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1-year subscription to Playstation Magazine for only $9 at Amazon
Amazon is currently offering a pretty good deal for the declining number of gamers that prefer receiving their news on paper. Specifically, the site is offering a one-year subscription to Playstation: The Official Magazine. But you'd better hurry. Like really fast, as over half of the subscriptions Amazon has on sale have already been claimed. No, seriously. You should go now. Why are you still reading this? What's that? You prefer reading your news on the internet? Touché.
Addon Spotlight: PoMTracker
Every weekend (well, almost every weekend), Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. Before I get started, this addon is useful to one class only: Priests. Not only that, it's only useful to healing priests, since all it does is make it easier for you to keep track of your Prayer of Mending (sorry mages, wrong PoM). Still here? Good. I've tried many different mods to tell me who my PoM is on and how many charges it has left, since it is a lovely spell and I like to use it to its fullest, which means I need to know when the darn Spirit Wolves have snagged it again so I can recast it on somebody useful. I used MendWatch all throughout Burning Crusade, but it had some annoying bugs when Wrath hit and I started hunting around for something more stable and easier to read. I quickly found PoM Tracker, and it's worked like a dream for me ever since.
Healer strife reaches Age of Conan
It's the kind of scenario you wake up from in a cold sweat, reaching for the comforting bulk of the axe under your bed: the healer wars. City of Heroes arguably had it worst, but other games haven't escaped, and now Age of Conan is getting it. The row centers upon that archetypal figure of MMO gaming, the healer; and the argument, in essence, is 'Healers aren't supposed to do damage, so just shut up and heal, noob'. In the case of Age of Conan, one player made a guide for Priests of Mitra, a powerful healing class. In that guide, he treated the issue of PoMs doing damage with the simple words 'You don't.' This wasn't all he said, but it was enough to cause a firestorm, particularly when one of the visiting moderators saw fit to sticky the post - which was seen as endorsing a 'you're just healbots' mentality. It seems to be a particular curse of support-type classes that everyone you group with has a better idea of what you should be doing than you do yourself. We'd like to know, from those who've played such characters: have you ever been told to 'just heal'? Do you care whether you can do DPS or not? Would you willingly give up all offensive abilities to help a team survive better? Or, in a barbarous world like Hyboria, should everyone be dangerous in combat?
SCEA announces "PlayStation: The Official Magazine"
Official PlayStation Magazine is dead. Long live PlayStation: The Official Magazine! Miss the Official PlayStation Magazine (OPM), Ziff Davis' all-things-PlayStation 'zine that was unceremoniously axed last November just before the launch of the PlayStation 3? Well, Sony has announced that Future US – publisher of other fine magazine products like Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, and ... uh, Pregnancy – has signed up to publish the newly announced PlayStation: The Official Magazine scheduled to hit newsstands in November, and run 13 issues a year (that's once a month using Sony's proprietary calendar technology). Of course, Future has also published the Official Sony PlayStation Magazine in the UK since 1995, and PSM (the independent PlayStation Magazine) in the US, so the whole Sony magazine thing is old hat for the folks at Future, we're sure. Speaking of PSM, editorial duties for the new mag will be handled by Rob Smith, former editor-in-chief of PSM, leading us to assume that the publisher won't be maintaining two PlayStation magazines, one "official" and one "independent." It's too bad, we'd take the acronym PSM over POM any day.
AddOn Spotlight: MendWatch
Non-Priests (or Priests that don't heal), you might just want to skip over this one. MendWatch is an AddOn that...well, the author explains it best: MendWatch attempts to track the priest spell Prayer of Mending. A timer bar shows the current target of the Prayer of Mending spell with a countdown of how long the spell will last. When the target gets hit the amount the Prayer of Mending healed for will be shown and the bar will slowly fade away. If the Prayer of Mending jumps to a new target a new timer bar will be shown for the new target.This AddOn fixes my one complaint about Prayer of Mending: it can be a bit hard to track who it's on or whether you even have one out there at all, when the battle starts getting thick. Just like Cloak of Shadows brings a Rogue vs. caster duel from "imba" to "insane," MendWatch brings PoM from "awesome" to "incredible."If you're still reading but not familiar with Prayer of Mending, here's the spell's description:390 mana, instant cast, 40 yard rangePlaces a spell on the target that heals them for 800 the next time they take damage. When the heal occurs, Prayer of Mending jumps to a raid member within 20 yards. Jumps up to 5 times and lasts 30 sec after each jump. This spell can only be placed on one target at a time.
