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[Wildstar] Everybody's dead, Dave.
Artereis
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
GAME IS DEAD; SERVERS ARE SHUT DOWN.
Below is the original OP for posterity.
Game is Live; Get cooking, Spanky
"Another MMO!? No more, no more!"
There will always be another MMO, at least until Titan releases and collapses under its own hype, forming a black hole from which no MMO can escape. But Wildstar looks like a game that is just about having some fun instead of promising the revolutionize the genre. Here, have a launch and What Is video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N-95t5hk14
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_4_riSI7Ydg
It's a bit...enthused, sure, but there's a bit of potential to be had here. The game's a cartoony sci-fi type that plays almost like a WoW 2 than anything, with kinetic combat that feels like a step up from Guild Wars 2, but it also makes sure to focus on areas besides combat with deep features like housing and paths. Carbine, the developers, seem to be making sure the end game is there, with raids and PvP content like war plots. So once you hit level cap there should be plenty left to do.
Might as well start at the beginning, with Wildstar's bevy of content. Can we get a neat little banner for that?
Awesome. Let's begin.
Wildstar features a revolutionary feature called Stuff. Carbine has even taken one step further, and Wildstar allows you todo stuff. "Incredible!" you exclaim, credit card already in hand, "but just what is this Stuff?" Well, let's split it up.
Dungeons: Your basic loot run with your closest friends (or complete strangers). Go in, kill the bosses, get the loot, and repeat until you're armed to the teeth. It's been said that dungeoneering enough can result in earning loot on par with raiding gear, but it may take longer than raiding (depending on how (un)lucky the player is).
Adventures: Dungeons, with a twist! These take place in the wide outdoors, and the scenarios vary a bit more than just "kill them all." Tower defense, escorting a convoy, even a pseudo-MOBA experience that you can try. Adventures also feature a number of choices that will change how the rest of adventure plays out, offering a bit of replayability.
Housing: At level 14 you unlock your own little piece of Nexus. Housing is completely bonkers in Wildstar, giving you tons of furniture to collect from dungeons, finding collectibles in the world, and so on. You can adjust the size and position of your stuff, and even pick the lighting that suits you best. You also have plots where you can build various odds and ends like a crafting station, a garden, targeting dummies, and even buff stations. If you like Animal Crossing, housing may utterly consume you.
Raiding: Yes, Wildstar loves the raid game. Like dungeons, this is very standard business, but Wildstar features 20 and 40 player raids in case you have some kind of sick longing for the old days of WoW raids.
Lore Searching: There are tons of datacubes and lore entries scattered across Nexus, and you get neat rewards like comic book covers to place in your house for finding enough.
Dress-Up: Wildstar doesn't just feature costume slots for you, but also for your mounts. Get the fanciest hats for your lizard mount, or deck out your hoverboard. Wildstar is all about being the prettiest space princess.
Crafting: Wildstar features a robust crafting system that is fairly deep and hard to fully explain here. I mean, each tradeskill has its own talent tree.
Battlegrounds: Wildstar will launch with two delicious battlegrounds, in both regular and ranked flavors. You can level just fine in battlegrounds, and get both loot bags and PvP currency after a game.
Arenas: Be it 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5, ranked or practice, Wildstar has you covered. The arenas here are a bit different, giving each team a pool of respawns to draw from. Once your team is out of respawns, you're gone for good once you die.
Warplots: This is the real shit. A 40v40 war against two fortresses. Using war coins, your gang customizes your warplot with all sorts of weapons and defenses, the most appealing of which is plopping a boss you downed in a dungeon or raid and letting it loose on your enemies.
But hey, in order to dive into this deep pool of stuff, you're going to need a diver. And a swim suit. And...sun screen? Okay, let's stop torturing this metaphor and break down the two factions and their respective races.
Refugees, renegades, and rebels, the Exiles are a loose coalition of peoples that are united in their opposition against the Dominion. For these haggard mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, Nexus offers at long last the possibility of a new place to call home, and they've banded together to keep it free from the Dominion.
Splitting from their Dominion counterparts centuries ago in a civil war, humans are largely a nomadic species looking for a place to call home. Tough and gritty, they're basically space cowboys without the cows. And they're not all boys. Alright, maybe that wasn't the best comparison, but you get the idea.
Exiled somewhat unfairly from their planet by their elders for breaking ancient rules in order to fight off the Dominion, the Granok are nonetheless a simple species. They like to fight, drink, and drink while fighting. Oh, and they're huge rock people. Is that worth mentioning? I feel it's worth mentioning.
Aurin are your standard treehugging pacifists, or they would be had the Dominion not torched their home planet. Sporting huge bunny ears and weird cat tails, they seek a new home while also checking off the prerequisite furry race. It's okay, we won't judge. Much.
Originally working for the Dominion, the Mordesh were left hanging after a botched immortality elixir left them with particularly undesirable side effects like rotting flesh and a desire to eat people. While they've since found a cure to the symptoms of their illness, they've hooked up with the Exiles while they search for a permanent cure. They tend to do the black ops and morally grey scientific research of the Exiles.
Formed by the ancient, advanced, and now mysteriously absent Eldan, the Dominion is a vast and powerful empire. While benevolent to their citizens, the Dominion also keeps them on a short leash, and refusing to keep in step can have dire consequences. Nexus is the legendary homeworld of the Eldans, and thus the Dominion is claiming the entire world as theirs.
Handpicked by the Eldan to lead an empire, the humans of Cassus have taken the task with gusto over the many centuries. Cassians tend to be the stuffy, arrogant prudes that one might expect from a race having their egos stoked for countless generations as the Chosen Ones of the Cosmos.
Drakens love hunting and fighting, and not much else. After a duel in which their Clan Lord lost to one of the Dominion's Emperors, the Draken have served as a rather potent part of the Dominion's military. They possess a love for skulls that rivals Khorne.
Built by the Eldan themselves, you can say that the Mechari are the ones that keep the Dominion running from behind the scenes. Centuries of protecting their creators' empire, however, have not done much for their sense of humor. Do not pull pranks on the deadly robot people.
Scientists, inventors, and researchers of the Dominion, the Chua are typically the black sheep of the empire on account of their insatiable lust for painful experimentation and all-around asocial tendencies. This is a race that turned their own home planet into a lifeless ball of slag and pollution. Aurin, the EPA, and Captain Planet do NOT care for the Chua.
Wildstar has six classes that each have three aspects: Assault, Support, and Utility. Every class does DPS through the Assault side, and the only difference is between ranged and melee. Support roles are either tanking (Warrior/Engineer/Stalker) or healing (Esper/Medic/Spellslinger), and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Utility is mostly for stuff like mobility, CC, and stuff that tends to be more useful in PvP, and these skills scale off a split of your Assault and Support power.
Warriors believe that if swords were good enough for Conan, then they're good enough for them. These muscle-bound berserkers are not luddites, however, and they know Conan would have used arm-mounted cannons if he had them back in what historians call Barbarian Times. Your handy arm cannon can fire missiles, ropes that drag your victim back towards you, and just generally solve the problem that vexed Conan for years: people running away from you.
Engineers have come up with a very simple principle: the best friends are the ones you build. Backed up by a small squadron of deadly automatons, the engineers finally had struck the perfect balance of companionship without backtalk, teasing, or being asked to pick up the bar tab. Miss the warmth of human physical contact? Strap on an exosuit, which provides both warmth and about 237% more firepower than the average hug. As a an Engineer, you'll enjoy the latest technological advancements that make loneliness someone else's problem.
Stalkers learned early in their lives that the best game of Hide and Seek involves just two people. And the hider is also the seeker. And the other person doesn't know they're part of the game. And the game ends with their abdomen being pierced by clawed gloves that would even make Freddie Krueger do an impressed little whistle. Dressed up in fancy nanosuits that can offer both cloaking AND defensive options when the whole "run and hide" thing isn't working out, Stalkers are the reason therapists are seeing a spike in patients with extreme paranoia.
Experts say we only use ten percent of our brains. In reality, these "experts" need to head back to school and really buckle down and finish this time. We use all our brains, and the Espers use them better. A lot better. Like "using your brain to take mastery over life itself" better. Think warm thoughts and watch as your allies recover from even the most grievous of wounds. If you ever wanted to think someone to death, then start working on that Esper application. Psychic swords that really cut? Taking your very nightmares and siccing them on your enemies? For an Esper, critical thinking means someone is about to lose a limb.
You might think Medics would be pretty straight-forward. They heal people, right? But on Nexus, healing is only half the story. This breed of Medics are borderline quacks that don't use their instruments as directed, utilizing their powerful resonators to heal and liquefy the viscera of others. Far away from hospitals and medical tents, these maniacal MDs strap on medium armor and get right in the thick of things. To really envision a Medic, just imagine a doctor with questionable credentials running around zapping people with a defibrillator.
Cowboys are boring. Spellslingers, however, are more like a spaghetti western mixed with a magic show. They dual-wield pistols, sure, but they also use magic sigils and spells to amplify their damage and recover from wounds. Spellslingers also consider armor to be incredibly wasteful and just outright unfashionable. Why give up a cool hat and badass coat when you can just use SPACE MAGIC to teleport all over the place? If you're in real trouble, then enter the "Wild West", by which I mean "an alternate dimension" and take a breather. Spellslingers are like being Clint Eastwood and Merlin at the same time, only without having to be the offspring of demons or yell at chairs.
Paths are something you pick when creating your character, and it sticks with you for the rest of that character's time on Nexus. Roughly based on the Bartle personality test for MMOs, it provides an alternate progression based on what activity you like doing best. As you complete normal quests out in the world, you'll also discover missions for your path which will award path experience upon completion. Your path has its own level, and you unlock various goodies as you level up such as costumes, titles, and abilities related to your path.
Are you the person that likes to uncover every spot on the map? Do you enjoy finding little shortcuts and hidden areas? Are you a fan of jumping puzzles? Well, Explorer might be up your allow. Explorer missions include seeking out special areas of Nexus, getting to specific landmarks, and trying to find the quickest route between two points. Explorer rewards help facilitate your lust for dangerous terrain by offering several abilities that reduce or outright stop fall damage. High level explorers can even tag any location in the world and teleport there later.
Scientists like to know stuff. If you've ever edited a wiki about some obscure factoid, then consider the path of Scientist. You'll get a little scanbot that follows you around and analyzes the various flora and fauna of Nexus. Scientists get abilities that help them navigate the world by reducing mob aggro radii, summoning groups to your location, and creating a portal back to your capital when you're all done.
So you're a people person. You like that "massively" part of MMO, and enjoy socializing with others. That's why you wisely picked Settler. They construct various structures in towns and quest hubs, from flavorful doodads to large projects that offer special quests when completed. There are even little camps out in the world that you can build up to be safe havens for questing players. A Settler's skill set includes enough abilites to basically summon a mini town, including vendors, mailboxes, and crafting stations.
Alright, fuck all that. You don't care about running around, clicking on shit, or dealing with people. You like grinding for bear asses and by god you're going to grind for bear asses like nobody else. Then be one of the proud Soldiers, who basically kill a lot of shit, be it with experimental weapons or whatever they have on them. Soldier gain combat techniques like quick healing between fights and the ability to dip out of a fight when things get too hot. Level up enough and you can enough drop a weapon supply crate for you and your group.
Wildstar has scads of media on their YouTube channel (check out the DevSpeaks), but I made sure to give you the prime bits.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=x-NXdWk9sm8
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fn8648VGMKM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hCaIxmffFWY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lmCyPXv5APY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3cWhaTldG3k
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9pgK0I3FqvU
You can buy Wildstar in standard or deluxe flavors, and the game has a standard $14.99/mo subscription fee (with the first month being free). However, players can buy an in-game item called CREDD for $19.99 that, when consumed by a player, extends their current subscription by 30 days. CREDD can be sold on the auction house, essentially giving players a legal way to buy gold with real-world money and game time with gold.
Get it? Got it? Good!
Hope to see you in game!
Below is the original OP for posterity.
"Another MMO!? No more, no more!"
There will always be another MMO, at least until Titan releases and collapses under its own hype, forming a black hole from which no MMO can escape. But Wildstar looks like a game that is just about having some fun instead of promising the revolutionize the genre. Here, have a launch and What Is video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N-95t5hk14http://youtube.com/watch?v=_4_riSI7YdgIt's a bit...enthused, sure, but there's a bit of potential to be had here. The game's a cartoony sci-fi type that plays almost like a WoW 2 than anything, with kinetic combat that feels like a step up from Guild Wars 2, but it also makes sure to focus on areas besides combat with deep features like housing and paths. Carbine, the developers, seem to be making sure the end game is there, with raids and PvP content like war plots. So once you hit level cap there should be plenty left to do.
Might as well start at the beginning, with Wildstar's bevy of content. Can we get a neat little banner for that?
Awesome. Let's begin.
Wildstar features a revolutionary feature called Stuff. Carbine has even taken one step further, and Wildstar allows you todo stuff. "Incredible!" you exclaim, credit card already in hand, "but just what is this Stuff?" Well, let's split it up.
Dungeons: Your basic loot run with your closest friends (or complete strangers). Go in, kill the bosses, get the loot, and repeat until you're armed to the teeth. It's been said that dungeoneering enough can result in earning loot on par with raiding gear, but it may take longer than raiding (depending on how (un)lucky the player is).
Adventures: Dungeons, with a twist! These take place in the wide outdoors, and the scenarios vary a bit more than just "kill them all." Tower defense, escorting a convoy, even a pseudo-MOBA experience that you can try. Adventures also feature a number of choices that will change how the rest of adventure plays out, offering a bit of replayability.
Housing: At level 14 you unlock your own little piece of Nexus. Housing is completely bonkers in Wildstar, giving you tons of furniture to collect from dungeons, finding collectibles in the world, and so on. You can adjust the size and position of your stuff, and even pick the lighting that suits you best. You also have plots where you can build various odds and ends like a crafting station, a garden, targeting dummies, and even buff stations. If you like Animal Crossing, housing may utterly consume you.
Raiding: Yes, Wildstar loves the raid game. Like dungeons, this is very standard business, but Wildstar features 20 and 40 player raids in case you have some kind of sick longing for the old days of WoW raids.
Lore Searching: There are tons of datacubes and lore entries scattered across Nexus, and you get neat rewards like comic book covers to place in your house for finding enough.
Dress-Up: Wildstar doesn't just feature costume slots for you, but also for your mounts. Get the fanciest hats for your lizard mount, or deck out your hoverboard. Wildstar is all about being the prettiest space princess.
Crafting: Wildstar features a robust crafting system that is fairly deep and hard to fully explain here. I mean, each tradeskill has its own talent tree.
Battlegrounds: Wildstar will launch with two delicious battlegrounds, in both regular and ranked flavors. You can level just fine in battlegrounds, and get both loot bags and PvP currency after a game.
Arenas: Be it 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5, ranked or practice, Wildstar has you covered. The arenas here are a bit different, giving each team a pool of respawns to draw from. Once your team is out of respawns, you're gone for good once you die.
Warplots: This is the real shit. A 40v40 war against two fortresses. Using war coins, your gang customizes your warplot with all sorts of weapons and defenses, the most appealing of which is plopping a boss you downed in a dungeon or raid and letting it loose on your enemies.
But hey, in order to dive into this deep pool of stuff, you're going to need a diver. And a swim suit. And...sun screen? Okay, let's stop torturing this metaphor and break down the two factions and their respective races.
Refugees, renegades, and rebels, the Exiles are a loose coalition of peoples that are united in their opposition against the Dominion. For these haggard mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, Nexus offers at long last the possibility of a new place to call home, and they've banded together to keep it free from the Dominion.
Splitting from their Dominion counterparts centuries ago in a civil war, humans are largely a nomadic species looking for a place to call home. Tough and gritty, they're basically space cowboys without the cows. And they're not all boys. Alright, maybe that wasn't the best comparison, but you get the idea.
Exiled somewhat unfairly from their planet by their elders for breaking ancient rules in order to fight off the Dominion, the Granok are nonetheless a simple species. They like to fight, drink, and drink while fighting. Oh, and they're huge rock people. Is that worth mentioning? I feel it's worth mentioning.
Aurin are your standard treehugging pacifists, or they would be had the Dominion not torched their home planet. Sporting huge bunny ears and weird cat tails, they seek a new home while also checking off the prerequisite furry race. It's okay, we won't judge. Much.
Originally working for the Dominion, the Mordesh were left hanging after a botched immortality elixir left them with particularly undesirable side effects like rotting flesh and a desire to eat people. While they've since found a cure to the symptoms of their illness, they've hooked up with the Exiles while they search for a permanent cure. They tend to do the black ops and morally grey scientific research of the Exiles.
Formed by the ancient, advanced, and now mysteriously absent Eldan, the Dominion is a vast and powerful empire. While benevolent to their citizens, the Dominion also keeps them on a short leash, and refusing to keep in step can have dire consequences. Nexus is the legendary homeworld of the Eldans, and thus the Dominion is claiming the entire world as theirs.
Handpicked by the Eldan to lead an empire, the humans of Cassus have taken the task with gusto over the many centuries. Cassians tend to be the stuffy, arrogant prudes that one might expect from a race having their egos stoked for countless generations as the Chosen Ones of the Cosmos.
Drakens love hunting and fighting, and not much else. After a duel in which their Clan Lord lost to one of the Dominion's Emperors, the Draken have served as a rather potent part of the Dominion's military. They possess a love for skulls that rivals Khorne.
Built by the Eldan themselves, you can say that the Mechari are the ones that keep the Dominion running from behind the scenes. Centuries of protecting their creators' empire, however, have not done much for their sense of humor. Do not pull pranks on the deadly robot people.
Scientists, inventors, and researchers of the Dominion, the Chua are typically the black sheep of the empire on account of their insatiable lust for painful experimentation and all-around asocial tendencies. This is a race that turned their own home planet into a lifeless ball of slag and pollution. Aurin, the EPA, and Captain Planet do NOT care for the Chua.
Wildstar has six classes that each have three aspects: Assault, Support, and Utility. Every class does DPS through the Assault side, and the only difference is between ranged and melee. Support roles are either tanking (Warrior/Engineer/Stalker) or healing (Esper/Medic/Spellslinger), and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Utility is mostly for stuff like mobility, CC, and stuff that tends to be more useful in PvP, and these skills scale off a split of your Assault and Support power.
Warriors believe that if swords were good enough for Conan, then they're good enough for them. These muscle-bound berserkers are not luddites, however, and they know Conan would have used arm-mounted cannons if he had them back in what historians call Barbarian Times. Your handy arm cannon can fire missiles, ropes that drag your victim back towards you, and just generally solve the problem that vexed Conan for years: people running away from you.
Engineers have come up with a very simple principle: the best friends are the ones you build. Backed up by a small squadron of deadly automatons, the engineers finally had struck the perfect balance of companionship without backtalk, teasing, or being asked to pick up the bar tab. Miss the warmth of human physical contact? Strap on an exosuit, which provides both warmth and about 237% more firepower than the average hug. As a an Engineer, you'll enjoy the latest technological advancements that make loneliness someone else's problem.
Stalkers learned early in their lives that the best game of Hide and Seek involves just two people. And the hider is also the seeker. And the other person doesn't know they're part of the game. And the game ends with their abdomen being pierced by clawed gloves that would even make Freddie Krueger do an impressed little whistle. Dressed up in fancy nanosuits that can offer both cloaking AND defensive options when the whole "run and hide" thing isn't working out, Stalkers are the reason therapists are seeing a spike in patients with extreme paranoia.
Experts say we only use ten percent of our brains. In reality, these "experts" need to head back to school and really buckle down and finish this time. We use all our brains, and the Espers use them better. A lot better. Like "using your brain to take mastery over life itself" better. Think warm thoughts and watch as your allies recover from even the most grievous of wounds. If you ever wanted to think someone to death, then start working on that Esper application. Psychic swords that really cut? Taking your very nightmares and siccing them on your enemies? For an Esper, critical thinking means someone is about to lose a limb.
You might think Medics would be pretty straight-forward. They heal people, right? But on Nexus, healing is only half the story. This breed of Medics are borderline quacks that don't use their instruments as directed, utilizing their powerful resonators to heal and liquefy the viscera of others. Far away from hospitals and medical tents, these maniacal MDs strap on medium armor and get right in the thick of things. To really envision a Medic, just imagine a doctor with questionable credentials running around zapping people with a defibrillator.
Cowboys are boring. Spellslingers, however, are more like a spaghetti western mixed with a magic show. They dual-wield pistols, sure, but they also use magic sigils and spells to amplify their damage and recover from wounds. Spellslingers also consider armor to be incredibly wasteful and just outright unfashionable. Why give up a cool hat and badass coat when you can just use SPACE MAGIC to teleport all over the place? If you're in real trouble, then enter the "Wild West", by which I mean "an alternate dimension" and take a breather. Spellslingers are like being Clint Eastwood and Merlin at the same time, only without having to be the offspring of demons or yell at chairs.
Paths are something you pick when creating your character, and it sticks with you for the rest of that character's time on Nexus. Roughly based on the Bartle personality test for MMOs, it provides an alternate progression based on what activity you like doing best. As you complete normal quests out in the world, you'll also discover missions for your path which will award path experience upon completion. Your path has its own level, and you unlock various goodies as you level up such as costumes, titles, and abilities related to your path.
Are you the person that likes to uncover every spot on the map? Do you enjoy finding little shortcuts and hidden areas? Are you a fan of jumping puzzles? Well, Explorer might be up your allow. Explorer missions include seeking out special areas of Nexus, getting to specific landmarks, and trying to find the quickest route between two points. Explorer rewards help facilitate your lust for dangerous terrain by offering several abilities that reduce or outright stop fall damage. High level explorers can even tag any location in the world and teleport there later.
Scientists like to know stuff. If you've ever edited a wiki about some obscure factoid, then consider the path of Scientist. You'll get a little scanbot that follows you around and analyzes the various flora and fauna of Nexus. Scientists get abilities that help them navigate the world by reducing mob aggro radii, summoning groups to your location, and creating a portal back to your capital when you're all done.
So you're a people person. You like that "massively" part of MMO, and enjoy socializing with others. That's why you wisely picked Settler. They construct various structures in towns and quest hubs, from flavorful doodads to large projects that offer special quests when completed. There are even little camps out in the world that you can build up to be safe havens for questing players. A Settler's skill set includes enough abilites to basically summon a mini town, including vendors, mailboxes, and crafting stations.
Alright, fuck all that. You don't care about running around, clicking on shit, or dealing with people. You like grinding for bear asses and by god you're going to grind for bear asses like nobody else. Then be one of the proud Soldiers, who basically kill a lot of shit, be it with experimental weapons or whatever they have on them. Soldier gain combat techniques like quick healing between fights and the ability to dip out of a fight when things get too hot. Level up enough and you can enough drop a weapon supply crate for you and your group.
Wildstar has scads of media on their YouTube channel (check out the DevSpeaks), but I made sure to give you the prime bits.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=x-NXdWk9sm8http://youtube.com/watch?v=fn8648VGMKMhttp://youtube.com/watch?v=hCaIxmffFWYhttp://youtube.com/watch?v=lmCyPXv5APYhttp://youtube.com/watch?v=3cWhaTldG3khttp://youtube.com/watch?v=9pgK0I3FqvUYou can buy Wildstar in standard or deluxe flavors, and the game has a standard $14.99/mo subscription fee (with the first month being free). However, players can buy an in-game item called CREDD for $19.99 that, when consumed by a player, extends their current subscription by 30 days. CREDD can be sold on the auction house, essentially giving players a legal way to buy gold with real-world money and game time with gold.
Get it? Got it? Good!
Hope to see you in game!
Sterica on
+1
Posts
WHERE DO I GO???
Click objectives on your question tracker, and a handy arrow will point the way! This also applies to Path missions.
I'm at the end of my newbie area, but I want to level with my friend. How do?
Both factions have two areas after the initial newbie/tutorial zone, which are split Human/Granok and Aurin/Mordesh for Exiles whereas Cassian/Mechari and Draken/Chua are the Dominion split. This is the default and where your quest will take you. If you'd rather go elsewhere, then turn in the quest but DO NOT use the terminal to take you out of the newbie zone. Just head to the far end of the area opposite from where you're at and look for a glowy terminal there to click. That'll take to you the other option instead of your racial default.
What do stats do!?
http://i.imgur.com/4jqQlrk.png
How it works: you have skills broken down into three categories (Assault/Support/Utility). Assault skills scale entirely off Assault Power, Support scales entirely off Support Power, and Utility evenly scales of both. For the sake of leveling, you want lots of Assault Power. If you plan on tanking or healing, you should take the opportunity to grab the odd piece of support gear every so often.
When do I unlock...?
PvP: Level 6 to queue for battlegrounds, and around 15 you can queue for the other battleground.
Crafting: Level 10 (you can only get as high as the journeyman skill for beta)
Housing: Level 14
Mounts: Level 15
Adventures: 15, 25 and 30 (you can enter a bit earlier but this is the recommended level)
Dungeons: 20 (ditto as above)
Raids/Warplots: Available at Level 50. If you are curious about the raid attunement you can check out This (Reverse faction for faction specific instructions)
There is also a thing in the menu that shows what each level specifically unlocks.
How do I change my costume?
You have to go to a Protostar vendor in your capital city and talk to him. The /costumes command no longer works. Same goes for dying items.
How do I unlock tier 2/3 AMPs?
Each zone has a rep vendor that will sell you two AMPs at the Popular reputation, which should be easy to hit just by leveling through the zone normally. AMPs rarely drop off mobs and AMPs have a decent chance to be inside scavenged bags from challenges but there's no guarantee they'll be for your class. Check the guild bank as people tend to store them there.
What's the difference between tradeskills and hobbies?
You have have two tradeskills and as many hobbies as are available (which is just cooking for the moment).
Gawd, I can't be an anime bunny princess for EVERY CLASS?
Racial restrictions are a product of time restrictions on the art department. Each model needs to be rigged for the animations of each class, and they did not have enough time. The current plan is to someday allow each race to play any class.
My warrior xxGokulordxx looks sick as fuck. How can I save his beautiful face for launch?
Currently during character creation AND ONLY during character creation, you can hit "customize" and look for a "save/load character" option. This will bring up a code that you can store somewhere until launch, upon which you can hit the same button and copy/paste the code for instant character. If the character has already been created, then you are shit outta luck unless Carbine lets us grab codes for pre-existing characters before beta ends. Also, make sure you have race and sex decided, because obviously you'll get errors if you try to paste in a female Mordesh code for a male Draken.
When do I get hoverboards?
Level 25 unless you were in the winter beta and got one of those. Also, use renown to buy a hoverboard, as it is significantly cheaper than the gold option.
Wait, what is renown?
Renown is a currency earned by doing group content like Adventures. It is largely spent on aesthetic items like furniture, mount flair, and so forth, but I believe you can buy crafting mats or something similar with it.
Any other fun moneys I should know about?
Prestige: PvP currency
Elder Gems: The endgame currency, similar to Valor from WoW. At 50 your experience bar earns a single gem every time it fills up, and there's a weekly cap on how many you can get that way. Gems buy a ton of stuff, such as raid gear (but only if you've beaten the boss that drops it), aesthetic items, and other stuff that is irrelevant since gems also buy ability tiers and AMP power and that's what you'll be spending the first months of level cap buying!
War Coins: Used to build stuff on warplots
Influence: Used to buy guild perks like bank tabs.
Crafting Vouchers: Earned via crafting dailies, these purchase schematics and various reagents.
How do I link/preview/etc. items?
To link an item, shift + right click the item. Note that you can pretty much only link items in your inventory.
To see how an item looks: same deal (shift + right click). This seems to work on inventory and items being sold by someone but NOT linked items.
I failed a challenge. How do I redeem myself?
There is a challenge menu that allows you to manually restart challenges. Completed challenges can even be repeated for another shot at goodies!
I got CC'd. How can I make this suck less?
Stun is the obvious one (press the button the game tells you to hit), but the others might be less intuitive.
Knockdown: You can dash (aka dodge) to break it early. This does require and consume a dash, so keep it in mind.
Tether: Kill the thing attached to the tether.
Subdue: This is subtle, but subdue is actually just a disarm. If you cannot do ANYTHING and aren't clearly stunned or whatever, then you are probably subdued. Your weapon got knocked somewhere, and you can run over and pick it up to clear the subdue.
Disorient: You cannot clear this early, but it simply random rebinds all your movement keys so just try to learn quickly the new directions.
Root: As far as I can tell, you're more or less forced to suck this up or burn a CC break.
Whoa, I casted a crowd control skill and NOTHING happened. What the hell?
Interrupt Armor (IA) is a little number in a circle next to the target frame (and your frame, but you have zero IA by default). If CC is used against a player with at least one IA, the CC fails and the target loses one IA (sometimes more depending on the skill). If a target has no IA, then you'll see a little broken red shield signaling their vulnerability (however, if you see neither shield nor number, it means the target has no IA and doesn't regenerate it on their own). If you see a gold shield with no number, it means the target has infinite IA and is effectively immune to CC.
Interrupt Armor is a key thing to learn, and not just for PvP, as mobs and even bosses can be vulnerable to CC if the party coordinates their crowd control properly. Most bosses regenerate IA quickly, so it's important that players plan ahead of time as to whom has the CC and the timing for getting it off. In some cases this is vital to beat an encounter.
An enemy's health bar turned purple. What the fuck?
This is known as a Moment of Opportunity (MOO), where an enemy was interrupting while casting a telegraph. During this short period, they take 50% more damage from all source. This rewards players who are even more on the ball by giving them a considerable DPS boost for not only coordinating their CC, but doing so at the right moment. It's also important in PvP, as interrupting a healer during a heal reaps even more of an advantage.
Need AMPs? Who Doesn't? Just follow this handy spreadsheet!
All the Amps
So who has that good shit at their house??
We Have a Spreadsheet for that(Exile)
And one for that(Dominion)
"...only mights and maybes."
speaking of:
Espers
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/111302-esper-update-august/?p=1154378
Medic
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/111297-medic-update-august/#entry1154336
Engineer
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/111285-engineer-august-update/#entry1154162
Spellslinger
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/111288-spellslinger-august-update/
Warrior
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/111296-warrior-update-august/#entry1154335
Stalker
https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/111300-stalker-update-august/#entry1154375
Some things we knew about plus some new tidbits
"...only mights and maybes."
Like...just about every post-WoW MMO for the past decade, Wildstar has been having issues since launch. You (wisely) hesitated about leaping in at the ground floor, and now you want to know if the game is worth the money.
The answer...depends on what you're looking for.
Just about every person in this thread will tell you that the leveling process is one of the most fun in MMOs if only because of the combat, and that alone was worth the price of admission. While the quests are a bit dry, the story is fun and doesn't take itself too seriously, and it really ramps up once the game starts sending you on single-player dungeons around level 35. There's also things to do like path content, shiphand missions (each zone has a dungeon that scales to group size but it's intended to be soloed) collectibles such as comic books, and of course the housing is pretty easy to become obsessed with. The people who still love the game are the people who took their time and may not even be 50 yet. The only issue with leveling now is that the population is now small enough that you will have trouble doing group content like elite quests or dungeons/adventures if you're on the wrong server/faction/time of day. This content is pretty fun so that is kinda unfortunate.
Level cap is where things grow dire. Veteran dungeons, while fun, are very tough and even getting a bronze medal can require several hours of playtime. I cannot tell you how many times I spend a whole evening trying to clear one dungeon. And these things weren't tuned very well either: Stormtalon Lair is a place where you will one-shot every boss and then spend two hours wiping on Stormtalon himself. While extremely rewarding to beat, one cannot help but feel like these things are shoddily balanced. Let's not even get into raids, with their punishing attunements that can be blamed for any real endgame raid groups dying off.
Adventures are in a better place, but the game has like five that you will quickly grow tired of running. After that you basically play around with your house or do awful dailies. This game has dailies that, while not a pain to do, take WAY TOO LONG to max reputation with and have absolutely no variation. The worst of which is Blighthaven, where the majority of daily content requires a group. I quit Wildstar over this, because nothing says "fuck this game" like waiting two hours for a world boss to respawn only to have the game shove a middle finger in your face and give you no credit for the daily.
PvP is okay but came out in a clearly ignored state, with the stats have ridiculous diminishing returns and CC being rendered incredibly weak due to the bad breakout mechanics and abundance of CC immunities. They're improving it, but the few PvPers left in this thread are having a hard time getting games to pop. Assuming it works, the PvP is well-implemented and is a totally legit way to level.
The devs were fairly fast getting content out until they decided to focus on polishing content, which is good because Wildstar launched as an obscenely buggy game. Not showstoppers, but thousands of small bugs that would slowly erode your patience if you played on a regular basis. I would like to say a lot of the more annoying bugs have been squashed, but I have no delusions that many more still exist and they will annoy you to some degree. So my conclusion? The game is definitely worth $60 if you and some friends just want to level to 50 in a light, cartoony Firefly-esque setting with solid combat mechanics and fun classes. By the time you hit 50 hopefully some of the more glaring issues will be fixed. And that's not just wishful thinking: a lot of issues like earning medals in dungeons and attunement are already being looked at. If you want a new MMO to call home, then you should wait and see what Carbine is planning in the future to try and give the game its second wind.
"...only mights and maybes."
SteamID: steamcommunity.com/id/lehmancm/
BnS: Draggan (Server:Poharan)
There was a pretty large abandon-ship, but plenty of talent and population on Stormtalon to have some competitive raiding guilds.
I'm hoping it gets better. I'm not sure how long my sub will last. WoW keeps giving me an itch. Clean almost 3 years now.
I'm beginning to consider alternatives, but I really enjoy Wildstar still.
Message me, Kragor(when hes not dead or is online) or tynnan for circles invites on Stormtalon!
People should come hang out on Stormtalon as Exiles.
This isn't meant to be a mocking post or anything. If you're having fun, that's awesome for you. And it's a real bummer for everybody who had to regretfully turn away from the game. I'm just a dumbass, but I and others saw the writing on the wall (though it doesn't mean we wished it to be true). I'd just love to hear the dev's thoughts on the whole matter, and while I'm sure they gave it their real honest and hardgiven try, I'm curious if they maybe saw it too, or if they were taken by surprise.
PSN: BrightWing13 FFX|V:ARR Bright Asuna
Add on to that the poor state of PvP and the fact that zero people were doing anything with Warplots, a feature that was hyped just before the game came out as a big deal, and I left after just over a month.
I also hope it gets it's shit together, figures out it's future, fixes a bunch of things, and comes out on top. But with NCSoft holding the paypurse, I ain't holding my breath. Wildstar has a high climb back to a better place already ahead of it to be sure.
At the very least I have already returned to my old flame FF14. So I am content to watch Wildstar and wait again without my incorrigible MMO itch getting me into trouble again.
This can be annoying as hell at times when learning something, but it feels damn good once you manage it. It does mean you need to spend a lot of time with the game though. Learning a dungeon or encounter takes a while, but once you know it you can easily repeat it. It pretty much all comes down to playing well, apart from some instances of buggy encounters.
I personally would call the game a grindy, buggy mess, which also happens to be really fun to play despite that. And once the upcoming fixes make it into the game within a month or two, it should be in a way better place. Hopefully there are enough people around at that points to keep it going.
Perfection. I get it. You want to reward people playing well and people interacting in tandem. It's a beautiful thing, it's a wonderful goal, and even as a filthy casual it's something I strive for in my play. Nothing makes me happier then a solid run in any MMORPG where I know that I played well and things were smooth as can be. I like games that reward that.
But everything I heard about the 3+ hour dungeons at max and anything beyond was that Wildstar's reward for perfection was the absence of punishing you for not being perfect. I play games to relieve stress. I'm the bad sort that settled for B's in the mega man GBA games way back in the day. I don't mind parsers or whatnot, I like to know how I'm doing and what I can improve. But if I'm having an off day I'd still like to be able to jump onto a game and not have a hairy run take 500% longer than a regular run (well....you get the idea).
I like FFXIV dungeon timers. 90 minutes to complete a dungeon. Smooth run prolly takes 25 on average, newbie run prolly hits around 40. Speed run maybe 15. The time completion itself encourages solid gameplay, and I like that the only thing Square limits is the length of time you have to complete. I like that you can hit the timer pretty easily doing learning runs on the most difficult endgame content. It's discouraging but its like the game itself is reminding you to study hard in small brackets, then maybe take a break and do something else. Because as annoying as wasting an hour and a half of game time not accomplishing anything (beyond learning something at least, hopefully), doing anything more requires a completely new vote-in with 4-8 other people and that encourages trying something else rather than continuing to slam your head up against a wall.
Don't mean to compare this game to FFXIV specifically, just like their version of dungeon timers. And the not being punished being the carrot for good gameplay permeates Wildstar. That's part of why I only played to 32 esper. I would sit, and think about playing for 10-15 minutes before logging in every day. Was I having an off-night? Was something about real life weighing heavily on my mind? Was my wife going to be hanging out nearby and wanting to talk? A yes to any of these questions and I wouldn't log in, because chances are it would throw off my game and I'd die 2-3 times or more every hour. Maybe even every half hour. Part of that was being an Esper, which was still 90% immobile then. But partly its just this game discourages anything but absolute attention/devotion even in regular play. I know some people are looking for that and here it is! Go nuts. But I just can't get that seriously into a game except for maybe 1-2 intense and short (1-2 hr) sessions a week. If then. I don't want macroed gameplay and I alt tab with. I want something in the middle. I want something where I'm not guaranteed to die if I look away for 10 seconds.
Sry, I don't mean to gripe. Just the perfection bit highlights everything about why I'm not really playing anymore. I'm just not hardcore enough for Wildstar. It's okay, I have a group I go to for it. (It's GHOST).
Edit: Damn guys, this comes across as harsher than I intended. I'm not saying that regular play requires you to be amazing and super skilled per se, but it does require solid attention even on common mobs. It probably takes two or three common mobs to be attacking you at once and a 10 second distraction to kill you on eating three telegraphs or something. Idk because it's been a while since I've played. Of course, if I remember correctly having two or three mobs on you at once was pretty damn common and any higher tier of mob could single kill you if you weren't on your game.
XBOne | LyrKing
Just hop on, the guild's at the point where pretty much any four random people can group with you and get you that SSM silver.
You just gotta believe a little harder!! You can dooo iiiiit!!
http://imgur.com/WZaKDnu
Fuck me but this feels good. Such a fun, but frustrating boss.
That was a good idea but I don't think anyone ever did those.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I agree with Raz that we're probably not going to get any sort of post mortem but honestly the game's faults aren't exactly subtle.
Wildstar's main problem is that it's the type of mmo that players have been yelling that they've wanted for years until they got called on it coupled with Carbine's unwillingness to see that they're not really competing so much in an mmo space as they are in an entertainment space. They are competing with the same things that WoW and FFXIV have to compete with in that there is now PS3 and XBox, Netflix and Hulu and they've learned they have to dish out content in manageable, accessible chunks because people don't play games the same way they did 10 years ago. I'm not even talking about just the fact that people got older. There's space to have accessible, challenging content coexisting.
I can admit when I'm wrong and it turned out that "stop fellating your hardcore player base at the expense of the ones that can actually keep your lights turned on" holds more weight than I originally thought.
I think they can turn the game around but they have the wrong publisher for second chances.
"...only mights and maybes."
PSN: BrightWing13 FFX|V:ARR Bright Asuna
You know those villains which will shoot their best, most promising disciple/soldier/agent because they made one mistake?
That'd be what NCSoft is.
But they are far and away more forgiving of failure, and in recent years have done a great job turning their financial prospects and intellectual properties around. They are not NCSoft.
NCSoft is probably even now debating shooting Wildstar in the head in between discussions of F2P options and further layoffs. It's hard to predict the future, but there is cause for worry nonetheless.
I've just never seen a game drop-off as hard as this, at least based on the PA presence. Even aoc seemed to keep up some activity
Are you Eisenhide in-game, too? I've been having no luck finding a world boss circle yet.
Casual =/= dumb. The idea that casual players would do dailies at end game x infinity and be happy and satisfied because that was their place in the scheme of things and pay 15$ a month so the 1% could have elite grognard hardcore raid action was ridiculously naive.
"...only mights and maybes."
And a lot of systems were simply not workable or not finished.
Maybe I'm just reading into it, but between NCsoft's report and other things, I get the impression NCsoft did not have any confidence in the final product, and were looking to recoup some of the costs of development. In that context, the timing makes sense. Release the game a few months before WoW's new expansion(when content drought for WoW is at it's highest), get bored WoW players to buy and play it, and when the ship comes crashing down, you've managed to recover most/all that development money.
Nothing super substantial to support it(since no-one will ever admit that's what happened), but it feels that way.
Carbine made the mistake of thinking that crowd actually cared about difficulty, and it never did. It cared about exclusivity, or being able to act like they had something a majority of the player base had no access to. It's a big reason why F2P games have taken off, and why the term "whale" has entered our lexicon. That same crowd that was complaining that WoW got "too casual" (aka not exclusive enough) are the crowd who pays 150 dollars for ships in a game that doesn't exist yet (shots fired at Star Citizen, shots fired!). They want to feel exclusive, important. Unfortunately those people aren't going to sustain your subscription based game.
Both factors combined with the lack of meaningful patches immediately post-launch mean server populations have cratered as player's have moved on to other games or other mmo's.
Time will tell if Wildstar will remain afloat and if Carbine will a chance to improve the game's biggest issues. There's still a good game here and I've never had more fun with any mmo's combat than Wildstar. (though Tera came close.)
That's less "hardcore" and more "not tuned at all."
I think the people who were seriously outraged by the thought of a filthy casual having something other than a clown suit or *gasp* raiding, left WoW some time ago.
I think Carbine thought there were enough of those people to make an mmo just for them, and there wasn't.
Oh, and on the subject of casuals vs hardcore, it's the casual market that keeps a game afloat with their numbers. I raid Heroic endgame in WoW and I have no issue with people having lower ilevel/differently colored gear. There's plenty of stuff that shows what I've done, like titles and mounts. Cosmetic stuff to reward my style of play.