1.) Telegraphs are a mess
In large scale anything, they create a significant visual clutter. This includes telegraphs you won't ever turn off (enemy damage telegraphs). Hit registration on telegraphs were bugged for half a year (fixed now?). A lot of interesting abilities are rendered useless by having an "inferior" telegraph by being too short or too narrow. Also, as personal preference, I find it annoying how you can only really circle-strafe as a caster.
2 & 3) No invulnerability frame on dodge roll, dodge roll distance is too short
I don't prefer invulnerability frames, but dashing is an afterthought outside of saving them to get out of knockdowns. From a PVP perspective, there used to be the "Air Dash" mechanic (
Wildstar BETA Super Dashing - Double Jump + Dodge Roll (Wildstar Dodging Bug/Exploit?) - YouTube) that made moving around interesting. e.g. Stalkers had 3 dash tokens, which was really useful for their small hit box and the distance actually got you out of telegraphs. Dashing in its current iteration can only evade narrow telegraphs; Warrior and Medic telegraphs still wreck you. For PVE, you can walk out of any telegraph without sprint.
4) Big telegraphs are king.
For PvP, it's significantly easier to land large "block" style telegraphs. They hit just as hard/harder than skill-shots (True Shot). Spellslingers don't hit harder than medics/warriors (they hit for significantly less) on their burst with harder to aim abilities.
5) sprint/daze are lame mechanics
Everyone that doesn't have "cannot be dazed" AMPs rides a one way ticket to the melee-train if they get hit once. It also promotes me putting up stupid undispellable DOTs on targets to keep them permanently dazed. Sprint is a mechanic that lets melee stick on ranged at no penalty. In the past, I used to dot people and run in circles healing (Esper) until my innate came back up. Now melee builds run faster than casters and can't be dazed.
6) bad breakout game-play
I'll hold making a drastic opinion until I see the changes to breakout mechanics. I don't think many people that I played with enjoyed any of them. F-spamming out of stuns was the worst. Yet, subdue and knockdowns have been crazy too. Battlegrounds are a great place to get knocked down and be dead before your roll is finished.
7) Warplots and Battlegrounds were telegraph nightmares
With respect to 1), Warplots and Battlegrounds are mostly unavoidable zergs of telegraph damage. You'll die before you can use "breakout" mechanics against geared players. In general, Warplots and Battlegrounds were hastily implemented. The map layouts promotes people running around in stacked groups to do objectives. This isn't very interesting game play.
8) Wildstar has a wide breadth of features, but none of them are polished enough to be great.
I exaggerated a bit. There are some solid things about Wildstar.
Warplots - Not close to polished enough to be enjoyable. Mostly at the fault of how PVP works in a telegraph style game.
Battlegrounds - Standard map types with little interesting terrain features/side objectives.
Arenas - I enjoy how fast paced they are and the multiple-lives concept of snowballing people.
User Interface - Minimal customization, a long history of bugs, and poorly implemented (performance issues). Hoping UI 2.0 fixes all of this. There are some great fans working on developing their own interfaces.
Class design - Run of the mill "safe" design with a lot of abilities in every tree that will never be touched by anyone optimizing their characters.
Adventures - The end game adventures are long "kill quests" style dungeons (Crimelords).
Raids - I only did one boss. I like Wildstar bosses, but they're pretty easy so far.
Runes/specials/secondary stats - Needs a large amount of balancing. Tons of excessively strong specials exist.
Crafting - It's there. It's mostly a casual system and there's not much interesting about it for avid crafters.
Leveling - 1-50 is a World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade style grind where most of the quest are kill quests. This is especially true level 30 and on.
Lore - There's not much to pull you into the world. The heroes we're supposed to care about (Deadeye, Victor Lazarin, Mondo Zax, ...) are all throughout the zones, but we're never given a reason to like them. Maybe the lore log is full of interesting stuff, but the presentation outside of it is poor.
Group content/side quests - Kill big bad mob #2037 with a buddy.
Housing - This is pretty awesome. The best housing in a game that I've played. I've met people with some really creative designs.
The patching system always implements the craziest bugs (long live the crate). Bugs pass through internal testing as if there was no internal testing at all.
Wildstar is mostly what everyone else says it is; It's a World of Warcraft style MMORPG. I think the combat and class design will prevent the game from being a huge success. However, I commend Carbine on their efforts to get all of the modern features of an MMORPG in at launch. I'm sure issues with polish and depth are largely due to their time schedule. They also haven't had time to "mature" and learn from their faults like Blizzard has. There are a lot of great developers working on the game and I appreciate how open they have been to players. If you're willing to play through their growing pains, I'm sure there is fun to be had and that the game will improve with time.
