so, I did the hycrest adventure with seltron (and some others) a bunch of times. It's a great idea, but there are some issues:

(we weren't able to finish due to bugs, so feedback is from the first 4 parts)

-the rewards are NOT worth the time and effort. adventures are a nice distraction, but after two hours we had under 200 rep. after a billion more runs we'd be able to buy good level 15 items, but the xp would have pushed us up to 25 by that point, so... please lower the rep needed for the items or vastly increase the rep drop/rewards for the mobs and missions.

also the different missions have completely different difficulties, but the same rewards. a level 15 can solo the shield stealing mission, but the survive the ambush one is a complete zergfest.

the design is pretty good and it's VERY different from normal wildstar. I like that they call reinforcements and all. seems more realistic (and a lot harder). these are definitely a good addition, but the rewards and bug issues need to get worked out.

we also had a server dc the party, so that killed/reset a run pretty far in.

performance was good. no slow downs or issues there.

Bugs:

-the tavern where you meetup in hycrest is a forbidden zone. one time the vote options didn't even pop up before our party wiped (cause they close the door and lock you in. maybe the devs thought this would good for a laugh?

-if you wipe during the defense section after stopping the train, the quest bugs out. you cannot resume as it will always be waiting for you to go to the right spot, even if everyone is sitting on top of it.

-the train needs to block players from going underneath it, it's annoying to get stuck under there and there's no point to let people do it.

-once you're on the train, the npcs there don't fight back at all.

-you can walk through the prison train walls, and you get the option to hit F to revive an upright and healthy exile prisoner, which seems odd.

-if you walk out of bounds as a spiderbot, the map does NOT warp you back. i walked all the way past fort glory without issues, until i accidentally touched water (apparently that kills bots)

-the survive the ambush quest mobs have NO leash. i ran them around the entire map. literally.

#####################################################################################################################

I did the shield stealing mission solo at 15, and then took the escape mission, but i couldn't kill 3 8-9k mobs at once at that point, so i left.

the rest of the runs were done tonight,

seltron and i did a duo run up through the train without wiping until that defense section (ranged auto attacks are sooo strong and unavoidable :/) i was 22 warrior, he was a 16 medic (dps).

we then picked up another lvl 16 medic and a stalker (i think lvl 16-17) and also wiped on the 2nd wave of the robot defense after ambushing the train. they hit for 1.5k, seltron heals for 200... the math just didn't work, and due to the bugs you don't really get much of a chance to practice the encounter.

I would say for a party of 15s, the difficulty on that defense section and on the survive the ambush option is a bit high, especially since very few people are playing effective healers by that point (and some of the mobs are int armor 2 or immune to CC as well).

#####################################################################################################################

After choosing the option to recover the datadisk, the adventure points you toward a cellar that you need to run through quickly. Unfortunately it's considered a forbidden zone, and we couldn't find anything else in the zone to accomplish before going into the cellar. I'm not sure if this is unintentional or if we missed something, but in any event we had to abandon as we could not proceed.

#####################################################################################################################

I really enjoy the idea of these adventures, and having something additional to do outside of the typical quest/grind cycle. I have a few thoughts on balancing the reputation and other rewards for the adventures:

Reputation and Equipment Rewards

Given group availability and time commitment, I would expect the average player to only run an adventure one or two times. Maybe 3 if they want to see each of the options.

With the current gains (and baring full completion giving 50x the rep we were seeing), there is no way even the most dedicated would grind to 32,000 reputation for lvl 15 gloves/boots. These sort of max reputation rewards should be saved for the end game (where I will be returning to max my reputation).

The same item slots, or reasonable trade-offs should be available for each of the armor classes. This actually seems to be an issue which quite a lot of the reputation rewards. Love those boots and gloves!

Level/Experience Balance

Players can't enter this adventure until level 15, and all enemies appear to be level 15. This seems to put a very small window of time that a player would attempt this content (at least until max level).

Also, unless I'm missing something, it looks like the 3 sets of options are always the same, and are not dependent on your previous choice. That's fine for the first introductory adventures, but I hope there are more branching choices in the future.

For reference, I think the GW2 branching dungeon idea was quite a lot of fun (not that the implementation was always perfect).

#####################################################################################################################

Ran the adventure several more times (in the mean time getting to level 19, though certainly not from the experience rewarded in the adventure). Some thoughts:

completion reputation rewards for success are extremely low. I would have to run that instance 10+ times just to get the first tier (if i remember the rep requirements).

experience rewards seem to be low for time invested, but not nearly as bad as reputation.

during the ambush phase at the church, the control panels on the watch towers are glowy, but can't be interacted with (unless we missed a portion of the quest that you're able to do so). are we supposed to be able to turn off those search lights?

the commando squads don't actually drop on top of the flares. It seems like they probably should??

final equipment rewards for adventure success were acceptable for lvl 15, although RND nature seems like it should be a bonus and not the full reward (given the low amount of rep received)

no indication of what the criteria for gold completion is, or by how far you missed it.

respawn of final encounter finicky (see note)

Final encounter respawn: the entire group has to unmount and stand directly on top of the quest minimap icon location to get the event to trigger again. I like that you can't accidentally trigger the event, but perhaps a glowy ring/other visual indicator of where you need to stand? There is also a slight delay on the quest helper text showing the number of people remaining that need to be in the correct location. This makes it increasingly difficult to tell if you're standing on the correct spot.

As to the content of the adventure, what we saw was relatively easy and straightforward. I went in with a full group of 5: a warrior tank, medic healer, and three DPS: two spellslingers and an engineer. We had no problems with mob/boss difficulty, unless we encountered something unexpected.

Sometimes it was unclear as to what we had to accomplish, but we figured everything out up until the aforementioned datadisk issue.

#####################################################################################################################

I 4 manned the hycrest adventure to completion with 3 of my guildmates. Our group was as follows:

15 Engi (Tank, mentored from 30)

15 SS (Healer, mentored from 20)

15 Engi (dps)

15 Esper (me, dps/spot heals)

We did three runs.

FIRST RUN:

(Q1) Collect weapons quest worked properly and was not too difficult for our first try.

(Q2 ?) Free the farmers from the jail. This quest bugged out on us. We opened the jail cells, then the ambush and gunship showed up. We killed the ambush and got to the "disable the gunship" objective. When launching up top, clicking the middle spike, and then realizing we needed to disable the stabilizers at the same time... The stabilizers bugged out and were unclickable after our first attempt. So we just wound up clicking the middle spike and then having no way to disable the stabilizers as we couldn't trigger any of them. We reset the instance.

SECOND RUN:

server crash and reset midway through first quest

THIRD RUN (TO VICTORY):

(I forget the order of the quests we did here...)

(Q1) Farmer's Daughter. Worked completely. I enjoyed the robot miniboss. He wasn't very hard, but I wasn't expecting much difficulty.

(Q2) Ambush Quest. Definitely overtuned. We were not expecting about 10 mobs to pop on us. We wiped after the initial spawn, but cleared the remaining mobs with a moderate challenge and no deaths. The end boss spawned, though we thought he was just a miniboss at the time. Enjoyed the fight, though it was pretty easy. He had a ton of hp, but we were 4 manning it. Nearly had a heart attack when he ran away at half hp. Thought he reset.

(Q3) Escort Farmers out of the area. Also slightly overtuned, imo. At the end a pack of 9 spellslingers agro. It may just be because SS mobs have such high white damage that is unavoidable or our lack of a 3rd dps, but I found the damage to be very high. We barely wiped, but the farmer family made it out and our quest completed.

(Q4) Inspect Weapon crates in the farmer's buildings. Very easy, I don't really remember this.

(Q5) Disable Security consoles in the Dominion town. I liked the sneaking change of pace from our previous action-oriented quests.

(Q6) Final Boss fight. The adds, being spellslingers, were farm more dangerous than the boss because of the SS's white damage. The boss was reasonable for an introductory instance. Our tank died near the end from white damage from SS adds, but we killed him anyway.

THE LOOT:

++about 80% of a level @ 15 for THE ENTIRE DUNGEON

- - VERY low rep, as others here have stated

- - absolutely no loot from mobs except for the occasional rep drop (maybe from quests)

- - absolutely no exp from any mobs... only from quests. The first 5 quests gave ~25% of a level total and the boss kill quest gave ~50% for a total of ~75-80% of a level at 15.

+/- the end boss dropped a great blue esper weapon for me, but mediocore or unusable loot for the rest of the party.

THE BUGS:

- - The spot lights on the silos/watchtowers will follow players for hundreds of yards as the agro'd-but-not-triggered white spotlight. Then when it catches up it realizes it is supposed to leash and goes away. Definitely bugged.

- - The gunship's stabilizers were bugged after our first attempt as I described above.

- - The disguises when near townsfolk wears off if standing still despite being right next to a group. You need to move in/out of range to refresh the buff. At the end, just before the boss, two of us had permanent disguises and two of us were in normal form. I'm not sure which way it is supposed to work, but we were all standing in the same area at the rally point.

- - The end boss quest incorrectly displayed his location on the map as being near the road that leads to the jail/gunship area instead of in the church.

- - The quest given outside before the adventure to complete the Hycrest Insurrection DID NOT COMPLETE when we finished the zone. Additionally, it seemed to bug out my quest log where I had 0.5-2s freezing every time I would progress other quests. I dropped the quest and the freezing seemed to go away. I'm not sure if that is a coincidence or related.

THE COMMENTS:

+ + I really enjoyed this adventure. I've been looking for a MMO to play since we quit Rift a little over a year ago. I've been skeptical of WS for the past few months, but this adventure gave me a lot of hope. Thanks.

- - Really poor (ie none) loot/exp/rep from monsters.

- - Spell Slinger mobs are much more powerful than any other monster and this dungeon uses swarms of them in a couple instances (Ambush, Farmer escort)

+ + Snipers that knock you down if you don't dodge, but don't agro despite shooting from 89743897 feet away.

+ + The reinforcement summons and our battles against interrupt armor.

+ + Pick-your-own story. Very neat.

I think that's it from me for now. I enjoyed the dungeon despite the beta-bugs. Really good work. If anyone working on this would like more specific/focused testing then just shoot me a PM and I'll put together a Voodoo group to go do it.