Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[Nija]

I'm going to reroll an Esper tonight just because of you. This way, I have someone to blame.

Don't. Take your warrior to the 29 PVP bracket at least. (That's what everyone says at least.)

Stop tanking, just do DPS. Why would you quit when your warrior is almost to the best part?!

[Goldenmean]

How did petless engie builds work out?

I fucking hate pets and frankly I hated playing Engineer but I hated all 3 classes I tried so that didn't say much besides the early game is too slow and boring.

They work fine. I've never used a pet in my tanking spec. I use artillery bot in my DPS stance, but it's more for the innate crit bonus you get with 4 points in it than anything the bot itself does. I could probably spend those points elsewhere pretty easily.

[Draegan]

How did petless engie builds work out?

I fucking hate pets and frankly I hated playing Engineer but I hated all 3 classes I tried so that didn't say much besides the early game is too slow and boring.

From what I've seen randomly from people, you lose the stats (10% cirt?) if you don't have the pets. It's fine for leveling and shit but in any more difficult content you're handicapping yourself.

[Draegan]

I'm going to reroll an Esper tonight just because of you. This way, I have someone to blame.

Don't. Take your warrior to the 29 PVP bracket at least. (That's what everyone says at least.)

Stop tanking, just do DPS. Why would you quit when your warrior is almost to the best part?!

I typically don't play much battleground PVP in these games. I'm not a fan of instance pvp.

[Goldenmean]

From what I've seen randomly from people, you lose the stats (10% cirt?) if you don't have the pets. It's fine for leveling and shit but in any more difficult content you're handicapping yourself.

Only really true for PvE DPS. The artillery bot is passive 6.5% crit with 8 points invested, which is hard to turn down. Most end-game DPS builds I've seen do run the artillery bot at tier 4 for this reason.

It's absolutely not true for tanking spec. The passive bonus you get from the tanky bots at tier 4 is a lot less impressive, and tanks need to put a lot more utility on their LAS, so it's not worth the tradeoff. You *can* run tanky bot builds, but they seem the exception rather than the rule, at least partially because one of the bot abilities is bugged in such a way that it occasionally prevents medic heals from landing once it's been activated (Oops!).

As for PvP, I'm not a PvP guy, but having a stat stick that can be trivially killed mid fight seems like a bad idea, so I'm guessing bots don't see much use there either.

[Ginaz]

Looks like CREDD is now live.

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/credd-is-now-live/

Edit: I would highly advise people to NOT purchase CREDD at this time.  You won't get nearly as much for it as you will a few months from now, mainly because there isn't much gold floating around right now with most people still leveling and purchasing skills, mounts and housing shit.

[Draegan]

Gold is like .99 from farmers or something. It's pretty cheap. If you're going to sell CREDD make sure you get some plat.

Played my Esper to 11/12 ish last night. It's much more than a two button class. The fact that you can stack TK Storms, I'm usually playing faster than just hitting Strike a few times and blasting with a finisher. It's a bit more engaging than I thought it was going to be.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I wonder how CREDD will balance out.  If one month sub = $14 then how much gold = one month? 

[Ozzu]

On my server, Myrcalus, I saw CREDD going for less than 4 plat.

I'd be willing to bet that in 2 months, it'll be going for 20+.

[Hoax]

Well then you know what to do.

[Nebu]

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but I'm really starting to feel every bit of this sentiment in the late game. 


Just hit 46 last night and am hitting the wall hard.  I'm not sure this type of combat is for me, particularly living in a place where packet loss and a 100 ping from my ISP is the norm.  The 40+ zones are filled with so much aggro that it's a trash-killing fest and playing an esper is particularly punishing due to our builder being stationary.  Espers also lack the burst to burn down mobs that spawn other mobs... and with all the telegraphs from multiple pulls, it's tough to build any psi points.  Then there's the group content.  The dungeons require so much dodging of red shit that any latency causes instant death... which ensures a wipe since I'm the group's healer. 

While I do enjoy the setting, the dialogue, and the quest variety, I think I may go back to tanks soon.  The combat reminds me too much of WoW raid mechanics... and I really hated that.  I really miss my early-Rift chloromancer and the Rift 5 man content.  It was much more to my liking in terms of pace and variety.

[jakonovski]

Hit level 15 and the first adventure thingy, Hycrest. It felt pretty disjointed but still fun. Was tanking, died a lot even when the group didn't wipe. Is this supposed to happen or was it just because we're newbies? At the end it gave stats, most damage, most heals and least deaths. Got bronze, thought it's rather unfair towards tanks.

I think I like this game and might actually level to cap.

[Goldenmean]

Hit level 15 and the first adventure thingy, Hycrest. It felt pretty disjointed but still fun. Was tanking, died a lot even when the group didn't wipe. Is this supposed to happen or was it just because we're newbies? At the end it gave stats, most damage, most heals and least deaths. Got bronze, thought it's rather unfair towards tanks.

I think I like this game and might actually level to cap.

The medal reward is for the entire group, it's not for you personally based on your heals/deaths/damage, it just happens to be presented on the same screen. The exact medal rating calculation varies based on adventure, but generally it's based on how fast you completed, optional objectives, and how many deaths the party as a whole had.

And yes, the first adventures on either side are a little confusing, and also a little brutal. The Dominion side one has some areas with infinitely respawning mobs that it's not immediately obvious you aren't meant to stop and fight them. Some of the encounters are tuned more difficult than your average group of level 15 PUGs will be able to down also. I haven't done it since beta, but my recollection is that Hycrest is actually much easier than AstroVoid, which is the dominion equivalent. Getting bronze at all really isn't a bad showing, all things considered.

[jakonovski]

Yah, it wasn't hard at all because you could just run back into the fray really quickly. It did feel a bit overly frantic, but that may be just because of the silly zerg ambushers that mowed down the whole group at least once every new pull.

[Cadaverine]

I hit 15 on my Exile Medic, and tried pugging the first adventure as the healer.  It was not a good experience.  The rest of the group refused to stay together and in range, so keeping everyone healed was very difficult. I don't know if people were undergeared, or what, but people kept going from full health to half health or less in seconds, or just dying out of nowhere.  Finally the group broke up having killed maybe 3 mobs.

I ended up shelving the Medic for a Warrior, though I'm concerned that that might be just as annoying.

[jakonovski]

People do tend to follow a tank that gives instructions, even if it's only "follow me". Provided they can read. So there's that at least. But the first adventure is very confusing for sure.

[Goldenmean]

I hit 15 on my Exile Medic, and tried pugging the first adventure as the healer.  It was not a good experience.  The rest of the group refused to stay together and in range, so keeping everyone healed was very difficult. I don't know if people were undergeared, or what, but people kept going from full health to half health or less in seconds, or just dying out of nowhere.  Finally the group broke up having killed maybe 3 mobs.

There's a couple of things that might be contributing to this

1) You're grouping with people who are used to how things are done in other games where it's always the healers job to keep them up. My feeling in this game is that (with the exception of targeted heals), it's the DPS job to get in the healing telegraphs if they want them. This is worst with medics because they have such close range telegraphs. A medic doesn't have the time to run to whichever ranged DPS is taking damage, heal them and then run back to melee to keep healing the tank, even if they do have a UI set up such that they can *tell* where the wounded DPS is in the world.

2) There's some scaling issues with doing adventures/dungeons if you overlevel them and the game scales you down. I leveled significantly faster than most of the people I group with, so I've been tanking the level 15 adventure and level 20 dungeons as a 40-50 tank. The problem is that unless your gear is all the same level as you are, it'll get down-leveled to *below* what the instance is. So, as a level 40 character in a level 20 dungeon, wearing a level 30 piece of gear will actually modify your stats like a level 10 or the like. This makes me squishy as hell, and ironically means that I had an easier time doing a veteran adventure than I did doing the intro one. If your tank was falling over in no time flat, that might be why.

3) People were standing in stupid. Generally, if you stand in a telegraph that can be avoided, taking a huge chunk of your health in one shot is a best case scenario.

Honestly, it sounds like you were playing with bad players. Bad players aren't going to do very well in Wildstar's 5 man instances from what I've seen. They aren't very forgiving.

[rk47]

They sure didn't sign in for the challenge. 

[Kageru]

I think I'm getting old. I'm having fond memories of sitting and chatting with friends while we kept an area of an EQ dungeon clear or waited on the pull. The move towards frenetic action games is just too busy and anti-social. Could be the rose colored glasses, but I think if there's something that's so edge of your seat I want it to be a game I can pause or restart at my convenience.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions though, I'm likely to have ~300 ping and looking at some of the raid and PvP gameplay, or even PvE, I suspected that would be punishing.

[Pennilenko]

The first level 20 dungeons are as hard as any heroic raid content I've ever done in wow or any other mmo.

[Rokal]

I think I'm getting old. I'm having fond memories of sitting and chatting with friends while we kept an area of an EQ dungeon clear or waited on the pull. The move towards frenetic action games is just too busy and anti-social.

It's true, people barely talk in Wildstar. I'm in a guild with 10-20 members on most nights and I see maybe one message in guildchat every 5-10 minutes. It isn't the sort of gameplay style that lends itself to idle chat. Things will probably change as people hit level cap and presumably spend less time in combat. It's an unfortunate side effect to having more active gameplay.

I did the level 25 Adventure last night, the DOTA-esque one. It was very confusing, despite a pretty long unskipable scripted sequence at the beginning that tries to teach you how to play. We ended up losing the first attempt at the adventure as we got to the end of the AI opponents base and were promptly 1-2 shot by the shrine objective you are supposed to kill. We had cleared all the northern flags in the Adventure, which spawn minions to help you, but didn't have much of a following by the end. After we respawned our base was already being overrun by AI minions and we slowly lost out to the flood.

The second attempt with a different PuG went much better. We split into 2 groups and capped way more flags then we joined together 5-10 minutes later to focus on intercepting the AI "players" (bosses) when we saw them on the map. Killing the AI players "levels" your characters (didn't see stat changes to correspond to this) which supposedly helps a ton on this adventure. It felt pretty easy once we were doing it the right way.

I can see the appeal of the adventure: it really did feel like a PvP battleground despite fighting AI, but it falls into the seemingly typical Adventure problem of not explaining itself well. I will also say that it was *extremely* boring to heal. The enemies at flags don't really require a healer, only the AI players do. This means as the healer you will spend 90% of the dungeon bored out of your mind. I ended up exchanging half my spells for DPS ones just so I would have something to do, despite doing shit DPS in my healing gear, and regretted it as soon as we stumbled into AI players. For the second attempt I queued as DPS so that I could enjoy myself and the experience was much better.

[Nebu]

Chatting by the traditional means can only occur while selling/crafting.  Hell, you can't even talk using a chat program during normal gameplay.  I have a mumble server with push to talk and the channel is silent with 5 people in it most nights.  You're so busy spamming buttons that talking isn't possible.  We tried voice activated, but all you could hear was the smashing of keystrokes.  

[Zetor]

I did the first level 15 adventure as a medic healer, and (while there were parts that were genuinely challenging and fun, like the entire train sequence) most of it felt a bit repetitive and frustrating. Basically (as I think others have said before in this thread) healers aren't capable of saving people that stand in bad, and it cost many wipes until the group came to terms with it. There's also very little bursty tank healing that isn't bound by cooldowns, so if the tank eats a telegraph from the bullet hell endboss, it's 2-shot time followed by an agonizing wipe, a long-ass run back to the encounter, fighting through 2 waves of elites, and then giving another try at the boss. This is all in a leveling 'dungeon', mind.

My biggest problem isn't even the difficulty itself; worst case it'll get the GW2 treatment... and really, the dungeons are MUCH better than GW2. It's just that these things are loooong. Since this wasn't even a 'full' dungeon, I expected something like a 20-30min scenario -- instead, it turned into a 2.5hour slog mostly consisting of running and fighting boring trash with a ton of hitpoints. It's the little flashes of brilliance throughout it that make me somewhat hopeful about it all... but yea, these things are going to get nerfed pretty badly once larger number of random "my first MMO / my first time playing a healer or tank" folks start queuing into them and the complaints start (or have they started already?).

edit: also, my #1 peeve so far: enemy stun/knockdown attacks that end JUST in time for the player to dodge away from an incoming AOE... except that with my EU->US ping, I'll get hit every single time no matter how much I spam the dodge button. Maybe this is why they insisted on the region lock? 

[Rokal]

Zetor, out of curiosity, what healer are you playing? I definitely got much better burst healing spells later as a Spellslinger.

My experience with Adventures is that they last ~30-40 minutes when they go well. Dungeons were more like an hour for our first times through, but the first 2 dungeons only have 3 bosses in them so that time could definitely be cut down as people understand what to do.

[Goldenmean]

Basically (as I think others have said before in this thread) healers aren't capable of saving people that stand in bad, and it cost many wipes until the group came to terms with it.

I am hoping this is a learning curve problem for the community. A lot of these people are coming from WoW, and it's just ridiculous how many DPS just tunnel visioned through standing in stupid, or flat out didn't even attempt to move out of them because "But it'll lower my DPS!!", and unless you were doing bleeding edge hard mode content, it really didn't matter, because the healer could usually keep you up if they were geared. Having played a healer for years, my general opinion on Wildstar making telegraphs punishing is "About damned time". I got really sick of acting like a "Save vs. stupid".

There's also very little bursty tank healing that isn't bound by cooldowns, so if the tank eats a telegraph from the bullet hell endboss, it's 2-shot time followed by an agonizing wipe, a long-ass run back to the encounter, fighting through 2 waves of elites, and then giving another try at the boss. This is all in a leveling 'dungeon', mind.

I think this is a class specific issue with medics. Spellslingers are stupidly good at burst healing thanks to spellsurge. But while I'm tanking, I'm usually running with my medic healer friend, and yeah, she doesn't seem to have a lot of burst to bring me back when things go wrong. My solution to that has been to throw more cooldowns on to my bar and just generally to do my best to make sure things don't go wrong. It's also possible you just haven't gotten to your "Oh shit" buttons yet. I think medics get a long cooldown big heal at level 18 or so.

My biggest problem isn't even the difficulty itself; worst case it'll get the GW2 treatment... and really, the dungeons are MUCH better than GW2. It's just that these things are loooong. Since this wasn't even a 'full' dungeon, I expected something like a 20-30min scenario -- instead, it turned into a 2.5hour slog mostly consisting of running and fighting boring trash with a ton of hitpoints.

Ironically, the dungeons themselves seem shorter than the scenarios. We wiped like mad while learning the level 20 dungeons, but once you know the mechanics and have a decent group they seem entirely doable in 30-40 minutes (which is good, because to raid attune you need to do the veteran versions in about that time frame). Also, I think there's something wrong with mob health tuning in adventures. Trash takes forever to kill in some of them. Or maybe this is just the gear scaling issue again rearing its head.

It's the little flashes of brilliance throughout it that make me somewhat hopeful about it all... but yea, these things are going to get nerfed pretty badly once larger number of random "my first MMO / my first time playing a healer or tank" folks start queuing into them and the complaints start (or have they started already?).

Yeah, I expect the same thing, but for now they seem to be sticking to their guns of "We'll have content for everyone. If you can't raid, do dungeons. If you can't do dungeons, do shiphands and overland content". We'll see if that continues to be the case or if they cave, because of all of the MMOs I've played (which is a pretty wide cross section), this has the introductory group content with the highest learning curve.

[Zetor]

Yea, it may be a class issue as well.

I'm playing a medic -- my best healing abilities are weak cone AOE heal, instant AOE hot, instant AOE heal, smart heal (which sometimes goes to a dps standing in fire instead of the tank), medium cone heal only usable after a crit, a stun, and a blink; everything except for the weak cone is on a ~10sec cooldown. I read up on the abilities (incl. guides), and medics do get a lot of burst healing at 25+ (and 35+) when you can detonate the HOT drones for healing (or auto-activate at near death) and get an ability that refills shields. Right now it feels like playing a resto druid with only wild growth, efflor, and a swiftmend that only targets the lowest hp party member in the group... it's just frustrating when instead of being the person that can save people, I'm reduced to playing whackamole on health bars and praying nobody screws up.

e: to illustrate -- the last boss in that adventure is a big robot that throws eleventy billion kinds of telegraphs on the ground. Some of them will just tickle, but quite a few take off 50% hp right away. So we start fighting him, and the HP of a tank and a DPS both start dropping sharply. I bust out the medic burst healing cooldown, the two AOE heals and the smart heal to top them off. Five seconds later the same thing happens again (also to another DPS) and I can do nothing except point my weak-ass healing cone at the tank, which does approximately squat. They die, and then me and a DPS work on the boss for the next 3 minutes (the boss was aggroed at me at that point, but healing through boss damage isn't too bad when no telegraphs are hitting) when we realize that we're never going to have the damage to take him down. Then (after the next attempt) the tank complains that I'm not healing him and "big heals plz". Of course!

[Count Nerfedalot]

I think I'm getting old. I'm having fond memories of sitting and chatting with friends while we kept an area of an EQ dungeon clear or waited on the pull. The move towards frenetic action games is just too busy and anti-social. Could be the rose colored glasses, but I think if there's something that's so edge of your seat I want it to be a game I can pause or restart at my convenience.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions though, I'm likely to have ~300 ping and looking at some of the raid and PvP gameplay, or even PvE, I suspected that would be punishing.

For all the bad stuff that got streamlined out of MMORPGs post-EQ, some good stuff got thrown out also. Combat paced slow enough you could strategize with each other over what to do next, discuss who will take the add, or even make quips and joke around or just chatter is among the most missed. Now it's all business, everyone has a job to do and they damn well better do it "right" and that means both execution AND just plain knowing what to do automatically for every possible situation that may arise.

Voice comms helped for awhile but as pointed out the pace is getting so frenetic now that you can't even spare the time (or a finger) for push to talk.

Bleh.  I wonder if this is why I enjoy MMOs less and less these days? They're stressing me out! Well that and low tolerance for stupid design decisions that have to be made over and over again by every single new team.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Having serious buyers remorse.  I don't know why I thought it would be different than beta but the sheer amount of quests is killing me.  doing quest after quest after quest with no real variation or break in between.  I think if you compare the number of quests to max level vs vanilla or even present day wow it'll be a 5to1 ratio.

[rk47]

I think I'm getting old. I'm having fond memories of sitting and chatting with friends while we kept an area of an EQ dungeon clear or waited on the pull. The move towards frenetic action games is just too busy and anti-social. Could be the rose colored glasses, but I think if there's something that's so edge of your seat I want it to be a game I can pause or restart at my convenience.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions though, I'm likely to have ~300 ping and looking at some of the raid and PvP gameplay, or even PvE, I suspected that would be punishing.

People don't talk much in raids anymore.
I play in SWTOR atm and they wanted to just SPACE BAR through the whole cinematic and go straight to pull and tank spank.
I had to chat in between 2.5 sec heals just to get some convo going. All I got are mostly lol, heh, meh, wtf really?
And that's that.

[Azuredream]

I don't like the medal system, at least for veteran adventures. Each one has different requirements that you need to fulfill to get a gold medal instead of bronze (for merely finishing) or silver (for finishing only some requirements). If you get gold, you get epics at the end. If you get anything else, you get blues. What this leads to in practice is that as soon as gold has been lost, everybody bails from an instance. Gold isn't very easy to get either, so the amount of runs that get finished versus the amount of runs that get started is very lopsided. There are bugs and stuff I could complain about too, but I think Carbine will fix those eventually so they're not a problem in the long run, but I don't know if they're going to be willing to scrap their whole medal system or change the way it works.

[Goreschach]

I think I'm getting old. I'm having fond memories of sitting and chatting with friends while we kept an area of an EQ dungeon clear or waited on the pull. The move towards frenetic action games is just too busy and anti-social. Could be the rose colored glasses, but I think if there's something that's so edge of your seat I want it to be a game I can pause or restart at my convenience.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions though, I'm likely to have ~300 ping and looking at some of the raid and PvP gameplay, or even PvE, I suspected that would be punishing.

People don't talk much in raids anymore.
I play in SWTOR atm and they wanted to just SPACE BAR through the whole cinematic and go straight to pull and tank spank.
I had to chat in between 2.5 sec heals just to get some convo going. All I got are mostly lol, heh, meh, wtf really?
And that's that.

Maybe they've seen your lp's.

[rk47]

Or maybe they're not a skilled keyboard warrior like me who can multitask while under pressure.

[Ozzu]

Having serious buyers remorse.  I don't know why I thought it would be different than beta but the sheer amount of quests is killing me.  doing quest after quest after quest with no real variation or break in between.  I think if you compare the number of quests to max level vs vanilla or even present day wow it'll be a 5to1 ratio.

I tend to avoid most task quests and stick with the story quests (World Story, Zone Story, Regional Story, etc.). This keeps me from getting so slogged down.

I've been tired of the quest hub system since about a month after WoW came out. The reason I put up with it in this game is because I enjoy the combat and the dungeons are fun.

[sam, an eggplant]

My theory, which is based upon nothing concrete whatsoever, is that most kids can't really type these days. They can do brief facebook updates and thumbtype on their mobile phones, but in actual typing on a keyboard they're very slow, under 30WPM.

[Rokal]

Having serious buyers remorse.  I don't know why I thought it would be different than beta but the sheer amount of quests is killing me.  doing quest after quest after quest with no real variation or break in between.  I think if you compare the number of quests to max level vs vanilla or even present day wow it'll be a 5to1 ratio.

I've heard it suggested that the best way to level is to focus on story quests and only do the "tasks" quests that will be quickly done along the way. They don't reward a ton of experience and you can get to the level cap quicker if you're focusing on story quests instead. I've definitely noticed that when I felt overwhelmed by quests, or like a quest was taking too long, it was because of tasks. I'm still doing them all, but I'm also only playing 2-3 times a week with a friend.