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Encrypted Text: No'Kaled makes its claim for the throne
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. If you're frequenting any of the rogue community sites, you've seen the question: Should I be using No'Kaled? While assassination and subtlety rogues can blindly equip the legendary quest daggers at each stage, combat rogues have to make a decision. As I've said for years, rogues spec for their weapons. You need to round up all of your available weapons, and then mix and match to find the right combination. There are three different levels of No'Kaled, and there are also three stages of daggers we receive from Wrathion. Between all of these weapons, there are nine different possible combinations that you could have today. Your personal arsenal of weapons is dependent on your Elementium Gem Cluster acquisition rate and your luck with Madness of Deathwing drops, but chances are that you have at least one version of both the quest daggers and No'Kaled.
Encrypted Text: Turning murder into legendaries
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here. Patch 4.3 is now live, and with it comes plenty of new additions. You can spend your time playing games at the newly revamped Darkmoon Faire, or you can play dress-up by transmogrifying your old tier sets. The developers buckled down and cranked out three new dungeons, complete with a plethora of new gear and valor point options. The new dungeons are also bristling with new lore moments and plot exposition, giving us insight into Deathwing's madness. But you're not here for that. You're not reading this post because you can't wait to hear what fashion style I'll be transmogging to. (A pirate, FYI.) You couldn't care less about tossing rings or commanding tonks on Darkmoon Island. Dungeon guides can wait. If you're as black-blooded as I am, then there's only one thing on your mind: Who does a rogue have to kill around here to get a pair of legendary daggers?
Five MMOs better than World of Warcraft - Part 1
For our first game, we choose SOE's EverQuest. The Elder Game. When it launched in 1999, nobody was quite sure yet just what you DID in an MMO. Sure, join groups and kill stuff, but is that it? In its early years, it was largely just a chat room in glorious 3D. Monster killing was almost secondary, which was fine, because it took so long to pull and kill one and then recover from it. Straight through their second expansion, Ruins of Kunark, many groups were without any sort of healer, and a high bandaging skill was prized. Absent any sort of real goal to the game, players were content to build a strong community, participate in role-playing events, and by the way, set the stage for most every modern MMO. The EQ developers scattered content everywhere. By their second expansion, they thought players might enjoy gaining favor with NPC factions and working together to take down the big monsters. By the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, they were convinced of it – but they gave a nod to the casual play community by making a new race, the feline Vah Shir; an entirely new path to max level (the second time they'd done that), and some of the most solo and small group friendly zones in the entire game. On their fifth expansion, they implemented the raid tool – instead of various groups working separately to kill, they would all be gathered into one raid. At the time of the Planes of Power, EQ had made the template that many later games would follow.EQ had its problems, and they were big ones. It was nearly impossible for most classes to solo effectively. Top guilds had insane recruiting gauntlets that more or less shut out new people. The game was so incredibly huge by then that nobody could ever see more than a fraction of the place. Opaque keying requirements meant most content was locked behind raids, which shut out non-raiders. And the raiders were left with little to do but raid. When World of Warcraft went live, people flocked to it, and EQ's fortunes went into a steep decline. Since then, though, they have drastically overhauled the game. There is still no better game for large-scale raids – the maximum size for new raids is an incredible 54 people – and the waiting around for health and power to recover has been largely eliminated by rapid recovery when not in combat. If your joy in life is raiding, there is still no better game out there than the original EverQuest. It's had many imitators, EQ has the straight, uncut stuff with no compromises. Find out which MMO we think has a better PVP experience ==>>
