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CH4OT1C! -> RE: =AQ= Grand Giftmaster Prizes (1/25/2026 7:01:00)
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Time to "grumble" about that pesky precedent I guess.
Being serious, this will be less of a complaint, and more of a pragmatic assessment of the situation we now find ourselves in. Frankly, complaining about it wouldn't do any good; it's not like we can go back to modify these items. That was made perfectly clear to me with the situation surrounding Vanity last year. Nonetheless, I think it's important for us to take stock of where the staff are, and how they proceed. There are multiple options, and none of them are particularly great. Before anything else though, I want to stress that these issues have absolutely nothing to do with the choices of any of the winners. They just requested items and received their requests. They even shared them with the community (and I thank them for that). It's not their responsibility to worry about design standards and balance; that responsibility lies solely with the staff.
I'll be blunt: the staff broke their own rules. Significantly, in fact. You only need to look as far as Luminous Edge, which has a Melee/Magic toggle despite the contest rules stating you could only have one form. These rules are rigid; they're not soft guidelines (that much was confirmed by the staff on Discord only yesterday). This is undisputably a problem. It damages the integrity of the staff's word; how are we supposed to trust that word if it is subsequently broken? Nonetheless, this is by far the least important issue from the release. Sure, it broke their contest's rules, but it's not going to threaten design standards - I'm not particularly bothered by it.
That cannot be said for some of the other rewards. Let's start with @Orihime Inoue's Cataclysm, which is a clone of Warcaster Stave. This item was the subject of a major GBI discussion just over 12 months ago. Simply put, spellboosters shouldn't be able to affect spells that aren't the same element as them under current design standards. I shall not rehash that debate here. Suffice to say, the staff compromised by allowing Warcaster to affect alt-element spells as an exception. This was for reasons surrounding staff integrity, explicitly stated here:
quote:
Some players were led to believe that Warcaster would remain unchanged, and while this was an honest mistake, it’s not one our community should bear the burden for. While balance is crucial, we never want our players to feel misled.
As an exception, the Warcaster Staves will retain their original versatility but at an increased cost.
Source
I also stress here that @The Hollow explicitly communicates this breaks balance. It was an exception made solely due to maintaining the integrity of the staff's word. That is not the case for Cataclysm. Nobody was "misled". Even on the contest rules (which, to reiterate, are hard rules), it states the following:
quote:
AdventureQuest staff reserves the right to make final decisions regarding the eligibility of selected prizes.
Source
In other words, even though Warcaster was not on the list of excluded options, the staff could have still either said no or enforced removing the non-elemental effect. Releasing Cataclysm in this state has broken both balance rules and the staff's word, and the staff did this willingly. They did this despite maintaining staff integrity being the very reason an exception was made in the first place. That's on top of its regular precedent issues surrounding the original weapon: trading magic weapon damage for spell boosts.
However, the biggest problem by a country mile has to be Wrath. At the time of writing, I'm unsure whether its counterpart, Sila's staff, will be updated, but it doesn't really matter for the purposes of this post. The only relevant thing is that Sila's staff is a tome. Wrath is not a tome as we would currently understand it. The closest description would be a Hybrid Melee weapon with 3 compressed spells and "draw mana". It's not even a Whack to School Locker (which isn't a tome either, by the way. It just has compressed skills "somewhat like a tome"). And let's be clear: the staff could have made this a Melee tome. They willingly broke their own design standards. Tomes do have baseline attacks, they're just only accessible if spells are disabled. The "Draw Mana" option is meant to be their baseline attack. That's why it's there. That's why it's worth ~392 MP (which is 75% Melee in MP). If the staff were reskinning a tome as a Melee weapon, the "Melee" part should only be relevant if spells are disabled. Most of its spells don't resemble anything from Sila's staff either - the original neither had panic eating nor a harm spell. This weapon is closer to a custom item than it is a reskin. That's on top of the primary issue associated with Cataclysm - the damage boost provided by this weapon is omni-elemental too. They broke that balance rule here too. I haven't even gotten onto the sheer amount it compresses, but I think the point has been sufficiently made.
The tl;dr is that the staff broke multiple of their own contest rules and abandoned their design principles to make these items. Items that, to reiterate, can't be fixed (at least not without the staff changing tune). I want to be constructive, so where do we go from here? From my perspective, we have two main ways forwards, neither of which I consider to be particularly good:
1). Claim Wrath and Cataclysm are mistakes, with the former being a custom item and the latter being another exception.
2). These items become the new standard.
What are the advantages of option 1? We get to retain current design standards. As outliers, we wouldn't expect them to fit into current standards. However, there are some massive disadvantages to doing this. For one, we now have a situation where @GwenMay has just obtained a custom item. Regardless of their generosity, this wasn't what the contest offered and is immensely unfair to all of the participants. Not only is this unfair to the other ticket winners (regardless of whether they knew what Gwen was doing), but it's also unfair to everyone else. I imagine others would have donated considerably more if they knew custom items were on the line. It's essentially a problem on the scale of the 2023 Summer Donation contest (Wing/Wishweaver) and would (in my view) require a massive apology. More importantly though, it means abandoning staff integrity. It means the staff outright admitting they strayed from their own rules to the extent where the contest rewards were misleading. It also undermines the integrity of the balance system - it turns out that money allows you to break said principles, after all. There's no way of sweeping this one under the rug like Vanity - the rules were clear.
That is why, and especially uncharacteristic of me, I'm advocating the second. Yes, it is normally considered extremely poor design practice to balance everything around the new most powerful item. However, in this particular case, it offers significant advantages. If we change the baseline standard of a tome so that it has "draw mana" and a baseline attack, then it's not an issue (well, except perhaps destroying the unique aspect of tomes from other weapons with compressed skills...). The only necessary component would be releasing a Sila's staff with the same mechanics (albeit in magic format). Cataclysm and Warcaster are only problems for precedent if no other spellboosters can boost alt-element spells (regardless of whether that's what they do in reality). From that perspective, all the main contest related problems go away - Wrath is a reskin of a tome, and Cataclysm is the baseline for a spellbooster.
Of course, this doesn't come for free (or for cheap). It means abandoning several long-established balance rules (and with all the consequences that entails), and will introduce significant powercreep. It also doesn't entirely absolve the staff of breaking their own rules - the MRM toggle on Luminous Edge is still there, after all. Most importantly though, it means the staff would have to live with the consequences of these choices - new items would be compared with these items as the standard, not as outliers. Monsters will need to be balanced in relation to these mechanics. Other mechanisms may need changing to be fair. But these can all be done in the long term, retroactively, and without the need for immediate change. Most importantly though, they also avoid the significant harms of breaking their word on such a massive scale.
Ultimately, it's up to the staff how things proceed from here. One thing's for certain though: there will be long-term consequences whichever way things go.
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