How to build and edit your unique house in WildStar

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/How-to-build-and-edit-your-unique-house-in-WildStar-11582
Everyone wants to have a quiet, peaceful house somewhere out of the civilization. In WildStar you can build one when you get to the 14th level.When you meet requirements, you just need to go to the house's hologram in your capitol and interact with it. Then you'll be moved onto your own backyard.



Building and Edition
First of all, set up your house. In the right bottom corner you should see options you can choose:
Landspace – building all structures on your land. With that panel you can build your first house. Most of houses which you can make depends on your level, so your choice at the beginning will be rather poor. There is no possibility for building walls and setting up rooms on your own.

Besides house, you can make a garden, place for a party or some mines, which will respawn mineral deposits. Very useful for crafting. Of course, those things break from time to time, and you have to set up a new one.

What is more, you can set up challenge place - when you complete it, you get a reward. Challenges regenerate from time to time.You can also upgrade them. To upgrade a structure, you have to have a proper FabKit. FabKits can be found during exploration of the world or from missions or crafting.

House – you determine how it looks from outside. Appearance of roof, walls, door and sky. You can, for example, make fireworks explodes constantly.

Crate – it's your inventory with items you can place on your property. If you have decoration in your regular inventory, you have to click on it with right mouse button to transfer it to the crate. Then just click on "Place" to set up an item on the ground.

Vendor – shop with various items you can set up next to your house. They are rather expensive.

List – list of all your items set up on your property.

You have a house, so now decorate it. It's enough to enter the crate and choose what you want. Click "Place" and the item is on the ground. It is recommended to click on the item and to drag it where you want to place it and then enter the "Toggle Advanced Control" tab. You should see a window of edition where you can choose the size of the item, move it and turn as you like.

WildStar guide: Choose your path-soldier

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/WildStar-guide-Choose-your-path-soldier-11572
The Soldier path is all about two things, power and destruction. Soldiers main goal is to protect and serve their allies and destroy their enemies. Since Nexus is a newly settled planet it is full of dangerous places with scary monsters and creatures that stand in way of good development, for both the Exiles and the Dominion. Soldiers do what they can to make these places safe, ensuring that their respective faction can develop the area properly.



There are several types of missions for Soldiers. Swat missions have Soldiers using special weapons and tactics to accomplish specific goals. For example, Soldiers may find themselves using special grenades to clear pests in underground tunnels, or big “tesla coils” to clear them on surface. There are also protect and capture missions where you need to fight waves of enemies to complete a specific goal. In many ways Soldiers serve as the peacekeepers of Nexus.

WildStar Soldier missions
ASSASSINATION:
Ever dreamed of being a hit man? Channel your inner assassin as you track down targets, put them in your sights, and rack up the body counts!

DEMOLITION:
Most problems can be solved with the right amount of explosives. Blow stuff up using bombs, grenades and other weapons of mass destruction. BOOM!

RESCUE OP:
Listen up, Soldier! We have civilians that have been taken hostage by the enemy, and we need you to get ‘em out of there! Are we clear? Get moving!

SWAT:
Special Weapons And Tactics. Know what it really means? Shiny new toys! Test advanced military hardware on your foes. Mercy? Not part of the equation.

HOLDOUT – SECURITY:
No one likes a thief. That’s where you come in. Defend your loot against dirty underhanded criminals, and crack some skulls with the hammer of justice!

HOLDOUT – CONQUER:
Are you ready to lock, load, and start taking care of business? Defend your territory against waves of hostile enemies. No guts, no glory!

HOLDOUT – FIRST STRIKE:
Hit ‘em hard, and hit ‘em fast! Strike your targets and destroy them before they call in reinforcements, then bask in the glow of your badassitude!

HOLDOUT – PROTECT:
Being a hero ain’t easy… but it’s time to step up. Defend allies against incoming waves of hostiles, ensuring they survive another day!

The highlights of the Carbine pvp team reddit interview on arenas and battlegrounds

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/The-highlights-of-the-Carbine-pvp-team-reddit-interview-on-arenas-and-battlegrounds-11560
Three members of Carbine’s PvP Team took to Reddit this a few days ago to answer questions about arenas and battlegrounds.The team included:
CRB_Bardic - Jen Gordy, PvP Systems Lead
CRB_KevinLee - Kevin Lee, PvP Systems Designer
CRB_JTal - Jeff Tallon, Itemization Designer



Here are some of the highlights.
1.A third battleground has been exhaustively tested internally. Hopefully players will get to experience it soon.
2.There are currently no plans to let the two factions talk to each other in-game. Apparently its been a hot debate topic at Carbine, and they’re still looking to hear feedback.
3.After some internal number crunching and testing, the team found PvP gear needed some work. That lead to a drastic change where the PvP Offense and Defense stats accounted for half the total stats on any piece of gear. The idea is that PvP gear can be worn for PvE, but you put yourself at an extreme disadvantage. And the same for the other way around.
4.PvP Gear Progression: At 50 you can purchase a Dungeon-quality blue set with Prestige (PvP currency). Next is a Veteran-quality epic set for each class which needs prestige and a personal rating in battlegrounds, arenas or warplots. The final tier is raid-quality epic gear for both prestige and a high personal rating in arenas or warplots.

5.Arenas all have a “team revive pool.” Carbine felt this helped make the matches a little longer while adding a lot of interesting elements and more tactical arena play. Average arena match in beta has been clocking in at 5 to 6 minutes. Very few have come any where near close to the 30 minute time limit.
6.The PvP stats allow the devs to quickly and easily balance and tweak PvP in the game without touching the PvE side of the game.
7.Each player will have 5 PvP ratings: ranked battlegrounds, 2v2 arenas, 3v3 arenas, 5v5 arenas and warplots.
8.PvP stats work in BGs, arenas and warplots as well as the open world.

WildStar gets an open beta from May 8-18

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/WildStar-gets-an-open-beta-from-May-8-18-11523
Want to try out WildStar, the upcoming PC MMO from a team for former Blizzard designers, before its release later this year? You're in luck, as developer Carbine Studios has announced that it will hold an open beta for WildStar beginning May 8 and running through May 18.



Starting Thursday, you can visit the WildStar open beta page and request a key. If you've already participated in another WildStar beta event, you're already good to do. The WildStar beta lets you advance through the game up to level 30.

To mark the release of the WildStar open beta, Carbine Studios will host a 30-minute livestream at its Twitch channel on Thursday starting at 11 a.m. PDT. Developers will provide a "state of the game" update, talk about why they think WildStar will shake up the MMO space, and answer fan questions.

A second WildStar livestream will be held on Friday, May 9, also starting at 11 a.m. PDT. Developers will talk about the challenges of getting WildStar ready for release, provide a first look at higher level open beta content, and even potentially reveal "post launch content gameplay." The WildStar team will also field questions from social media.

WildStar launches June 3 for PC, and it went gold last month. The game's business model is a hybridized. Carbine Studios will sell a monthly subscription for $15, while you can also use an in-game item called C.R.E.D.D. to earn game time. You can do this through buying it from other players using in-game gold or you can purchase it directly from Carbine Studios at the WildStar website for $20.

The preview of WildStar classes

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/The-preview-of-WildStar-classes-11318
There are currently four classes available in WildStar, with two more hidden over the horizon. Classes are chosen during character creation, and cannot be changed. The currently released classes are described below:





The Warrior
Roles: Tank, Melee DPS
Weapon of Choice: Tech Sword
Armor: Medium / Heavy
Primary Attribute: Strength (DPS) / Technology (Tank)
Resource: Kinetic Cells

Warriors are the melee bashers of WildStar. Their job is to step into the fray and deal and soak up tons of damage. Wielding powerful tech swords (worth noting: swords are the only type of weapon they use, meaning no space axes or hammers) and an arm cannon, Warriors are the clear melee fighter archetype with a cool sci-fi twist, including a grappling claw and a laser saw. The Warrior gameplay is based on using more basic attacks to charge up Kinetic Cells, and then using those Kinetic Cells to power the Warrior's more destructive attacks, creating a flexible rhythm of combat.

The Spellslinger
Roles: Healer, Ranged DPS
Weapon of Choice: Dual Pistols
Armor: Light
Primary Attribute: Dexterity (DPS) / Wisdom (Healing)
Resource: Mana / Spell Surge

The Spellslinger is somewhere between a pistoleer and an arcane mage. The Spellslinger wields two mag pistols, which allow them to charge magical spells into their gun's attacks. Spellslingers are agile and mobile, kiting their enemies and using debilitating magic to keep them on the chase, all while blasting them down. The Spellslinger has access to a wide variety of magical blasts and attacks using their mag pistols, and they use lots of area effect (AoE) abilities. Using their special ability Spell Surge, a Spellslinger can modify their array of abilities to have different effects, such as stunning or applying a damage over time (DoT) effect.

The Stalker
Roles: Melee DPS, Tank
Weapon of Choice: Claws
Armor: Light
Primary Attribute: Dexterity

Stalkers are sneaky assassins who combine a wide array of stealth and deception tactics with brutal combat attacks, and powerful defensive systems. The Stalker is more than just a rogue, capably filling the tanking role in WildStar. The Stalker's weapon of choice is Claws, a pair of large Wolverine-style blades that extend from their arms. Stalkers use an array of other tools and weapons, including cloaking devices, proximity mines, hologram illusions, and more. The Stalker will be a class for which positioning and player reaction will be important factors for success. With the sweeping attacks (read: cone AoE) and battlefield control maneuvers that a Stalker has at their disposal, players will have to carefully consider how they want to approach each combat situation.

The Esper
Roles: Ranged DPS, Healer
Weapon of Choice: Psyblade
Armor: Light
Primary Attribute: Magic (DPS) / Wisdom (Healing)
Resource: Mana / Focus Points
Resource: Suit Power

The Esper is a power psionic caster who uses a combination of controlling magic and summoned weapons to quickly dispatch their foes. The Esper's primary weapon is the Psyblade, a weapon made from the telepathic energy that is the Esper's strength. By harnessing the Psyblade in different ways, the Esper is able to create a wide range of different attacks, including AoE effects and and deadly illusions that function as short-term pets. In combat, Espers use two resource pools, drawing on mana to cast their spells, and enhancing their abilities with Focus Points that are built by using skills (similar to combo points in other games). The Esper is a mobile master summoner that combines control, support, and offensive abilities in a deadly flourish of telepathic might.

WildStar Gets Another Beta Weekend Starting April 25

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/WildStar-Gets-Another-Beta-Weekend-Starting-April-25-11305
NCSoft and Carbine Studios have added another closed weekend session to their rotation of WildStar beta sessions, allowing players to jump in and try the new MMO on Friday, April 25.



After wrapping up an extra-long beta weekend that ended Monday, the plan was previously to launch WildStar’s next session on May 2. This new session means there will be one on each weekend for at least three weeks straight, and with the April 25 session comes a raise in the beta level cap to 25.

That means players checking out WildStar in its early state will get access to new content, according to a Turbine press release:

1.New Adventure – Northern Wilds Adventure is a MOBA style group content experience for you and four of your buddies. Take over the whole map and destroy the enemy base to win, but watch out for the defending faction… they’ll viciously fight to win so come prepared to kick ass.

2.Whitevale – The Dominion version of Alcatraz, Invading Alien scientists (…that dissect anything that moves), and a sunken ship filled with treasure hungry Marauders are waiting for your arrival. Oh … and a nuclear teraformer explosion has unleashed brain controlling squid on the Exile and Dominion military forces. No big deal.

3.Hoverboards – Like hoverboarding? Duh. Of course you do. Get your hoverboard at a mount vendor in the capital city!

4.Abilities and AMPs – Get new abilities to put in your Limited Action Set so you can continue to customize the way you destroy baddies, and unlock more perks in our AMP system.

5.Unlock more clues to the history of the Eldan – Where did this hyper-advanced race go? What kind of technology and secrets are out there? Where can you get a solid space fish taco on Nexus? Get out there and find out, Spanky.

WildStar: Meet the Chua and the Mordesh

Source from:http://www.wscredits.com/news/game-WildStar-1614/WildStar-Meet-the-Chua-and-the-Mordesh-11304
Carbine Studios has revealed the two final playable races in its upcoming massively multiplayer online RPG, WildStar—the Chua and the Mordesh. Both races were unveiled at the San Diego Comic Con following a panel about the game.



The first of the two races, the Mordesh, can be best described as undead. According to the game’s lore, they were once a race of people who were in league with the Dominion who were, en masse, changed into walking dead fueled by cannibalistic rage due to the failure of a miracle drug. In the aftermath, the survivors joined forces with the Exiles in order to survive the Dominion’s quarantine processes.

The Chua on the other hand are diminutive rodent-like critters who develop advanced weapons and technology for the Dominion. Nearly as brilliant as they are sociopathic, the inventive race of Chua are balanced by their devious, competitive and insane personalities.

In all, there are eight races in the game, with four per faction—the Dominion and the Exiles. Further details about the two new races can be found at the game’s official website.

The game’s release date and business model have yet to be announced, but it shouldn’t be too long before these details are revealed.

WildStar's character creation with Massively's hands-on

Character creators are a big deal to me. If I didn't have to make my characters quickly enough at launch to avoid losing my precious names, I would probably spend the better part of a month before clicking "create" the first time. So you know that the first thing I did when I sat down to play WildStar's recent press beta was to play around with the character creator.

All right, that's the first thing everyone does: You have to make a character, but I was playing that to win, people.

Character creation in MMOs usually falls short of what's offered in games like The Sims and Saints Row IV. At the low end you have games like Final Fantasy XI (pick a race, pick a face, pick a hair color, am I seriously done now?), and at the high end you've got Champions Online or the dearly departed City of Heroes. WildStar does not hit the high end, but it does do some things pretty nicely, even if it also misses some opportunities.

When you first click to create a new character, you're given a fairly straightforward loadout. At the left are your options, at the right are descriptions, and in the middle is your character in a race-appropriate pose. The Granok look rough-and-tumble, the Draken look threatening, the Cassians are imperious, the Chua are scheming, the Aurin are bashful, and so on. Unfortunately, the starting armor does commit the cardinal sin of not being gender-unified; men get a jumpsuit while women get a low-cut top and hotpants. Come on.

Clicking on the faction icons at the top of the left interface swaps factions, and clicking any of the three listed elements -- Path, Race, and Class -- allows you to change your selection. Rather comfortably, you can still click between factions with one of those open, and the bottom of the race selection window shows the available classes for your selected race. It's clean and fairly straightforward.

At the bottom of all this is a button to customize your character appearance, and it's here that the creator earns some points. Clicking Customize immediately switches your character from his or her emote stance into a much more neutral position and zooms in so you have a clearer picture of what your character's face looks like, which is where the customization options center. Unfortunately, there are no body sliders in place, not even a simple height or mass slider.

You can call it stylized; I call it a major weakness.
Points are earned back by the surfeit of other options available. The face options avoid the common sin of having four or five faces that are functionally identical (hello, World of Warcraft) by keeping each face very distinct and offering sliders for fine adjustments. Sliders are bounded nicely to avoid giving a character clownish or freakish features, and while their individual effect is subtle, the overall impact is notable.

Skin colors run the gamut. Humans are given a wide enough range of colors (and facial options) to feel true to life, and the other races really spread out to allow for varied options. Some of the colors are particularly striking; Granok, for instance, can have a skin tone that resembles a moss-colored stone, complete with patches of moss along their skins. You've also got a variety of race and gender-specific items available, some of which affect more than you might think. Mordesh eye color affects the color of their fluid containers, for example, and the eye color of the Mechari also determines the color of the crystals that serve as their "hair."

There are lots of individual options to like. Faces, for instance, are expressive and different for each race. The little custom touches are frequently appreciated. Cassian women can have earrings that give their ears a pointed appearance, Aurin have ear options that seem less like proper ears and more like fins, and Granok men can have beards of crystal. Draken have an impressive set of horn options and hair options. Non-humans actually feel, well, non-human, rather than just like humans with a few extra doodads here and there.

Also to the creator's credit, there is an option to save and load character options so you can pop back in to an old character and play around more. The save/load feature is done in a text string, as well, so you can even, say, copy the string, send it to a friend, and have him make an obvious sibling to your character. That, I like.

It's not perfect. Hairstyles, for example, need work; we have several great ones now, but I want to see more. None of them is just a minor tweak to the others, but there are styles that exist for only one faction for humans, and all of the races could use a few more options.

There's also that lack of body sliders thing, and that's kind of glaring. I get the style that Carbine is going for here, but let me have my lithe and muscular Cassian lady and my runty Granok. I realize that there are far worse creators out there, but this is a problem I really would have expected to be fixed right out of the gate. Let us customize our characters a bit more. Obviously you guys know how to bind sliders at the right points so you're not going to end up with Chua towering over Mechari.

Overall, it's a solid character creator. It falls shy of the apex and a bit shy of some better creators (Final Fantasy XIV did most of the same things and had a height/muscle slider), but it's more than functional and fun to play with besides. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an army of alts that I need to prepare for launch with some saved codes.

Don't miss the rest of today's WildStar coverage!
WildStar's Engineer with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's Medic with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's housing system and new classes with Massively's hands-on

WildStar's housing system and new classes with Massively's hands-on

Call me a pacifist, but housing and healing are two of my favorite aspects to any MMO. Maybe it stems from a deep rooted desire for safety and comfort, or perhaps I'm just a real-life Hittori Hanzo: no longer interested in making instruments of death. Either way, WildStar's latest reveals have me excited.

In the course of the most recent press beta, I scored some hands-on time with both new classes and glimpsed the newest changes to housing at a press event last week. The two new classes, Medic and Engineer, add variety to the healing and tanking game, while housing improvements turn homemaking into more than just a hobby. The upcoming MMO from Carbine Studios and NCsoft is turning out to be one rich frontier, ripe with potential for anyone looking for a new MMO home.

The Medic and Engineer in brief
Don't be deceived by the name; the Medic isn't your typical healer. Specializing in various fields, the dual-wielding Medic is one of, if not the, most mobile classes in the game. Granted, every class in WildStar is forced to move through the endless telegraphs of damage, but the Medic specializes in his/her own fields, and each requires equal parts planning with on-the-fly decision making.

Fields, as the developers call them, are temporary areas with beneficial buffs. Think of these as akin to telegraphs, only instead of being rewarded with a monster bite to the face, you receive a boost to your shields and/or health. The challenge comes when the Medic must lay down fields while dodging telegraphs, creating a unique meta game of various shapes, screams, and keyboard-spamming anxiety.

The heavy-gunned Engineer (think giant space shotty) is one of WildStar's pet classes, adopting the cute likes of quadrapedal robots that serve different support functions. This class is geared for long-range combat, and with the right set-up, it even has the ability to serve as a tank for other allies. My favorite aspect of the class came with its unique ability, which turned my Engineer into an angry, mechanized version of myself capable of dishing out a load of damage.

Want more on the two new classes? Massively's Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti just published deep-dives with the Medic and Engineer today.

Housing
Every good hero needs a home, and what a home we'll have in WildStar! Each new player, around level 14 at time of writing, attains his very own space plot to help get him get started on the planet Nexus. Each plot contains a space for a house along with several areas, or sockets, to insert various plugs.

Plugs define the flavor of your home. They are aesthetic add-ons to the land surrounding the home, but nearly every plug encourages interactivity with the owner and the owner's friends. For instance, a mining plug will allow you to cultivate several veins of ore that can be mined by you each day. Gone on vacation to some boring Earth place? Set your permissions and one of your friends can come mine the ore, giving each of you a percentage of the ore mined. And that's just one of many crafting plugs. Plugs can also contain triggers for events, crafting stations, mini-dungeons, minigames with prizes, and more. Most plugs also contain levels of difficulty that help scale up the rewards you earn by interacting with them.

Housing has also received a new feature known as a buff board: an interactive board that bestows three random buffs on the player when clicked. These buffs, which last the entire day, cater to different types of content in different ways to ensure that each player has something that both benefits and encourages the way she spends time in game. In fact, the buff board is in a way a great metaphor for how the devs are approaching housing in general -- it's a great addition to how people play an MMO, not a distraction from it.

The mechanics for decorating the outside of the house have improved, too. During my last WildStar demo, objects could be placed around the outside of the house to help distinguish the home from others, but only in specific locations on predetermined nodes. The system now is much more robust, allowing characters to freely place various decorations anywhere around the house. As the team showed off the new mechanics, we also witnessed the new controls for item placing and manipulation that seem to be pulled straight from modding programs or RIFT's dimensions system. Clicking on the item produced multi-axis controls around the object, which allowed for rotations, scaling, and free positioning.

Once you're inside your home, these same controls are used to position and shape everything into the crib of your dreams. The beta team says that during testing it's seen Gothic themes, haunted houses, pubs, and even what appeared to be a strip club for small stuffed animals. So, I guess you can even build a crib of nightmares, too. The dev team has also added item linking, allowing players to group items they've placed together and move them as one object rather than 30.

The most exciting features I saw this time around dealt with lighting and mood creation both inside and outside the house. Lighting within the house doesn't just range from dark to light, although these settings are available; instead, it allows players to create the dusty haze of an attic or the crisp feeling of a frozen cave. Each object placed within the house also takes into account the lighting system, reacting to each source of light and the general ambiance. Even better, lighting in every room is independent of lighting in all the others, allowing for players to theme their dive-bar lighting different from the, ahem, flashy lights of their stuffies strip club.

Back outside the house, players can choose how the sky and weather look. We saw the romantic vibe of slow falling snow, clear starry skies, and even fireworks that seemed perfect for the guild party after a good raid. While we saw only a handful of different options, the system for far more is in place, and given the breadth of indoor lighting options, I'd put my money on a solid selection come launch.

Don't miss the rest of today's WildStar coverage!
WildStar's Engineer with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's Medic with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's character creation with Massively's hands-on

WildStar's Medic with Massively's hands-on

My favorite classes in games are the ones that inspire spit-takes.

The fact is that I don't really hate your bog-standard Warriors or Mages or whatever. But the classes that really get me interested are classes that demand that you explain what they do and how someone came up with that concept. Guild Wars has the Dervish, World of Warcraft has the Shaman, Final Fantasy XIhas the Corsair -- they're flavorful, they're unique, and they're just plain neat.

Combine that with my love of melee and WildStar's Medic had me from hello. I really like getting into the paint with things, I like the idea of a healer focused on getting up close and dancing, and I love the idea that medics balance between being doctors and technological shock troops. So jumping into the beta, I was happy to dive into the shoes of the doctor and start doing a whole lot of harm to anyone and everyone who opposed the Dominion.

First, do harm
The first thing to keep in mind with Medics is that they really are melee healers. You can argue that they get to stay a little further out of danger than the Warrior or the Stalker, but even their first direct heal works in melee range. Hanging far back from the action is just going to result in a useless Medic. This is why it really matters that they have a very useful toolkit of tricks to help them both survive out in the world and keep other people alive.

Like the other classes, the Medic starts out slow. You have your basic attack, Discharge, then your basic power core consumption ability, Gamma Rays. Right away you're set into a pretty understandable routine; Discharge builds cores while Gamma Rays deals more damage and consumes them. So you fire off Gamma Rays, build up more cores, and so forth. Rays also introduces you to some of the variety possible in telegraphs, as it has a strong central beam and two "satellite" beams that deal less damage. Try to aim for the center, yes, but you can clip other targets.

Your next trick, Paralytic Surge, is a quick stun, and after that you pick up Nullification Field, which teaches you to work with your various Field abilities. On paper, it sounds pretty simple -- you drop an area that deals damage and slows anyone standing within. In practice, however, because you need to be so mobile during fights, that field feels very small. You have to really engineer your movement carefully to get maximum effect from it.

This is as good a point as any to note that WildStar can be pretty rough at times, especially as a Medic. Talk about the class having a high skill requirement wasn't just chatter; it was a factual evaluation. Medium armor is enough that you can cling to life a bit longer, your healing abilities act more as a buffer than as a constant regenerating health pool, and your damage output is not extraordinary right out of the gate. That means carefully figuring out what you're doing and how you're doing it, dodging telegraphs, and making a build that allows you to keep running and gunning for as long as possible.

In my case, that meant picking up Shield Surge (a less-damaging attack that also restores shields) and Fissure (a pulse attack that lower defenses) and swapping out Nullification Field, giving me more reliable options for dealing damage and healing while still moving around. Past your fourth slot, the game cleverly gives you a couple of new abilities as you unlock a new slot on your action bar, constantly encouraging you to play with new builds and try different abilities.

Apply pressure
AMPs and tier points both allow you to fine-tune that build and what you want to do with it. Spending AMP points allows you to improve various capabilities, like your damage output, your shield regeneration, and so forth. The effects are small at first, but they're set up such that you can improve the capabilities you naturally focus on rather than being locked into a single tree of improvements.

Tier points come in a little bit later, but they're both nice and another way to keep encouraging you to try new builds. I mentioned my love for Shield Surge, so obviously I sank points into improving that first. Each ability has eight tier improvements. Most of them simply increase the effects, so putting points in Shield Surge meant a bigger shield buff and damage. At rank 4 and rank 8, though, each ability has a new improvement added in... some of which encourage you to play with something in a different way.

For example, Paralytic Surge has an added effect if it hits an enemy affected by a field at 4 points. That means that if you really don't like using fields, you're encouraged to start playing around with them more. Others apply additional effects for keeping enemies inside the field for the full duration of the channeled ability. They're all buffs, but they aren't as simple as "now you are more awesome." Of course, this is all gleaned from tooltips, so perhaps in practice at those levels it's more automatic.

At level 11, I had a pretty solid build for my playstyle through careful use of probes and abilities. I'd open with Fissure and Devastator Probes, tossing Repair Probes on myself while using Shield Surge as my big punch, with Paralytic Surge as an on-demand stun and Discharge as my core building ability. The fun part was that I didn't feel as if I'd picked out the only viable build for my level, just the one that suited my own playstyle the best. Not that it made playing a Medic less tricky, but it meant that I felt rewarded for careful use of abilities and movement.

Trauma centers
I'd be remiss in not talking about the actual play environmentinstead of just discussing the class. And it's a good... but I do have a minor quibble or two.

The initial tutorial zone comfortably introduces you to the most basic mechanics of the game and the overall feel of your faction, giving a top-level overview of how your class and path works while leaving plenty of room for you to play around. The next area gives you more chance to miss things and more opportunities to experiment while at the same time pushing you forward organically.

Stuff is happening and you feel that you've got enough freedom to move around but not so much freedom that you get lost. The tweet-quest format works very well here, giving you just enough information to know what you're doing without burdening you with unnecessary fluff... although you can ask questions and learn the fluff if you want. There's also a wonderful contrast between how the factions are presented to one another. The Exiles are being harassed and fought by the Dominion, and the Dominion is enemy number one, but the Dominion is mostly focused on doing its own thing. The Exiles aren't whom you're hunting; they just keep getting in the way when you're doing other stuff.

At any rate, it's off to the first real zone after that, and here the map expands greatly, sending you out and about, hither and yon, and... hold on a moment, can I catch my breath? Log out for like two minutes? Maybe take a breather?

If there was a designated resting spot in town, I didn't find it, and I looked. I'm well aware that this is one of the big mechanical things behind getting a house, but it also created a feeling of added pressure, as if I was being told that I wasn't allowed to log off just yet because I had too many things to do. No time to relax! You need to smash stuff in the face! Look at all this! Level up and your entire screen explodes with glee, oh yeah!

And hopefully you're not fighting anything when that level up happens because good luck dodging the surfeit of telegraphs when your entire screen is flashing and letting you know you dinged.

The point I'm getting at is that the game has a lot of stuff here and now and places a nice emphasis on kinetic motion rather than following the more sedate pace found in other MMOs. This is a good thing in many ways, but it also means that it occasionally feels as if too much is going on at once. You're overloaded on new information and denied a stopping point, and it can get a bit wearying. Even though I'm someone who really likes the whole telegraph system, amidst the numerous fights with three or four enemies at once I sometimes found myself overloaded by stuff going on at once and how do I dodge this?

All that energy can go into overload, in other words.

But even with those minor quibbles, when the game is on, it is on. Sure, I had moments of frustration, but dancing about and smashing things up with a Medic was great fun, and I certainly wasn't ever bored. I don't know whether Medic is going to be the first class I focus on when the game launches, but I'm excited to see more of it and how it plays at the higher levels.

Don't miss the rest of today's WildStar coverage!
WildStar's Engineer with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's housing system and new classes with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's character creation with Massively's hands-on

WildStar's Engineer with Massively's hands-on

It must have been serendipity that got me into the WildStar beta the week after the Engineer was announced (well, that or a PR push, but what are the odds?). As my friends, my family, and those who come within shouting distance of my voice know, I am always drawn to Engineers in video games. Whether the game be Team Fortress 2, Guild Wars 2, or Warhammer Online, if I have a big wrench, turrets, guns, pets, and/or lots of gadgets, I'm a pretty satisfied human being.

WildStar's Engineer almost sounded too good to be true to me: a heavy armor-wearing ranged class that could DPS or tank while fielding combat robots. There might have been mention of a mech suit as well, but by that point I was twitching on the floor after suffering a happiness seizure. But would this perfect match on paper meet up to the cold, colorful reality when I got into the game? There was only one way to find out. Honey, take the kids out for the next two days, for I have space clobbering to do!

Gears and guns
I leveled a Mechari Engineer named Beebox to 10 over a couple of days to get some good hands-on time with the class. The choice of a female Mechari almost set me off of the game, as the bizarre body proportions and flouncy run felt, well, a little insulting to both genders. "Tee hee, I'm a girlie robot, look at my literal cans and the girlie way I run!" Stylized I can get behind, but perhaps the art and animation departments went a little too far with the Mechari.

Flouncing aside, the Engineer is pretty cool from the get-go. You come out of a cryopod with heavy armor and are soon handed a giant pulse rifle. This is my rifle and this is my gun; this is for fighting and this is for statistical improvements that help my gearscore for the inevitable raid gating. You also start with the ability to throw on your mech suit (which gives you a damage buff for a short duration) and a pulse blast. The latter is a pretty cool attack. It has a short charge before unleashing a powerful attack. During the charge, the telegraph system allows you to position your attack for maximum effect, as the center of your three lanes of attack hits the hardest.

Speaking of telegraphs, I hadn't been giving them much thought prior to really giving WildStar a go, mostly because I assumed they were like a lot of other "action" MMOs -- you know, don't stand in the red circle of death. But I found a new twist here, with telegraphs that take all sorts of shapes and the need to jockey for positional advantage between your telegraphs and those of the enemy. It was delightfully intuitive, and the only fault I had with it is that some of the ground cover made it hard to properly see the red and blue telegraphs.

For a Dominion character, the first couple of levels of my existence were spent on the giant spaceship Destiny. As a tutorial, it was a shade too long but very thorough and not at all boring. By the end of it, I had a good handle on fighting as well as an appreciation for the backstory of the Dominion and Nexus.

Over the next 9 levels, I expanded my library of skills. WildStar starts out by automatically granting you skills and placing them in your hotbar for the first few levels, but after that you not only have to purchase them but have to decide which skills you want equipped. Face the facts: You're not going to have enough hotbar spaces for them all.

At level 2, the Engineer gets a very useful finisher called Electrocute. It's a three-second channel of electricity that draws on the charge that your other attacks cause. So I quickly got into a pattern of doing two Pulse Blasts followed by a nasty Electrocute, which would more often than not turn all of the bad guys into gibblets.

So what about pets? You unlock your first robot at level 4, a bruiser bot that has a handy taunt to keep aggro off of you. I went for several levels thinking that this bot was the most ineffective pet ever because it never taunted until I finally realized that unlike many other MMOs, WildStar expected me to manually trigger the taunt myself (the summon bot skill turns into the taunt skill when your pet is in the field). I was much more excited to get my smaller but deadlier artillery bot at level 6. This little critter has a good long-distance attack, but you can also trigger a barrage attack to smite enemies in a small area. And yes, you can have both pets out at the same time if you want to use those hotbar slots for them.

Past the bots, level 3 gives you Zap, a lightning-quick, short-duration stun. I was pretty partial to it in just about every fight, since that second or so reprieve gave me time to charge up another pulse attack or order my bots into the fray. Other skills include Quick Burst (an attack that opens up when you crit), Urgent Withdrawal (you snare the enemy and jump some ways back), Hyper Wave (a taunt), Flak Cannon (a channeled low-damage cone attack), and Recursive Matrix (a deflection shield for you and your physically closest friends).

By level 10, I had several options of builds. I preferred to field both of my bots along with my Pulse Blast, Electrocution, and Zap. Even with heavy armor and ranged damage, I couldn't content myself with standing still. Engineers need to be mobile to avoid the worst of group attacks, and maneuvering fields of fire so that multiple enemies will be hit is a must.

So what did I think of my initial experience with the class? It wasn't much of a surprise: I loved it. I felt like a hardy space marine with a squad of robot troops stomping all over the landscape. The skills felt very quick and responsive, and my initial irritation at pulse blast requiring that second or so to charge up before erupting eventually gave way to an enjoyment of the pace of battles. I definitely can see the Engineer as being a welcome group member, not just for taunts and damage but for team-supporting abilities.

I spy with my little eye
Even though I was playing over the weekend to examine the Engineer, I had several other quick observations that I wanted to share. Overall, WildStar meets my reasonable expectations for whatCarbine's been projecting. It's pretty slick, very colorful, full of personality, and simply fun. There's a lot of the old mixed with clever new approaches, and the whole kit-n-kaboodle seems to work. No major red flags popped up for me aside from a nasty stretch of lag when a stress test group came in to play.

Little things that pleased me included the absolutely terrific music, the fact that housing and costume items dropped off mobs, going through a museum and seeing a diorama, laughing at the plentiful humor, getting into the little challenges (time-limited localized quests), watching those on the builder path construct cool little depots for us all to use, and seeing just how much attention was paid to lore delivery.

I kept a list of a few downsides for fairness' sake. I know every new MMO gets compared to World of Warcraft, but the sheer similarity with WildStar's stylized art is going to cause people to make this comparison more than normal. Quest guidance wasn't always as clear as it should be; I often found myself squinting at the cluttered map figuring out where to go for what.

WildStar is also, well, pretty in-your-face with its attitude. It's kind of like a late-'90s commercial with snowboarders drinking Mountain Dew; it growls at you things like "DOUBLE KILL!" and has Batman-like exclamations pop up on the screen, and it has the least subtle level-up animation of all time. Your mileage with this attitude may vary, but it could be a little too much for some folks and tip the scales from "funny/charming" to "ugh annoying."

Undoubtedly, on launch day I'll be rolling up an Engineer as my main. If you like pets, tanking, or simply blasting bad guys to kingdom come with big guns, you'll probably be doing the same.

Don't miss the rest of today's WildStar coverage!
WildStar's Medic with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's housing system and new classes with Massively's hands-on
WildStar's character creation with Massively's hands-on