My First WildStar Dungeon Impressions

I was finally able to do one of the dungeons in WildStar.  Thanks to the mentoring system, everyone in our group was scaled down to the appropriate level and we were able to experience this dungeon in all its glory.

For the last two weeks all I’ve heard is how difficult or hard the dungeons are in WildStar.  That statement is a little inaccurate.  Dungeons in WildStar are… exact.  They really aren’t difficult at all if you press the right buttons.  Don’t stand in bad telegraphs (red spots on the floor), interrupt when you need to, and have a decent understanding of your class with appropriate gear and technically… technically… the dungeon should go off without a hitch.

We wiped several times while running through the dungeon despite having level 50s with experience in the place (on both normal and veteran) scaled down to help us.  The cause of every wipe was positioning or not interrupting fast enough.

Veteran dungeons are simply these same places on steroids.  You’ll need to kill fast and be more exact while completing additional objectives.  That is certainly a challenge until you meet the requirements.

To me this is quite different from dungeons I’ve experienced in past games where I felt the difficulty was measured by danger.  For example, in WildStar the difficulty of a boss is interrupting him and staying out of red circles–obeying mechanics.  In EverQuest the difficulty of a dungeon was knowing you COULD die, maybe have a corpse recovery with experience loss, and have to work your way back into the dungeon.  Difficulty in EverQuest was avoiding death with 100% certainty and taking into consideration the dynamics of random “oh crap” moments as well as factoring in other groups. Dungeons were there to give you the experience of playing in rather than playing through, which only added to the danger and difficulty. Slight difference there, maybe somewhat semantics, but to me it really does make a huge difference on how the game plays.

Overall, WildStar’s first dungeon is certainly the most challenging first dungeon I’ve played through in a themepark.  Very straight forward–kill trash, kill boss, obey the mechanics, etc,. but worth doing for anyone looking to experience a taste of what end-game might be like in WildStar.

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  • Anyone else experience difficulties queing for adventures or dungeons? I hit 15 last night and tried to run the adventure with a friend of mine and the que never popped for us. We qued several times, as healer/dps and healer/tank but nothing. Was definitely a little disappointing.

  • If you queued up with a tank in your group and didn’t pop, well, that’s bizarre. In my experience, Tanks get pretty much instant queues. (Note, you both have to unlock the adventure by finding it in the real world before you can run it. This, weirdly, does not apply to dungeons.)

  • Yeah I found it then, we both tried to que. Would not even let us que until I found it.

    Weird. I’ll try again tonight.

  • Yea I play an Engineer tank and I get instant queues for anything.. never have to wait.

  • Make sure you don’t have the group finder set to only look on your realm, it massively increases the wait time.

  • Keen i would say veteran version is easier then the one we ran also, just because everyone in the group should be able to take off 2-3 interrupt armor.. have a rotation going you can interrupt everything.

  • Though I wouldn’t say its easy.. esspecially if you are going for silver/gold in dungeons.. have to move very fast

  • This got me thinking about camping lower Guk and why that was way cooler than dodging red circles on the floor and fighting giant bosses who have lots of positional attacks. Hrmm. Not sure but it was.

  • I can’t chase the feeling away they are going to nerf that down the road. Dungeons are not very difficult, but they are just hard enough that Average Joe success rate might not be high enough to keep him going and him having fun. Average Joe isn’t special, he’s just part of the critical mass needed to keep a MMO rolling. Not targeting Average Joe is possible, but you need one hell of devoted fan base to cover your expenses which I don’t believe Wildstar has yet.

  • Maljjin idk cause every patch since released they actually buffed the dungeons / adventures.. War of the wilds too easy.. Had to make it harder, buffed siege, buffed crime lords etc..

    They are making the instances harder not easier

  • Long-term, Maljjin is correct. Unless Carbine plans to operate and cover expenses by appealing only to a niche crowd that enjoys hardcore themepark raids, they’ll have to appeal to Average Joe. WoW is the example here. What Blizzard did with WoW is the roadmap of market research. The money is in first appealing to the masses, then creating meta-game sub-niches within your game systems to keep pockets of particular people playing. Appeal to the 80 in order to design for the 20.

  • Well been reading dev posts on reddit and they are actually mad people are raiding already.. they thought it should take months for the attunment and also mad so many people have epics.. they want the content to be harder.

    Soo we will see

  • When a large portion of their staff is laid off after the sub numbers plummet they’ll be mad too I bet….

    Personally I don’t find Wildstar difficult. It’s artificial difficulty by multiplication. Even if 4 people master the task, the 5th person can lose you the fight. Not really interesting or really hard in the long run as much as frustrating for those who helplessly lose after doing the dance perfectly.

    And don’t get me started on the dodge windows. They are way too narrow for a MMO. I have zero issue with any other game. In Wildstar I have a 50/50 shot whether being out of the red means I’ll actually dodge the attack.