[Megathread] Wildstar - Now F2P

[Deleted]

I think I'm going to go with stalker or warrior for a 3rd alt to play here and there.
What I need some opinions one is whether you prefer Esper or Medic, and Settler or Scientist?

Which class is going to have an easier time soloing content, since I'll be playing alone most of the time?

I prefer Medic for personal reasons. I simply hate the Soothe noisy, zero-information, spammy and uncustomizable animation of this spell that it means I will never heal on my Esper, hence losing half the class right off the bat.

Esper is easier to casually solo with than Medic, especially tougher named quest mobs or weak prime mobs, since you have the option of using its high mitigation and high lifesteal build. It is also built from the ground up with a rotation skill system rather than priority system like many of the other classes. It has multiple off-GCD skills, which also happen to be resource builders. This means you can spam those skills while using your main attack then deal out finishers rapidly. All these combine to make it much easier to learn and quest than Medic. Despite this, many find the Esper far too static and unwieldy for their taste. This is mostly due to the untoggle-able and stationary special power Innate spell. Hence, why it is the least popular class.

Medic, by contrast, has almost zero off-GCD skills, even utilities like cleanse and worst of all not even on ground, targetted aoes and charged abilities. This means from an efficiency perspective you are paying up to three times more than on other classes per skill, i.e. you have to first click it, then target it, then click it again to activate it, then on top of that the GCD hits and you have to wait it out before you can do the next ability. It has little in the way of direct mitigation and almost no lifesteal compared to an Esper. What it does have applies almost exclusively to shields or requires using active skills (Protection Probes), taking up space in your limited skill slots, hence compromising damage. It also has some Priority abilities and AMPs that require optimal resource management. All the above combine to make it harder to quest on a Medic than Esper.

Scientist is ultimately more useful to the group than Settler because you can use it to Summon players. However, it is also by far the hardest Path to take and the Summon ability is on a long cooldown (you are no Warlock!). Personally, I prefer Settler because it has the best mix of utility without wanting to blow your brains out and its great for new players because while levelling up you really feel you are helping out other people by being able to create very useful stations at Settler points.

[sergel02]

I prefer Medic for personal reasons. I simply hate the Soothe noisy, zero-information, spammy and uncustomizable animation of this spell that it means I will never heal on my Esper, hence losing half the class right off the bat.

Esper is easier to casually solo with than Medic, especially tougher named quest mobs or weak prime mobs, since you have the option of using its high mitigation and high lifesteal build. It is also built from the ground up with a rotation skill system rather than priority system like many of the other classes. It has multiple off-GCD skills, which also happen to be resource builders. This means you can spam those skills while using your main attack then deal out finishers rapidly. All these combine to make it much easier to learn and quest than Medic.

Scientist is ultimately more useful to the group than Settler because you can use it to Summon players. However, it is also by far the hardest Path to take and the Summon ability is on a long cooldown (you are no Warlock!). Personally, I prefer Settler because it has the best mix of utility without wanting to blow your brains out and its great for new players because while levelling up you really feel you are helping out other people by being able to create very useful stations at Settler points.

Might think of an Esper Settler and Medic scientist possibly.
Now that you mention it, it is rather rotation based. A bit weird for me now since the classes I play in other mmos like wow and gw2 are more priority-based (well i guess my guardian is more rotation based honestly but there's lots of stuff going on and he looks cool so it's ok). Admittedly, a priority system is more interesting, but I still enjoy Esper so I guess I'll do a little more playing. I want to get my current one to 14 to check out houses.
There also seems to be enough to do in battle that I might be fine with its playstyle. I can see why others don't like being stationary for a bit, I don't mind, gives me a slight respite. I think one thing I don't like about the Esper is that they never use their weapon like the other classes. It's pretty much a stat stick.

Why do you say scientist is the hardest path though?

Queue times are determined by the ratio of roles playing, not total player number. So for example 100 people queue at once but only 2 of them are healers.

Ahh so a bit luck of the draw, depending on who queues up? Makes sense, finding people can be a problem in most mmos.

[Deleted]

Why do you say scientist is the hardest path though?

Because it is like hardmode Explorer due to almost no information about many objectives. Then you have a TON of manual and repetitious scanning you have to do with a little bot you have to summon. The bot cannot help you out with anything really, only scan and no auto-scanning. You also have to scan fallen mobs that can disappear before you can use the scan, plus you first have to defeat them and they may be well out of your questing path.

The other path skills you get are also too unwieldy to use, e.g. Distract. It is only really useful for /dance in towns and cities.

It is just a painful path compared to the amount of help and clear, fairly minimal objectives of all the other Paths.

You can mitigate a lot of the mess with addons, but it does not remove the amount of work and manual exploration involved.

[Ryuji]

Personally I enjoy Soldier the most. Mostly straightforward. Kill this named guy in the middle of a bunch of other guys, use these fancy weapons on enemies and make them die quickly, rescue people, hold out from incoming waves to protect or defend something, etc.

Then there's the abilities like Back Into the Fray where you can heal up to full health and shield instantly on a fairly decent cooldown. Good for those barely-made-it scenarios, which happens often on my Warrior after pulling multiple groups. :P

[Repefe]

But does it matter that scientist is harder ? You can reach lvl 10 on scientist easily and that unlocks both the summon group and town portal abilities. Levels after that just lower cooldown on those abilities. For me the effort it takes to fully level up the path is nice to have, it's something to do. And if you don't have time to level is all the way right away ... you don't really have to. Lvl 10 is enough.

As for medic vs esper ... I kind of like how esper works. You stand your ground and blast enemies to bits except for the times when you are dodging red zones. The combo points+finishers are easy and satisfying mechanic that medic is lacking. The problem with esper on lower levels it's actually harder to solo hard mobs compared to medic because you have lower defenses and can't kite as well as medic can while still doing dmg. But that can change on higher levels when you can make more elaborate builds I guess.

[nocturnus]

No it isn't. See, you're still in wow mode. Im level 25 atm. And Im having a blast. Dungeons feel like end game right now. Leveling feels like end game. This isn't "OMG WHERES MY EPIX AT? AND WHY CANT I RAID" World of Warcraft. I'm casual as fuck. Yet you can be casual in this game. Because it's not gear dependent like wow. Your skill as a player is determining your success. It's just unforgiving if you make a mistake. People put time pressure on themselves. I feel absolutely no pressure at all still being only half way through the leveling process. You don't need 6-7 hours a day.

I'm not sure we're playing the same game then. Why do dungeons feel like end-game to you? They seemed pretty generic to me and not worth repeating after completing the quest. Also I wonder, why do you think this game is less gear dependent?

As for the levelling I agree. I feel no pressure to rush to the end, but in my case it has to do with these 2 facts:

- I don't enjoy the levelling as much as I did in other MMOs. An hour is my max, for It gets boring very quickly.
- I won't be raiding in this game. While it is what I enjoy most, I just don't have the time to commit to a group of 39 people, even if I manage to do all attunements at a relaxed pace. Doing the 'easy' modes isn't an option either. I'm just not able to enjoy a game (any game) if I know I'm not playing at the toughest difficulty.

I doubt I will reach 50 before my free month expires. It matters not, the game would end there (for me) anyway. It was worth the initial €30, not worth a sub though.

[Deleted]

After playing a few days (reaching level 20 on different classes) there are a few things that (still) bother me about this game.

1. movement
   After 3 days I still haven't got used to the way my character moves. Especially the speeding up/slowing down and other momentum related 'features' (strafe left, then strafe right delay) really bothers me. Also the movement speed changes when moving up and down a slope is just annoying. I know this is supposed to bring some realism into the game but the only thing it does is make me feel detached from my character. It actually feels like lag! The strength of a good game is a good game-play, which means that you can identify yourself with the moves of your character in a very natural, direct-control-ish way. Games don't need realism, what games need is good game-play.
2. skills
   Most skills I obtained so far seem rather bland to me.I looked in my spellbook and was looking for a skill to look forward to, but to be honest, I couldn't find any inspiring spells. There seem to be very few spells that can actually make a difference in questing. Especially on my warrior, many fights against harder mobs are just a dps race. Kill the mob before it kills you.
3. visual pollution
   In some areas there is so much visual pollution cluttering my screen. Chat bubbles from mobs, mob names, nameplates. I have been trying to tweak them to be less annoying but I still have not been able to achieve what I wanted. Also the fact that nameplates letter size is the same size whether you are close/far from a mob really adds to the clutter (Can this be tuned? I haven't found it yet.).

I'll keep trying this game for a few more days, but somehow it really can't seem to get into the flow. Especially the movement thing really keeps me from enjoying my characters.

[Deleted]

[*]visual pollution
In some areas there is so much visual pollution cluttering my screen. Chat bubbles from mobs, mob names, nameplates. I have been trying to tweak them to be less annoying but I still have not been able to achieve what I wanted. Also the fact that nameplates letter size is the same size whether you are close/far from a mob really adds to the clutter (Can this be tuned? I haven't found it yet.).[/LIST]

I'll keep trying this game for a few more days, but somehow it really can't seem to get into the flow. Especially the movement thing really keeps me from enjoying my characters.

Yeah, the UI is a mess. I literally could not get out of the Tutorial area the first time I played Wildstar in beta (prior to UI 2.0 changes) because of being overwhelmed by it.

I installed three key addons that made a huge difference:

1. ClassicQuestDialog - classic WoW-like single place quest dialog. Eradicates quest clutter.
2. PotatoUI - classic WoW-like clean target frames.
3. BijiPlates - gave me fine-grained control over nameplates.

[Tekkommo]

Just got done with the War of the Wilds Adventure.

It killed my desire to play an Esper and made my think more than once about just leaving the place. I don't know if there is a way to do it better, but the way we did it was just so long and boring. Constantly killing a bunch of stuff over and over again with no real sense of progression until you get to the very end.

I've never been so happy for an instance to be over and I'm never going back to that place again if I can help it.

Yeah did this the other day, it was so boring, everyone in the group just wanted it to end.

It didn't help that it was so easy as well. I don't ever want to go back, but I guess I'll need to if I want to try raiding.

[Deleted]

Just got done with the War of the Wilds Adventure.

It killed my desire to play an Esper and made my think more than once about just leaving the place. I don't know if there is a way to do it better, but the way we did it was just so long and boring. Constantly killing a bunch of stuff over and over again with no real sense of progression until you get to the very end.

I've never been so happy for an instance to be over and I'm never going back to that place again if I can help it.

Unfortunately, it is the easiest adventure. So, you will be going back there a LOT, especially if you are in a guild that will be gearing up others.

This is one of the reasons why I re-rolled to Medic once I realized the full horror of the endgame gating to decent content. I could not stomach the thought of playing my Esper at 50+ for that type of repetitious, daily content.

[Berethos08]

You also have to scan fallen mobs that can disappear before you can use the scan, plus you first have to defeat them and they may be well out of your questing path.

Pretty much every mob I've encountered that was part of the scanning process could done while it was still alive, though scanning first will cause the bot to aggro.

You still have to go out of your way from time to time (the majority of mine were part of either main quests or tasks in the area thus far) but you aren't required to actually beat a mob to scan it.

It is a lot of scanning individual objects one at a time though, regardless of living, dead, plant, or object.

[Yriel]

TLR If you don't like the grindy part of MMOs then please suggest a constructive change. The only possible alternative at the moment would be to remove all duplicate NPCs and Quests so that leveling and Endgame progression would be a breeze in terms of speed but then the Developers would have to charge 150bucks or so for the game to emulate gamesell + Subscription which the players probably wouldn't want.

I guess many would like an "MMO" where you just create a character and then raid. No levels, no quest, just endgame.
I wouldn't play it but it seems there would be a playerbase for that. Don't know how large though.

[Evilfish]

I guess many would like an "MMO" where you just create a character and then raid. No levels, no quest, just endgame.
I wouldn't play it but it seems there would be a playerbase for that. Don't know how large though.

Many don't even know what they want. They want a game like WoW, but they don't want a game like WoW.

The fact is that Wildstar questing has not been ironed out, not truly and that's a black spot on their record as far as i'm concerned. I mean, people are right in most cases. The quest seem to rarely stray from the usual pattern of go kill or go gather.

There were a few that add some flair to gathering and killing, such as mind controling a spider and gathering spider eggs and getting them to a spot without dropping them, or taking control of an explosive... what the fuck were those called... the rhino elephants... and blowing them up.

There are varieties of quests that allow you to do something different however the manner they are presented is not noticeable.

WoW gets the idea. They know presentation, that's why people feel that "WoW does quests better" but they don't. Not really, they just know how to present them to the players.

Wildstar does not have the same experience, sadly, even with the ex-wow devs working there. And what's worse is that they don't have the same time to develop that sense as WoW had.

[Deleted]

WoW gets the idea. They know presentation, that's why people feel that "WoW does quests better" but they don't. Not really, they just know how to present them to the players.

The whole questing experience and quest interface is much easier to understand in WoW. In WildStar it is just plain confusing!

[Lysah]

I love war of the wilds. It's such a cluster of bugs and RNG that you never know what will happen, and fighting back from a 2 to 11 deficit and winning feels rewarding, even if the only reason it was possible was enemy mobs being stuck on Hoarfrost. There is still some skill to outmaneuvering the dumb AI and struggling to compete with their ability to cap totems way faster than players can.

[Deleted]

The whole questing experience and quest interface is much easier to understand in WoW. In WildStar it is just plain confusing!

For 5 year olds maybe? I dont see what the confusing part about wildstar questing is?
You see npc with "!" on their heads. You talk to them and get a quest.

You move across the map towards the indications of where the quest is based.

You have a progress-bar that tells you what you have left to do.

This is the same as pretty much every other game ever.

[Ilir]

God I hate those DPS that keep moving for no reason when you're trying to heal them and when there is no telegraph on them except mine. I hate the dps that can't dodge. And I hate it when they don't follow the tank and they keep aggroing everything and I have to heal them + the tank + the dps that don't dodge + me 'cause of course I took the aggro because of the heals -_-

I hate the fact that I cannot dye my armor but only the costume, like wtf ? Or maybe you can but it does not work for me.

[Geckoo]

For 5 year olds maybe? I dont see what the confusing part about wildstar questing is?
You see npc with "!" on their heads. You talk to them and get a quest.

You move across the map towards the indications of where the quest is based.

You have a progress-bar that tells you what you have left to do.

This is the same as pretty much every other game ever.

Yes, but as many other games, how the game tells and shows the information is done in a 'bad' way. By bad i mean that i could have been better, more clear, more user friendly... etc. Although i don't think this is a big issue at all, it just takes time to get used to it, the problem is that quest interaction and user interface are one of the first things a new player is going to experience.

I love this game, but i give the same advice to any friend that asks me about W*: the game is great, but you need to have a little patience the first 10-15 levels, until you get really used to how the game works and your class starts to get more solid and fun. The first gameplay experience in Wildstar is simply bad, is the content in higher levels that can really hook up players.

God I hate those DPS that keep moving for no reason when you're trying to heal them and when there is no telegraph on them except mine. I hate the dps that can't dodge. And I hate it when they don't follow the tank and they keep aggroing everything and I have to heal them + the tank + the dps that don't dodge + me 'cause of course I took the aggro because of the heals -_-

Always try to mark yourself, that helps a lot, at least for me as a stalker. If i know where you are, i can try to place my self in a good location to have those heals, and if i take too much damage i'll always run to you and stay in front of you until it's 'safe'

[Deleted]

For 5 year olds maybe? I dont see what the confusing part about wildstar questing is?
You see npc with "!" on their heads. You talk to them and get a quest.

You move across the map towards the indications of where the quest is based.

You have a progress-bar that tells you what you have left to do.

This is the same as pretty much every other game ever.

If it was the same as every game ever people wouldn't be complaining would they? I myself only started playing yesterday (gave up on trying to get a guest pass) so I haven't had enough time to get used to it but it is needlessly awkward

[wych]

If it was the same as every game ever people wouldn't be complaining would they? I myself only started playing yesterday (gave up on trying to get a guest pass) so I haven't enough time to get used to it but it is needlessly awkward

In what way?

It tracks it down the side of the screen and clearly states every objective present, you can even click on individual objectives within quests to get an arrow of where that objective is.

I can make a complaint about how guns look stupid or I don't like the shade of green on the grass, doesn't really make it valid