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Watch a man get stunned by the Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone (stun copter!)
You're gonna want to steer clear of this CUPID. The Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone, or "stun copter," can deliver 80,000 volts of pure projectile terror directly into the skin of an ill-intentioned hoodlum. This is serious business for Chaotic Moon, the folks behind SharkPunch and the Pizza Hut touch table. The Austin-based design studio created the flying machine as a tech demo, but CUPID could be quickly brought to production whenever a personal security or law enforcement client sees fit. This prototype unit is based on a Tarot Hexacopter, originally designed to carry a digital SLR for video and aerial photo shoots. With a Phazzer Dragon on board, however, a few modifications made this an entirely different beast.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Support in League of Legends doesn't mean healing
Out of all the roles in League of Legends, support is the most misunderstood. People expect supports to be similar to healing classes in other games, the kinds of characters who knit sweaters and cook dinner while the real warriors go out and fight on the front lines. When people first learn about the metagame, they often have the mistaken impression that because the support doesn't farm, there are fewer expectations of the playstyle. However, supports are less like MMO healers and more like the shortstop in baseball. He's not a baseman, but that gives him flexibility to be where a baseman can't be. He's constantly in the thick of the action, and his team regularly relies on him to make plays. In League, the support's freedom from farming gives her the freedom to roam, to fish for aggressive opportunities and shut down the enemy. She can even wander into mid lane or the enemy jungle in search of these opportunities. Far from a shrinking violet, the support is one of the biggest playmakers on her team. I got my start in LoL playing support, and it's a role I inherently understand well. I'm not really happy making aggressive lane plays and would prefer to relax and let my mechanics win my games for me (hence why I like ADC), but when thrust into the role of playmaker, I do reasonably well. For team leaders or just people who like to make others play by their rules, support is the role of choice.
Scattered Shots: Scatter-trapping with grace and ease
Frostheim appears to be decimated, unable to write this week, over the loss of the most recent raiding gun from the patch 4.3 PTR files. As someone who PVPs to get my first raiding weapon of most patches, I can choose whichever ranged death-dealing machine I want. Of course, as a Worgen (not to mention someone who is generally the butt of many of Frostheim's jokes on our podcast), I usually choose a crossbow after buying, returning and screenshotting the gun. Today, Scattered Shots will be all about a very basic hunter PVP survival skill: scatter-trapping. All hunters of all specs can scatter-trap, and whether you're being ganked doing dailies, trying to win Baradin Hold, or doing competitive Arena, it's one of those skills that can really set you apart. Traps on their own are only useful for people you can force to cross through them. Mostly, this means melee, although you can sometimes force a ranged player to cross a trap if you're humping a pillar properly. What do we do when we want to freeze someone who isn't chasing us, though? Freezing Trap is really our most effective crowd control ability. We'll often want it to be used on someone that matters like a healer. Unfortunately, short of stepping up to a healer and dropping a trap on them, there's no way to force them to cross our path.
BodyGuard stun-glove leaps out of comic books, into the arms of LA Sheriff's Department
What's better than a seasoned crime fighter? How about a seasoned crime fighter packing a 300,000-volt punch? A new prototype stun-glove is poised to make such Robocop-inspired dreams a reality, integrating a non-lethal taser, LED flashlight, and laser guided video camera into a fetching piece of futuristic armor. Activated by pulling out a grenade-like pin and palming an embedded finger pad, the Armstar BodyGuard 9XI-HD01 sparks a loud and visible arc of electricity between its wrist-mounted taser spikes, a sight that inventor David Brown hopes will encourage would-be crooks to surrender. The gauntlet's hard plastic shell is even roomy enough to add GPS equipment, biometrics, chemical sensors, or other embedded additions, as needed. The first batch of pre-production superhero gloves will hit the streets of LA later this year for testing and evaluation. Need more? Check out the via to see Kevin Costner (what field of dreams did he walk out of?) take the edge off this shocker in a surprisingly dull video.
Addon Spotlight: LoseControl
Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, take back control of your life with LoseControl. Give me an A! Give me a -ddon! Give me a Spotlight! What's that spell? A half-assed attempt at an engaging introduction for this week's Addon Spotlight! Does that lame joke make you want to charge my office and do physical harm to me? Well, good, because this week's addon is a PvP-centric tool that can help you regain control of your character and potentially your sanity. One of the worst feelings is losing control of your character. In fact, as a design decision, many MMOs including WoW limit the amount of player abilities that cause a player to lose control of their avatar. No one likes losing total control for a long time -- it just isn't fun! Balance reasons aside, there is a reason that most stuns, CC options, and other abilities are on short timers.
Forum post of the day: Stunted stuns
Badeggplant of Hyjal is frustrated that Starfall will lose its random-proc stun effect from Celestial Focus in patch 3.0.8. In her eyes this removes the utility of the spell and makes it a poor use of mana with a long cool down. She believes that the damage from the spell should be increased to replace the missing stun.What's interesting about this thread was Ghostcrawler's response. Blizzard is working to remove random proc stuns, such as this one, but also mentioned that Blackout will soon be on the blacklist. He claims that Blizzard is "waging a war" against random stun effects. Many are concerned that Impact will also be impacted.
Spiritual Guidance: Dispersion just wants to love you
Welcome to Spiritual Guidance, where each week Matt Low talks about the ins and outs of the Priest class. Now and then one of our resident Shadow Priests, Alex Ziebart, hits Matt over the head and hijacks the column. This is one of those occasions. Dispersion is a talent that Shadow Priests talk about a lot. The vocal majority hates it. The vocal minority loves it. The general populace... uh. Who knows. They don't talk. Me? I'm not awed by it. I also don't hate it. In fact, I've spent talent points in it and will continue to do so, and I find it fairly useful. It just doesn't amaze me.Dispersion definitely has a PvP slant to it. If you arena or BG, you're going to see it as much, much more awesome than people who PvE almost exclusively. In the arena, it's just a good talent, especially once they changed the talent to be able to be used while stunned, feared and silenced. Foiling a stunlock or an assist train can be enough to take the wind out of your opponent's sails. Obviously it requires your partner(s) being able to play off of it as well, but I'm fine with that. PvP should be about the team, even if you're just in a battleground.
Skill Mastery: Master's Call
First appearing as an 11-point Beastmastery talent, Master's Call is now a new baseline skill for Hunters in the Wrath Beta. With this skill, your pet will rush to your target and remove all existing movement impairing effects or stuns on the target, and cause them to be immune to them for 4 seconds. It can be used while you are stunned. This is certainly a handy ability to have. In PvP, this should be awesome for getting away from Warriors and Rogues. In PvE, there's bound to be bosses and mobs with slow and stun effects, and this little skill could in theory, save a wipe.
New CoX patch takes some of the punch out of Energy Melee
We knew this one would be controversial. There's a new patch hitting the CoX live servers today. Along with some welcome fixes for the buff icon issues players have been complaining about, as well as a collection of other changes including fixes to suicidal pets and NPCs, there are changes to Energy Melee in its various versions that have had the forums abuzz with debate. The changes were to 'better balance' the powerset, while keeping Energy Melee as the king of single target burst damage.The changes that have most players up in arms are the nerf to the stun dealt by Total Focus and an animation change to Energy Transfer, changes that hit the Tank, Brute and Stalker classes. The new animation, while more visually impressive than the old, is slower; an Energy Transfer used to take one second, and now takes 2.67 seconds. (For those that don't know, Energy Transfer is a damaging attack that also has a good chance to stun.) Despite the usual high levels of communication from the developers, some players are unhappy and consider this a crippling nerf; however, nobody seems to be particularly surprised that some form of nerfing has taken place. Energy Melee really was that good.
New CoX patch on Test makes stunning changes
A new patch has gone to the City of Heroes test server today. Courtesy of the European CoX forums, we've been able to take a look at the patch notes a little in advance. It's another round of fixes and tweaks, and we're particularly pleased to see the dual pistol wielding Lady Jane has been given a stern talking-to and instructed not to rush into combat like a maniac any more. The 48 month Veteran Reward pets are similarly non-suicidal - for real this time.The controversial change, though, must surely be the adjustment of Total Focus: 'All player versions of Total Focus Disorient Magnitude reduced to 3.' For those who don't know, Total Focus is a double-handed overhead smash that previously dealt a Magnitude 4 disorient. That's one of the most powerful stun effects in the game, enough to send a boss staggering and temporarily helpless.
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.
