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Working As Intended: The forgotten fields of Green Acres
My first trip to Ultima Online's Green Acres was in 1998. The first guild I'd ever joined had just split up into a bunch of... let's call them "philosophically incompatible" groups, and I was still hanging out with some of the shadier types because I was a clueless teenager in my first MMO and wanted desperately to fit in and hadn't yet figured out where I belonged. "Hit this rune," my new guild leader commanded. His favorite murderin' weapon was a poisoned warfork. He was not a nice man. "I'm being evicted from my safehouse in Green Acres. Help me move my crap."
The Summoner's Guidebook: A beginner's guide to League of Legends' runes
Runes are one of the easiest ways for a beginning player to waste IP in League of Legends. A lot of players spend a lot of IP on wasted runes. The truth is, you can get away with a relatively small number of useful runes and still be effective. We've gone a long, long time in the Summoner's Guidebook without a discussion of runes and rune pages, so we should fix that. A bit of a disclaimer, though: Runes are costly, and you'll have to put several new champions on hold no matter what you do. At level 20, you will want around 5,000 IP for runes, and you'll want another 10,000 or so more over the course of your career. On top of that, there is easily more you can blow on runes if you want some real diversity. I'm not here to explain that, though -- we can leave that one to the pros.
Human Head 'fully intends' to make a more savage Rune sequel
Now that Prey 2 has been pushed back, it seems that Human Head co-founder Ted Halsted wants to put up the green light on bringing back the 10-plus year old action title, Rune. "I can't reveal what we've got planned," he says, "but we fully intend to bring digital viking mayhem into the here-and-now."There were rumblings of a sequel a few years ago, but the potential game's publisher at the time decided to pass on funding development. These days, Kickstarter is the funding method of choice, but Halstead only says he's glad there are multiple methods to funding, and the team "certainly wouldn't rule out Kickstarter."What else can we expect from this not-officially-announced project? Halsted says a second game would offer a more savage viking world, with updated combat, and a big emphasis on clan-based multiplayer. "We're envisioning an action-world of warrior tribes," says Halsted. They're just not, you know, announcing it yet.
Lichborne: 3 quick tips to step up your death knight's game
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. So you know your rotations. You know your gear priorities. You know what to reforge, which buttons to hit, and how to stay out of the fire. These are all good things. Yet still, you feel like you're missing something. Maybe you feel like you could crank out another 1-2k DPS on some fights. Maybe you feel like your health keeps dropping a little low when you tank. Sometimes, the problem with problems like these is that it's not a big glaring thing you're forgetting (nor is it forgetting to drop your favorite lucky vanity item). Sometimes, it's just that you need to tighten up your play just a little bit. This week, we're going to take a look at a few simple tricks that hopefully a lot of you can use just to shore up your play and go the extra mile.
Rune the day: Allods Online previews the Isle of Revelation and a revamped rune system
As Allods Online continues to march toward its humongous release patch, it is pushing previews out before the update like a train's cowcatcher throwing out bovines. GPotato is proud to reveal another new zone for Patch 2.0.02 called the Isle of Revelation as well as a much improved rune system for the game. Allods Online's Isle of Revelation is a level 45+ area that's been ruined almost beyond repair, although a resourceful player may discover its mysteries even so. The blasted landscape is also home to the Citadel, an endgame city for members of both factions that has all of the merchants and services that you may require. The devs are also reworking rune mechanics to make them easier to use. Instead of fiddling with runes in equipment slots, players will now find runes in their own special window. By detaching runes from gear, players can swap armor and weapons without having to worry about moving the runes too. Patch 2.0.02 is scheduled for sometime this spring and includes several additional zones, customizable mounts and a new minimap feature.
Haste bug squashed by hotfix
Patch 4.0.6 brought with it a rather nasty bug that primarily affected non-mana using DPS including hunters, feral druids, rogues, and death knights. The client was disagreeing with the server on exactly how much haste refreshed the regeneration time of focus, energy, and runes, causing the client to report that certain resources were ready for use before they actually were, which then caused the player to press the button and the ability to not fire. CM Bashiok has been keeping us up to date on the status of the bug and just recently reported that it should be fixed via a hotfix that was applied late last night. You can read the full text of his post behind the break.
Cataclysm Beta: Build 12984 death knight changes
In the wee hours of the morning, an (as yet unimplemented) beta build found its way out onto the internet for dissection by the usual datamining suspects. As has become a happy habit with the past few builds, there are death knight changes to be had. Now, these changes don't solve all of our problems. In fact, some of them exacerbate a few of them. However, a couple of the changes are amazingly good, and I'd call this patch, overall, another step in the right direction. Let's take a look at what changed and what it means for the death knight playstyle. As a warning, this patch has not yet been placed on the beta as of this writing, so things may still change from what's here.
Lichborne: Glyphs, gems and enchants for the blood tank
Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the latest news, tips and strategies for the death knight class. Last week, we went into the basic outlines of what makes a blood tank: your talent choices, your gearing choices, your threat rotations and things such as that. Once you've got all that down, though, the next thing you can do to take your tanking to the next level is to get some decent gems, glyphs and enchantments. They'll separate an adequate 5-man tank from a tank who's ready to step on and start taking on the game in earnest.
Lichborne: Rune cooldowns, tank mastery, and Cataclysm
The devs have been speaking a little a bit about the new mastery system coming with Cataclysm, and while they've kept most of the specific numbers vague, there's been a surprising amount of information one can read between the lines about death knights. Of course, it started with the frost death knight stats. The stats were solidly DPS oriented, providing damage, haste, and runic power generation. This lead to two major concerns: What would frost tanks do for mastery? And for that matter, even DPS don't need runic power generation that much, considering we can only use so many frost strikes (or death coils for other specs) before we need to spend our runes anyway. The Blues actually gave answers to these questions, answers that managed to both answer the question and provide a whole new level of speculation and questioning. On the question of the new runic power bonus, Ghostcrawler and Eyonix revealed that death knights would find their rotation less constrained by the global cool down and rune cool downs, and that changes such as that would make the runic power generation more desirable. On the tank front, they're actually being deliberately coy about what they have planned for death knight tanks, but they at least seem to know the issue's on the table. This week, I figure it might fun to take a look at these statements and mull over some possible ways they might implement them.
Lichborne: The Future of Death Runes in Patch 3.2
Welcome to Lichborne, the Death Knight class column, with your host, Daniel Whitcomb, who's still wearing mourning black for AE Unholy Blight. And also because black looks awesome.I admit to being a bit underwhelmed by the Death Knight Q&A. To be fair, this is primarily because most of the things covered were already in the 3.2 patch notes, and the rest was pretty common sense stuff. However, one little comment by Ghostcrawler did catch my attention: His praise of Death Runes. This caught me more than a bit by surprise, since, if anything, the Death Knight changes in Patch 3.2 seem tailor made to discourage the use of Death Runes, at least for Frost and Unholy.Between the damage buff to Blood Strike and diseases, and the nerf to Scourge Strike, we have a pretty good chance of seeing people move away from using Death Runes. The major reason to use Blood Strike in both trees right now is to create Death Runes so you can use higher damage abilities on your next refresh cycle. If Blood Strike becomes the higher damage ability, it's not worth it to use the Death Runes on something else. There's a off-chance, I suppose, that you might want the Death Runes handy for an emergency use of Ghoul Frenzy, in theory, but that chance is so slim that no-one's going to want to waste the talent points in Reaping, at the very least.
All the World's a Stage: So you want to be a Scribe
This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirty-sixth in a series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay various aspects of the lore and gaming elements of WoW. What is inscription anyways? I mean, we all know that it's the newest profession, added in Wrath of the Lich King, and it lets you make these "glyphs" which allow you to modify or improve your various class abilities in interesting ways. In gaming terms all that makes perfect sense, but when it comes to telling a story with your character, there are a lot of details missing. Technically, a glyph is a character or symbol, like a heiroglyph or a pictograph, which we can see to a certain extent when we click on the glyph and put it into our in-game glyph interface -- it looks pretty cool with all those circles and lines and stuff. But what does it really mean? Are you pasting these symbols into a book of some sort? Are they getting magically tattooed onto your skin somewhere? And where did inscription come from to begin with? Has it been around in Azeroth all along somehow, or was it some sort of ancient knowledge only discovered recently, around the time in the Warcraft lore when the Wrath of the Lich King begins? If it was discovered, then who discovered it and how? How exactly does a scribe learn these glyphs? Does he or she pore over ancient tomes that haven't been read in thousands of years, trying to decipher ancient texts? Or is the art and magic of it more in the artistic calligraphy of it rather than any difficulty in discovering or interpreting the symbols themselves? There are far more questions than answers when it comes to roleplaying a scribe, and to a large extent each roleplayer is free to choose his or her own approach. What follows is the just one suggestion as to how you might work out a plausible solution -- please feel free to read it and improve upon it in whatever way you like.
BlizzCon 2008: In-depth Diablo 3 hands-on
When we weren't taking photos, sitting in Starcraft 2 panels, or watching the closing ceremonies at BlizzCon, all of our available free time was devoted to Diablo 3. It was the first thing we played within minutes of the grand opening, and the game they had to pry us away from when the doors closed. Yes, it's just that good. Plus, we still have two character classes that haven't been revealed yet, so who knows what else this has in store for us.We were happy just to be able to return to the world of Diablo after seven years since the Lord of Destruction expansion set was on store shelves, and it was worth the wait. Find out everything we could during our exhaustive hands-on after the break, and be sure to check out the galleries below that show off in-game screens and concept art. Plus we're sticking that gameplay footage in again, because it's the only way we can enjoy Diablo until there's a beta, or some sort of miracle occurs.%Gallery-34203%
News from the WWI '08 WoW Dev panel
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_Class_changes_announced_at_Worldwide_Invitational'; At WWI, the WoW Dev Panel is underway, and spending a little while talking about the Death Knight class, and other class changes coming in the expansion. As the panel continues, we'll update this post with more information as we get it live from Paris.Update: Tons (tons!) of new official Wrath information after the break. Don't miss!Update: It's over, but we'll be talking about this stuff for a while. Titan's Grip is confirmed -- two-handed dual wielding for Fury Warriors. Hunter pet skill points are out, and pets are getting their own Talent trees. Shaman CC is official, Ret Pallys are getting new itemization, and Rogues are going to be able to sap a lot more. It's all after the break, more analysis coming up soon. %Gallery-26320%
Scattered Shots: Got mana?
Scattered Shots is temporarily subtitled "Scattered Thoughts" this week, as David goes off on a speculative tangent. Perhaps all this expansion leakage is causing a leak in his brain too, but hey, a little bit of intellectual pondering never hurt anyone, right? This column is for hunters, by the way -- but, yeah... you knew that.After writing last week's article about hunter problems and predictions, I got to thinking about how hunters use mana, and reflecting on the question of whether hunters should be using mana or not. Hunters have many things in common with classes like rogues and warriors, such as doing physical damage, and yet they have much in common with mages and warlocks as well, such as being vulnerable to mana-draining abilities. This issue is vague enough that my observations here can only be considered personal opinions, and they won't be of interest if all you want from this column is a list of the greatest gear and talent builds. But for the speculative among us, there's lots to discuss here.
The Death Knight class revealed
Via Gamespy and Worldofwar.net, we finally have a good idea of what rolling a Death Knight will be like. A lot of the rumors seem to have panned out, but others have not. All I know is that at this point, I am full speed ahead to make a Death Knight my new main come WoTLK. There's a lot of meaty info to dig into, so let's get to it after the break.
Inscriptions hidden in patch 2.4
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/First_WoW_Wrath_of_the_Lich_king_Inscription_spell_found'; Blizzard has included the first look at inscriptions via hidden entries in the patch 2.4 data files. Inscription will be a new profession that will be released with Wrath of the Lich King. We are treated to an early glimpse at the Demonic Runes inscription that will increase fire damage done by the Mage Fireball spell by 50 additional points. The data is courtesy of WoW Head. There are two important things to realize from this newly discovered information. First, it shows that Blizzard is hard at work on Wrath of the Lich King, and is already starting to include content in the patch files. We saw this same behavior in patch 2.0 with Jewelcrafting recipes. %Gallery-5525%
Death Knights' "rune" system might take some skill
"Oh my frikkin dog, everybody and their second cousin is gonna wanna be Death Knights!" was the cry heard throughout Outland when the new Hero Class was announced. WoW players everywhere had visions of dungeons and raids filled with only Death Knights; as well as Alliance and Horde cities alike all filled wall-to-wall with thousands of players who abandoned their original class to become Death Knights, only to discover (along with rogues and hunters) that it ain't so easy being uber-cool and powerful when everyone else is uber-cool and powerful too -- because everyone else is taking your raid spot.Well Drysc has a ray of light to shed on this despair... or, in the case of Death Knights, perhaps that should be a big tank of unholy frozen blood to spill on it (assuming that would help): I expect just about everyone is going to want to try one, but is everyone going to want to drop their long-time proffered class for one? I seriously doubt it. Also there's some amount of self regulation that will really be required to keep group composition equalized. Not only will the other 9 classes still be needed to succeed in any group effort, but the tactics involved in playing a Death Knight might be too hard for the average Stanley Noobsauce to master. In response to one player who felt that the rune system Death Knights will be using seemed "clunky and not fun," Drysc responded:
Human Head CEO quit in Nov, talks now
FiringSquad reports that Human Head CEO Timothy Gerritsen has left the studio; in fact, he did so shortly before Thanksgiving last year. When questioned, Gerritsen said he departed on friendly terms, but was driven to leave because of creative differences. Gerritsen did not like the direction the other owners were steering Human Head in.Gerritsen confirmed that he would remain in game development, though he declined to give specifics. Human Head co-founder and president Paul MacArthur has been acting as interim CEO.
