While I didn’t get much in, I did get enough to quench the thirst.  Seems a cold is going around town and we were not immune to the effects.  That and a long weekend, plus finally nice weather after what seems 6 months of winter, we were outside a lot and around the city.  Fresh air!

Wildstar

This was weekend #3 of the pre-order open(?) beta for Wildstar.  It had been 2 weeks since the last and that one was pre-empted by ESO for the most part, so I’m a little rusty.  The good news is that they put in a kitchen sink patch which means beta is going well as nearly everything is tuning.  Sure they added a few more body types (which is actually kind of neat) but the biggest change for me was the UI.  It is a whole lot smoother now.  It looks a ton like some of the WoW mods I used for my UI.  Clear icons on the bottom, wide open screen on top.  I think it looks great.

Anyhoot, back into the game I played my Esper again.  Saturday was lag day, so no gaming then.  There are surprisingly very few bugs in this game.  I’ve played from 1-18 and haven’t found a single one related to content.  I’ve seen plenty of UI bugs with this patch.  Consistent ones too, but the the actual game has been super smooth.  I’ll get back to this in a minute.

I mentioned the patch applied some balance changes.  My esper does a bit less damage but now the skills are actual choices.  Previous to this, there were 2 or 3 skills that simply outshone every other one and now they are all pretty even, if situational.  I’ll use a pet tank for boss work.  I’ll use an AE attack for when I need to move and damage since my regular builder needs me to be standing still.  I like what I see.  Hopefully the next beta weekend I can hit 20 and run some dungeons.  Group content so far is open-ended.  Who knows what will happen when the live gates open though.  Side note, the server I picked randomly is apparently the French server.  Good thing I can speak it.

Elder Scrolls Online

I put in some time here too, though a bit less than Wildstar.  I hit level 27, found another dozen bugs and realized that Greenshade (the AD’s 3 zone) has a rather large memory leak issue.  Zoning into it from any dungeon has a 25% of permanently hanging or crashing my game.  It’s weird too, since it’s so consistently a problem in this zone but not any other.

As per previous posts, I am getting seriously annoyed at the inventory issues.  There are way too many glyphs that serve absolutely zero purpose.  Research of armor pieces is needed for 2 things.  First, the opportunity to slot a benefit to the item (like more armor or immunity to resists) but of the 10 or so “types” of benefits, only 3 are worth anything.  Who needs more “exploration experience”?  Second, you need to research X amount of benefits on a single piece of gear to craft set gear.  So, let’s say you need 4 types of benefits on a girdle before you can craft a “night watch” girdle.  Since sets require 3-5 pieces to gain the set bonus, you’re looking at ~12-20 different research combos needed.   Each research takes 6 hours to start and doubles from there (12-24-48, etc..)  You can do 1 at a time to start, but after level 8 (I think it was) I could do 2 at a time.  Suffice it to say, I have very little researched.  My bags are full of crap that I’m starting to wonder if it has any use at all.

Second, repair costs.  Death is ok.  In fact I like dying in games, it shows there’s a skill level required.  The rate of death in ESO is pretty solid.  The repair costs are high though.  It costs me about 1000g to get a full repair.  Quests give me ~200g per and I’m sitting on 22,000g right now.  That’s a fairly steep penalty.  I am going to be ultra curious as to what the money sink will be in this game once there are no quests left to run and the repair costs are 5000 per shot.  This is something I find good by the way.

I’ve followed J3w3l‘s advice and better slotted my skills upon quest turn in to get a larger boost to experience.  I’m down to my last skill line to pump, which is pretty neat.  I still only deal half the damage of any other non-tank and seem to take 25% less damage in return.  Not the biggest fan, let me tell you.  On the flip side, all these skill lines allow me to make some smart choices about attack patterns.  It’s getting better.  I do wish they let you  know the morph options in-game before you actually level the skill.  Ah well, wikis have all the data anyway.

Still fun, if a bit less everytime I have to use the dame /reloadui command.