In the weekly stream of the WildStar developers “The Nexus Report”, they discussed in detail the future plans for the MMO and aim to focus on two aspects in the upcoming weeks, which have already been developed: the difficult raid access quest and the rune system.
“You’re not getting in here!”
Raiding has so far been reserved for a very small percentage of players in WildStar, who have struggled through the lengthy attunement quest series. Obviously, they want to change this and encourage more players to at least take a look into the raid instances – they can always scream and flee later.
Three parts of the quest series will be shortened:
- It will no longer be necessary to complete all Veteran dungeons on silver; a bronze rating will suffice. Previously, players achieved this only by repeatedly running the same instance over and over until they had enough routine to meet the tough time limits.
- Secondly, it will only be necessary to collect 100 data patterns instead of the previous 300. Even hardcore players often criticized this intermediate step, as it represented merely a “time-sink” that forced them to run through the same adventures repeatedly.
- Finally, they want to change the task for which all world bosses had to be killed – what this change will look like has not yet been definitively decided, but a reduction in the required bosses is probably the most likely scenario.
These announcements are currently causing a massive outcry in the official forum and on the communication platform reddit, as Carbine had long insisted that they did not want to change the access quests to maintain their difficulty level and the “hardcore” factor of the raids.
Realistically, nothing changes about the difficulty: Only lengthy tasks will be shortened, which only take a lot of time but hardly require any specific gameplay performance: The required bosses still need to be defeated, and nothing changes about the raid instances themselves. However, it is problematic that players who are already raiding have spent a lot of time on this quest and now feel slighted.
We reported on this conflict a few weeks ago and can understand Carbine’s move very well. Some raid guilds attributed the shortage of new raid players and the associated loss of players to the cumbersome access quest. Changes seem appropriate here, and a significant part welcomes this decision.
Clear rune rules are needed in the land…
The second major announcement is the massive change in the rune system. Previously, rune slots were distributed relatively randomly on items, both in type (water, fire, fusion, etc.) and in number. It could happen that during the first visit to an adventure, you receive a strong weapon that had a rune slot and during the next visit find the same weapon again – this time, however, with 4 rune slots.
To make armor from similar gameplay content more equivalent going forward, a uniform distribution of rune slots will be introduced, which looks as follows: Green items will only have one rune slot, blue items from crafting professions and reputation vendors will have two, and all armor pieces from adventures and dungeons three. However, what type of runes an item has is still random. Only items obtained after the respective patch will be affected by this change – all items previously obtained will remain completely unchanged.
… and new runes too!
Often as a player, you are dissatisfied with the rune slots on an item, and a socket for fire runes would be much more useful if it were designed for water runes instead – going forward, you can influence this too! Through a new item, you will be able to exchange all rune slots, but only once per rune slot. However, you are not entirely free in this selection, as you get a choice of two elements each time.
Need an example? If an item has a slot for a fire rune, you can choose to change that slot and get a random selection, for example, “water” and “fusion” (but never “fire” – the original type will not be offered).
Finally, you will also be able to add new rune slots to existing items, increasing the maximum number of runes by up to two times – the corresponding item for this should be obtainable through both PvP and PvE activities.
These changes provide players with even more opportunities for targeted customization without completely negating the random factor in loot distribution – hopefully, these changes will have the desired effect.
