Honor's Code

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 ...