115579-leveling-woes

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So after trying to level the one alt I've managed to get up to 20th, I've had some problems. I want to describe what I just went through to give an idea of why I personally hate leveling in this game right now. Please keep in mind that there are a lot of things I actually love as well, so this isn't about Wildstar as some oversimplified symbol. It's just about one dude's experience of one aspect of the gameplay (albeit a very important aspect).
1. I roll a new character, proceed to level in the zones until 15th, then decide I want to try the adventure I just unlocked. So I do a bunch of runs and, hey, they're pretty fun. I like tanking with my chua engineer. So I do this until 20th (which doesn't take very long).2. Now I can't get a queue. At all. Over an hour and nothing pops. So OK, I'm out of options. I go back to zone leveling. Except Auroria is level 14-22, and I've barely touched it. What does this mean? I have to either go through a crapload of quests that are brainless easy and give poor XP, or I have to run through the zone looking for level 20ish quest areas. Neither of these are fun options.3. I decide to check out Whitevale. It's level 22-23 to start, so why not? I can handle mobs a couple of levels higher. Heck, I remember having a blast killing mobs 4-5 levels higher in WoW. So why not? I'll tell you why not. Because the level 23 mobs are considered Red difficulty, and they annihilate me. The first quest I pick up ends with investigating a body which spawns three enemies who rush me and I die. OK, respec, get a bit more tankiness, get a couple pets. Die again. And again, and again, and again. No changes work. Nothing helps. These mobs are facerolling me.4. Look at my gear. OK, it's not bad, level 15 blues almost across the board. Sure the items are lower level than they should be, but being blues, they're probably not far off level 20 greens either, and having a full arsenal of gear the same level as your character is a rarity in most games anyway (until you hit level cap, of course). So this really shouldn't be the problem, but I'll bite. Time to buy some new threads. I go to the auction house... and there is nothing. I find two mediocre upgrades. Apparently leveling alts is not popular, and no one seems to be crafting and posting.Conclusion.I can't get gear. Spec changes don't matter. Queues aren't popping. I only have two leveling zones to choose from, one is too low/requires me to actually *search* for quests, penalizing me for deciding to try different content, while the other zone, even though it's only a few levels above me, is fun-crushingly hard to the point where I feel like I'm no longer playing a video game. It doesn't seem like a skill fail; I'm dodging the red, there's nothing to really react to (usually in MMOs skill = reactivity, shutting down those hardcore abilities that really hurt). I'm just getting nuked down by these guys, even with my stuns, even with my taunting pets, even with evasion.Basically, my character is stumped. I'm being forced back to Auroria to search out same-level quests, which I don't particularly consider fun or player-driven, or I sit around hawking the AH for better gear and then cross my fingers on completing Whitevale quests. This is a pretty terrible situation to be in.All of this said, while I am very frustrated (leveling an alt should never, ever, ever feel like one massive chore), I do understand that much of this has probably been said. I've heard plenty of criticism about the 'on rails' nature of leveling in Wildstar. And I do know that Carbine is working on a few things that would help my situation (i.e. active population, which hopefully will help queues). But I still feel like sharing this experience in detail because I haven't come across a fun-block like this since grinding mobs in Vanilla WoW, back at that one cemetary around level 50.Dunno what to do now. Dungeon queues will probably not be helped by Drop 3. I only have one adventure to run and it's been run plenty already. I guess I could pray that PVP queues pick up for low levels, but it seems unlikely and honestly I'm not that into PVP right now. So it's basically suck it up and go to Auroria. One choice, and it's not a fun choice, and now leveling my super cute chua is just a big headache and I don't even want to look at him anymore...That's it. If anyone has advice, I'd love to hear. It's certainly within reason that I've missed something.	
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A few things:
 
-4-5 levels difference in WoW is not equal to 2-3 level in Wildstar.  Especially if you don't know the class very well.  ESPECIALLY the step into Whitevale.  Whitevale is the time when telegraphs go from cones or lines to crazy cruciform networks, spinning blades, et al.  And they do EPIC amounts of damage.  If you can stay out of the red, you can handle things 2-3 levels above you without dying, but it's not always easy depending on the character.  You can't eat a telegraph at that level even for a second.  Since you aren't eating the red, I'd figure your gear is not at level, because if you're level 20, your gear is level 15, and you take a smack from a level 23, you're going to splat.
 
-They're coming up with ways to make leveling a bit easier to level by (raising the experience gained IIRC), but it might not get here until the January drop.  The reason they're doing that is a lack of people at the skill positions.  If you're queueing as a tank, that means you can't get a single healer at 20, which doesn't surprise me.  Because you need an entirely different LAS setup and set of gear to tank or heal, most people don't.  And especially in dungeons, when people get nervous about tanking and healing the party.  Giving them the experience boost may help get more people to level via instances and thus play more support roles in the midtier levels and in harder normal content.  As it stands, queues suffer horribly from lacking healers and tanks, usually both.
 
-Queues also suffer from a reputation for incompetence and PUG rage, which I'm sure is reducing the amount of people queueing.  Lots of people, if they can't form a premade, figure they're going to get ragequitters in a PUG.  That doesn't help, but I'm not sure I have many good ideas for how to fix that offhand.
 
-Gear's a big issue because a lot of crafters don't sell on the AH anymore.  I know I don't, at least not anything shy of Epochos.  Your best bet is to find an armorer and weaponsmith and get your weapons tailored.  I don't charge anyone anything for Weaponsmithing, and I had Nephele build my Epochos tank set for just the cores.  So it's easy to get gear if you know people who make it, especially in heavy armor.  Ore's so easy to come by and so cheap on the CX, you'll find it easy to do.  But you're not on Evindra, where the sky is blue and the rowsdower roam.
 
The only thing I can tell you to do is what you're doing if you're not PVPing, don't have a pocket healer (the only way for tanks to fly), don't have a new place to get gear, and can't quest in Whitevale yet, you're stuck catching up with quests at your level and upgrading your gear.	
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The only thing I can tell you to do is what you're doing if you're not PVPing, don't have a pocket healer (the only way for tanks to fly), don't have a new place to get gear, and can't quest in Whitevale yet, you're stuck catching up with quests at your level and upgrading your gear.
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Well I shouldn't be forced to carry a pocket healer or PVP just to get by. I also shouldn't be forced to upgrade gear, since level 15 blues are equal to level 18ish greens, and being level 20, that's perfectly fine. It's all bad to me at this point.
 
I'm also not sure that "standing in the red for even one second = death" is something that a fun game should ever say about the combat experience of a level 20 tank/dps class. :P
 
At this point I'm done with my alt, not gonna ride rails looking for quests that my character can handle. In vanilla WoW I could kill red mobs with skill and planning; in later WoW I could kill them with neither, the game just got easy. That said, to me red mobs should always be in the '4-5 levels above' range. Having an incredible challenge from a mob merely 2-3 levels above you is just a set-up for choking your own content (which is exactly what's happening in my case now).
 
Edit: And thanks for the suggestions, I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I guess it's just coming down to the reality that there are no solutions for months to come and by then I probably won't care about leveling alts in Wildstar, haha.  Off to the Wasteland I go to cure some plagues and decapitate gangs... :P
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Well we're just going to agree to disagree on the gear thing. I have never played an MMO where gear equivalent to two levels below you is "sub" anything. I imagine something like 5% or less of players ever have more than a few pieces of gear that's level-equivalent (stats pulled out of bum, but you get the idea). Generally by the time you're anywhere near a set you've already out-leveled the first several pieces you got, on and on it goes. So a full suit of level 18 greens when you're level 20 doesn't strike me as a problem... not even a small problem that is stacked onto others. IMO, it's exactly what you should expect from the majority of players and so that shouldn't be contributing to difficulty killing enemies.
 
So far as standing in red for a second, again, it's damn-near impossible to 100% avoid all red at all times, particularly when dealing with groups, which is common in this game. No, I'll go one step further— it's not even fun to have to avoid everything. I don't want to stare at the ground 24/7, and I'm not sure many others do either, and that's pretty much the only way you're going to never eat a lick of red. Sounds like a snoozefest to me. :lol:
 
Consequently the only part I agree with you is the level difference. So I don't see this as a stacking of three reasonable weaknesses, I see this as two instances of 'exactly what is will be for most people, and normal' (the gear and the taking a wee bit of red now and then), and one instance of...
 
This leads to something I was actually about to post on, because it seems critical to my problem.
 
Vanilla WoW was something like this for most classes (let's not talk hunter/warlock as the mainstay):
 
L0: green = easy peasy
L1-2: yellow = doable without much strategy unless they're coming in large numbers
L3-4 orange = think about it a bit and don't have major spec/gear weaknesses, and you can handle these fine; they just take a bit longer
L5-6 red = strategy required, takes longer, hurts when they hit
L7+ skull = good luck, but even that won't help
 
This range, and the accompanying levels, made a lot of sense to me. In Wildstar it seems like the orange part is skipped entirely, so the game goes from "normal difficulty, just watch the red" to "high difficulty, stare at ground, have a full set of same-level gear, optimize your build frequently". This seems like an unreasonable and unfun jump to me. :(	
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It won't be too hard to catch up on Auroria quests if you're interested, if you focus on the correct ones.
Pick up the quests in your area and only complete the Zone and World quests.  If you walk into the area you're supposed to be in and all they have are tasks, one of those tasks will start the zone/world quests you need.
 
The zone/world quests are typically fast, give decent EXP and after 4-5 of them they will send you to the next area in the zone.   You will smoke through them faster than you think.   Cut through some of your path stuff as you're doing these low quests and kill two birds with one stone.  Do -not- complete any tasks, and skip regional as well, as far as I understand regional is based only on furthering the quest hub you're currently at's storyline.
 
Concerning whitevale.  Are you utilizing bruiser bot to do some tanking for you while you blast them from range?   I know it's a simple question, but with the proper bots and skills engineers can tank/kite 5 man mobs, or so I've been told.	
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I might go back and try Auroria in the way you describe, Abn, but it sounds like a chore to me. Having to sort through types of quests is just ungh... I honestly don't have the patience to spend even one hour not having fun just so I can get to the leveling content appropriate for my level (which, I have to admit, I also do not find particularly fun... questing in MMOs has always been a chore I want to finish ASAP... but that's obviously a 'me' problem). I also don't run path quests in this game, found the paths to be awesome in theory but boring in execution. I took scientist to get a pet and haven't touched my path since.
 
I was using bruiser during one of my test fights in Whitevale, and it made little difference. The taunt took some heat off me for a few seconds but the mobs were right back on me after, and two of them are melee so I would have to spec into snares and such to kite them, while still taking hits from the ranged mob. While this is all possible, it's also going to turn questing into a long series of tactical maneuvers for every pack I engage. That sucks to be honest.
 
Have to admit, talking about all of this has led to a new conclusion... I love challenge in games, but when leveling is a challenge, there's a serious problem because leveling offers no rewards other than moving on to the next challenge (i.e. gaining a level). If I need to sit here with maximum focus and strategic builds just to complete a standard quest... no thanks. I like my challenges in MMOs to be cooperative, impressive, and with considerable rewards. When solo fighting basic creatures with poop rewards becomes a challenge, well, that is what I would call tedium, or grind.  :wacko:
 
Again, this might be a 'me' problem. :P	
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Well I shouldn't be forced to carry a pocket healer or PVP just to get by. I also shouldn't be forced to upgrade gear, since level 15 blues are equal to level 18ish greens, and being level 20, that's perfectly fine. It's all bad to me at this point.
 
I'm also not sure that "standing in the red for even one second = death" is something that a fun game should ever say about the combat experience of a level 20 tank/dps class. :P
 
At this point I'm done with my alt, not gonna ride rails looking for quests that my character can handle. In vanilla WoW I could kill red mobs with skill and planning; in later WoW I could kill them with neither, the game just got easy. That said, to me red mobs should always be in the '4-5 levels above' range. Having an incredible challenge from a mob merely 2-3 levels above you is just a set-up for choking your own content (which is exactly what's happening in my case now).
 
Edit: And thanks for the suggestions, I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I guess it's just coming down to the reality that there are no solutions for months to come and by then I probably won't care about leveling alts in Wildstar, haha.  Off to the Wasteland I go to cure some plagues and decapitate gangs... :P
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Mobs 4-5 levels higher is just an arbitrary number that gives the illusion of challenge.   You cannot make relative comparisons against other games with different levelling structures because 4-5 levels higher in WoW in terms of difficulty is really 1 level higher in Wildstar.
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Well we're just going to agree to disagree on the gear thing. I have never played an MMO where gear equivalent to two levels below you is "sub" anything. I imagine something like 5% or less of players ever have more than a few pieces of gear that's level-equivalent (stats pulled out of bum, but you get the idea). Generally by the time you're anywhere near a set you've already out-leveled the first several pieces you got, on and on it goes. So a full suit of level 18 greens when you're level 20 doesn't strike me as a problem... not even a small problem that is stacked onto others. IMO, it's exactly what you should expect from the majority of players and so that shouldn't be contributing to difficulty killing enemies.
 
So far as standing in red for a second, again, it's damn-near impossible to 100% avoid all red at all times, particularly when dealing with groups, which is common in this game. No, I'll go one step further— it's not even fun to have to avoid everything. I don't want to stare at the ground 24/7, and I'm not sure many others do either, and that's pretty much the only way you're going to never eat a lick of red. Sounds like a snoozefest to me. :lol:
 
Consequently the only part I agree with you is the level difference. So I don't see this as a stacking of three reasonable weaknesses, I see this as two instances of 'exactly what is will be for most people, and normal' (the gear and the taking a wee bit of red now and then), and one instance of...
 
This leads to something I was actually about to post on, because it seems critical to my problem.
 
Vanilla WoW was something like this for most classes (let's not talk hunter/warlock as the mainstay):
 
L0: green = easy peasy
L1-2: yellow = doable without much strategy unless they're coming in large numbers
L3-4 orange = think about it a bit and don't have major spec/gear weaknesses, and you can handle these fine; they just take a bit longer
L5-6 red = strategy required, takes longer, hurts when they hit
L7+ skull = good luck, but even that won't help
 
This range, and the accompanying levels, made a lot of sense to me. In Wildstar it seems like the orange part is skipped entirely, so the game goes from "normal difficulty, just watch the red" to "high difficulty, stare at ground, have a full set of same-level gear, optimize your build frequently". This seems like an unreasonable and unfun jump to me. :(
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This is a point I've already made, and imo, it's a problem. :P
 
When you start with a reasonable difficulty and then increase it incrementally over several levels, you create breathing room. This lets people do content a bit higher than their level without struggle, and as a result, you now have that much more content available. I can choose to level in the yellow zone, or choose to level in the orange zone. Whereas in Wildstar, there is only the yellow zone and the red zone, so I have no choice. I have normal or annoyingly difficult— and as I just mentioned above, difficulty, to me, is only fun when the context is right.
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. Having to sort through types of quests is just ungh... I honestly don't have the patience to spend even one hour not having fun just so I can get to the leveling content appropriate for my level
 
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			What server are you on?   Very worst case scenario you could have someone summon you to the jellies and PL you while you go bake cookies or something, then you're level 22-23 and ready to hit Whitevale running.	
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The point about level 23 mobs expecting level 23 gear is well made, so I concede on that. Effectively my gear is substandard. I guess in my ideal, where 2-3 levels above you is not a big difference, the gear scale still wouldn't matter much. But since Wildstar makes 2-3 levels above a big deal, yes, the gear difference matters. Seems like finding a crafter would be the next step then, although in my case it means nothing at all because I can't wear level 23 gear. :P  So finding a crafter won't help.It's a situation where you're right, but it doesn't help me. Still worth noting though because I did write this post as feedback to Carbine and if my arguments are flimsy, they should be shown as such.
 
As far as your other post, you'll have to look over my last post about difficulty in context. I don't find it fun or refreshing to face constant challenge from leveling mobs in an MMO. That's just a grind because it's not really requiring me to think dynamically, which is what I'd consider fun. Like, DOTA = think dynamically = fun for the sake of fun. I don't need gear or levels, and I don't care about rating; I legit love the gameplay in DOTA. Whereas here it's just stare a lot. I dunno, as I said, I love endgame difficulty like this because it's (usually) cooperative, fighting big baddies, and getting you some sweet stuff. If you take those three incentives away it's just chasing a carrot on a stick through fifty levels of grind. :/
 
 
edit: and just musing here, but I bet this has contributed to the number of people leaving the game sub-50. Setting aside the folks who like to RP or just immerse themselves in the world, in my experience a lot of the more invested MMO gameplay-focused players have begun to think of MMOs as simply being a race to cap to see the 'real gameplay', since sub-cap combat typically isn't as involved, and the rewards you get are meaningless since they go away so fast. But if people came to Wildstar expecting a hardcore endgame (all the talk of raids being the primary driver there), but not expecting the world itself to be hard (fun hard or grind hard, either way), then it's a problem. They want to see the 'true game' as it's frequently viewed, but they're struggling just to get there, and eventually they just say screw this.
 
I wonder...	
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The point about level 23 mobs expecting level 23 gear is well made, so I concede on that. Effectively my gear is substandard. I guess in my ideal, where 2-3 levels above you is not a big difference, the gear scale still wouldn't matter much. But since Wildstar makes 2-3 levels above a big deal, yes, the gear difference matters. Seems like finding a crafter would be the next step then, although in my case it means nothing at all because I can't wear level 23 gear. :P  So finding a crafter won't help.
 
It's a situation where you're right, but it doesn't help me. Still worth noting though because I did write this post as feedback to Carbine and if my arguments are flimsy, they should be shown as such.
 
As far as your other post, you'll have to look over my last post about difficulty in context. I don't find it fun or refreshing to face constant challenge from leveling mobs in an MMO. That's just a grind because it's not really requiring me to think dynamically, which is what I'd consider fun. Like, DOTA = think dynamically = fun for the sake of fun. I don't need gear or levels, and I don't care about rating; I legit love the gameplay in DOTA. Whereas here it's just stare a lot. I dunno, as I said, I love endgame difficulty like this because it's (usually) cooperative, fighting big baddies, and getting you some sweet stuff. If you take those three incentives away it's just chasing a carrot on a stick through fifty levels of grind. :/
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			I'm on Stormtalon Dominion, Abn. I wouldn't ask people to go out of their way to help my alt though... reflecting a bit on what I've written here, I'm realizing that there are a lot of things I don't like about leveling that have nothing to do with this current block, so it's probably futile to continue. I honestly haven't capped an alt in an MMO in years, I hate ladder gameplay that much. :rolleyes:	
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Weapons are definitely a big deal, Vic, and the first thing I went after on the AH. Not a single weapon was posted from level 1-25, sadly... but I believe I've got most slots filled with level 15 blues atm, except my boots, which are level 20 greens (funny enough given your comparison).
 
I might talk to a crafter friend tonight. I know I'm being impatient though, and have a strong dislike for leveling, so maybe it's just not meant to be. I do hope that the devs give more breathing room between normal and hard, but at this point, that will likely never happen, and of course no game should be modeled after the concerns of a minority.  I'm gonna have to face that more people like the difficulty style of leveling in Wildstar than dislike it, or this would have been a big issue a long time ago.	
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Well a few thoughts as I read through your initial posts (have skipped much of the rest).
 
My perspective is Exile Engineer, which is 1/2 of what you're working on.
 
I don't know precisely how they made Auroria, but Carbine seems to have done a lot of mirror image stuff.  If you are level 20, then there should be a final major quest hub.  For Exiles this is Skywatch and the storyline involves events around a Murgh outpost.  This is pretty much the story "peak" of the zone and is about level 20.  If you are exceptionally well geared or skilled, you can do it earlier.  However I would urge you to find that major story peak in Auroria and do it.  That should catch you up in XP and a bit of gear.  Whitevale really is targeted at about 22.  It can be done earlier, but as you have found out, it does help to have updated kit.  There's usually a "trailing" quest hub too after the major peak one.  For the Exiles it's the Osun region and there's also a Shiphand mission if that helps you find the bookmark in Auroria.  
 
In short, you talk about searching through quests -- it really shouldn't be a big deal to figure it out given this story structure.
 
If you are dying to mobs, the answer is NOT to go more tanky.  Engineers feel tanky, and they are quite good tanks in groups, but that pretty much amounts to holding threat and absorbing damage.  You do not do enough damage as a tank (by and large -- there are some niche spec and gear loadouts that I've heard have some success but I wouldn't recommend them) and you'll hold threat on those mobs right up to the point where you die.  If you are dying to mobs, as long as you're not being dumb, the answer is to go for MORE damage.  Effectively you need to kill faster to avoid dying.
 
So, check your spec a bit, and loadout.  Level 20 is probably one of the first times one might consider tweaking their AMP skills and it is relatively cheap here (especially since this is an alt, and you have larger pockets on your main if you're running low on moolah).  Check out Engineer DPS specs, try to figure out the most important bits because you probably can't get all of it yet.  Play with ws-base and see what you can do at 20 before committing to a spec.
 
You say you have a level 15 blue quality weapon.  Not all blues are equal.  I can make you a level 15 blue weapon that will work til about level 25 as a weaponsmith (maybe 23).  A QUEST blue item is NOT AS GOOD.  So... just saying you've got a blue weapon doesn't really mean much.  So, talk to a weaponsmith if possible.  Really.  It will be dirt cheap and be amazing for you.
 
Finally, when you say "red mobs" I am not wholly certain you just mean mobs of several levels over you, or PRIME mobs (outlined in red).  Even AT level, Primes will be an interesting fight and have a good shot of making you metabolically challenged.  I've always found it interesting that I can more easily solo a Prime as an Esper than I can as Engineer.  It's due to the heals and movement skills mainly.  Engineers don't have either.  So, you can't really take your experience with another class as a "aha, I should be able to do X here" because they're just that different.
 
Hope that helps.	
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One other thing though...
 
I made this alt to dungeon, really. I didn't get to see any of them for long on my main because they were just too hard, we'd wipe, and people would inevitably bail before getting even one boss down. I figured that months after release lower level folks would be alts, so the players would be more skilled and patient. Now, I'm not sure what the exact problem(s) are, but dungeon/adventure leveling is pretty much impossible without a premade.
 
So I'm gonna throw this out there— if a group of people are thinking about starting the game, or restarting, or just leveling alts together for fun... let me know. I'd love to be able to level through cooperative content with a group of other players. Small chance of course, but I'm around!	
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Players are more skilled (in general) however more patient is unlikely.  If they were the type to ragequit the first time around, they're probably going to ragequit the second time around.  If they were patient the first time around, they're probably patient the second time around.  It's more due to individual personality rather than game knowledge.
 
And you may be frustrated trying to take a dungeon-centric path.  Due to the reward structures, there's little reason to do the dungeons beyond seeing them at level and at ability level.  Even rallied down, they will be easier due to additional amps and abilities.  And even when rallied down, you get no gear past the level of the dungeon.  So if you are doing Stormtalon at level 23, you're getting (if lucky) level 20 kit.  That's just not going to sustain you.
 
Not saying this is a great state of affairs, but it's the current reality.  Your best bet is definitely to find a social guild or group that want to bang alts together and do stuff while leveling up.  	
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Good points, Remi, few responses for ya—
 
Finding the quest hub I should be at is part of the problem, I really hate running around trying to figure out what I have to do or where I have to be. I'm not a fan of problem-solving in video games, even if it's something fairly simple to those who know. I just don't want to do it. Hell, I don't even want to be leveling in the first place. :P
 
I did start off in Whitevale with my premium dps spec, and it was bad. I died really fast. I actually lasted longer with more tankishness; I simply don't have the dps to nuke these guys, and when that's the case, you have no option but to try to outplay them or outlast through heals/tankiness. Neither situation worked so the problem is beyond spec, I'd say. It's possible that I'm just not good with specs but having played games competitively and done pretty well for myself, I'd like to think this particular aspect isn't a me problem, haha.
 
Didn't really realize that not all items are equal, kinda poopy. That works in a game like D3 where your goal is to blow stuff up and loot search, but if the level 15 blue I got from adventure runs is weaker than a crafted weapon to a significant degree, I see a problem in design there. Complaint aside, I'll take a look into the crafted weapon situation. :P
 
For red I mean the level difference, not the elites. I'm very aware of the elites now... I hated them when I leveled my main! I can't count the number of times I died thinking I had pulled normal mobs, when there was an elite in their midst...
 
Your info did help though. At the least the positive replies here have given me new info and lifted my spirits a bit. Very helpful indeed!	
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Well, I'm looking for a dungeon group 'cause it fills two of my three qualifiers for having fun with the type of combat MMOs offer: it's social/cooperative, and the enemies are big baddies. The loot thing is a consideration but yea, less so.
 
On the flip side, I prefer to quest solo because it's just a lot of tedious tasks. I don't find that questing with others makes it any better... if anything it just gets slower, and god, it's painfully slow already haha.	
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Well if your spec was good, it's definitely your kit.  You might be able to blow in with a really good weapon and destroy things if you can get something crafted.  Just have them slap in max finesse on the best efficiency node, and dial the rest down to minimum.  If you can afford the core beyond refined sapphire (usually the gem-crystal combo -- totally don't remember the name for this level -- maybe hydrogem-X?) you can get even more oomph.  
 
And still, back to class and spec, I know the engineer well.  You self snare while fighting, and you have no movement skills of note (urgent withdrawal doesn't do much), and no healing skills of note.  Any fight you are in is NOT an outlast fight.  It is totally a "I need to make you explode as fast as possible" kind of fight.  It's just the nature of the class.  As esper, I can kite for days, but that's not the engie.  So gear, spec, and kit for BOOM.	
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Other sources for gear include vendors. I have never looked at the stuff most sell until end game, but maybe there is an upgrade to be had.
 
Since this is your alt, you have a main with an incompatible tradeskill? Like tailoring? Try reskilling that to something you can use. If you have a little bit of cash and saved mats from your main, you should be able to switch to armor smith and bang out some lvl20 armor in short order.
 
And I seriously doubt the only quest available to you is one that murders you. Look for a few more "!" around. The advice to backtrack and just do world/zone/regional quests is also solid. They are clearly marked in the quest log as such. Ignore tasks and challenges, unless you find you hit 90% by doing something else already.	
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I would suggest you try this site to work out what areas are the right level for you...
 
http://www.theflamewrought.com/dominionzonemaps#Malgrave
 
See I actually help people and don't just troll that guy with the Animal avatar.	
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