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Breakfast Topic: The perfect partner
We've talked about playing with partners in the past. Many people reported that they enjoy sharing World of Warcraft with their significant others. I have to admit, time spent with my Mom on WoW has been a wonderful experience. I've been watching her explore classes and quests and I must say I am very proud of her. While sometimes solo play is the order of the day, it's great to have good company in the game. Just for fun I recently rolled new alts with my boyfriend. I wanted to play a Warlock and he wanted to play something complimentary, so he chose Priest. It's really awesome to be able to keep going non-stop with no mana breaks. I Life Tap, he Renews. With his Power Word Shield, we take very little damage. The two characters provide excellent synergy and seem to be the perfect pair. We've rolled together in the past, but usually we choose our characters based on what we want to play at any given time. When you roll with a partner do you choose classes that are complimentary?
Raid Rx: Basic healer raid design
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. Last week I promised you pink tutu's and syncronized healing moves. See that picture? That's all you're getting. Merry Christmas. Being a healer is about living with dissapointment (at the dps), ok? So anyways... You have 25-people chomping at the bit to see more than just Karahzan/ZA. W00t! But from a healing standpoint, who do you invite and how many? I'm here to help. Basic Raid DesignYou have 25 slots. About 6-8 of them will be healers, which is roughly the same ratio that you had in Karahzan and even old school 40-mans, if you can remember back that far. The rest of the raid will be a couple of tanks, some off-tanks, and loads of dps. On average, you'll have 7 healers, so that's going to be my basis. The key to Burning Crusade raiding is variety. Straight off, you're going to need one of each of the healing classes like I've said before. No joke. If you are missing a class, you're missing their utility. Yes, of course you can fake it for a while, but trust me - you will hit trick fights where each class becomes the critical one. /cough Hydross /end cough Start recruiting now to fill any gaps. Well, that's easy. Slap 4 people in raid slots and you're 57.1% done. The real question becomes what to do with the remaining 3 slots? Well, I'm not just here to look pretty in a pink skirt. Let's examine each healing class and what balance you should aim for.
Is Druid insta-shifting overpowered?
Serennia, a gnomish warrior on Tichondrius, believes that the changes to druid shape-shifting [shown in the video clip above] in patch 2.3 make it too easy for druids to get out of snares without being caught in their vulnerable caster form. She puts it very eloquently:In 2.3, druids can shift from any form to any form (ie cat to bear; bear to travel, etc) without having to enter human form. But, it gets worse, they can shift from the same form to the same form also (bear to bear). Why is this significant? It's basically a free snare removal without ever having to expose themself in human form, making it much more difficult for anyone to kill them. It still costs them mana to do it, yes, but it's an easy trade-off for never being locked in caster form with no armor anymore to get away from a melee. So much for those well-timed caster-form kidney shots, right? Druids needed help in 5v5 with a bit better caster form survivability, and they got that with the new Natural Perfection changes and a bit more utility. However, they did NOT need to be even harder to kill with this short-sighted change. Melee might as well not even attempt to catch a good druid anymore, and well, casters never could to begin with. She says that this may or may not be what Blizzard was intending when they decided to go ahead with this change, but for my part, I think it's a buff druids really need, especially feral ones, who are likely to get the most use out of insta-shifting between forms. I've said before that, although restoration druids enjoy a lot of success in PvP, it's very hard for many feral druids, and personally, I think this sort of mobility can help make up for other areas where the druid is not as strong, and can provide more synergy between the druid's different forms and abilities without some of the risks that made this synergy impractical before. What do you think?
Shifting Perspectives: That special versatility
It's often been said that druids are the three-in-one class: we can mimic warriors, priests, rogues (and even mages), but can't fulfill their respective roles as well as they themselves can. While in recent times druids have been able to gear up and perform as well as their parent classes in many respects, we are far from "warriors with stealth" or "rogues that can heal" or "priests that can off-tank in a pinch."Our problem as druids is that we cannot but neglect the full breadth of our abilities when we must specialize in only one aspect of our class. Of course, any class works best in situations where most or all their abilities might be needed to succeed, sometimes even in the course of a single fight -- it's just that for druids these abilities include tanking, damage, and healing all together. If you're playing with an experienced group, each player is likely specialized to one of these three roles, and his or her whole purpose is to minimize the chance that backup tanks, healers, and damage-dealers will be needed. That leaves druids trying to compete with warriors, rogues and priests (and mages), trying to do just as well at the same task, but with fewer abilities to call upon in the fight. Locked into these smaller roles, we must gear up and spend our talents in such a way that even if we were to shift out of our main role into another when the need arose, we wouldn't be able to do very well at it at all. This brings me to the adventure at hand: Today we will go on an journey of the imagination together, exploring the potential future of druids, considering how this problem of specialization versus versatility might be approached. Indeed, as I gaze into my crystal-ball-shaped paper-weight, I see two possible futures: one, called "The Path of the Pandering Pedant," seeks nit-picky perfection in a class designed for breadth and scope, while the other, "the Way of the Multitudinous Master" brings the full manifest of all our abilities into harmonious use with one another.
Meet Codemasters' new, synergistic face
Were you planning on buying Hospital Tycoon on June 7? No? Perhaps it's time to rethink that choice, because it'll be your first chance to play a game with the brand new Codemasters corporate identity. You see how that "C" just slides into the "M"? That's a little thing called synergy. Oh, you want to know more about synergy? Peep this incredibly awesome quote. "The identity can have different moods, depending on whether it is working or playing. When at work, such as corporate literature, it is very sophisticated, confident and businesslike," said director of marketing Nicola Hewitt, an actual human being. "However, when it is at play and being creative, on packaging and marketing materials, it's out to have more fun, try new things and to be enjoyed by everyone who comes into contact with it." We're serious. A human wrote that. We've got one more after the jump.
TUAW Desktop of the Week
This week's TUAW Desktop is a bit on the dark side ladies and gents; dark and interesting. Titled Blackness and Hailing from Flickr user Matt Lew (who *ahem* failed to include any details of what he has going on here), the primary ingredient here is the Ecto Wallpaper Pack which can be had at deviantART. I'm also seeing some text-based icon replacements in the right-aligned Dock (which I know I've seen before but I can't find a link), a minimal Adium theme and what looks like iTunes controls in the menubar which I believe are provided by Synergy. Of course, there's also a ShapeShifter theme going on here, though I'm not quite sure which one. All in all, Matt did a nice job of putting together an all-over black aesthetic using a wide variety of tools and tweaks. If you'd like to see your unique, functional or otherwise interesting desktop featured in our TUAW Desktops of the Week series, check out past featured desktops as well as the original post for the rules and to get an idea of what we're looking for. Then, upload your desktop screenshot to our TUAW Desktops Flickr group. We'll feature one or more desktops each weekend, giving credit to the desktop owner, wallpaper creator and any apps featured in the screenshot (if available). Keep those desktops rolling in!
Motorola Capri, a.k.a. the RAZR slider, previewed
The guys over at PhoneScoop have sure made the site live up to its name today: not only did they get some serious hands-on time with Motorola's upcoming RAZR slider -- codenamed Capri -- they also got to preview the next version of Moto's much-maligned Synergy UI that will show up in such models as the Canary and the SCPL. At least on paper, the Capri seems to offer a very compelling feature set that will probably attract anyone into the RAZR lifestyle- you're getting a model only slightly thicker and heavier than its clamshell counterpart, but which sports a 2.0 megapixel camera, A2DP-capable Bluetooth, and what sounds like a greatly improved user interface. Especially noteworthy in the overhauled Synergy is an address book that seems to work much more intuitively than past iterations (remember the one on the StarTAC?), allowing you to organize entries by name and search for contacts using multiple letters. Although Phone Scoop was only testing a pre-production model, they have identified some potential problems to watch out for on the final version, such as the unusually crappy quality of what should be a decent camera, and most importantly, a spring-assisted slider that's difficult to activate due to the raised antenna bulge so familiar to RAZR owners. Click on if you want to peep a few more snaps, but you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't head over to PhoneScoop for the full gallery and a very thorough write-up...
How-to: Sharing Keyboards and Mice with Synergy
Barb, over at Engadget, has posted a very detailed how to by Fabienne Serriere on using Synergy to share keyboard and mouse in real-time with multiple computers and she covers the Mac end of things nicely.
