2015

Gavel Hype Continued (Jan. - Aug.)

After 1.13, there really wasn’t much that happened (outside of the community and guild politics, of course). Grian released some teaser videos for Gavel, such as an Aldorei build timelapse and a playthrough of An Iron Heart Pt. 2. Salted began teasing a new item system, which went through a lot of changes throughout 2015. The Wynncraft twitter teased some cool stuff, and we also got a super cryptic unveiling of the Wynnic language. Still, it wasn’t enough. The community wanted Gavel, but months had gone by without it. Would the wait be worth it in the end?

To partially alleviate the wait, 1.13.1 released in the early summer. This concluded the WynnExcavation questline, and at the way end, the king teased that we’d be going to Gavel soon… only furthering hype.

9/7 and More Gavel Hype (September)

9/7 refers to an event where a user named Admintest1 joined, and as their name suggested, they had the red admin rank. Around that same time, every single thread started disappearing before the forums eventually closed down for a few hours. When they returned, all threads were gone, with only profiles spared. The forums got a fresh start, and 9/7 went down in history. No one knows what truly happened, but everyone joked that Jumla spilling his coffee ruined everything.

Around that same time, we also got the famous Gavel teaser trailer, and a quick watch will show you that a lot of its features never made it get into the game. We never got Ragnar, or that chat system, or a main storyline (not mentioned in the trailer, but had been hinted at elsewhere). It took 5 more years to get the Grootslang boss too. Despite this, I think the trailer did a great job at hyping up Gavel, as it showcased all of the update’s highlights that managed to make it into the game. It certainly got the community excited at the time, but Gavel was still a few months away.

Gavel’s Release (December)

As some may know, 1.14/Gavel released in late December, and the weeks leading up to that were filled with unprecedented amounts of hype. Beta testing began in November, and given how many secrets Gavel would have, those testers were either hand-picked or winners of official giveaways. Everyone else had to rely on lore teasers and an AMA from Salted to be satisfied. We also got a livestream in the final fews days which really showed just how massive the update was. And then, at long last, The Gavel Update arrived on December 21st.

Gavel did not start perfect. Bugs were prevalent and many hotfixes occurred in the first few days, and class balance was definitely out of wack too. Nonetheless, there was so much to see and do, and features like a texture pack, quest cutscenes, and human mobs made the world so much more immersive. That’s right - before this update, Wynncraft didn’t have its own texture pack!

However, there was a group of players who didn’t really focus on exploring, but rather speedrunning to level 100. After all, the level cap had been raised for the first time in years, and a first level 100 had to be crowned. Eventually, the contest was won by veteran player J6Unlimited/Zuikaku_, who reached that level after many sleepless nights. Players TheDollarBill, DodoBird, Kokaga, SeanThomas2, Gartato, and Hanky soon followed in their place. Not many people got to level 100 for a while though, and that’s because leveling used to be VERY tedious due to a lack of grind spots and the fact that the highest-level was Fantastic Voyage. Fun fact: the best grind spot upon Gavel’s launch was a cave filled with trolls visited during The Thanos Vaults quest.

The New Item System (December)

Apart from well, Gavel itself, the most prominent feature added in 1.14 was a new item system. Prior to Gavel, there were no elements, no more than seven different identifications, and armor gave defense rather than health. The update opened up a lot of potential for build variety, but upon launch… that really didn’t exist. + Attack Speed (which affected SPELLS) and Raw Spell were the tyrants of the meta, with the latter being nerfed way sooner than the former. This thread perfectly captures the early Gavel “meta”. It definitely took a long time in Wynn’s history for the meta to reach the diversity it has today,

Gavel also added Mythics, and between this and the addition of items that required good roles, the economy evolved significantly. Players now had things to spend their money on apart from white horses and the same four pieces of armor, leading to a much larger market community.

It took a while, but over time, a class builds community popped up as well, with a forums and discord channel for the gameplay aspect eventually popping up. Today, class building has a thriving subcommunity that has changed as much as the item system has, and they can be credited with discovering and calculating a lot of buildmaking aspects (such as how damage is calculated, Effective HP, and how often mana/life steal triggers)