In our first hands-on, Michael "Ragar" Branham tells us why we should be excited about Carbine's upcoming MMO

Ability Points, Milestones, and Specializing: Because You Can’t Run A Dungeon With All DPS

All this talk about combat telegraphs and player paths is great, but I wanted to dig a little deeper into the classes. How do I spec my character for tank/DPS/healer? Is there a talent tree or anything like that? What makes my Warrior different from any other Warrior? While the full system wasn’t there just yet, I can talk about two of the systems being used to help build the class you want to play: Ability Points and Milestones.

Ability Points are pretty much what they sound like: you earn these points as you level and you use them to buy the different abilities you’ll be using for your class. Basically, instead of having every character in the same class learn the same abilities, you start off with a small set and then pick and choose with points afterwards. Early on you’ll be able to grab basically everything you want, but as you get further in you’ll have to start making the tough choices for how you want to play.

Another factor to make this harder is the limited action bars, although this may change as WildStar evolves. Even if I could buy all of the available abilities, I couldn’t use them at the same time because there weren’t enough slots on my action bar. The general idea is that you’d have the abilities you’d need for your normal use action bar, plus stuff to swap in for specific needs (e.g. AoE trash, heavy raid damage, need lots of survival cooldowns, etc.). Complicating matters further is the addition of Milestones.

Characters in WildStar have six statistics: Strength, Dexterity, Magic, Technology, Wisdom and Stamina. All of your attacks scale off one or more of these stats. Using the Warrior as an example, my DPS abilities all scaled off Strength while my +threat tanking moves all scaled off Technology.

You might think that this makes gearing out somewhat of a no-brainer, but there’s more to consider here than your primary statistic. Each class also has a list of Milestones to choose from and five slots to assign them to. These Milestones unlock once you get a statistic up to a predefined amount. Some of them give benefits to abilities you had purchased, such as generating bonus threat whenever you use a taunt like Bum Rush, while others were more of a passive benefit, like giving you increased Armor.

The obvious solution here is to just stack your primary stat and pick all of the Milestones associated with that stat. You could do that and it would likely be perfectly valid, but you shouldn’t just ignore those non-primary stats. Those other stats could unlock Milestones that would support your role, such as adding life drain attacks and avoidance for tanks or bonuses to attack stats and procs for DPS players. By adding in these other modifiers, there’s more to consider for a min/maxing theory crafter now. How much threat/health do I have to sacrifice to pick up enough of that tertiary stat for the blood drain or avoidance buff? Is that more beneficial for long fights or for short ones? My assumption is that you’ll still likely be mainly stacking one or two primary attributes and grabbing those Milestones, but it wouldn’t surprise me if players stashed one or two rings/necklaces/other trinkets in their bags to swap in whenever they could use a specific bonus during progression fights.

All of this customization sounds great and all, but what about specializations? Will I have dual specs or will I need to run back to town every time I need to change abilities or want to flip from healer to DPS in a raid? After talking to the Executive Producer, Jeremy Gaffney, it sounds like the current thought is that you’ll be able to have multiple specs. As for swapping abilities within your spec, you can do that out of combat. You can’t buy new abilities without being at an Abilities Kiosk, but swapping between the ones you have bought is pretty simple. I didn’t get the chance to test this out for myself, but since I only made it to level 11 or 12 on my Warrior it would have been hard to see much of a difference.

Conclusion

I loved WildStar when I first played it at PAX Prime 2011, I was excited to see the new footage at PAX last year, and I left the San Francisco event wanting to play more of the game. That really about sums it up, but I’ll elaborate a bit to make it sounds less fanboyish.

What I’ve played so far has the potential to be a fun and unique MMO when it’s done. The combat feels great, the story and world feel very well done, and the art style fits the tone of the game perfectly. That being said, Carbine’s work isn’t done just yet. We still need to see their instance design, both for small groups and for raids. We also need to see what they’re planning for PvP: I may not care about it in the slightest, but there are a lot of players out there who do enjoy it. There are also the matters of endgame and content timing: Carbine talks of having lots to do once you hit level cap and having new material coming out fast enough to satisfy players, but the MMO community is a voracious lot and “fast enough” is a hard target to hit.

After talking to all of the people from Carbine, I believe they’re more than capable of pulling this off though. I certainly hope they manage to do it – my WoW guild’s exploded and I could use a change of scenery.

Michael "Ragar" Branham