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A Hex on both your houses
Hex was announced for Shamans at the WWI and there's a little bit of confusion out there about Hex. That's okay -- Hex is a little confusing. As explained by the dev panel, Hex is meant as a kind of "emergency" crowd control -- used in the same situation you'd see a Hunter throw a Feign Death or Scatter Shot. A brief moment of "Oh, crap!" to defend yourself, and hopefully your tank (or arena team) will snag that sucker off you before you're dead.To sum up the spell, Hex transforms its target into a critter. It's fast, just short of an Instant -- Hex has a .5 second cast time. Here's where things get a little more confusing, and where some of the "what the..?" starts. According to some sources, the specifics of the spell read "while moving the hexed target cannot attack or cast spells." That means your victim can either walk, or they can fight. They can't do both at once, but they can still act. From Tom Chilton's description of the spell, a mob will likely completely freak out and be erratic. I took that to mean, however, that a player might be a frog -- but it'd still be pumping out damage or heals while ribbiting at you.In this sense, "Hex" isn't really crowd control -- it's a more a kind of debuff. It forces the subject to be either rooted in place, or unable to cast or attack, but it leaves the choice of which up to your victim. A new spell is still good news for the Shaman class, but it isn't quite the good news we have been hoping to hear.
How I learned to stop worrying and love Cyclone
You'd have expected a little more in-depth Arena discussion from the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational. You'd have been wrong, but you'd have expected it. We've covered the new Arena maps, but something from the Question and Answer periods really stuck out for me. What's the future of the Arena going to be like...for crowd control? Should we expect more, less, or about the same? What's going to happen to that naughty little Cyclone?The answer from Tom Chilton was predictable -- without crowd control in its various forms, Arena matches become little more than DPS races. Crowd control (and its cousin line of sight) helps Arena fights take a little longer, and introduces viable strategies that are based all around controlling the other team. (As opposed to just blowing them to heck.) But the forums are alive - alive! - with complaints about Cyclone, Sap, Sheep, and hell, even Scatter Shot. No sir, folks don't like crowd control. Often, it seems like they'd rather get killed than sheeped.I think it comes down to a pretty basic thing -- we have fun in these games by controlling our characters. Anything that jeopardizes the control of our characters on either a short-term or a long-term basis is therefore anathema. No one wants to stand there, helpless, while some Rogue performs their billionth stun on you. It seems to me (in my rosy-glassed retrospect) that we heard less complaints about insta-kill POM+Pyro than we do about a 3 second stun. Your mileage may vary, but I think until Blizzard finds some way around that dichotomy -- CC is good for interesting fights, bad for fun -- we're going to continue to see tumultuous forum fights about the issue. I'm forced to agree with Chilton -- crowd control adds a layer of strategy and depth to the tactics of the Arena. Still, I hope they do something about it.
The Daily Grind: Best news from WWI?
Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational just wrapped up, and aside from the highly anticipated announcement about Diablo III, there were also a huge amount of changes announced for World of Warcraft. From Shamans getting the ability to have their totems cover the entire raid as opposed to just their party, to the confirmation that you will be able to make a Death Knight of every playable race. Many players are buzzing about the upcoming changes. This morning we thought we'd ask you what you thought the most interesting World of Warcraft news was from the Paris Worldwide Invitational? This blogger thinks that her favorite thing (aside from Diablo III, which really isn't WoW news) is the unveiling of the Blizzard authenticator encryption keychain. It will be interesting to see if other MMOG companies follow this step or not.
The Tuesday Morning Post: Post-WWI edition
Good Tuesday Morning everyone! We have a long maintenance ahead of us today, from 3AM to 11AM PDT. This downtime is in part to install new hardware on the Dunemaul realm in preparation for Wrath of the Lich King. Adam speculated a bit on what it may mean for the release date, but what it means in the short term is that those of us who play around now have to find something else to do. Since we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours to wait until we can play WoW again, this is the perfect time to do a little bit of browsing on WoW Insider. Here's a recap of just some of the great content from the past week. The World Wide Invitational was the big event of the weekend, of course, and there we had a team on the convention floor gathering all the news. You can check out our giant WWI roundup for all the liveblogs and reports on the class panel, the PvP panel, the dungeons and raids panel, and the Q&A panel, and event coverage. You'll also find extensive analysis of all the information broken down by class and subject. We also have a peek at the WWI goodie bag and videos from the Turpster! Check the roundup for all of it. In addition, we posted even more Worldwide Invitational news and analysis on Monday:
