The most recent WildStar patch hit just yesterday. You would think it would take a little bit longer for people to get really upset about it. But a player has already extensively analyzed the impact for the game and the players and come to a number of conclusions. Spoiler warning, pretty much none of them is positive, and most point to a system that makes most content in the game less rewarding rather than more.
One of the big sticking points, for example, is the fact that the system requires both rare and common essences for advancement. While common essences become easier to acquire over time with a catch-up mechanism, rare essences are firmly gated behind dailies, which means the catch-up mechanism doesn’t actually allow you to catch up much faster (if at all). You just hit the sticking points faster.
There’s also issues with the impact the stats have on the current game balance, as the effects ripple down through all content in both making characters with Matrix nodes extraordinarily more powerful (even in lower-level content) and in invalidating content which doesn’t drop needed essences (essentially, everything that isn’t Prime-difficulty dungeons and expeditions). It’s a worthwhile analysis to read, even if it will take a little time to see if the most doom-and-gloom predictions are borne out over the long term.
