Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

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J

Jackdaddio_sl

shitlord
727
0
Rezz_sl said:
Eh, general combat wasn't hard at all. It was actual bosses and dungeon trash that took awhile to kill, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that -many- players simply didn't optimize their builds for anything, and I would wager that some had points spent in borderline useless stuff. When I finally got into groups where players weren't newblars, it was a cakewalk and shit died fast. Not even overgeared (though I think that was basically impossible if they were doing the newblar dungeons), just not having points spent in abilities they don't use and similar, as well as watching the floor.
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As many of the games that came out in the last five years that allow players to make their own 'optimized' builds, I seriously begin to doubt there truly is a market for that beyond players that frequent sites like this.

What I mean by that is, the hoi polloi doesn't really want to optimize builds foranything, be it PvP or PvE. They really do want to log into a game, see X class and go with the basic understanding of how that class works and run with that for every situation. The problem is devs actually think the pool of people who want to change between three or four builds for each thing is far larger than the games they are designing it for.

In reality it's more:"I'm a tank. I'm going with this build for everything, not swapping out three skills just so I can beat X boss, putting on this armor so I can beat Y boss or using an axe instead of my favorite hammer/shield for Z boss."Same with healers, same with DPS. WildStar and ESO to an equal extent, are prime examples of this from what I've seen. You have about 25% of people who are with the switching/swapping while most simply don't want to be bothered with that shit.

Even a good portion of that 25% who do use multiple builds are simply copying from 10% of people who truly understand how it all is supposed to synergize between them and their teammates. Unless you're an indie game, that's a recipe for disaster for a company trying to keep people engaged or at the least, paying a sub. I think GW2 did so well because even though you have a similar setup, there's no fee and the entire game including price point took that into account from the ground up.
 
Stave

Stave

Potato del Grande
2,106
4,027
Jackdaddio_sl said:
As many of the games that came out in the last five years that allow players to make their own 'optimized' builds, I seriously begin to doubt there truly is a market for that beyond players that frequent sites like this.

What I mean by that is, the hoi polloi doesn't really want to optimize builds foranything, be it PvP or PvE. They really do want to log into a game, see X class and go with the basic understanding of how that class works and run with that for every situation. The problem is devs actually think the pool of people who want to change between three or four builds for each thing is far larger than the games they are designing it for.

In reality it's more:"I'm a tank. I'm going with this build for everything, not swapping out three skills just so I can beat X boss, putting on this armor so I can beat Y boss or using an axe instead of my favorite hammer/shield for Z boss."Same with healers, same with DPS. WildStar and ESO to an equal extent, are prime examples of this from what I've seen. You have about 25% of people who are with the switching/swapping while most simply don't want to be bothered with that shit.

Even a good portion of that 25% who do use multiple builds are simply copying from 10% of people who truly understand how it all is supposed to synergize between them and their teammates. Unless you're an indie game, that's a recipe for disaster for a company trying to keep people engaged or at the least, paying a sub. I think GW2 did so well because even though you have a similar setup, there's no fee and the entire game including price point took that into account from the ground up.
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Never really thought about that, but you make a good point. At my age, I don't have time to theorycraft shit. I just want to play the game. When I start a game that has builds, I look up the best build for my class, and roll with it. With WoW and Diablo 3, etc, it's not so bad because there are lots of good sites. But with Wildstar and a lot of other new MMOs, there isn't really shit for sites or info on builds, and I don't feel like spending hours and hours to go find build theories. So I just wing it or rolled with half assed builds that I find on the forums. Even a lot of single player games like Witcher 3, as soon as I get my first skills where I have to choose, unless it's blatantly obvious, the first thing I do is go to google to try to find out which one to start with, or if I will fuck myself choosing one over the other. It's actually boring and a pain in the ass and detracts from playing the game if you really think about it.

In reality, the theorycrafting crowd is very small, and once the best current build is found, it's all cookie cutter anyways until a patch or some new item changes shit up. Why even make a middleman step? These games could have some built in preset builds, and maybe a few community popular builds. Like you just choose if you want to tank through avoidance, or tank with health steal, or heal with hots, heal with shields, etc. Basic builds for each class. Or if you really need to keep the customization in there, have some sort of in-game user submitted list, that players can submit builds and vote on the best ones, so your average players can just pick the most popular one, click a button and have it assign automatically. It just seems like such an outdated system with a lot of room for improvement.
 
Miele

Miele

Lord Nagafen Raider
916
48
Stave_sl said:
Never really thought about that, but you make a good point. At my age, I don't have time to theorycraft shit. I just want to play the game. When I start a game that has builds, I look up the best build for my class, and roll with it. With WoW and Diablo 3, etc, it's not so bad because there are lots of good sites. But with Wildstar and a lot of other new MMOs, there isn't really shit for sites or info on builds, and I don't feel like spending hours and hours to go find build theories. So I just wing it or rolled with half assed builds that I find on the forums. Even a lot of single player games like Witcher 3, as soon as I get my first skills where I have to choose, unless it's blatantly obvious, the first thing I do is go to google to try to find out which one to start with, or if I will fuck myself choosing one over the other. It's actually boring and a pain in the ass and detracts from playing the game if you really think about it.

In reality, the theorycrafting crowd is very small, and once the best current build is found, it's all cookie cutter anyways until a patch or some new item changes shit up. Why even make a middleman step? These games could have some built in preset builds, and maybe a few community popular builds. Like you just choose if you want to tank through avoidance, or tank with health steal, or heal with hots, heal with shields, etc. Basic builds for each class. Or if you really need to keep the customization in there, have some sort of in-game user submitted list, that players can submit builds and vote on the best ones, so your average players can just pick the most popular one, click a button and have it assign automatically. It just seems like such an outdated system with a lot of room for improvement.
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I was a bit guilty of too much googling myself, but at some point I decided to say "screw it" and figure out shit on my own. Dragon age? Pick skills I like, game can be easy enough anyway. Witcher? Same thing. In MMOs I never had an issue making functional builds, but I really don't like the "swap setup every other boss" metagame. I don't mind swapping a skill or two in Wildstar or changing spec in WoW (hey, it's two clicks), but it has to be once every blue moon, not after every pull. The only game where I just follow the flock is D3, some nerds are too difficult to outmath and I have no time to spend on theorycrafting to that level, but I still change a skill here and there (or an item) if I think it could be more fun.
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,260
2,383
The community build stuff and such is one thing valve did with dota 2. Dota2 has a fuckton of heroes, and a fuckton of items, and a fuckton of builds as a result. However they integrated guides ingame, so when you pick a hero, you can open the guide menu, seek for the highest rated guide for the hero, and it'll then tell you ingame what to take for skills everytime you level and what items to buy in what order in the shop and you can just follow the guide. It's a great way to start playing, so you have something functional and useful from the start instead of building random fucking shit, and once you master the build and understand the hero, you can make your own modifications(and create a build for it so everytime you play the hero, your build is the one that's being shown and so on).

For online games, it'd probably be useful to have something like that. That said in general fansites do it fine, but I agree fansites are terrible for it in mmos. Like when I play HotS and don't know a hero, I got to heroesfire, click on the top rated build and just do that until I'm more comfortable. If I'm playing D3, I go to Diablofans and look up the highest rated guide and follow that and so on. Yet when I played FFXIV, or wow back in the days(now it's different), you could find a bunch of theorycraft on how to play the classes, but nothing was centralized. Hell XIV doesn't even have customization, it's mostly knowing the rotations and shit, but you still had a hard time finding up to date info for that. It's surprising there's no real "optimal builds for pve/pvp" kind of site for every mmos and shit. For wow I guess you could look up wow progress and find your builds there and shit but it's not intuitive compared to looking for "frost mage build" in google and having a website dedicated to wow builds.

Note that now WoW has Icyveins(which also has D3 and HS builds I think), so it's a lot better, but back when I played there wasn't really shit, even mmochamp didn't have actual builds, you had to go to the forums and find shitty posts and stuff. It's weird than when a new moba is released, the first fansites that pop have guides sections, yet when a new mmo is released, it takes a while to even have talent calculator a lot of the time, and it's a pain to find up to date guides because it's generally random guides written on official forums but never updated or on random guild websites.

(And googling it, it seems there's a wildstar build site. Not sure how up to date it is though).
 
Miele

Miele

Lord Nagafen Raider
916
48
Wildstar build site is fairly up to date, but it still takes some google fu to look for proper guides (build alone is only half the guide). I'd love something like that Dota2 system even for MMOs, I believe Rift had introduced something along those lines, with builds based on "concepts" that a player could pick at the start.

To be fairly honest WS has straightforward skills and I never had many issues picking them (min maxing their usage is a different thing), yet the whole rune system is so annoying for me that I tend to ignore it until I can.

I'm having fun so far with my return to WS. I'm playing Esper again, I like the class and I found out my old account has a ton and a half "rewards" that I already got: mounts, skins, etc.
I cleared up my bags and bank, checked some rewards, got back via mail a fuckton of tradeskill materials, maybe because they were stored in a different kind of container before, I don't remember, I tend to ignore crafting as much as possible. I still love the animations and the graphics, I'll find out if the gameplay is more engaging or not...
 
D

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
10,034
3
The problem is not with build variety and depth, the problem is with the variety and depth of the content. If your base content requires theory crafting you're making a shit game.

Easy to play and hard to master has always been a tenent of great games.
 
Stave

Stave

Potato del Grande
2,106
4,027
Miele_sl said:
I'm having fun so far with my return to WS. I'm playing Esper again, I like the class and I found out my old account has a ton and a half "rewards" that I already got: mounts, skins, etc.
I cleared up my bags and bank, checked some rewards, got back via mail a fuckton of tradeskill materials, maybe because they were stored in a different kind of container before, I don't remember, I tend to ignore crafting as much as possible. I still love the animations and the graphics, I'll find out if the gameplay is more engaging or not...
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Check your mailbox as well. I know I was sent like 30 BOE epics on each of my characters. They apparently removed some items from the game and sent out replacement epics or something, I dunno. But I got a ton of nice gear because of it.
 
Rafterman

Rafterman

Molten Core Raider
740
684
Draegan_sl said:
The problem is not with build variety and depth, the problem is with the variety and depth of the content.If your base content requires theory crafting you're making a shit game.

Easy to play and hard to master has always been a tenent of great games.
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I can't remember the last MMO that's required theory crafting for base content, including Wildstar. You can pretty much build any class any way in most modern MMOs and faceroll just about everything up to end game.
 
Stave

Stave

Potato del Grande
2,106
4,027
Rafterman_sl said:
I can't remember the last MMO that's required theory crafting for base content, including Wildstar. You can pretty much build any class any way in most modern MMOs and faceroll just about everything up to end game.
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Wildstar initially required certain things in your builds to even stand a chance running even the starter dungeons, due to armor interrupts, etc. Most average pug players didn't know this, and had just picked whatever abilities. I don't know if it's still like that, but builds definitely were very important in OG Wildstar.
 
Ignatius

Ignatius

#thePewPewLife
4,793
6,451
The level 10 dungeon makes it pretty clear interrupts are important. The bosses all insta-wipe you if they arent interrupted lol
 
S

Sithro

Molten Core Raider
1,498
198
Well, it seems playable now. I've been able to log in with no problems.

Here we go! Korvok Ironfang on Entity 1 if you guys want to friend me.
 
Del

Del

Vyemm Raider
1,168
2,868
Stave_sl said:
Wildstar initially required certain things in your builds to even stand a chance running even the starter dungeons, due to armor interrupts, etc. Most average pug players didn't know this, and had just picked whatever abilities. I don't know if it's still like that, but builds definitely were very important in OG Wildstar.
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Yeah, but it doesn't take theory crafting to know that abilities with interrupts are important to have.
 
Miele

Miele

Lord Nagafen Raider
916
48
I made it to 15, did the level 6 expedition solo (you can queue for it from anywhere specifying you don't want other people to queue with you), I did the level 10 dungeon, which is quite fun for being a practice run that teaches how to use skills and how to move around. I also found out that I'm a shit dps medic, but a good dps stalker, but I disgress.

So far it's being a lot of fun, a simple change like having permanent sprint speed made everything so much smoother. I should add that having mounts right away helps a fuckton, I had like 5 or 6 account bound, but there are 2 hours mounts for rent that cost a few silver for newbies. I'll probably stalker-tank dungeons before making up my mind about all the changes, but I'm impressed by how much I missed this game. The graphics and animations are really lovely, so is the lore delivery with datacubes and journals found around the world, plus the silly voice overs.

I know Galeras and Whitevale will be the real test, if I can get past them, I'm confident I'll pull out some good fun from this game.
 
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Sithro

Molten Core Raider
1,498
198
rrr_img_112034.jpg


Forgot how nice this game looked.
 
S

Sithro

Molten Core Raider
1,498
198
I'm enjoying the hell out of it. Don't know what his problem is. It's a really good theme park MMO. Also enjoying the humor.
 
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