Friday Catch Up

My productivity was interrupted by an invitation to dinner, which was followed by an equally delicious nap, but let's pretend it's Friday. The Medic AMA and Live Stream snuck by me, and the Engineer AMA happened while all the 1-15 press stuff was going on . So I will attempt to summarize the interesting stuff following the cut.


Medic AMA highlights:

• Fields are all independent and will stack if multiple medics put the same fields overlapping.
• Mostly AOE/Telegraph heals for the medic, but some single target abilities. "If we had to assign a number to that percent, we'd say somewhere around 85-90% of the heal spells are freeform."
• Comfortable range for healing and DPS  is about 15 meters.
• Medic is the most mobile of all healers.
• Chua can be Medics. Recent change, Official website needs to be updated

Medic Livestream  [Part 1] [Part 2] highlights:

• Showed 1v1 PVP between Stalker and Medic. The score was 1:1
• The game really looks different when telegraphs are turned off.
• The Gamma Rays ability does damage in 3 lines. If you get a single enemy to overlap multiple lines they will take extra damage, this works for other Medic abilities too, like Fissure. This is an interesting mechanic for me, because it means Medics will have a damage bonus against larger enemies with bigger hit boxes because they will be able to overlap these telegraph lines.
• There are 3 damage types currently in Wildstar - Technology, Magic, and Physical
• Invoking the Engineer's name crashes live streams.
• Medics have some of the most interesting telegraph shapes. Combined with Probe-detonation it looks like the skill cap will be high for this class.
• All classes have an out of combat resurrection.
• 2on2 PVP shows that fights get extended quite a bit with healing.
• Direct CC is limited, but battlefield control is high with fields
• I didn't feel healing was well explained, they showed each week that the healers can, in fact, heal, but communicating to the viewers exactly how it is working has been a challenge they have not overcome. Good stream though, worth the watch if you can spare the time.

Engineer AMA highlights:

• "No gap closers for the Engineer!"
• Pet interface is still in development but currently offers stances (aggressive, assist, defensive, passive) and micro positioning that controls all active bots at once.
• Pets build threat independently of the engineer. Tanks can use the Bruiser Bot as kind of a mitigation cooldown by triggering its taunt ability which will draw fire while healers top off the Engineer, but the Pet will not tank itself effectively.
• Engineer is good at sustain and survive, but limited on CC and Gap closing. (and one assumes burst)
• The Bot active abilities are off the Global Cooldown and can be activated mid cast of other abilities.
• All Engineer abilities can be cast on the move, those with cast times will reduce your movement speed which combined with shorter range than Spellslinger and Esper balances the heavy armor.
• There is a good question brought up about gear sharing between some Tanks and Healers but not all. The Class team punts on the question because the econ team is responsible for that, but it is something to think about. Based on what we know about each class this is the gear combos:

Heavy:

• Brutality for Warrior DPS
• Finesse for Engineer DPS
• Tech for Warrior and Engineer Tanking

Medium: 

• Brutality for Stalker DPS
• Finesse for Medic DPS (See Below)
• Tech for Stalker Tank and Medic DPS 
• Insight for Medic Healing

Light: 

• Moxie for Esper DPS
• Finesse for Spell Slinger DPS
• Insight for Esper and Spell Slinger Healing

(All DPS have their own gear, but 2/3 of tanks and healers have to share drops. I have no idea what this means, but I'm pretty sure I just proved Half li...ok, put down the edged and/or ballistic weapon of your choosing. I won't finish that joke.)

Join the team tomorrow on the official Wildstar Twitch page for the official Engineer Livestream at 12 noon PST. Oh pickles! It is very very late. I hope I can get up in time! If you want to leave a comment I'd like to hear if the link changes are good or bad, and if you have any gearing worries with the primary stat distributions in Wildstar. The way I see it each Heavy piece could go 4 places, each Light could go 4 places, and each Medium could go 4 places, but in the case of light and heavy the chance of getting a specific stat is slightly higher because there are only 3 options. Am I wrong?

EDIT 12/15/13: Turns out I was wrong: Medic uses Tech for assault power instead of Finesse, leaving each armor type with 3 primary stats, also each class shares one stat with one other. I'm even more ok with this.