strafing
Latest
3 skills to improve your Arena performance
WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs. One thing I'm asked fairly regularly is the following: What can I do to improve in Arena? My usual response is a slew of questions. First, how much resilience do you have? I've spoken about this in past articles, so I won't harp on about it here. The second question is simply do you practice? Again, as I've mentioned, practice makes perfect. That is really the most important thing you can do to make yourself a better player in the Arena, so take every opportunity. Even on my healers, I generally fly around on my non-PvP realm with PvP switched on. I'm not going to be able to kill anyone of my own level, but I might get some practice surviving! But this week I'm looking to be a little more specific for you, and we're going to talk about some skills or gameplay styles or whatever you'd prefer to call them. If you can incorporate them into your gameplay, chances are you'll improve in Arena. Obviously, in order to incorporate them, what are you going to need to do? Practice, of course! So, what first? Let's talk movement. Movement in PvP is much more subjective and situational than in PvE. It's not just a case of getting out of bad; positioning and movement can win and lose battles. If you're being chopped up by a paladin with a big sword, you want to be moving away; if you're being zapped by casters, you want to do your best to be using line of sight to your advantage.
PlanetSide 2 devs answer questions via Twitter
MMO Crunch has the details on Sony Online Entertainment's PlanetSide 2 Twitter question-and-answer session that went down on September 16th. The chat covered a lot of ground and answered quite a few of the PlanetSide nation's most burning questions. What kinds of questions? Well, there are bits about customizable armor, bunny hopping, strafing, sun glare as it affects pilots, online vs. offline skill training, and dozens more where those came from. PlanetSide 2 fans will also be happy to know that each of the game's continents will support over 2000 simultaneous players, and said continents will feature varied environments including snow-covered terrain, glaciers, and forests. Check out an abbreviated list of discussion points after the break.
New World of Planes video shows off air combat, ground strafing, and more
Gaijin Entertainment has released another heart-pounding video from its upcoming World of Planes MMO, and the scene has shifted from the Pacific theater showcased last month to what looks to be the Kuban region of southern Russia. A gaggle of great-looking World War II fighters are on display, as are a few stomach-churning cockpit perspectives and some spiffy smoke, fire, and damage effects. There's a lot of air combat, of course, but there's also a brief glimpse of some target strafing and quite a lot of detail when it comes to terrain textures, buildings, and other ground objects. Flight sim fans will be happy to know that Gaijin was responsible for 2009's IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey, a console-based air combat title that followed in the footsteps of the venerable Sturmovik series on the PC. Gaijin also developed a PC version called Wings of Prey and looks to be using that expertise for its new free-to-play World of Planes MMO. Kick the tires and light the fires by checking out the new trailer after the cut.
The Anvil of Crom: You must unlearn what you have learned
Hoo boy, circle-strafing. Basically I suck at it. However, with a little help from a new peripheral and an hour spent coming up with a rather meticulous set of key-bindings, I'm on the (slow) road to improvement. This week's Bear Shaman-flavored adventuring featured a lot of unlearning as I've scrapped the traditional WASD/keyboard-turning approach to Age of Conan that I've been using since the game's release. It's not pretty right now, but once the awkwardness wears off, I'll likely be much more adept at both PvE and PvP. As far as content goes, I got Mr. Oakarm into his mid-30s and struggled to find a group for Stygia's Black Castle dungeon (still trying to coordinate one as of press time, in fact). Craig Morrison also weighed in with his monthly dev update, and all of this adds up to a lot to cover this week. Join me after the break for the details.
WoW Rookie: Keyboard shortcuts
WoW Rookie is brought to our readers to help our newest players get acclimated to the game. Make sure you send a note to WoW Insider if you have suggestions for what new players need to know.Accept this fact: to be good at playing WoW, you need to learn to use your keyboard at least some of the time. You don't have to bail on your mouse, but it's very helpful to learn some of the very basic keyboard shortcuts that will make your life in the game that much easier. (Easy is good, right?)Using the game interfaceThere are hotkeys for almost everything you do in-game. You can find most of them by just hovering your mouse over the icons that you click -- as no doubt you may have already noticed. Let's start with the button bar that you use to bring up your Quest Log, Spellbook and other things. You'll see that when I hover my mouse over the gold cup icon, a tooltip pops up. The L in parentheses after "Quest Log" means you can just press your L key to bring up the log instead of clicking the icon. (Don't worry that it's a capital L, just press lower-case L. When a keyboard command is capitalized, it's written as "Shift-L".) After the break, you'll see a list of keyboard shortcuts for the game interface.
Scattered Shots: Beloved complexity
This week on Scattered Shots, David provides a break in the rushing waves of Patch 2.4 news to wax philosophical about his love of being a hunter. To be perfectly honest, he hasn't had time to even try out the new patch yet, but he's really looking forward to waxing on and off about the patch at some point as well.They say that being a hunter is WoW on easy mode, but in reality, the "easy mode" style of hunting is only the beginning of what a hunter can do. Sadly many hunters never really arise out of that stage - easy hunting can become like a rut in which one may not even realize that there is another way to do things. A player can rise out of this rut, however, either through an enterprising nature, or through acquaintance with a good hunter role-model. However one rises to it, the opportunity is there for hunters to do all kinds of things amazing things, mostly at the same time. In fact, you could say that a fundamental mechanic of the hunter class, probably the mechanic I love most in the entire game, is that of controlling multiple characters at once: the hunter and the pet. You have the most control over your hunter character, obviously, and the pet functions as something like a yo-yo which is attached to the hunter. You can point the pet in the direction of an enemy to attack, or you can recall it to wherever you are, but you can't tell it, for instance, to kite an enemy around in circles in the same way you yourself could.The limitations inherent in the abilities of the hunter and the pet, as well as the synergy between them, reminds me a bit of chess. Managing both the pet and the hunter to greatest effectiveness in different situations means you have to keep more than one thing in mind at all times. When you play most other classes, you can just pay attention to them and what they're doing, but being a good hunter requires you to be more aware of what's going on around you, just like chess requires you to keep track of the whole board, not just the little portion of it where the most action is happening.
