100401-concerns-and-a-request-for-dev-response

== Content ==
			
Right now Wildstar is facing a couple of pressing issues which haven't garnered much feedback from Carbine on how they are going to address them. I'd like to lay them out as I understand them, get feedback from other players on things I may be incorrect about, and hopefully get a dev response as to how they will be addressing the issues going into the future. These two things are intertwined, and one logically leads into the other. 
 
First, we need to talk about stat weighting. Right now for everyone outside of tanks the unfortunate truth is that you are better off running your dailies, spending all the money on repeated lower tier crafting combines, and hoping to win the rune slot lottery rather than buying the gear from the daily rep vendors and probably even running dungeons and adventures. The reason for this is the overriding contribution of assault or support power to your ability to do your job well. Secondary stats such as strikethrough, crit, crit sev, etc require much more allocation from your stat budget to offer the same performance increase as a much small budgetary allocation toward AP or SP. This is why the current optimum way for most classes to outfit themselves is with maximized primary stats on crafted gear, with a few specific AP items(pirate's bane, berserker aegis, etc) filling out your kit. This is also why they cannot introduce technologist expert research, because crafted gear is already superior for the vast majority of the playerbase and adding higher power cores to actually make all the adventus gear viable would completely obliterate any other avenue of gear acquisition. Something has to change to make the secondary stats more valuable and break the fire/fusion or bust rune obsession. It feels asinine to take off hard won dungeon epics or even raid drops to put on galactium gear in order to do your job better, but that is where we stand. That leads us to....
 
Rewarding gameplay. Right now it is becoming hard to take the designated path of progression seriously. Typically you do adventures, then dungeons, while working on reputations to fill out missing slots and eventually you get to raid. Due to the way stats work and the random nature of rune slots many of the so called carrots we are supposed to be chasing to upgrade our character are actually pretty lackluster. Most of the reputation gear, despite being purple and having an overall higher stat budget, is outperformed by well rolled crafted gear. The same holds true for a large degree of the dungeon epics and even the Genetic Archives loot. Never before in an MMO have I been less enthusiastic to see what drops when a raid boss dies. Roughly half of what we get no one wants, even for offspec. Running dungeons is become tedious, to the point that upgrades consist of essentially perfectly rolled pieces with the exact slots needed to offset the specific nature of crafted gear. When it could take thirty runs to get your item and the acquisition of said item is invalidated due to getting double water runes it makes you wonder why you bother. Something has to change, because as it slowly sinks in that running dungeons and raiding to progress your character is not really doing much you lose that urge to play. 
 
Now I'm sure carbine is aware of these problems(the pvp dev who put fire slots on the weapons certainly is) and working on them, but being a warrior tank I have decided sitting around and hoping for them to fix it eventually isn't necessarily the right course of action if I actually want to keep playing. This needs to be the number one priority, over balance, over pvp, over bugs, over everything. When I log in I should feel some moderate level of confidence that playing the game is going to lead to something rewarding, and right now that just isn't the case. 
 
Now, complaining without solutions isn't much help, so I'll offer my personal views on some things I think could help. I'd love to hear other opinions and hopefully a dev can chime in with what they actually plan to do and why they believe their answer is the most elegant one. 
 
For stat weighting: This seems like a purely mathematical problem. AP and SP are too strong, and the secondary stats are too weak. Tanks need seperate itemization(we can't get all the tanking stats and all the secondary stats and armor on one piece of gear in order to scale with dps classes), but for everyone else simply nerfing the overall contribution of A/S P to their damage equation would seem to immediately increase the power of the secondary stats. That or lower the item budget costs of the secondary stats and increase their values appropriately. Now, much of this probably has to do with scaling, and eventually 5 more ap vs X amount of crit probably weighs in favor of crit as AP scales up, but right now for the vast majority(maybe all) of the players it's just easier to stack AP. Also, rune values are massively out of whack. A 14 brutality rune should not be 33% as valuable as a 14 assault power rune, which is 1000% more valuable than a 14 crit rune. It makes no sense, and it turns the replicable nature of crafted gear into the best way to combat the rune slot lottery that defines useful gear vs junk. 
 
For rewarding gameplay: going out into the world and doing stuff should always be the best way to progress your character. This means a major nerf to crafted gear and adding omni slots to the first slot(or even just one guaranteed slot) on every raid drop. With the current crafted gear nerfed down to a reasonable level you could actually implement the better cores from technologist research, and if you limited the adventus items to 1 rune slot(2 with a dual hybrid) you could actually make good gear from crafting achievable without overwhelming the gear from everywhere else. Now, are players going to be happy if you nerf all the crafted gear they've sunk tons of money into? Probably not. But for the long term health of the game I don't see any way where, using the current random nature of rune slots, competitive crafted gear is ever going to be the non-optimal way to progress. In addition, some sort of token system that would allow you to reroll slots on an item one at a time that comes from dungeon completion(maybe a daily quest?) would be a welcome addition.  I'm told this all changes as you progress further into the raids, and that late GA/datascape gear has enough of an overall item budget jump to offset non-optimal stat allocation and rune slots. But if they ever implement better cores that won't be the case. 
 
Anyway, just the thoughts of a frustrated player. If I'm wrong feel free to tell me why, and if anyone has a better solution or if Carbine has addressed it somewhere and I haven't seen it feel free to point me in the right direction. I'm taking the time to write this post(just like I did the warrior tanking one) because I like the game and I want to keep playing. I have a guild full of people who enjoy the game but are frustrated by the way the systems within it function. I'm sure we're not the only ones. We just need you to tell us you acknowledge the problems and have a plan to fix it. "The Devs are listening" should not be something we say sarcastically as a punchline every time we run into something that seemingly makes no sense. 
 
Graiban
 
PS: If nothing else, please implement daily quests for dungeons and pvp. Do it. Give them the tokens to reroll one rune slot and incentivize people to actually play. The game needs something to motivate people to run content right now in a bad way. Rerolling one rune slot every four or five days is a good carrot that wouldn't break the game. you could even limit it to one slot per item so people can't create absolutely perfect pieces. 	
----
			Thanks for posting this. I'm still in the 40s, so I've been wondering why it's so obvious to everyone that the game isn't fun at 50. This explains it.	
----
			WildStar is so frustrating to love. Excellent core mechanics that are constantly being out-shined by it's poor Design Philosophies from Raid Entry to Loot. It's irritating. I'm constantly wondering: "Why they would do that?" "Why did they think that was a good idea?" "Who came up with that?" "Why haven't they fired him?" lol	
----
			
Mostly agreed, but I don't think a nerf to crafted gear is the answer. Rather I'd buff the perks of dropped gear.
Not the stats strictly, because that would allow people to be overgeared for the content.
But have for example:
 
- specials (actually good specials, not the current garbage) that can't be obtained from crafted gear
- more guaranteed omni slots (you already mentioned this)
- slower or zero durability degradation (I'm sure raiders have serious repair costs)
 
If better Technologist cores get added, they could require dungeon drops to be crafted. And they could provide access to some of the suggested perks instead of a straight up power boost.	
----
			They worried so much about making it hard they forgot to make it fun.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They worried so much about making it hard they forgot to make it fun
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They worried so much about making it hard they forgot to make it fun.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Thanks for posting this. I'm still in the 40s, so I've been wondering why it's so obvious to everyone that the game isn't fun at 50. This explains it.
----
			
Oh look at the familiar complaining faces in this thread. /shocked.
 
Anyway, for the OP.. you said:
 
{| class="blockquote"
Typically you do adventures, then dungeons, while working on reputations to fill out missing slots and eventually you get to raid. Due to the way stats work and the random nature of rune slots many of the so called carrots we are supposed to be chasing to upgrade our character are actually pretty lackluster. Most of the reputation gear, despite being purple and having an overall higher stat budget, is outperformed by well rolled crafted gear.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Thanks for posting this. I'm still in the 40s, so I've been wondering why it's so obvious to everyone that the game isn't fun at 50. This explains it.
----
			In most other games, I read lots of complaints from the crafting community that their gear at max level isn't up to snuff.  Now here, I'm reading that crafting gear is too good.  Isn't there a balance to be found somewhere?	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Oh look at the familiar complaining faces in this thread. /shocked.
 
Anyway, for the OP.. you said:
 
 
I think that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with crafted gear being viable -- or even the best -- for leveling gear. It all gets replaced, so there's nothing wrong with giving the crafting player base some love and letting them pursue mastery in their chosen craft -- and have it mean something for a change. I applaud Carbine for this move and do not want it to change.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They could make crafters make all the leveling gear in the game and I wouldn't care. The problem arises when crafted gear that takes zero effort to craft and costs 6 gold per combine until you get perfect slots is comparable to raid drops. It should not be rendering epic drops from dungeons worthless. Pursuing mastery of your chosen craft in this case means leveling an alt to 50 and doing daily quests that take two minutes. We're not talking about obtaining multiple raid drops to craft a raid quality item, we're talking about buying a core off the AH and clicking combine until you get the slots you want. What exactly is the motivation for you to go do their elder content when nothing of value drops from there?
----
			I had a relatively fun time leveling, but once I hit 50 and read some of the player concerns similar to these I unsubbed. It sounds incredibly tedious and not worth my time. 	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
They could make crafters make all the leveling gear in the game and I wouldn't care. The problem arises when crafted gear that takes zero effort to craft and costs 6 gold per combine until you get perfect slots is comparable to raid drops. It should not be rendering epic drops from dungeons worthless. Pursuing mastery of your chosen craft in this case means leveling an alt to 50 and doing daily quests that take two minutes. We're not talking about obtaining multiple raid drops to craft a raid quality item, we're talking about buying a core off the AH and clicking combine until you get the slots you want. What exactly is the motivation for you to go do their elder content when nothing of value drops from there?
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
While I think the AP obsession in this game hurts drops hard and the rune stuff is... Asian level rng...
 
What happened with raiding cause it's fun? I always raided because working with a whole bunch of people getting the mechanics right is fun! If I was only after raid loots I would have rage quit ddo fast... My raid leader did the same raid for 2 years without getting the best must have caster item. He was still leading us even though a bit bitter lol. And the epic version of that item?!?! We knew only of a couple people with that.
 
Fun, collaboration and mechanics are no longer motivation for Raiders.
 
I'm sad.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
While I think the AP obsession in this game hurts drops hard and the rune stuff is... Asian level rng...
 
What happened with raiding cause it's fun? I always raided because working with a whole bunch of people getting the mechanics right is fun! If I was only after raid loots I would have rage quit ddo fast... My raid leader did the same raid for 2 years without getting the best must have caster item. He was still leading us even though a bit bitter lol. And the epic version of that item?!?! We knew only of a couple people with that.
 
Fun, collaboration and mechanics are no longer motivation for Raiders.
 
I'm sad.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
That's not how crafting works, and if you think that's all there is to it, you're missing out. And all the mats spent trying to get the best piece? That has to be worth something.
 
Epics from adventures are not "Elder content". They are a lower tier item rarity, just because their purple doesn't mean they're better than everything else. They're simply better than other items in their class.
----
			
Crafted/adventure: max 1-2 slots. guaranteed
Dungeons: 2-3 slots, guaranteed
Raids: 4-5 slots, guaranteed
 
I just solved itemization and gear progression.
 
edit: I forgot,
 
Give technologist the ability to craft an item to reroll all runeslot colors. All or nothing leaves some amount of acceptable RNG.	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Crafted/adventure: max 1-2 slots. guaranteed
Dungeons: 2-3 slots, guaranteed
Raids: 4-5 slots, guaranteed
 
I just solved itemization and gear progression.
 
edit: I forgot,
 
Give technologist the ability to craft an item to reroll all runeslot colors. All or nothing leaves some amount of acceptable RNG.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
I had a relatively fun time leveling, but once I hit 50 and read some of the player concerns similar to these I unsubbed. It sounds incredibly tedious and not worth my time. 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Crafted/adventure: max 1-2 slots. guaranteed
Dungeons: 2-3 slots, guaranteed
Raids: 4-5 slots, guaranteed
 
I just solved itemization and gear progression.
 
edit: I forgot,
 
Give technologist the ability to craft an item to reroll all runeslot colors. All or nothing leaves some amount of acceptable RNG.
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Consume a reroll runeslot colors item.
----
			
Don't get what op is getting at, most epics from adventures are equal or slightly better than the best crafted of that type
 
I.e. Meteoric sliver vs Adventus blade	
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Don't get what op is getting at, most epics from adventures are equal or slightly better than the best crafted of that type
 
I.e. Meteoric sliver vs Adventus blade
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Right now Wildstar is facing a couple of pressing issues which haven't garnered much feedback from Carbine on how they are going to address them. I'd like to lay them out as I understand them, get feedback from other players on things I may be incorrect about, and hopefully get a dev response as to how they will be addressing the issues going into the future. These two things are intertwined, and one logically leads into the other. 
 
First, we need to talk about stat weighting. Right now for everyone outside of tanks the unfortunate truth is that you are better off running your dailies, spending all the money on repeated lower tier crafting combines, and hoping to win the rune slot lottery rather than buying the gear from the daily rep vendors and probably even running dungeons and adventures. The reason for this is the overriding contribution of assault or support power to your ability to do your job well. Secondary stats such as strikethrough, crit, crit sev, etc require much more allocation from your stat budget to offer the same performance increase as a much small budgetary allocation toward AP or SP. This is why the current optimum way for most classes to outfit themselves is with maximized primary stats on crafted gear, with a few specific AP items(pirate's bane, berserker aegis, etc) filling out your kit. This is also why they cannot introduce technologist expert research, because crafted gear is already superior for the vast majority of the playerbase and adding higher power cores to actually make all the adventus gear viable would completely obliterate any other avenue of gear acquisition. Something has to change to make the secondary stats more valuable and break the fire/fusion or bust rune obsession. It feels asinine to take off hard won dungeon epics or even raid drops to put on galactium gear in order to do your job better, but that is where we stand. That leads us to....
 
Rewarding gameplay. Right now it is becoming hard to take the designated path of progression seriously. Typically you do adventures, then dungeons, while working on reputations to fill out missing slots and eventually you get to raid. Due to the way stats work and the random nature of rune slots many of the so called carrots we are supposed to be chasing to upgrade our character are actually pretty lackluster. Most of the reputation gear, despite being purple and having an overall higher stat budget, is outperformed by well rolled crafted gear. The same holds true for a large degree of the dungeon epics and even the Genetic Archives loot. Never before in an MMO have I been less enthusiastic to see what drops when a raid boss dies. Roughly half of what we get no one wants, even for offspec. Running dungeons is become tedious, to the point that upgrades consist of essentially perfectly rolled pieces with the exact slots needed to offset the specific nature of crafted gear. When it could take thirty runs to get your item and the acquisition of said item is invalidated due to getting double water runes it makes you wonder why you bother. Something has to change, because as it slowly sinks in that running dungeons and raiding to progress your character is not really doing much you lose that urge to play. 
 
Now I'm sure carbine is aware of these problems(the pvp dev who put fire slots on the weapons certainly is) and working on them, but being a warrior tank I have decided sitting around and hoping for them to fix it eventually isn't necessarily the right course of action if I actually want to keep playing. This needs to be the number one priority, over balance, over pvp, over bugs, over everything. When I log in I should feel some moderate level of confidence that playing the game is going to lead to something rewarding, and right now that just isn't the case. 
 
Now, complaining without solutions isn't much help, so I'll offer my personal views on some things I think could help. I'd love to hear other opinions and hopefully a dev can chime in with what they actually plan to do and why they believe their answer is the most elegant one. 
 
For stat weighting: This seems like a purely mathematical problem. AP and SP are too strong, and the secondary stats are too weak. Tanks need seperate itemization(we can't get all the tanking stats and all the secondary stats and armor on one piece of gear in order to scale with dps classes), but for everyone else simply nerfing the overall contribution of A/S P to their damage equation would seem to immediately increase the power of the secondary stats. That or lower the item budget costs of the secondary stats and increase their values appropriately. Now, much of this probably has to do with scaling, and eventually 5 more ap vs X amount of crit probably weighs in favor of crit as AP scales up, but right now for the vast majority(maybe all) of the players it's just easier to stack AP. Also, rune values are massively out of whack. A 14 brutality rune should not be 33% as valuable as a 14 assault power rune, which is 1000% more valuable than a 14 crit rune. It makes no sense, and it turns the replicable nature of crafted gear into the best way to combat the rune slot lottery that defines useful gear vs junk. 
 
For rewarding gameplay: going out into the world and doing stuff should always be the best way to progress your character. This means a major nerf to crafted gear and adding omni slots to the first slot(or even just one guaranteed slot) on every raid drop. With the current crafted gear nerfed down to a reasonable level you could actually implement the better cores from technologist research, and if you limited the adventus items to 1 rune slot(2 with a dual hybrid) you could actually make good gear from crafting achievable without overwhelming the gear from everywhere else. Now, are players going to be happy if you nerf all the crafted gear they've sunk tons of money into? Probably not. But for the long term health of the game I don't see any way where, using the current random nature of rune slots, competitive crafted gear is ever going to be the non-optimal way to progress. In addition, some sort of token system that would allow you to reroll slots on an item one at a time that comes from dungeon completion(maybe a daily quest?) would be a welcome addition.  I'm told this all changes as you progress further into the raids, and that late GA/datascape gear has enough of an overall item budget jump to offset non-optimal stat allocation and rune slots. But if they ever implement better cores that won't be the case. 
 
Anyway, just the thoughts of a frustrated player. If I'm wrong feel free to tell me why, and if anyone has a better solution or if Carbine has addressed it somewhere and I haven't seen it feel free to point me in the right direction. I'm taking the time to write this post(just like I did the warrior tanking one) because I like the game and I want to keep playing. I have a guild full of people who enjoy the game but are frustrated by the way the systems within it function. I'm sure we're not the only ones. We just need you to tell us you acknowledge the problems and have a plan to fix it. "The Devs are listening" should not be something we say sarcastically as a punchline every time we run into something that seemingly makes no sense. 
 
Graiban
 
PS: If nothing else, please implement daily quests for dungeons and pvp. Do it. Give them the tokens to reroll one rune slot and incentivize people to actually play. The game needs something to motivate people to run content right now in a bad way. Rerolling one rune slot every four or five days is a good carrot that wouldn't break the game. you could even limit it to one slot per item so people can't create absolutely perfect pieces. 
----
			
{| class="blockquote"
Agree with this....
 
All apart from the sentiment that looted gear should be better than crafted.
 
Crafted gear should always be better than looted gear, with the exception of the very highest, end game gear that drops from the highest tier of raids/dungeons.
 
This promotes interdependence between players and fosters community. Otherwise dont bother to have crafting at all as there is nothing more sole destroying than being a crafter in a game where you simply dont matter to anyone because low level mob loot outshines the best stuff you can make.....
----
			
Hi Folks,
 
Just a reminder to please stay on-topic and constructive please. Carry on! :)
 
Thank you
- Team WildStar 	
----