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Alter-Ego: Five favorite Fire tank powers
I'll admit it: Of all the powers I've played with in DC Universe Online thus far, the Fire and Ice powersets are undoubtedly my two personal favorites. Normally I'm not so much the tanking type, but there's something about these two trees that just satisfies the comic book nerd in me. I grew up watching my favorite heroes taking on incredible odds, being beaten down, and triumphing at the end of the day. However, as in any MMO involving endgame raiding, no man is an island. While I might enjoy standing toe-to-toe with the bad guys, if I don't have a good group behind me, there's only so much I can do before I'm spending quality time with the defeat button. This is where I have to note that specific endgame "builds" don't appear to be quite as easy to create in DC Universe Online as they are in other games such as World of Warcraft. As DCUO is still in its infancy, there are many players who are working hard on theorycrafting statistics. This means that there simply aren't any 100%-perfect cookie-cutter builds everyone adheres to as yet. Still, there are some power choices that seem to be fairly popular for Fire tanks in this early stage, which is what we'll be taking a look at this week.
Enter at Your Own Rift: Zero-sum game
Ever since I started following RIFT, I've been entranced by the wide-open -- but not limitless -- class system. After all, the virtual world and everything populating it is only half the game; the other half resides in the avatar that sticks with you while you explore it all. Many MMOs have interesting ways of letting you build and grow your character, but sooner or later they come to a point where there's little more to be done other than incrementally increasing your stats by gaining better gear. Not so with RIFT, as even a level 50 can drop a few coins to shape a completely new build from scratch. No longer are we bound to a rigidly defined creation; we are free to experiment, tinker, and try out these roles to our hearts' content. With RIFT's soul system, there are a few ground rules that everyone learns early in the game. You can have up to three souls in your archetype active at any one time; you can only spend as many points in a build as you have in levels (such as 10 points at level 10); and you'll end up with 66 points at level 50, which means that you'll at least dabble in a second soul tree with every build. And while you can certainly spread soul points across all three trees, today I wanted to look at the benefits of a zero-point soul, the "third wheel," if you will, of builds.
Enter at Your Own Rift: Pre-launch checklist
I'll just come out and say it: The month or so right before the launch of a highly anticipated MMO is simultaneously ecstasy and agony, full of love and loathing. The waiting sucks, but the anticipation is delicious. The enthusiasm from the community is electric, but the heated emotions can be toxic. The discussion is fascinating, but the know-it-alls are annoying. Personally, I kind of wish we could be at launch-plus-one month right now, just so that the frenzy of insane opinions will have died down and we can just, y'know, play the game without feeling as though we were in the middle of a verbal rugby match. Like any MMO, RIFT's going to have its positives and negatives, but I feel that this launch is going to be something we haven't seen in a long time: a solid, stable MMO that offers up a complete package. That pleases the Justin. Since I can't whip out my magic remote control and fast-forward to April, I propose we do the next best thing. Let's open up our imaginary quest logs and run down a checklist of seven "To Dos" and a few "To Don'ts" to help us prepare for RIFT's release. Planning can be fun! Shut up, it can be!
Plan your perfect character with the RIFT soul calculator
One of the greatest strengths of any MMORPG is its community. Regardless of the size of a title's playerbase, it's practically a given that the demographics will include folks with the skills (and the goodwill) to make the experience better for everyone. Usually this happens free of charge in the form of web-based tools and analysis, and the latest case in point comes to us courtesy of ZAM and its new RIFT soul calculator. The tool allows rifters to experiment with builds all the way up to the game's level 50 cap (even though RIFT's current beta phase doesn't allow for endgame play). ZAM's announcement post carries a beta qualifier of its own, as the soul calculator is still under development and may feature a lingering bug or two. RIFT is a subscription-based fantasy MMO developed by Trion Worlds which launches on March 1st. You can learn more about the game and sign up for beta via the official website.
Wasteland Diaries: Long-term goals
So you're a brand-new clone in Fallen Earth, dressed in your snappy LifeNet ensemble? So far you've managed to get yourself blown to bits inside the bowels of the Hoover Dam. Remember that awesome scoped battle rifle you were using? Well, forget that. The weapons you will be using for the time being will be a bit more primitive and a lot less deadly. Luckily for you, Elena Winters was able to respawn you safely away from the dam. After being led around by the nose, you're no doubt ready to begin making some of your own decisions. I'm going to tell you that you aren't quite ready to do that. Not just yet. Before you go off on your own, there are some important things you need to know. These things I will tell you will save you a lot of trouble later on. I wish someone had given me all the information I'm going to give you, but I learned it the hard way. As they say: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This also holds true in Fallen Earth. Now that you're in a safe place, I'll get that handy information to you after the break.
Massively's hands-on with Rift: Planes of Telara's dynamic content
Just a few weeks ago, I was invited to attend Trion Worlds' Gamer's Day in San Francisco to get some hands-on time with a couple of the company's upcoming titles, including Rift: Planes of Telara. If Rift seems to have come out of nowhere, that might be due both to the acquisition of EverQuest II veteran Scott Hartsman to head the project as executive producer, and to a clever name change meant to reflect the team's shift in development focus. In fact, that shift in development focus is precisely what I was at Trion's studio to test -- I got to check out the Rifts themselves in all their glory, in the context of the greater dynamic content system that the developers are so excited about. Massively's writers have been able to play and report on character creation and the starting areas of Rift several times over the last year or so, including earlier this summer at E3. But until today's embargo lift (coinciding with the reveal at Gamescom), no one had quite seen the fabled planar invasions and takeovers in action. Now we have.
Exploring Eberron: Rolling the right character for you
Who are you whippersnappers? Get off my lawn or I'll blast ye into kingdom come! Shoo! I mean, howdy! Sorry, I got a little startled there. We just found out this morning that Rubi, your faithful DDO columnist, was captured by a beholder and locked away in a level 20 dungeon. While the Massively DDO guild, OnedAwesome, faithfully levels up in a rescue attempt (every Wednesday night, 9pm eastern/8pm central!), I've been drafted to keep the column going until victory is assured. Considering that a vast majority of my personal DDO resume is confined to levels 1 through 10, I have a soft spot for the newbie experience. And seeing how many fledgling dungeoneers are flocking to DDO these days, I figured I'd go back to the beginning to walk new players through the first week of the game. For you veterans out there, this would be a great time to (a) point out how much I say is completely wrong, and (b) offer up your own tips and advice in the comments section. Today, let's start with one of the most vital decisions you'll ever make in the game: rolling a character. Hit the jump and let's hope for all 20s!
Wasteland Diaries: Building character
When making a character in Fallen Earth, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. While I still have three of my four respec injectors, newly created characters will not get a respec. So it is very important to determine what you want your character to be before you start spending AP. Fallen Earth is a "classless" system, but most builds are differentiated mainly by their choice of weapon mastery, and these could be construed as the three classes. While choice of weapon type will be the cornerstone of the build, there are still a great many questions you will want to have answers to before you start to improve your stats. But your first consideration should be what type of character you want to play. You will want one that suits your playstyle, but isn't completely gimped. My goal with this post will be to help make sure you have a plan before you start your build. Even though you can probably just assign AP at random and still make a viable (at least for PvE) build, you probably want your character to be the best that he or she can be, right? Now, I am not a character-building expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I have some experience with it. After the cut, I'll give you the tools and knowledge you need to build a solid PvE or PvP character. You will need to make the tough decisions yourself.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: There's a spider in my room (VEAT level 24)
I want to give everyone a bit of an idea for how these illustrations come into being. After the first installment of the ongoing guide to villainous epic archetypes was on the plate, I let Ms. Fienemann know what I was planning so she would know what to draw. Once she drew that title image, I immediately laughed and noted how the middle soldier was sad. His name was Terry, and Jim and Earl (the other soldiers) were being jerks to him and not giving him even, like, a little bit of their lunch after Terry had fronted them both for coffee earlier in the week. This week, Jim and Earl continue being mean to Terry despite not being in the drawing. And that just makes it funnier. Where were we? Oh, right, leveling your epic villain archetype in City of Heroes. Or more accurately, making the big central decision to leveling your spider. By the time you hit 24 -- not very long after the last installment -- you're going to be neck-deep in a free respec that leads into unlocking the additional career paths for your character. Unfortunately, you're going to have to choose one or the other.
Tips for creating an iPad-compatible Keynote presentation
While the iPad version of Keynote represents a slight twist on Apple's flagship presentation app and serves as a gateway into multitouch computing on a large display, it has a few shortcomings when compared to its Mac OS X counterpart (as we noted back in April). As a result, those who start their Keynote workflow on Mac OS X may be surprised when some of their transitions, builds and fonts don't show up the same way on the iPad. No need to work in Keynote blind, however, for TUAW is here. Here are some tips that'll provide you a framework on preparing a Keynote presentation on Mac OS X with iPad compatibility in mind. A tip of the hat to The Apple Blog for their Keynote/iPad post.
Wasteland Diaries: Rifleman's lament
Every MMO seems to have a build or class triad. The rock, paper and scissors system. Or tank, healer and DPS (damage per second). Armor, infantry and artillery. However you look at it, it seems like most MMOs are balanced using this rule of three. In Fallen Earth the triad consists of three weapon skills that define the basic builds. Though it is a classless system, characters are usually designed around their weapon proficiencies. Fallen Earth currently has a rock, scissors and rock-eating scissor-smasher. Prior to version 1.4, the flavor-of-the-month build was melee. Pistol builds have now taken the top spot. This, of course, is debatable, but not many can argue against the ineffectuality of the rifleman in Fallen Earth. Pistoleers have never been the weakest of the three; in fact (at least since open beta) they have been very viable and well-rounded builds. They are arguably, now, at the top of the heap and the balance has been shuffled leaving riflemen still at the bottom. The unbalancing has also caused an unbalancing of the factions as the pistol-using factions are clustered on one side of the faction wheel. For the most part, dual-wielding has always been much better than two-handed weapons, and that still holds true with melee weapons as well as firearms. But the rift between pistols and rifles has grown while the rift between melee and rifles has shrunk. One thing gets fixed while something else gets thrown out of whack. The next step is to balance the game. Continue reading after the break for a more in-depth analysis.
Wasteland Diaries: Salutations to mutations
The Fallen Earth players that are close to making the jump to Sector 2 have a few things to consider. Of course, the biggest question is always that of faction. Faction choices can be influenced by mutations, since certain mutation lines are only available from certain factions. Some will just prefer to "flip the wheel", and I really can't give a good reason not to, but that's another story. When posed with the choices of mutations and factions, the choice can be overwhelming at first. Mutations are also tied to particular attributes, and mutation lines that will benefit from high intrinsic attribute scores will be most effective. Factions won't make much of a difference after the mutation line is unlocked, however. Upgrading and using the mutations are independent of your current factional allegiances. You can have someone who is allied with the faction in question purchase mutagenics books or injectors for you. Or you could get them from the Auction House as a last resort. In order to make this decision a bit easier I will attempt to describe the mutations in layman's terms. For the hard numbers, check the TAOWiki. For a more simplified breakdown of the mutations available to you in Fallen Earth, keeping reading below.
The Road to Mordor: Walking the virtuous path
Every Friday, The Road to Mordor brings you the latest in Lord of the Rings Online news, guides and analysis. LotRO's character building system is at once both flexible and a little intimidating to the new player. It combines several systems from other games -- including an achievement system (the Deed Log), collectible traits, skills that improve on use, easy reslotting – into a funky new beast. Frankly, I love being able to constantly tweak my build without having to scrap the whole thing and start all over with a maximum of fuss and funds. However, what always confused me when I was new to LotRO were the Virtue traits – honestly, I had no idea what they were or that they were even there until my third month of playing. The game doesn't give you a huge tutorial on Virtues, and when you do give them a solid glance, they're somewhat underwhelming: seemingly minor stat boosts in a variety of packages. So why bother getting them? Are they too much trouble for what they're worth? What's the best way to accumulating Virtues if not? That's what we're here to help you with. Speak, friend, and enter.
A chat with Check Six, WoW Arena team
The official Microsoft Sync blog (apparently the blog isn't official -- they fooled me) has posted a video interview (which you can see above) with Check Six, one of the high level World of Warcraft Arena teams showing up in tournaments lately. The video is somewhat tame, but that actually works in its favor -- this high-level Arena play can be complicated and hard to follow, and so simplifying it a little bit actually makes it more palatable. You high level Arena players won't get to hear their opinions on the latest builds or balance tweaks, unfortunately (for that, you can check out our Coliseum column), but the rest of us can at least put some faces to one of these team names floating around, and hear a little bit more about how these guys run these tournaments. They've been playing together for about two or three months, and they practice quite a bit: together, they do about ten or twelve hours a week, but I'd assume they play outside of the team as well. They say that WoW has a pretty "easy skill cap to reach," but after that, it's a matter of getting the right team members together, because they say teamwork is more important in Arenas than even a game like Counter-Strike ("CS"). And they kind of surprised me with how young they are -- it's a big deal to go running around the world and playing in tournaments when you're probably dealing with school and an early career at the same time. It's not the most well produced Arena interview you'll ever see, but I liked the frank look at the guys and what they're like away from their computers.
Working with Keynote builds
In Keynote (and also in PowerPoint), a build refers to the appearance and/or disappearance of elements (such as text, bullets, images, audio and movies) within a given slide. Working with builds is relatively straightforward. You select the item(s) that you want to create a build for and then choose the order to activate or deactivate each element. These controls are accessible via the Build Inspector pane, which you can get to by clicking on Inspector button or with the Command-Option-i keyboard shortcut. By default, builds are activated by a click with your mouse, or via the spacebar or right-arrow key on your keyboard. There may be times when you want to add some creativity and more Steve-ness to your builds, and automated builds provide you this functionality. In this picture, I have three elements that I want to "build in," or have appear, on the screen. I want "Who?" to show up first, "What?" to show up second, and "I don't know" to show up third Using the Keynote defaults, these elements would show up in the order that I click: "Who?" after the first click, "What?" after the second click, and "I don't know" after the third click. But let's say I wanted "What?" and "I don't know" to automatically appear in sequence after I click on "Who?" To do this, I just need to change the "Start Build" options of both elements. For the "What?" build, instead of choosing "On Click," I'm going to choose the "Automatically after Build 1." And for the "I don't know" build, I'm going to choose "Automatically after Build 2." Now, "What" and "I don't know" will automatically build in after "Who?" is clicked. One neat thing about automatic builds is that they can apply to "actions" as well. So if, in this baseball example, we want the elements to move to different bases after a build, we would apply the same "Automatically after..." logic to them. Got more Keynote tips (or want more)? Let us know in the comments.
Builds, powerhouses and tiny pets in Champions Online's new State of the Game
The big focus for this week's State of the Game for Champions Online is builds, which act as a way to switch your group role on the fly. The four flavors are: balanced, offense, defense and support -- or Guardian, Avenger, Sentinel and Protector, as they're known respectively in-game. Builds are part of a system that's designed to allow for more flexibility, and thus create characters who may be focused on defense for one mission and protection on another.Another point of interest are the addition of Powerhouses, which are the in-game training rooms where players can test out potential new powers before committing to them. They're also where retraining occurs as well, so consider them your one-stop shop for all power selection possibilities.As for the image you're seeing on our post, well, that's an action figure! Everyone loves chibi versions of characters and you can't have an MMO without tiny little personal pets following you around. So, who wants a mini-Foxbat? We know we do, because nothing's cuter than tiny super villains.
QuickArmory's Stats tool lets you browse and inspect popular talent builds
We've been covering quite a few different ways to see what players are up to in terms of talents after dual specs have been released (both 3D Armory and TalentChic have good information if you're looking for it), and here's another: Erorus at QuickArmory sent us some info on how to pull some talent demographics out of his site as well. He's created a Talent stats page that needs a little explanation, but is actually full of great info on what kinds of builds players are choosing. First, choose a class at the top, and then you'll be taken to a screen where you can see, in percentage points, the given percentage of players of that class who took those points on the tree. In other words, if you look at the Mage page, 62% (as of this writing) of Mages surveyed by the application took at least one point in Inceneration (and 61% took all the points), but only 1% of Mages put any points in Blazing Speed (probably because it sucks -- oh snap!). You can also see the percentage points by spec (by clicking the tabs at the top) and even some general distribution statistics on how people chose to spec within the dual spec system. And the main page for each class includes some percentages on glyph choices as well.But it gets wilder -- you can even compare populations by clicking on the talents, so you can look at, for example, all the Warlocks who specced Felguard (they're using Glyph of Felguard, duh), or all of the Hunters who specced both Explosive Shot and Aimed Shot.Very impressive. Of course, keep in mind the population here: these are only level 80 characters already in the QuickArmory system (about 12k as of this writing), so it's far from a representative sample of the entire WoW population. But then again, they're also self-selecting -- people who have put themselves into QuickArmory are likely to be more on top of good talent and glyph choices anyway. At any rate, even with the small selection, there are lots of fascinating ways to look at this talent data.
Save your specs with Talented
Respecs have been flying around lately like Prayer of Mending during a Sapphiron fight (healing priests, you know what I'm talking about). Several commenters have expressed annoyance at having to remember where exactly they placed those 71 points, and at having to click each of them back into place again. Heck, I would be annoyed myself, with three level 80s and various alts to manage. However, I don't get annoyed, because I have something that many of you apparently don't: Talented. Talented is an addon for managing talent specs, with several nice features:
Forum Post of the Day: Great Warrior literature
This thread, sent to us by reader Talmar (thanks!) is probably the best QQ thread I've ever read. Not because it's full of substantive criticism about the class, but just because it's got lots of references meant for literary nerds like me. The styles of Kafka, Shakespeare, Camus, Wilde, and Douglas Adams (who fits in that crowd, right?) all make appearances as players combine old literary quotes with the plight of Fury Warriors.And when Pynchon shows up on page 3, then the rails really go off the tracks. But it is a lot of fun. Because if you're going to QQ, you might as well do it in style, right?"Ghostcrawler believed in the perfect Fury build, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms our further... And one fine morning --So we grind on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Scattered Shots: Dual specs mean double the fun for hunters
Scattered Shots is your weekly guide to improving your Hunter skills, brought to you by Jessica "Lassirra" Klein of The Hunter's Mark, covering a variety of Huntery topics. Today, we'll be diving into what hunters will have to look forward to from the world of dual specs.So far the uproar about the dual spec feature coming to us in patch 3.1 has been predominantly from classes that are able to fill multiple roles in a raid environment, giving them more flexibility to swap between tanking, healing and dealing damage based on the needs of their group at the time. The 1000g price tag on this feature may seem a bit daunting to some, but the benefits of being able to swap between tanking and healing at a moment's notice without costly respec fees or inconvenient trips to the nearest not-so-nearby trainer are obvious. This all begs the question, though: what's in it for us pure DPS folks?The easy answer to that is being able to swap seamlessly from a PvP build to your raid build when invites start going out for the night. And lets not forget that Survival Hunters are the new Shadow Priest, right? If you're missing one of your friendly neighborhood mana batteries one night, you can swap into a spec for that at the drop of a hat. There are also plenty of opportunities for enterprising young Hunters looking to farm old world raid bosses solo, and there's a spec for that, too. There's plenty of fun to be had for us Hunters, and this new dual spec feature will make the transition from conquering the wilds of our world as a lone tracker to wiping the floor with the deadliest of raid bosses that much easier.
