Jeremy Gaffney on healing mechanics:
Jeremy Gaffney on the importance of a moddable UI:There are at the moment different single-target main tank healing/damage prevention type abilities, freeform AOE ones, ones that drop healing items onto the battlefield letting off-tanks self heal while you DPS, and many more, including specability around various ways of healing. I don't promise everything but there are a lot of options to heal the way you want to heal.
However I will say you're pretty much gonna have to be involved in the main battle. Standing in one spot with one target and hitting a series of heal spells will rarely work in the tougher raids etc just due to the environmental hazards/boss AOE attacks, adds, etc. Minimally you have to bounce (or shield thyself, etc) out of danger, manage adds, direct your groupmates via positive spell effect telegraphs, and more.
But I'm not a marketing guy, so I won't try to sell ya - as we polish up more raids/high level dungeons you'll see videos of it, and if you get a chance to get hands on you can call BS or not as well
Neat insight into the game and how it's being made!Free add here into the "good" pile for mods from another perspective...
I've worked on a bunch of MMOs, and WildStar's the first one with a moddable UI. It's old news to the guys on the team who have worked on games with moddable UIs (we actually have the guys who did the bulk of the moddable UI work on WoW and EQ/EQ2 on the team, which helps). But there's something I didn't know about moddable UIs til this game (competitors, please stop reading here).
It turns out that the development pace picked up massively after the moddable UI was in and flexible. Why? Every feature team could suddenly start making their own UIs (instead of bottlenecking on the UI team, which is a common case in most development in my experience). More so, making a UI was so cheap teams could easily make multiple UIs to try out per system, or modify the UI rapidly making iteration much cheaper to do timewise.
Also we've been in beta for a grand total of what, 3 days? And users have already made multiple mods to tweak stuff. That's pretty awesome actually.
In fact, if there's an interesting question in the modding community, it's what is fair to UI modders in terms of their work entering the game? After all if we see something cool we're likely to incorporate it in the game. That's a combination of awesome (cool, you influenced a game in development! Bragging rights) and suck (er, a company effectively just boosted your work). Giving money is harder than you'd think (there are laws about minimum wage and benefits in the US that are pretty nuts to work with, never mind if the guy did the mod in another country) and credit only goes so far...though good modders do get hired into the industry all the time.
And a dev downside: Doing cool custom animated/fully integrated UI work is tougher. Either you do developer-only calls (something we actively avoid) or you have to limit yourself to certain artistic constraints to work within the moddable system...so doing animated craziness on every element gets more expensive (time wise).
Anyways, in retrospect of course the development benefits of UI modding during the prebeta process makes sense (I'll admit I wouldn't have guessed how effective it was actually)...so much so that I doubt I'd design an MMO from scratch in the future without incorporating modding early. Ton of work on Jon and the UI's team part to make it happen, but large payoffs; the dev pace probably doubled after the UI modding started being widely used on our teams.
