Green Flag! Nexus Ho!
My start on Nexus was delayed by a family commitment.
Ideally, I wouldn't have taken vacation just as Wildstar launched but when
Little Hammer made the National finals for the History Bee, we were bound for
Atlanta.
This proved to be a boon. I have yet to see a queue and the game
has been remarkably stable and bug free as far as I can tell.
I blew through the Arkship quickly as I had done it many
times in Beta. What I had not done in Beta was change the default landing site.
I decided to roll my Mordesh Engineer, but I wanted to take him to the Human
and Granok starting zone of Northern Wilds.
A big reason I wanted to do this was that Northern Wilds
leads into Algoroc. Each starting zone has a couple of AMPs that you buy with
reputation. AMPs are somewhat analogous to talent points in Wildstar. The
difference is that you can’t train some AMPs until you find them in the world.
Generally the entire 2nd tier is locked down in this manner. One of
the key DPS AMPs for Assault (DPS) Engineers is called Harmful Hits. Harmful
Hits increases your Critical Hit chance by 9% when you land a Critical Hit.
The early Engineer plays a lot like the Vanilla Retribution Paladin. Critical Hits power a skill called Quick Burst much like Critical Hits powered the venerable Seal of Command.
It took me a few moments to figure out at exactly which
point you switched. I kept getting worried I would take a quest that would lock
me into going to Everstar Grove and Celestian (the Aurin / Mordesh starting
area). That area has some fantastic lore for those races, but overall, I find
the stories and quests far more enjoyable in Algoroc.
Basically, it’s the very last quest you take and it clearly
shows an (Optional) quest objective of the other starting area. Even if you
mess it up, you can blow through the Arkship in about 30 minutes. If you find
yourself in Celestian by accident, you can always start over.
Harmful Hits requires Algoroc Accord reputation (which you
get from doing quests in Algoroc). You could travel from Thayd to Algoroc even
if you go Celestian but you won’t have the reputation to buy it. You could get
a friendly guild mate to purchase it for you or you can check the Auction
House/Commodities Exchange.
I made it down to Northern Wilds and started clearing out
quests. It wasn't until after I finished Northern Wilds that I noticed that I
had a quest item in my bag that started a quest. Fortunately, the NPC I needed
had come to the new phase with me. I got a very nice blue weapon. The weapon
had an imbuement quest. This is a special quest in Wildstar that opens up a new
ability on your weapon. This particular quest would give the weapon a chance to
leave a Damage over Time (DoT) effect on your target. My problem was that the
quest to activate this ability required me to kill a very specific named mob.
That named mob was back in the Northern Wilds area and like the Arkship, there was
no way to return to that area to kill that mob. I had to leave the imbuement
quest undone.
My late start also helped with Challenges. I was able to
complete many of them with little of the competition I heard that early players
were facing.
With the Northern Wilds defeated, I set my sites on Tremor Ridge in Gallow.
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