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Why no one plays Wiccans: a perspective
Cyndarin
used Flamethrower! It was super effective.
Wiccans have never been a hugely popular archetype since I started playing, but as the game population has spread out to the new guilds and organizations, Wiccans have really become the most under represented archetype in the game. There are several issues I have been pondering and debating regarding the current status of the Wiccan guilds and why they trend as unpopular.
I will point out the most obvious explanation, and probably the most superficial: there are only two wiccan guilds as opposed to 4 or 6 of every other archetype. Naturally, the population will be lower. This does not, however, explain the typically very low combatant percentage of the Wiccan population. Going back to Vadi as the Champion of SD and even further to Alacardael and Nienla, in the past 18 to 24 months, there has never been more than a single truly active SD combatant at any given time. The exception being right now with Nihta and myself, which is a fairly recent occurance. Moondancers, in my observation, have been even worse off, having large periods of time where they have no combatants at all, like the present.
Wiccans pretty much exist in the exact same state as they did 6 years ago when they were released save for choke being replaced, and various envoy reports. There have been no major updates or changes to wiccans since their release. The guilds are extremely dated, and offer no new mechanics save for a single skill, shadowtwist, to attract current fighters or new players. If you played a wiccan 4 years ago, you will find nothing new and interesting in the current guild. I will say this issue is not entirely unique, as Nihilists (save for deathmark) are pretty much the same guild they were when I started, save for some crucial buffs to their skills like balance loss on crucify that make them much more powerful PKers so they naturally attract more combatants. Which ties in with my next point...
Wiccans can be perceived as less powerful versions of guardians. Fae are four seconds slower than all other ents. They Lack the variety of nihilist and celestine pacts, and are much less powerful than Illuminati ents and Researcher gems. They can also be killed with regular critical hits. Toad is a less powerful version of Absolve and Wrack, both of which actually give credit to the caster, where as toads and rewards that come with a kill are rarely the Wiccan who is out 8 power. Snoefaassia is a less powerful version of carcer, and requires a -quest-. The best skills in totems have been turned into artifacts for every guild out there, with no benefit for wiccans for having the actual skills. All guardians have alternate solo and/or group kill methods, wiccans do not. Wisp is a much more limited version of beckon. Pooka no longer works through prismatic, both Nihilist and Illuminati dominates do. Wiccans have access to powerful defensive skills, but Celestines have better ones. They do not have access to tarot, which is universally the best tertiary for guardians due to its offensive and defensive flexibility. Wiccans have the smallest hindering capability with only vines and a few odds and ends like brownie. Other guilds have multiple writhe sources, better passive ent hindering, ectoplasm, etc. We can do more damage in many cases, but not always. Omen, meteor, inquisition, etc.
Wiccans have no unique skills. Night and Moon are shared with warriors. Wicca is shared with each other save for only 3 skills. Tertiaries are shared between cities and communes. Cities have access to "city only" tertiary with the very powerful and flexible tarot. There is no equivalent for Wiccans. Ecology was the counter for tarot for commune bards, but was not shared with wiccans. The unique identifying factors of Wiccan guilds are the lore and the RP they create themselves despite being rather generic in terms of skills. This may seem minor but I would like point out that mages have 2 archetype specific tertiaries, 2 (or soon to be 2) guild specific primaries, and an archetype specific secondary with phantasms. Warriors have somewhat of the same generic skill issue, but with 5 archetype specific specializations that are all unique, 3 tertiaries (2 for cities), and a unique secondary, they allow for a lot more variety. Every other guild has something, or multiple somethings, entirely unique to them.
Bit of an old change, but DMP changes impacted wiccans far more than guardians and nothing was ever adjusted to compensate. Because of DMP scaling, what was once a major boon for wiccans is now much, much smaller. They are still tankier than a guardian generally speaking, but are easily outdone by telekinetic mages, tattoo monks, researcher passive healing, etc. The old selling point of wiccans being tanky casters is no longer uniquely true, and much less true than it was.
I've been sitting on this and letting it brew for a while. It's become an issue. It's become an issue that is almost universally recognized. An issue I'm getting extremely frustrated with. When it was announced that an "archetype that has received any attention is going to get something new" the first on most people's list was Wiccans, and among the last were mages and druids. Mages because they were just really good and already had a pile of unique toys, and druids because they had just received both allergies and shamanism less than a year before.
I know it's been touched on, in extremely vague and obscure ways, that something for Wiccans is coming down the pipe in the distant future. The point is we're only halfway through all this new druid/mage stuff and it's been many months since it all started,and the process is only getting slower. My old problem of no one wanting to play wiccan is now my current problem of still no one wanting to play wiccan, with really no foreseeable end in sight. The next 3, 6, 9 months are, more than likely, going to be exactly as they are now and have been for the 6 previous years. And to me that's kind of ridiculous considering the sheer overwhelming volume of special reports that have been seen by the admin. It's not that we haven't requested one, because I know I have for something as simple and warranted as a post choke deletion update.
At this point I don't know what to do other than stop caring and block it out. To play with my rusty hot wheels while so many others drive around in their monster trucks with custom paint jobs. Or just quit and play another guild so I can stop being mad about it, and people will stop specifically asking me why choke was deleted, why we don't have a special report, or why we don't have any unique terts, much less any unique skills at all. It's not fun.
Sorry for rambling on about the plight of the Wiccans. Maybe I just want someone to acknowledge Wiccans are the red headed step children on lusternia, or that out of all the guilds, one of them is just not like the others.
edit: Disclaimer because I know it will be brought up...this is not a "SDs are underpowered" rant. For one, I think MDs are worse off, and while we aren't the most powerful guild in the game, I'm fairly happy with their current state. I just don't want to be a watered down version of someone else. I want a niche that isn't giving people my kills.
8
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
This is just an off the top of my head idea (and I've never played a Hexen), but maybe add a syntax in Hexes that allows the hexen to throw an already-drawn hex alongside another targeted hostile action (striking the same target) in exchange for, say, an extra .5 seconds of EQ to the longer of the two actions. This would allow the Hexen to apply hindering affs alongside their offense, or offensive affs alongside their hindering. The hexen would still need to draw hexes as normal, in exchange for this short balance increase.
A similar syntax could be applied to Runes, albeit with a somewhat longer EQ increase, to account for not needing to draw the runes in combat.
(I say that I'm considered the red head stepchild a lot!)
I will add that sleeplocks, which - especially for moondancers - are the best (only?) way to really secure a toading solo, are even more boring.
Comparing powers of wiccans to those of guardian guilds doesn't really say much if you're not comparing to a single guild, but to whatever guild happens to trump the power you're referring to.
I wouldn't mind deathsight giving credit to the toader, but it seems like a rather minor point to me, especially for the overall attractiveness of the guilds. (This was suggested in report 808, but since another solution got approved, I'm not sure if they didn't like the idea of the toader getting credit or if it was just dismissed because they decided to implement solution 2. Might wanna try for it again.)
I support fleshing out more differences between the fae of the two guilds, and I would welcome a change away from the current tediousness of twists (reduce total number and/or make the initial twists more relevant, for instance) and the boredom of sleeplocks.
You only get it cause druids finally got a unique one.
I still want to see the shared primaries between nature users fixed, cause that one is only getting worse if we get Ackleberry and Jojobo one day.
Some people like having more than one character. I decided that I'd like to have two, one on each side of the game. With Titus doing his thing in Celest, I thought an alt in Glomdoring would be pretty groovy, considering Celina's a badass and it might rub off. I was going through the library here https://sites.google.com/site/xieltalnara/home browsing over skills to help me decide what guild to be a part of when I eventually make the character. I checked out Shadowdancer and it just looked dull. I think the idea behind it is very original and pretty darn cool, but I felt I could have more fun as a different class. I think Celina's post stands for itself, really. It spells out exactly what's wrong with the class and it would seem that she's correct on all counts.
I doubt it's worth anything, but SD's have got my full support for some love from the Admin. It sucks that real life is tramping a rainy parade across the designer, so I definitely hope it gets tended to quickly.
@Celina I think it would be a shame if you were forced out of the Guild you obviously care about deeply. Two years is a very long time to be part of an organization, but I guess the only thing you can do is ask yourself whether you're able to stick it out and hope for the best, or decide whether you'd be gaining more than losing by making the change to something else. Either way, I hope it works out for you.
tl;dr I'm probably not the only newbie to the game who, if not interested in pvp, picked this class, and that says a lot of the class in itself?
The Wicca guilds might not be so popular because, when making your character, you can either be...
Badass demon summoner, forging ties with hell itself and making pacts of damnation
Priest of such holiness and power that the highest of angels answer your call
A tender of forest/nature spirits, at whose command pixies and leprechauns spring forth
"THE DEMON LORDS CAN NEVER TRULY BE KILLED - GREAT IS THEIR POWER."
You shock a platinum-coloured geomycus with tales of terror bestowed on villages who don't follow Magnagora.
A platinum-coloured geomycus slaps her knee and declares that, by the gods, Ptoma Hive should follow the Grand Empire of Magnagora after all!
Shouts rise up from Ptoma Hive, as its denizens loudly pledge themselves to the Grand Empire of Magnagora.
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Firstly, Celina - I want to fix wiccans as much as you do, and have my fair share of ideas on little things, but to be honest we should probably be looking at putting our heads together to get a solution that works for both guilds.
"THE DEMON LORDS CAN NEVER TRULY BE KILLED - GREAT IS THEIR POWER."
You shock a platinum-coloured geomycus with tales of terror bestowed on villages who don't follow Magnagora.
A platinum-coloured geomycus slaps her knee and declares that, by the gods, Ptoma Hive should follow the Grand Empire of Magnagora after all!
Shouts rise up from Ptoma Hive, as its denizens loudly pledge themselves to the Grand Empire of Magnagora.
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This would also avoid buffing warriors further since it won't add things to totems Night and Moon.
The problem is just figuring out what to put in there.
The same can, for the most part, be said about Celestialism and Nihilism (when you replace fae with angels/demons). Even the investments are, with a few prominent exceptions, largely the same, and while the skillsets are fairly bland, they never felt like almost exact copies of each other to me (which they pretty much are, though). That's why I think that giving the two wiccan skillsets a different feeling can be achieved by as little as giving (some of) the fae interesting new, unique names, descriptions and attack/passive/faecall etc. emotes. Mechanically, the change could be fairly minor.
Part of the reason Wicca and Druids share a primary is because, thematically, they are very similar across communes. Druids are Druids are Druids, so to speak - the differentiation lies beyond the demesne.
It's unique insofar as you don't see that with the higher planes - though if another city drew on Water or Celestia, you'ld see a lot more similarity between skills (and maybe even shared primaries like that, with some differentiation).
Not to say it wouldn't be nice to see more moon/Shadowdancer differentiation on some levels (and that more isn't possible), but only that this is why there were never new Druid or Wicca primary specs added in lieu of Druidry and Wicca for Glomdoring. They were never intended to be so divergent as the cities - all of their power comes from the same source (the fae) and shares a lot of its inner nature with the other. While thematically they are different, some of that has, admittedly, been whittled away at due to player upset and concerns (like how Night and the Glomdoring interact with the Faethorn). By their own request they became that "dark guardian" of the Fae, in lieu of the forest contrary to but deeply wanting to control them. Not to say those changes were bad (nor good), merely pointing out where some of that thematic departure occurred.
I'm not really sure what you want in terms of "differentiating" the two types of Wicca - like I said, they're Wicca and due to the nature of Wicca they share so many similarities. That difference is in the deeper level (Night/Moon totem skills), and in their lore and roleplay.
While not saying we will or we won't, I think a large part of Wicca's purpose and them was that it was all about their relationship with the fae. Doesn't mean it can't be expanded on, but it would certainly fall in that same range.