Yes. Perhaps not as easily as City of Heroes, but there is a costume system and dye system which enables you to wear any class of armour (Light Armour wearers could pop on Heavy gear as a costume [no stat benefits]) and change the colour readily once a dye is learned.
That doesn't really "capture the fun" of designing my character from scratch right at level 1 and making him (or her!) look just the way he appeared in my head, and instead captures the tedium of having to farm for materials so that my generic guy (who looks just like every other single character of his race) can wear armor (that looks just like the armor that everyone else is wearing) that is a slightly different color.
Why would you wear armor if it doesn't give you stat benefits? You just have to take it off and put on your real armor anyway when you're done parading around town. CoH divorced appearance from ability entirely; this sounds like a half-assed system that pretends it's letting you look the way you want while actually still forcing you to wear the "right" armor for your class when it's time to actually do some adventuring.
You will be able to earn 30 abilities (10 Assault, 10 Support, 10 Utility) but you can only use 8 (total) at any one time. Each ability has 8 Tiers but at max level you will not be able to have everything at Tier 8 so you will have meaningful choice to make there.
You also get 4 builds you can have as a preset to switch between out of combat, and the abilities/tiers selected can be modified freely out of combat as well.
On top of this, you have the AMP System which modifies you abilities/grants new passive abilities. This can be set per build, but not modified once selected without paying for a respec.
So actual, yes - there is a massive amount of builds and combinations to be had.
Yes, but that's still vastly less than CoH. Can I create two characters of the same class with as much difference in playstyle as there was between, say, Empathy vs. Traps? Or Force Field vs. Storm Summoning? Or Dark Armor vs. Super Reflexes? Or Mind Control vs. Illusion Control? That's one of the things that made CoH fun to me, being able to play the same class over and over but with vastly different abilities each time.
In WildStar, will I be able to I create two characters of the same class where each one has a
different set of 30 abilities to choose from, or is it the same 30 abilities for every member of the class?
Because THAT'S the sort of variety I'm missing in other MMOs, not just "every character of the same class gets exactly the same abilities, you can just choose to emphasize different ones!" That's how 99% of existing MMOs already do it. That's how tabletop D&D has been doing it since I started playing in the late 1970s.
Why is this different? What makes it "capture the fun" of CoH, where I had a half-dozen Brutes and none of them had a single attack in common (except maybe Air Superiority), rather than like WoW, where every single Warrior gets the same 34 abilities as every other Warrior (but you can use some more than others depending on whether you want to emphasize Arms, Fury, or Protection).
And limiting it to only 8 powers is a "feature"? That's a drawback. I like getting more powers and incorporating them into my existing move pool, not being forced to pick and choose eight and ignore the other twenty-two. I used to have four or five full trays in CoH, and even in Dofus I have twenty powers on my main tray and another dozen on a secondary tray.
I wouldn't mind all this WildStar hoopla so much if people weren't pretending it was so different and unique and original. But, really, other than the design of its races (thank goodness there's not the same generic elves and dwarves and orcs), I'm not seeing any information here to convince me that WildStar is not just WoW In Space (Plus Long-Tailed Bunnygirls).
And if it's going to blatantly copy other games, why can't it copy the game that I still miss after more than a year, rather than copying one I got tired of back in 2007?
