Alright, so for my first go at pvp, I leveled up a warrior and got it to level 7 before entering. I had the class mechanic, standard auto attack, a leap, a spin, a knockdown, and a kinetic energy hard attack as the skills on my bar. The names of the skills do not come to mind and I am not presently near the client, but I imagine its obvious what they are given that they are the first skills you can have by level 7. What you have to bear in mind when reading a lot of the following is that, I play melee in a lot of games, and in particular the warrior in experience in GW2 was wonderful, it felt very fluid to play.

Below is my criticism of what I experienced.

General PvP:

Discerning between friend and foe. Obviously we have the standard nameplates that come in red or green, but when I started playing I felt like something was off in that my target selection didnt feel intuitive. Normally I don't give any conscious thought to target selection, but here I did have to. Health bars are larger than nameplates (especially with the current font for nameplates) so they are also the first thing I look at. They are a lot more visual and my response time to health bars is much faster than nameplates. The problem is both ally and enemy health bars were green. This makes it very confusing because my natural reflex identifies everybody as an ally, I then need to put conscious thought into identifying an enemy via nameplates. So yea, in conclusion, enemy health bars must be red not green or at least an option to make it this way.

Animations and dodging. I am a big fan of the dodging mechanic, I don't like stats such as “parry, toughness, resistance, deflect” etc. I don't like stats to do my damage mitigation for me, I do it by proactive play whether through prekiting and/or dodging, or in this case dashing which I consider a lot like dodging. I saw Wildstar had deflecting which disappointed me but I also saw it had dodging so I got excited. I went into the pvp match assuming that I would be dodging things left and right because this was a mechanic I had down perfectly already from past play. Then I realized, there was nothing to dodge. There are no animations.....

For example, my melee attack actually hits in an arc far wider than the actual swing. Me and another melee could duel in melee range, without being anywhere near each other in character models. While I can appreciate that the current system is easier to code and deal with while providing the basic functionality, it doesnt feel acceptable. In GW2, for my hammer to hit, I need to connect the hit. Here I could be getting hit without even feeling it because there are no animations, just damage scrolling on my screen. I cannot dodge that which has no animation. Sure I can dodge the telegraphs on the floor, but those aren't animations, I don't know if the skill is in progress, about to cast, if its hitting, theres nothing to time my dodge with, I simply have to dodge out of it at some point, but thats not good enough. The problem is the telegraph appears while the attack is happening, by that point it is already too late to dodge out of it. Basically, the ground shape telegraphs do not suffice for effective pvp dodging, they work in pve, but I cannot see it being a thing in pvp. As it stands, dodging in Wildstar is simply to move away from damage, not dodge the actual damage by reflex. Better yet, some skills don't have anything to indicate what they were doing. An enemy player I was fighting used electrocute on me, while he was channeling I figured “I will wait till the cast completes then dodge, thatll dodge the damage” then what actually happened was that electrocute was a channeled attack which was hitting me while I was waiting to time my dodge. But there was no way I could have known that because there was no animation, at best a couple of numbers in the SCT. That just doesnt feel acceptable. Sure, I will eventually memorize all the names of all the skills in the game and know what to dodge when by the skill bar, but in a market filled with MMOs providing fairly dynamic combat this feels like a downgrade atm. All in all, dodging felt like nothing more than a gimmick, I didnt really feel the skillful application and further more, my attacks didnt feel like attacks, the combat didnt feel visceral as if I was connecting, I could use kick on a player at least 3* my character width away, and then have them knocked down. I don't like kicking things that I cant actually kick.

Ground based telegraphs. So, I go and engage in a team fight. Then all of a sudden, everything on the floor is just an amalgamation of red boxes. How do I know whats what? Which one of these is more important, if I need to make the choice to dodge out of one into another, is it worth it? How do I know which is the weaker aoe or damage if I cannot discern which is which? Not to mention kick and auto attack have the same telegraph and the animation cannot be noticed, so how can I dodge the kd? I cant, just random dodge :D

Doesnt make for very skill based combat though, more just spam.

Breaking out of CC. So as it stands, the current main way to break out of CC was by spamming F to tap out. Now my first question is, why can I not always do this? Is there a cool down on the time I can use this tap out function? And if so why isnt this made clear to the user. If there isnt a cool down, then what was the reason behind this option only appearing a few times but never consistently? Personally I don't like this mechanic at all. Its one of those things that is a cool idea on paper but bad when implemented. As it stands, I don't see why people wouldnt just macro F spam to a single key for basically instant breakouts. Its easier for me to just macro F spammed like 5 times (or however many I need to break out) with the minimal distance between key strokes that the game can register. Then at the press of a key I guaranteed have the fastest speed to break out of CC, and this will be used in competitive play. Now unless you intend to ban all macro users (this is also hard, because the macros can be spaced out such that they appear to be like human keystrokes, not to mention banning players for this would be stupid since the system itself is begging for it) then the system is quite bad, there is not much skill to it. There are far better solutions to it than simply spamming F. Then if I get CC-ed again? Spam F more? This really doesnt sound like fun to me at all, especially at higher levels when more players are going to have CC. I understand that some classes have access to freedom which will provide CC immunity, but this to me is not enough. The core mechanic that deals with CC just doesnt seem like a good idea in practice. Not to mention you can never be proactive with CC, only reactive by breaking out.

The Warrior itself:

Leaping. Right, brace yourselves. When reading the following, bear in mind that to fully understand what a good leap must feel like, you have to have played a class before that had one. SWTOR did it alright with the jedi guardian but the control was of course still quite limited in that it needed targets to leap to either enemy or ally. GW2 however just got it perfect. So the first thing I noticed when I played WS was that I can use the leap without a target, this seemed very promising, I immediately thought of the freedom of control that GW2 gave which allowed me to make big plays by disengaging at the perfect moments out of a risky and dangerous situation. So everything went well in pve, then I entered pvp and I started to notice a list of flaws.

Leaps will leap you to the location of the player when you cast the skill, not the location of the player when the skill completes. So, why is this bad? If a player is running away and is at a distance the first thought of any good warrior should be to leap towards them, to close the distance that they have made by running and then maintain melee range and train down on them. Thats all fine except here, if I leap to a player moving away I will go to where they were on my cast and then complete a long animation for damage... while they are no longer standing there. So the first issue is, the animation at the end is unnecessary. I don't want a massive hulk smash at the end of my attack, not do I want to stop in place to finish my attack. When I use a leap, I use it for mobility, I NEVER use it for damage. So putting so much animation focus on the damage at the end is silly. Lets say later I get an execute skill, what I want to do is leap and cast the execute skill asap cause target is low, instead I leap and cast this silly hulk smash animation for damage that I do not particularly want. The damage needs to be calculated faster at the end of my leap within under 100ms, not what it is atm. Moving further on, I need to follow through with my target, when I finish the leap, if I am not on top of my target, then the leap is a really badly designed leap and I don't really feel like using it. This is where fluid combat comes in, I want to leap and know I will be where I need to be to combo, not leap then go “will I make it? Will he run or will he stop? Should I combo when I land? Guess ill wait and find out.” That isnt fast paced, dynamic or fluid, its bad and feels outdated and inherently gates my play speed. I didnt enjoy this at all and targets running away from me who already had distance from me where able to maintain that distance regardless of my leap, because if they are in 12m range, then my 20m leap will only leap 12m and then do a long animation during which time they will have run 12m range away again.

Leaping itself does not behave as I would expect. For example, say I am going up a hill, leaping is actually useless to cover distance. In GW2, a leap goes 600 range, going up a hill I get 600 range along the hypotenuse of a hill. Such that I get a standard 600 * cos(x) where x is the angle. In wildstar, if I use a leap uphill then I will simply go as far as my character bumps into terrain, usually thats like 4m, so I go 4m for using an animation that takes like 1 second or more, I could cover that distance faster while running. Whenever a leap covers less distance than running, then your code isnt well written. Even up a hill, I expect to get the distance I am told over the hypotenuse. GW2 manages that with savage leap, such that I still cover more distance with my leap than by running no matter what. Secondly and more importantly. During a match a player placed a bunch of red circles on me, I figured in order to conserve dodges, I would leap towards them because the enemy himself was out of the AoE. I figure if I leap to a target selected who is not currently standing within the AoE, then I too will be outside of the AoE. This was not the case. It appears the damage portion of the leap has a radius of impact, and if the enemy is within that radius of impact then you do not need to cover the distance. What happened in this scenario is my character simply jumped up and then did a hulk smash on the spot and died in the AoE. Completely not what I was expecting or what I would want out of any fluid gameplay. Good players need choices, if I make the choice to use my leap as an escape and not damage, the game should let me do just that, not prohibit me. In GW2 I can use my leap with pinpoint precision regardless of any situation, in WS the result is unpredictable and unsatisfactory.

Please remove the functionality of leaping to the nearest enemy. I do not need the game to hold my hand for me. During one match what happened was I was being trained so I rotated my camera angle away from my enemies, unselected target and then used my leap only to have the game then auto target a player behind me and leap me back towards them for 3m. Better yet was that because this player was running to me and I leapt to them we swapped places, he actually managed to run under me, that was a complete facepalm moment. If you expect ANY competitive pvp that involve the use of warriors, remove this auto target function immediately. If I choose to disengage, I should be allowed to, and if I cant then the game is imposing a skill barrier on me by restricting my options. Good players like options.

So, as you noticed most of my feedback was simply about this one leap. But you say, there are more skills? Well yes there are, but leaping is a core functionality of any melee class in MMOs. All the other skills I had were generic, some damage, a spin, a knockdown. The only skill I had which required skill to use was a leap, or so I thought it would be until I used it. I like to always have control over my character and whatever movement I envision in my head I should be able to execute, thats the mark of fluid gameplay. In Wildstar, I don't have any snares, melee and ranged run at the same speed, and my leap doesnt function how I would intend in 4 different aspects (speed, distance, location, targeting). This alone is enough to make me not want to play warrior. If the leap doesnt work, the class aint going to work. Leap to a good melee player is the equivalent of stealth to a thief/rogue, its the core mechanic.

I will gather more opinions about the higher level skills, but already a large part of this classes potential is lost, and I simply didnt like the feel of the warriors movement while playing it.