Honor's Code

You ever read a blog and immediately felt like they were speaking right to you? Kadomi over at Boldly Nerd had a post today “ Could I be any worse at blogging ?” and as I read it, I found myself nodding along with her. It's been (let me check) a month (yikes! So sorry!) since my last blog. I guess I should really write an update. I find myself in a remarkably similar situation to the one Kadomi describes. Early June, I was totally stoked for Wildstar and I had blast that first week or so. Even now, when I play it, I have fun, but I don't get to play it all that often. Like Kadomi, by the time I’m done with dinner and getting the kiddos tucked into bed, and spend a couple of minutes in adult conversation with my wife, it’s every bit of 10:00 pm. My wife is a SAHM (Stay At Home Mom) now so she really needs a little adult conversation at night. Since I have a full time job, I need to be heading off to dreamland by midnight. That leaves roughly two hours or so ...

Please note: There are spoilers to the story of Algoroc in this post. You hast been warned. I barreled into Tremor Ridge. This is really where you get that "cowboy in space" Firefly kind of feel to the Algoroc zone started. The Loftite rush is such a beautiful double entendre . The Loftite Rush is a clear allusion to the Gold Rush of the Old West. But Loftite also gives you one of your first experiences with reduced gravity and super jumping, which in an of itself is quite a 'rush'. The quest lines with the crashed Protostar ship were a highlight of my time in Tremor Ridge, This is really a case where you need to read all the quest text and the various journals. They take the experience that much better. One example is a journal you find, Chapter 7 "So You've Crashed Your Spaceship". The humor in these quests is excellent. I also loved the line the Protostar guy gives you. "Please accept my emotionally neutral farewell." Another rea...

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 2 nd tier is locked down in this manner. One of the key DPS AMPs f...

Gamebreaker has made the decision to move to the US PVE Server Orias . My old WoW guild mates are joining Gamebreaker. If you want to find out more about our guild, check out our site here . If you would like to join us, set course for Orias. Make it so!! "Join Us!" by Doran Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

Tonight is the big night. Wildstar launches at 12:01pm PST / 3:01 am EST Saturday (which I still think of as tonight, although it's technically tomorrow. I won't get started until sometime on Saturday. My days of playing at 3am are sadly behind me. If you are going to be up and waiting for Carbine to flip to switch, you might want to check out Gamebreaker Nation's launch party on Twitch . They will start streaming at 1am eastern and carry on right up until launch. My good friend, Ghostal is one of the hosts and they are going to do a great job. My Launch Plans Class From the moment I saw her, I knew the Engineer was going to be my class . Regardless of my class in WoW, I always had at least one toon with max level Engineering as a profession. I thought many times that Blizzard could solve the balance problems they had with the profession by making it a class. It was a hero unit in WC3 just like the DK. Instead Engineering started out really cool each expansion...

At PAX East, the major emphasis of the Wildstar team was on end game. Many people including Massively’s Wildstar writer, Eliot Lefebvre, are dismayed by the apparent emphasis on high end raids as the main PVE endgame in Wildstar. Wildstar has two raid sizes, 20 man and 40 man. If that feels a little Vanilla WoW to you it should. (cue Billy Mays voice) But wait, there’s more! They are also bringing back attunements. At level cap there is a lengthy quest chain that must be completed before you can start the 20 man raid. Completing the 20 man raid is required to start the 40 man raid. The attunement requirement is turned off in Beta to allow for more testing, but like the early mount that shortcut will not be in the live product. We will hear all the arguments about 40 mans we did in WoW. We will hear about how only 1% of the players see the content and how it’s a massive waste of limited developer and artists resources. These were arguments I believed and supported. I cheered ...

In Wildstar, you select both a class and a path at character creation and neither can be changed later without rerolling. Classes are fairly straightforward and help define your role (Tank/Heal/Ranged/Melee). Bartle Paths Paths are different. They constitute about 30% of your leveling experience and in theory map to the famous Bartle types . In practice, the correlation between Bartle Types and Paths seems a bit forced. Bartle broke down players in one of four types: Achievers, Socializers, Explorers and Killers. Achievers should be attracted to the Science Path, Socializers to the Settlers path, Explorers to the aptly named Explorer Path, and Killers to the Soldier Path. I've played all four paths in Beta through Level 7. Out of the four, Soldier seems to be the one that best fits its associated Bartle type.. As a Soldier, you get a variety of quests and missions that have you… kill stuff… with style. Explorer should be renamed the Jumping Puzzles path. I found the earl...

I had one major goal this past Beta weekend. I wanted to run Stormtalon’s Liar (STL) with my Engineer Tank. I had had one previous experience with tanking as an Engineer around level 15 in the Adventure “Hycrest’s Rebellion”. Now at level 20, it was time to see what Wildstar’s dungeons had in store. First surprise  Upon hitting level 20, Stormtalon’s Lair did not magically appear in my list of dungeons I could queue for. After doing some digging, I discovered that first you have to go to the actual entrance of the instance. Then you can queue for it. Visions of The Burning Crusade danced in my head. Since this was my first go at STL, I opted to queue with both DPS and Tank selected. The queue popped almost instantly and I had been selected to tank. Prep  In Wildstar, you use action sets. These are the powers you have on your hot bar and can use during combat. At level 20, I’m limited to only 7 active powers. In addition to the powers themselves, the action set remembers ...

Previously, I’ve talked about Wildstar’s classes , races, and character creation . Next let’s talk about those first few levels. Your first three levels (or so) serve as a tutorial and introduction to the game. Culture One of the strong points is that it does a good job of grounding you in the culture of your chosen faction. On the Exile ship, everything is broken down and falling apart. She really is on her last legs. On the Dominion ship, everything is pristine and well oiled.  The Exile quest line has you doing a rescue mission, while the Dominion quest line has you first torturing suspected Exile sympathizers and then basically declaring that the Dominion Emperor is a god. The Exiles have you fight off a Dominion attack, while the Dominion has you kill simulated Exiles. Both experiences do a good job introducing the lore of the various races, but by this point you’ve already chosen a race. I guess since you are less than an hour in, rerolling isn’t a huge deal if you ...

Part 1 - Wildstar Classes I have been in Closed Beta since early March and with the NDA release I can give my impressions. I have an Exile toon to about 18 and a Dominion toon to about level 8. Wildstar has been liken to Vanilla WoW and from certain points of view that comparison is valid. The first one is the leveling. This is slowest leveling game I’ve been in quite some time. I’m not breezing through content or levels, but it has never felt grindy or punishing. The zones feel very Vanilla WoW. There is one area that looked and felt like the original Stonetalon Mountains. There are patting mobs everywhere and in the early teens some of those mobs are tough. There is a palatable sense of danger in the wild. Death Dying is a real possibility and the penalties are fairly steep. When I got into trouble, I would blow everything I had, but early on your options are limited to one big cooldown and health potions / med pacs, which in Wildstar are on a fairly a longish cooldown (5 ...

Let’s talk about Wildstar’s classes. The game is still under a Closed Beta NDA. The information here is taken from the Wildstar Fan site and the Wildstar class videos. Wildstar made an interesting decision with their six classes. Every single one of them is a hybrid. In past MMOs, players of pure classes often complained anytime hybrids appeared to be able to do their jobs even marginally well. For example, players of a pure DPS class (a class that can only perform the DPS role) would ask what the point of their class was if a hybrid could DPS nearly as well, yet still have the option of taking on a support role like healing or tanking. It was the reasoning behind the so called Hybrid Tax that permeated Vanilla WoW through early Wrath of the Lich King content. WoW even had discord among its own hybrids. Some classes could only take on two roles, some could take on all three trinity roles, and Wow even produced the exceedingly rare class that could take on all three trinity,...

My original plan hit a bit of a snag. I started to really enjoy the Smuggler (Gunslinger) game play in SWTOR. He plays unlike anything I could play in WoW. My Smuggler hit 50 just before my subscription lapsed. I have a real life friend who is very active in SWTOR. He happened to have a level 50 alt and together we tackled Makeb. It was really great to be able to run with him again. We basically leveled up together in the early days of SWTOR. Makeb was a nice planet, but I really missed the Class Stories. As I continued to level, I noticed that the more I played the Gunslinger, the more I enjoyed him. I decided to stay subbed, and I am now gearing him up for SWTOR raids. But I'm not here to talk about SWTOR today. Lately, when we run our dailies or meet in the lunch room at work, my friend has been talking about this new game on the horizon. It’s called Wildstar. I hadn’t really considered Wildstar. Like RIFTS, Aion, LOTOR, Conan, Warhammer, EVE, and the dozens of other...