Corey Jenkins got the chance to attend a Q&A with Lead Combat Systems Designer, Chris Lynch and Lead Class Designer, Hugh Shelton, about WildStar's combat.

In a Class of Your Own


The next topic touched on was that Carbine was trying to allow players to customize their character’s combat abilities. I asked the duo how roles were going to play on a class by class basis and how the different classes overall combat designs differed from one another.

“For healers specifically we tried to vary it up per class. The Spellslinger for instance; a lot of their heals are going to be direct lines and a lot of direct heals. They don’t really have any true heal over time abilities. Whereas the Esper on the other hand, have larger AoE heals, heals over time, that sort of thing that might favor a more classic MMO player. We also have things like absorption effects that prevent you from taking damage entirely, and we restrict which classes get those types of abilities. So we definitely vary it up from class to class. And then on the tank side, the Warrior tank vs the Stalker tank. Healers probably like Warrior tank more, because I’ll say this, the Warrior’s based more around mitigation so it’ll be a steadier sort of damage that the Warriors can take. Whereas the Stalker side, you’re built more around avoiding attacks.”

We also learned that not all abilities will be learned solely through your class. Players will receive temporary and permanent “Path Abilities” as well. Path Abilities won’t necessarily be extremely important for combat, but they will provide useful utility abilities that may help you with your selected path.

 Aside from path and class abilities, there will also be an equip-able item-slot referred to as “Gadgets”. You can only have one Gadget equipped at a time, but each Gadget will have a unique ability that will be slotted on to your action bar. With Chris saying that Gadgets would be useful in combat for PvE and PVP players, it sounds like they’ll be important to the standard gear progression for all players.

In conjunction with making classes and roles feel different from one another, WildStar has a “Milestone system” in place. The initial version of the Milestone system was one that gave players passive bonuses to their character and abilities once they reached a certain statistical thresh-holds. However, with these thresholds mainly coming from gear, the team decided to do some reiteration on the system--which Mike Donatelli talked about briefly in the “state of beta post”— in order to give players a greater sense of customization and character progression.

Chris and Hugh touched on the design direction for this new system and gave us some insight on how they want it to play out when the game is released.


“One system is “Ability Tiering”. And the goal behind that is to allow players to choose and upgrade their abilities. As you level up you’re going to get what we call “Ability Tier Points”. And you’re going to be able to spend those on abilities to upgrade them. And that’s how you make your abilities more powerful or gain additional functionality out of those abilities. The second system is called AMP (Advanced Modification Protocols) and that is going to be our version, or WildStar’s take on a talent tree. Essentially, it’s going to be a little different. Imagine a constellation, like a star constellation map. And you’re going to start in the center and work your way out as you gain points to spend.”

That’s as much information as we could get about the new system for now, however, Chris did confirm that you will be able to redistribute the limited number of points you have to spend in this system should you decide to change your character’s “specialization” at a later time.

Those sounds off in the distance are Theory-Crafters everywhere rejoicing.

Another topic of interest we covered was how exploits are being handled. With any combat system it’s only a matter of time before the botters and hackers try to take over. Hugh definitely had a strong opinion on the matter, one that I’m sure most PvPers will agree with.

“We have a global cooldown that every ability triggers that’s handled on the server side. So even if you were to hack your client you wouldn’t be able to fire off more abilities than the server would allow you. And there will always be people that are going to figure out ways of hacking the system, but we plan on having support CS tools to allow players to report exploiters, so we can take out those players as quickly as possible.

I will just say one more thing about exploiting. I hate exploiters. I hate em’. I love PvP so when I play other MMOs that have been out for a while, that have battlegrounds, and all that’s there are bots and people that are macroing, that sort of thing, It drives me crazy.”

“I will rally as hard as I can to help us solve issues that come up”

Chris also chimed in at this point to get a bit more technical about how WildStar’s GCD worked.

“Our global cooldown is actually on an ability by ability basis. One ability might trigger a GCD of 250 milliseconds, but another might trigger a global cooldown of 500 milliseconds. So we can actually control that on an ability by ability basis”.

Wrapping up our discussion, I decided to test my luck with one final question, even though I knew what the outcome would be. When I asked if they could share any juicy info about the two unannounced classes--to no one’s surprise--they weren’t able to give us a class reveal right then and there, and instead, said that an official reveal was due in the next few weeks or so. However, they were able to confirm that one would be able to fulfill a Tank or a DPS roll, while the other would be able to fulfill a Healer or DPS roll. This news may not be all that surprising, considering that pattern holds true for the other 4 classes, but at least we can stop all the wild speculation about one of the new classes not being able to do damage to anybody right?

I want to thank Carbine, again, for letting me take part in this round-table Q&A session with them. WildStar is set to release in Spring 2014. For more information on the game, be sure to check out its official website and keep your browser locked to ZAM for more WildStar news updates.

See you on Nexus!

Corey "Cyglaive" Jenkins

Follow Corey on Twitter @Cyglaive