Let’s talk about fighting today.
No, let’s talk about my Medic.
Actually, let’s talk about my altoholism, first. Don’t worry, I’ll get around to the rest in due time.
So probably the biggest reason that I am not sitting on a level 50 character in WildStar many, many months after launch is that my progress in the game has been impeded by a scattered brain that is riddled with self-doubt over my current class/path pick, jumping between servers to hook up with various guilds, and flip-flopping between several characters in an attempt to nail down a main. Depending on the week, my main has changed, but as of late I’ve been growing increasingly annoyed with myself for letting my altoholism overrule what I know I should be doing.
Thus, I had a heart-to-heart with my heart while listening to Heart (feat. “Crazy on You”). “Syp,” I said to myself while glancing around to be sure that no family members were listening, “You really need to stop circling the carpet and just plop down. No more alts. No more flip-flopping. Pick a character and stick to it.”
Fair enough. I won’t bore you with the rest of the discussion (although colorful metaphors were used), but I ended up picking my Medic, Syp Tsunami, for several reasons. It’s my oldest character and has a really great house, the settler path (scientist was bugging me with how annoying it is), fun attacks, and a high desirability factor in our guild. Plus, she’s level 30, which is only 5 levels below my highest, so I’m not really that far behind. I got her through the rest of Whitevale last night and parked her butt at the start of Farside.
One of the biggest factors that has gone into picking a main is the way that WildStar handles combat. It’s by far the most actiony of any MMO that I’ve played, which has several upsides and downsides. I’ll admit that it looks fantastic and that it can be enjoyable to deftly avoid enemy attacks and use reflexive skill in the process. However, because one’s eyes need to be watching the screen at almost all times, it’s a lot harder to keep flicking the eyeball down to the hotbar to see what skills are available during spur-of-the-moment opportunities.
It’s actually a little tiring to fight after a while. I’m not really an action combat gamer at my heart; I’ve done my fair share of it, but it’s not what I seek out these days. Part of the appeal of MMO gaming to me is that I can quest and fight mobs without needing to sit forward and engage 100% of my attention. Sometimes I just want to plow through waves while semi-mindlessly going through skill rotations.
Really, my combat attitude is, “I want to point at something and make it die with minimum fuss.” WildStar, however, is all about the fuss. Every fight is some sort of small epic war played out on a tiny battlefield. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes that’s pretty cool. But now that mobs are taking longer to die, it’s starting to rob some of the fun of the fight for me. That’s why I’m going Medic, because that skill rotation is really straight-forward and can usually chew through a mob in one full run without requiring seconds. I wish that mobs would go down faster like they did in the earlier portion of the game, since that wasn’t as fatigue-inducing.
As it is, I can do about 30-60 minutes of WildStar at a go right now before I feel too drained and in need of a simpler combat style that isn’t consumed with red patterns exploding all over the ground.
By the way, you might have read this post title thinking, “Syp’s finally getting tired of WildStar!” but no, that was a sneaky double entendre on my part. Only that I meant the second part of the entendre (the “dre”) but not the “enten” portion. I apologize for the confusion but not really.
Bio Break 
There was a time that I thought MMO’s with tab-targeting were in trouble after this new wave of more action oriented MMO’s started to crop up. After playing action MMO’s for about two years, I’m finding RIFT a wonderful (and relaxing at times) change of pace. I’m chatting in-game, tweeting, interacting with my family at home all while playing. It’s much more difficult for me to do that when the game requires me to focus on the screen action 100% of the time. Like you, I really enjoy WildStar, it can be exhausting!
I feel the same way. I could easily pass several hours on a mind numbing power-leveling binge in WoW or SWTOR. The active play style and concentration required to make it through Wildstar has us stepping away from the computers after an hour or so to take a break. The game world aesthetic is pretty stunning so it’s fun to just look around once in a while. There is always housing fun to be had when you need something less stimulating. Also, there’s crafting…. but oh man, even crafting requires some concentration in Wildstar…
Great post!
Funnily enough I was just sitting here mulling over a post on this topic, having just completed an instance in TSW and two instances in GW2 that all went on far too long and involved far too much running and rolling. It’s a cycle, I guess.
When everything was stand&cast, hotbars and tabs, it began to feel very stale and constricting, both for players and devs, so all eyes turned to the opposite direction. Lots of movement, lots of free targetting, no auto-attack and the rest of the action rpg toolset. And of course you have the Ghostcrawler credo that what holds WoW back is making players use a mouse cursor at all.
Now we’ve had a few years to compare the two styles the old one doesn’t look so bad and the new one doesn’t look so great. Perhaps we’ll end up with something that doesn’t veer so far to one extreme or the other. For my money GW2 got it there and thereabouts in the sweet spot.
I’ve found hardware and the right add-ons can alleviate a fair bit of the strain (no lore-pun intended). I purchased a SteelSeries gaming keyboard which has a nice little gaming pad on its far left side and that helped alleviate a great deal of my combat fatigue. When I was leveling my Engineer, I also found an add-on that let me slap a giant freakin’ icon in my direct field of vision when a proc effect was ready.
…funnily enough, this same gamepad keyboard has aided in the tab-target MMO gaming as well…though that took significantly more time to adjust to. Go figure.
I agree that Guild Wars 2 does the best in marrying the old and new styles. It’s a great combat system.
I’ve decided I prefer tab targeting games, now that I’ve tried a few action MMOs. I did like Wildstar’s combat for pvp. It’s the only game I’ve ever played as much pvp as I did pve and that was all due to combat style.
But for everyday MMO tomfoolery I like tab targeting. That’s why Rift is my game of choice right now. It’s good ol’fashioned combat. Like grandma use to make.
It’s a fair point – I find I can only play Wildstar and ESO in relatively short sessions, and ESO especially requires that I be playing to the best of my ability or else I get regular face-plants and repair bills. After a draining day at work, I sometimes need something less demanding.
Funnily enough, I don’t have the same problem with Neverwinter even though that is also an action MMO.
This fatigue definitely contributed to me quiting Tera and it dissuaded me from sticking with Wildstar at launch. I prefer Neverwinter’s version to GW2, less frenetic overall in public content and with the trinity there’s more of a sense of team-work at least when playing with friends. It’s left me hankering for a more classic MMO combat experience for when I want to actually relax while gaming.
Like a few others here, I have returned to Rift after some time in more action-oriented MMOs (most recently WildStar), and it is a great change of pace. For once, I am even actually enjoying leveling my fishing skill, something that always felt like a chore before.