 1.18 (11) -> 1.19 (8) = 1.16 (8) -> 1.15 (1). 1.20 had way more than all others not including 1.14.

Your opinions aren't wrong, I just have different ones. I'm not trying to say 1.18 didn't have other stuff like rebuilds and quest reworks, but I do think 1.20 had more/better rebuilds and quest reworks overall. Neither is bad overall just because they included bad things. 1.18 isn't bad just because professions, and 1.20 isn't bad just because guilds.

 

Professions allow you to craft almost any item you could possibly think of, at launch there were hundreds of completely unique ingredients, I would hardly call that no bite. Also, no single item can be better then a mythic, but if you eat food and use a potion along with a crafted item you will, without question, have something better then a mythic. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from doing the same with a mythic instead, but either way the main reason why I like crafting is for consumables anyways.

Also, it really depends on the mythic, some can be nearly recreated with 200+ durability and others are basically impossible to even come close to, there's a post out there somewhere where somebody made a bunch of items and some of them are really good.

I really hate when we get a tiny bit of the story only to get a "to be continued" and 1.19 did deliver on that front, probably the most main story progression we've ever gotten from a single update. The point about having Gavel and Gameplay grouped together is a good one, I really struggled on if I wanted to group them together or not, or even have them on the list at all, the hard part to me is that Gavel (and gameplay) were basically Wynncraft 2 so I think it's kind of hard to judge where they should go, it's almost like comparing apples and oranges in a way.

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This is probably the most fair list I've seen so far, though I will say that I don't think Dungeons and Discoveries deserves to be a 3/10 solely because the bank and questbook remakes, though I guess that's really all that was added, so maybe you're onto something. The reason why I rate it so highly is because that's the update that brought me back to the game after taking a soft break from Gavel since most of my problem with the game was inventory management which I think we can all agree isn't really an issue any more, but it's totally fair to criticize the actual lack of content in the update for sure.

I also like the idea of adding numbers to quantify the quality, it kind of softens the ranking by showing that almost all the updates are close which is something I wish I did a better job of conveying. I realize putting 1.19 in fifth looks which is why I said that it was a good update in the thread, but if I had included a number it would have been much more apparent, I'll need to give that some thought...

 

Just want to start off by saying that last one wasn't directed at you, I'm sorry you thought it was, I really don't mean to take shots at people so I clearly could have done a better job with phrasing on that one. You've actually been quite fair representing the other updates, I just get the impression you're trying to turn me around to 1.20, not put down everything else. Sorry again :(

As for TCC, the big thing I think people miss is that it isn't just about your build, it's about the people you bring with you. You could bring 4 cataclysm assassins with Stonewalker I, II and III the most insane builds and get demolished in an instant, even though you would clear LI in a couple minutes. That's not because the build is the problem, it's because the party comp was. If you want to do well in TCC, you need to have healers and damage dealers, your party basically needs to have at least one mage or shaman and at least one archer, though bringing any more then two of warrior and assassin will put you at a serious disadvantage. To me, the best composition is mage for first platform healing (almost no damage, just heal), shaman (for close up healing and damage) and two archers (for DPS), healing on the starting platform is probably the most important team member, if the DPS know when to get back to the start winning shouldn't be an issue. I think the party composition for TCC is actually far more important then build is and people tend to overlook that.

I did say that, and I stand by it because I think the trade market brought two years worth of updates in value to the game. I don't disagree that it probably would have killed the game, which is why 1.18 (thankfully) came with a bunch of other good additions too. As for the guild thing, I've pitched it to several people over the past few months, the fact that nobody showed interest in it is why I can't be bothered to make a suggestion. If they need a poll to see that guild recruiting has an issue then they're past the point where anything I can write will help them. I still have a little hope for this game, but I'm not going to waste time on a suggestion only for it to be completely ignored like 99% of the good suggestions made. I respect that you're still optimistic about the future of the game, I really do, but I want to make it clear that I'm not and unfortunately nothing anybody says here is going to change that.

For raids, my reason for saying there's no reason to run them multiple times is because there's no guarantee that you're ever going to get something good and runs don't count towards a bigger goal, your drops are independent so you could get the best item in 1 run or it could take 100. If tomes had some sort of meaningful progression system (like upgrading them) I would be happy to change my mind about that part of raids, I guess it's still possible for 1.20.1 to have something like that, but I'm not hopeful.

There are a few things that I want to point out about quests, first, 1.18 also came with mini quests, not sure how you want to count those, I personally don't think they count for much, but I still think they add a lot to the game. I know I would rather have those and what we got from 1.18 then the quests from 1.20, so I'm sure I could quantify their value as a number, but that isn't really what I'm trying to get at with this, especially since stuff like that is really hit or miss with players. More importantly, I agree, 1.20 nailed it with quests, no questions there, but I don't really care all that much, there were only something like 5-8 hours of questing added per class and I only really main one class now because of tomes so I don't really value quests that highly, especially since even though there's a large difference in quests, the actual time difference to me is only a couple hours of content. To me, good quests just aren't enough to make up for what I consider to be a large lack of long term content and QOL changes. That's obviously going to differ from person to person, but my main gripe with 1.20 is that it just didn't have the things I look for in an update and it didn't manage to do anything else well enough to make me care.

 

Can I be honest and say I really fucking hate shaman?
Don't get me wrong, having a new class is fun, and shaman itself is fun to play in my opinion.
I dislike it because it doesn't feel like it really made its own place from among the classes, as much as it took the two failed places of mage and warrior.
Warrior is the crowd control class that isn't, and mages "support" is limited to a single spell, but shaman gets both of those things and does them better,
honestly, this wouldn't be a big deal for me if they fixed up the other classes first, and they did try in 1.19, but obviously, the changes to both classes were lacking, unlike assassins' changes.

 

I don't think Shaman is a better support than Mage. Shaman has to rely on the totem for healing, which has a smaller AoE than Mage heal and isn't good against high levels of sustained damage. A mage with KoH is a way better support than Shaman, plus Mage has Meteor, which is still one of the most powerfull spells in the game in the right build. Shaman is definitely built more around crowd control, the heal is just a small bonus which I think was an attempt to compete with Mage for team support, but I still think Mage is better at healing overall.

 

The problem with heal is that it needs to be cast, it might be really good, but unless you can be close to a mage casting heal you don't get any of that sweet healing. Shaman is so good because healing is just a natural part of how their playstyle works, if you're fighting with a shaman and need heal you can just enter their totem area and get fairly good healing, but also much more consistent healing. If you get the full 15 seconds of totem healing, it'll almost always be better then mages heal, plus you get all the attack bonuses.

I don't really have strong opinions on either class, but I know when playing bosses like TCC and the Eye, I would rather have shaman playing support over mage unless the mage is just chilling and healing in one spot, and even then I still think Shaman is more useful. That's just my opinion though, feel free to disagree :)

 

Shaman is 100% worse support class than Mage and the easiest way to prove that is just check what classes people use in TCC. After around ~80 TCC runs I have encountered just a few Shamans. Every single one of them used Toxo and I also met 1 The End and 1 Absolution user. On the other hand mage became nearly a must have (ofc it isn't but it's useful to have one) because of how heal outperforms Shaman abilities. A lot of mage users became a healing towers who sacrifice their dmg completely just to use healing to the maximum ( which in my opinion is a bad way of playing mage). In fact I consider shaman in TCC a challenge unless you wield Toxo or Abso.
EDIT: Actually Shaman is just terrible overall.

 

Which is why I said "unless mage is just chilling and healing in one spot". If a mage is running around and not using heal, they offer no support at all, whereas shaman is always offering support based on how the class works. That was my whole point. I think shaman, while worse, is more reliable because you know their totem is always somewhere to get healing where as with mage you need to ask for a heal which you still might not get.

I agree a mage healing tower is a must for TCC, but the problem is if the mage does anything other then that I would rather have a tanky support shaman.