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Massively in Moria: Hands on with the Warden
The Warden is one of the two new classes releasing in Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria on November 18th. It is considered a tank of sorts, yet uses medium leather armor instead of plate, and wields both a spear for melee combat, and a javelin for ranged combat. They're considered the guardian angels of Middle-earth, and specialize in special skill combinations called Gambits that can let the player adjust their skill needs on the fly, according to a particular situation. While they may not be the heaviest hitters or the most heavily-armored, their flexibility and adaptability in combat is where the Warden really shines.After spending several weeks in the Moria beta, we're going to approach this article as a hands-on piece, without spending too much time with stats and figures. Turbine has just released a dev diary showcasing the Warden with a wonderful summary of the basics of the class. We highly recommend using that article as a learning tool, and this one as our general impressions of the Warden in certain situations. We'll go through some of the skills that you'll get with the higher-level Warden, explain some useful Gambits, discuss solo-ability vs. group play and then give our final impressions. Follow along through the link below to see what we thought. Skills and Gambits >>
Dinner with the multiboxers
I wish I'd been invited to this at BlizzCon -- TGDaily sat down with a group of multiboxers last weekend, and lived to tell the tale. I don't think multiboxers are the most hated people in the game (Paladins and Warlocks probably get to trade off that title), but it's true that just like twinks, they can draw some ire. Blizzard has given them a free pass in the game (most likely because they're spending ungodly amounts of money keeping up their fleets of characters), but apparently multiboxers are just people. People willing to shell out lots of money and time on overpowering themselves inside a game.And that's really where the issue lies -- most of these people aren't no-lifers, they're just folks with money to burn that want to trounce a battleground all by themselves or run Karazhan solo. But at the same time, there is a sense of superiority that comes across -- they brag (under their breath in a crowded restaurant) that they can beat anyone else's player, and they claim that "other people can only see a quarter of the game," which just patently isn't true. This is a generalization I'm making, of course, but playing 10 characters by yourself seems to give an inflated sense of self-worth in the game (after all, aren't you 10 times better than someone playing with just one character?) and that could be the reason that multiboxers have the reputation they do.
BlizzCon 2008: Day 2 class panel
I know what you're thinking. "Didn't we have a class panel yesterday?" Well, of course we did, but as exciting as it was we had to come back for a second helping. We're live on the BlizzCon show floor, bringing you the latest class news and information straight from the developers' mouths and starting... right now! For the details as they happen, read on.
Daedalus Project updated
Nick Yee's excellent MMORPG survey and data site, the Daedalus Project, has been updated with new survey results on the following topics: Guild demographics: What influences players to choose certain guilds, how attached they become, the likelihood of their knowing guildies in real life, and how long they stay. What I find fascinating here is the graph displayed above -- 26% of surveyed players have been with their guild 2 years or more. Alex Ziebart mentioned the other day that his guild has been together so long across multiple games that guild chat's gone from talk of teenage dates to coaching expectant parents through morning sickness. I get the feeling that this is only going to become more common in long-haul games like Second Life and WoW. Character creation: How players choose characters, the elements of character selection they consider most important, and whether classes and races tend to be researched extensively before they're picked, or chosen based on impulse. Character class seems to matter to the most people; starting area the least.
BlizzCon 2008: Class panel liveblog
WoW Insider is doing a lot of coverage today here at BlizzCon in Anaheim, C.A. We've already live-blogged the opening ceremony, the U.I. panel and discussion, and up next will be the live blog of the class panel at 4:30 EDT / 1:30 PDT.Right now we're live-blogging the class panel in the main hall. This panel will feature discussion of where the classes are headed, why things are done the way they are, and perhaps even announcements about multispecs and new features.The full live-blog happening after the break!EDIT: Pics added throughout!
Breakfast Topic: Will the classes be balanced in time?
Now we know. The clock is ticking. Blizzard has given themselves a deadline by which they have to get the expansion and all of its nifty features into our hands. This in itself isn't that hard, I'm sure. The hard part is getting the expansion to us in a state that we enjoy. Polished. Finished. Done.Case in point here is the essential balancing element between the classes in terms of how they perform versus one another in PvE and PvP. Looking at the current state of things on the beta, many people have been looking at the amount of balancing work left to be done, then looking at the time Blizzard has left to do it, and thinking that our favorite little company that could isn't going to make it.Then again, most of the people saying this are players of one particular class or another. Very few have the ability to stand back and see all the classes at once from a very knowledgable and objective point of view, how they interact with one another and what their various strengths and offsets are. Most players see the entire game from their little own little vantage point, and are apt to view their class's shortcomings as serious failures of game design rather than areas in which they'll need to get their friends of other classes to come help them and work as a team. Sometimes, after playing for a while, the general playerbase realizes that the huge nerfs everyone was yelling and screaming about just a little while ago aren't really that bad, and the game is still very enjoyable regardless.What do you think? Are the classes going to be balanced by the time the expansion goes live? Or are the actually more balanced than they seem, even now? Is it going to be a huge disaster with just a few classes stomping all over the others, or is Blizzard going to pull some magic rabbits out of their hat just in the nick of time? Will we see tons of post-launch minor adjustments, or certain classes just languishing for months at a time, or will it all turn out to be okay pretty much from the beginning?
Back to School: An Apple for the teacher
TUAW's going Back to School! We'll be bringing you tips and reviews for students, parents and teachers right up until the bell rings in September.Going back to school isn't all about the students; the educators are often just as excited or stressed out as the kids about the beginning of a new school year. What can make life easier on the poor teacher? Great Mac software! Read on for information on a grab bag of Mac and web apps to help out your favorite educator.
Breakfast Topic: What will you play in Wrath?
Wrath of the Lich King's launch will bring us a host of talent changes and the first new class since World of Warcraft hit the MMO scene. Are we about to see a real Death Knight spree? Are Paladins about to be all the rage? Today, you tell us: what class are you going to be playing in Wrath?%Poll-18281%
Beta class changes on the way
MMO-Champion has posted a list of changes that are seemingly going to go live in the WotLK Beta with the next patch. The official talent calculators have also been updated to reflect the changes. Here is an overview of some of the major changes on the way:Death Knights Blood: Will of the Necropolis and Frost Aura buffed, and Blood Gorged will affect on melee damage. Unholy: Corpse Explosion and Unholy Aura buffed. Improved Corpse Explosion will have a longer effect time until full damage is done. Druid Moonkin Form and Force of Nature will have a reduced cooldown. Those spells, in addition to Tree of Life Form, will have set mana costs instead of a percentage of base. Balance: Typhoon and Starfall will have increased range, but will also cost significantly more mana. Restoration: Flourish will cost less mana (585 to 450), but it will also heal for less (1610 to 672). Feral: Primal Tenacity will be changed back to a chance to resist stun and fear effects by 5/10/15%. The range of Faerie Fire is being increased by six yards. Hunter (Survival) Hunting Party will be nerfed. It will now have at most, a 60% chance to proc on a critical strike, instead of 100%. Mage Arcane: Arcane Impact will be called Spell Impact, and will affect Blast Wave, Fire Blast, Ice Lance, and Cone of Cold, in addition to the current effects on Arcane Explosion and Arcane Blast. There will be a new tier 3 talent called Student of the Mind, which will increase spirit by 4/8/12%. Potent Spirit has been removed. Arcane Potency will require one point in Presence of Mind instead of five in Arcane Concentration. New tier 8 talent called Arcane Flows. It requires one point in Arcane Power, and reduces the cooldown on your Presence of Mind, Arcane Power and Invisibility spells by 30 seconds. Netherwind Presence, rather than causing several of your spells to have a chance to grant you an instant spell, will increase spell haste by 2/4/6%.
E308: A glimpse into The Agency's guilds and classes
In our recent talk with Matt Wilson at E3, we were given a lot of really illuminating information about classes and guilds in the upcoming SOE title, The Agency. It would seem that the Agency crew is doing a very good job of listening to many of the frustrations of MMOG players, while taking the time to study popular games like Team Fortress 2. If you've been wondering about the different classes and abilities, as well as social structure in this upcoming MMOFPS, then you'll be interested to hear what's in the works.Massively: What are the classes or archetypal roles in The Agency?Matt Wilson: Our four primary classes are basically Combat, which is the ability to have weapons and have high defenses. Stealth, which is more of a high-DPS, sniper rifles and other things that you take into battle, [Undercover] Stealth which is very important, which is sneaking around and distractions. And finally, there's the Support classes like your Medics and Field Techs. Field Techs are about defense, turrets, other cool things like that. Medics are more about supporting the team, being able to support med stations while you're out in the field, heals, that kind of thing. Those are the general archetypes. Then we have specialties that fall out of those, allowing players to specialize further in each class.
Spiritual Guidance: The new age raiding Holy Priest
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is now Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. For the next few weeks, I'll be taking a look into the depths of Black Temple from a Priestly perspective. I was planning on finishing my Black Temple guide but the lure of all this awesome beta news is simply too hard to ignore! I'll have to postpone the guide for a rainy day. Fellow WoW Insider blogger Alex Z. has a terrific analysis of the new Priest talents! It's an excellent analysis of how the Priests will be come the expansion. This week, I want to go further in depth on not just new spells and abilities that Priests bring to a raid but how changes to the other classes will be affecting us. I'll also touch a bit on threat, my thoughts on Lightwell, and the raid viability of Discipline.
Mark Jacobs clarifies the loss of Warhammer classes, cities
Yesterday's unexpected news of deep cuts into Warhammer Online's at-launch content is still sending shockwaves through the fan community. It seems like it's just been a whirlwind of WAR news of plate, with the announcement of the Guild Beta and the reacquisition of the Mythic Entertainment name close on the heels of the content losses. In the forums at the largest WAR fansite, Warhammer Alliance, Mythic VP and General Manager Mark Jacobs attempted to further clarify what prompted these dramatic announcements.Jacobs and WAR community coordinator James Nichols have been on the front lines of this discussion. Jacobs in particular has offered up two lengthy posts on the issue, providing Mythic's viewpoint on both the classes and cities pulled. On the class front, it sounds as though these offerings simply weren't coming together from a design perspective. Jacobs even goes so far as to say that new classes may be put in their place if they can't 'get them right' post-launch. The pulled cities, on the other hand, will probably be added to the game at a later date. For now, the team wanted to focus the energy of the players and the developers into two red-hot points. There's a ton of perspective on this issue in the forum posts - make sure to check them out.
Tank Talk: Building and keeping your tanking corps, Part I
Tank Talk is WoW Insider's new raid-tanking column, promising you an exciting and educational look at the world of getting the stuffing thrashed out of you in a 10- or 25-man raid. The column will be rotated amongst Matthew Rossi (Warrior/Paladin), Adam Holisky (Warrior), Michael Gray (Paladin), and Allison Robert (Druid). Our aim is to use this column to debate and discuss class differences, raid-tanking strategies, tips, tricks, and news concerning all things meatshieldish. This week on Tank Talk I'd like to step outside the technical aspects of being a tank and focus more on the psychosocial side of things. In particular I want to look at what happens when a tank is introduced into a tanking corps of a new guild, how to keep current tanks around, and how to deal with all those old tanks that have been in the guild forever.For lack of a better phrase, I'll call the time from when a tank joining the guild until their eventual status as "god of all things tank" the life span of a tank. And perhaps the most important part of a tanks life is the new part, and it's something that I've been on both sides of the coin – the one doing the inviting, and the one being invited. Each is equally exciting. When joining a new guild I had not only the opportunity to see new content and progress to new heights, but also an opportunity to improve my skill and focus my ability to tank a mean game. And when I became class lead and eventually the guild's leader, I gained an opportunity to help new tanks become acquainted with our style of game play and watch them succeed and excel within the guild.I like to look at there being mainly fives stages of a tank's life within a guild: Recruitment, Applicant, Raider, Senior Tank, and Mentor. Let's take a look at each of these and see how people in various stages can help usher a new tank into a guild's tanking corpse while keeping the old tanks around and happy. Since this is a long subject, today I'll cover the recruitment and applicant stages in a tank's life, with the raider, senior tank, and mentor stages coming in the second installment tomorrow.
Summer update adds Merchant class to Dream of Mirror Online
Gametribe, the European carrier of Dream of Mirror Online (run in North America by Aeria Games), announced a new game update this weekend. The update will go live on the 25th, and it will add a new class to DoMO -- the Merchant. The Merchant "uses money to fight and create powerful attacks." Sounds cool, but expensive!The update will also feature a handful of new quests, including a couple new steps to the main quest. The item mall will see the addition of greedy inventory bags. Unsurprisingly, those will increase a character's maximum inventory. Some new visual character customization options will be added as well.We've given kudos to DoMO for its art style in the past. Brenda Holloway (one of the staff bloggers here at Massively) even wrote that it's better than World of Warcraft. Don't scoff until you've tried it! If you have an aversion to microtransactions, though, maybe you should just take our word for it and move on.
Massively covers Dungeons and Dragons Online's Module 7
DDO's Module 7 goes live today, and boy, if you're looking for information about it, you're in the right place. Massively has been covering Module 7 since before Module 6 dropped, and just in case you missed out on any of our great coverage, it's right here for your perusing pleasure. Live at Connect '08, we provided coverage of the DDO panel, including a first look at the Monk class Turbine released in this patch. Shortly after that, we chatted with the woman herself, DDO Senior Producer Kate Paiz, on what worked well with Module 6, and everything else they were planning in Module 7 and beyond. We covered "Monk Week" and the official Turbine events leading up to the game. Not only did we provide great original coverage, but we aggregated coverage from around the 'net, including other interviews with Ms. Paiz, as well as official info drops (and did you take advantage of your chance to grab the soundtrack?) And finally, Massively's got the dungeonmaster of all Module 7 previews, including the number one reason you'll want to roll a Monk, a look at the Gary Gygax shrine and the new midlevel content, the new high level instances and bosses, and even an exclusive video preview of what you'll see in Module 7 (which you'll find right after the break). We critted on the coverage of this new patch (going live today), and you get to be the one to claim all the loot. Before you sign in and check out Module 7 today, be sure to check all the links above and read about it here.%Gallery-23551%
Sweeping changes to Hellgate: London in Abyss Chronicles
Hell is about to get even hotter, as Flagship Studios prepares to unleash fresh content for Hellgate: London. Our sister blog Big Download has some posted new screenshots of the upcoming Abyss Chronicles for HG:L, as well as info on the 2.0 and 2.1 updates to the title. Patch 2.0 will be Hellgate: London's second major content update, and brings with it a host of new features and changes to the game. The build is likely to go live on the Test Server in the next week, but until then, here's Big Download's breakdown of the 2.0 changes: A new quest line that covers the spread of the Abyss through Parliament Square and the survivors' efforts to fight back A major rebalancing of the Blademaster class A complete PvP overhaul, including achievements, rankings, rewards, and a new CTF team gametype Changes to the Shared Stash, such as a separate pane for each difficulty Addition of two new trinket slots for players to add rings and such to their characters An attribute respec NPC that allows players to remove points from an attribute for a fee-per-point Three new skills for each class A consignment house (read: auction house) where players can sell stuff to other players without direct trading Beyond rolling out The Abyss Chronicles with 2.0, the next area Flagship Studios is focusing on is PvP through Patch 2.1. The patch will 'open up an entirely new side to Hellgate: London' by introducing five cohesive elements of PvP in a single update: ranking, matchmaking, rewards, achievements, and Capture the Flag. The end result is what Flagship describes as 'a robust PvP experience.'
AoC feats calculator released into the wilds
World of Warcraft's various talent calculating applications have always been an essential item in every player's toolbox. An empty talent tree is rife with possibilities; who do you want to be, and how might you become that awesome person? Most importantly: how much longer will you have to grind before you finally get Silencing Shot? Talent calculators helped you figure all that out.We don't doubt that a similar tool will be just as important for players of Age of Conan. Neither did Ten Ton Hammer; that's why the folks there released a fully functional feats calculator to coincide with with AoC's public launch. All the classes are there, everything seems accurate, and the interface is pretty good; it's a great tool. Go forth, fledgling barbarians, and calculate your paths to greatness!
An in-depth look at class design in favor of the hybrid
When it comes to choosing your class, we don't usually think much past the basics of the class's design, and of course how awesome you'll look in your favorite armor. But there's so much more to designing a balanced character class in an MMO than you might expect.Recently, in a wonderful article at Gamasutra, John Hopson takes a look at the importance of designing a class from the most effective standpoint needed in an MMO. It doesn't have to do with the most efficient design, or the most powerfully specialized, but it's more about the situation you're in at that time. This is why his argument in favor of a hybrid class design is so compelling. Approached as a comparison to economics, it all makes perfect sense, and it will certainly open your eyes to what class designers are focusing on in current MMOs, and more importantly, future MMOs.
Player vs. Everything: Coolest classes ever
For most fantasy MMOGs, the basic classes you can expect to be playing aren't too hard to predict. Whether you're a stalwart warrior with shield in hand, a crafty mage raining fiery bolts of destruction, a sneaky rogue with poison on his knife, or a benevolent cleric healing the wounds of his allies, you make up part of what's known as the holy trinity of MMOs: Tank-DPS-Healer. You need someone to get your foe's attention, someone to whack them over the head until they die, and someone to keep everyone alive until that happens. Everything else is just icing on the cake. We can debate the merits of that particular combat system as long as you like, but what I really wanted to point out is how boring those three specialized roles are. The four archetypes I mentioned are a staple in almost every single fantasy MMOG on the market, but they're far from the most interesting ones. While it's true that you can't get by without them, they've become so vanilla-flavored at this point that they're practically passé. Whenever I log into a new game and look at their class list, I wince a little. "Oh, a chance to be a brave warrior... again. Hmm. Mage? Rogue? Meh." I've always been a big fan of classes that went against the grain, played outside the box, and did something a little different from the "core" classes. Not everyone needs to fit nicely into those three archetypal slots. The classes that don't often turn out to be the most rewarding and fun to play, in my experience. That said, I thought I'd take a look at some of the more interesting class designs in the games I've played and discuss what made them so cool.
Ask Massively: All you need to know about classes in Tabula Rasa
Just in time for your weekend reading pleasure, it's yet another edition of Ask Massively, purveyor of advanced philosophy for MMORPG addicts far and wide since Paris Hilton was a tramp-in-training. This week is a homecoming of sorts for us here at Ask Massively. The past several columns have all been high-level philosophical treatises on MMORPG philosophy. What makes an MMORPG successful? Should certain games really be classified as MMO's? Will World of Warcraft realize its vision of intergalactic conquest and turn us all into gibbering idiots while feeding at their gaming trough like starving piglets?The ivory tower is a fun place to visit, but it's not healthy to stay there too long. This week, we're going to get into the nuts-and-bolts of Tabula Rasa, NCSoft's latest and greatest entry into the universe of MMORPGs.Dear Massive-headI just picked up a copy of Tabula Rasa, and I'm a bit lost. I knew that there were not mages, necromancers, rogues, or bards in this game, but I'm having a difficult time trying to decide what I want my character to be. I can see that some classes are fairly obvious analogs to classes that I am familiar with from other games, but some of the others are downright confusing. I like the look and feel of the game so far, but what's a noob to do?-Bill S.Well, Bill, you're in luck. I think I can answer this one for you. I have been playing Tabula Rasa for a few weeks now, and I might be able to help you map the similarities between TR's classes and classes from games that you know and love.If you have a question for us here at Ask Massively, then drop by our tipline or send us an email to ask AT massively DOT com. I'd like to add that I really don't need cheap copies of Microsoft Office or Windows Vista, so if you're selling those, you might want to go somewhere else.
