One of WS's F&F testers answers more questions from the community

Last week during WildStar Wednesday, we saw the beginning of the Friends and Family Q&A session. The community submitted its questions about the alpha testing and the game itself and a mystery member of the F&F testing group volunteered to answer. There were far too many questions for a single blog post though, so for this week's WildStar Wednesday blog post, Carbine brings us the second half of the Friends and Family tester Q&A session.

Like last week, the player's positive about the game as a whole, remarking on how immersive the world and story were, how dynamic the combat felt, and the group interactions that occur with the different paths players choose for their characters. There is still room for improvement according to the mystery tester though, such as combat flow while switching between freeform targeted abilities and those requiring a defined target. There's also some obligatorylines in the question about favorite race and class just to taunt people hoping for a tidbit of new news.

The most interesting part though would be the answer to question 7:

StarWarsDaddy: What separates WildStar from other MMO offerings? Mechanics? Content? Overall gameplay?

WildStar has broken the mold on race/class stat stove-piping. What I mean is that every Warrior will not necessarily be hunting the same piece of gear, it depends on the abilities you want to use, what role you want to fill and how you have allocated your stat points.

Almost every ability available to your class will have two stats that affect it. So the more points you have in that stat, the more effective that particular ability is when used and thus the more you want on your gear. While Strength and Technology may be the main stat most warriors take, some may wish to buff Magic-dependent abilities and use them instead, as an example.

The idea of split-stat focus for each class is something a few other MMOs like World of Warcraft have been moving away from. Let's use a Monk for an example since it's what I've been playing lately. All of my gear has a set amount of Agility on it that's determined by the item level. My attacks all scale off Attack Power and since Agility gives me the most AP per point, that's what I would focus on even if it wasn't on all of my gear by default. Since I have no control over the amount of my primary stats on my gear (I have to use leather, I need Agility, and that's the only non-caster choice), the only balancing game for my stats comes from the secondary statistics.

With what's being suggested by this Q&A response is that each class will have attacks based off more than one statistic. A Warrior will have attacks that scale primarily off of Strength, those that scale from Technology, and perhaps even some that scale off Magic or another statistic. There's also the possibility of having skills that scale off multiple statistics. Combining this with what was mentioned last week about swapping abilities around outside of combat and things start to get interesting. The question is whether or not this is just their answer to talent specializations. It's one thing to say not every person of the same class will be hunting the same pieces of gear, but that could be as simple as saying that this gear is for tanking Warriors and this stuff is for DPS. Personally I'm hoping they're leaning more towards "this Warrior tank stacks Technology and is more of a absorb tank and Warrior #2 stacks Strength for more of a parry/block tank", but that's a lot harder to balance properly.

If you'd like to read the rest of the Q&A, head on over to the WildStar blog and read on. Now that we've seen the answers to the Friends and Family questions, what do you think next week's WildStar Wednesday will bring? Information about the Dominion? New classes/races? More number crunching and design theory about gear stats like the mess I wrote a wall of text about?

Michael "Ragar" Branham