Everyone likes to escape. Some people go to the beach. Some prefer the mountainous backcountry, some a darkened movie theatre. Dylan MacDonald’s refuge is a world of spells, sorcery and zombies. The 19-year-old Burnaby resident figures he spends the equivalent of four full days a week playing the role-playing card game Magic: The Gathering. He plays at home with friends. He plays online. He even ...
Lee Smith, left, duels with an opponent at his newly opened academy for the Western Martial Arts, Blood & Iron, in New Westminster. others also read...
What it ultimately comes down to is the difference between a necessary ability and one that is useful but not necessary. You also need to take iconic roles into account. I doubt many would support giving warriors Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Sanctuary, Lay on Hands, the paladin system of Auras, or what have you. The ability to die without taking equipment damage via Divine Intervention? How much, exactly, is Charge worth and if it's so pivotal to tanking why are you rolling a paladin to tank instead of a warrior? How do we keep classes compelling and interesting while giving them the tools to do the same job?
Continue reading Balancing class strength and flavor
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion
Balancing class strength and flavor originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Issue 212 of PC Gamer UK has hit the stands, and includes a fascinating six-page article with fifty reasons why lapsed subscribers should probably return to Azeroth. Forget the lapsed subscribers, there's enough information in here for current subscribers to drool over with unbridled glee. For those of you on this side of the pond, some highlights from the article. We requested comment from PC Gamer as to whether this information came directly from Blizzard, but we haven't yet received a response, so keep that in mind as we cover the highlights:
Reason number twelve: Cataclysm chooses fun over efficiency. The talent trees will be completely redone, something we've covered a little with previous posts on the new mastery system that will be made available. A quote from Tom Chilton states "I'd expect to see a further pruning of critical class buffs and debuffs, because it's still a little more restrictive than what we'd like to see. A lot of what Mastery and the talent changes are about is making sure that the choices players make about their character are interesting. Hopefully that will add character depth without making the game more complex."
Continue reading PC Gamer UK gives you 50 reasons to play Cataclysm
Filed under: News items, Cataclysm
PC Gamer UK gives you 50 reasons to play Cataclysm originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
World of Warcraft economy at stake because of cheap gold services viploan.co.uk It is found that a lot of confusions are emerging in these days regarding the World of Warcraft Economy and the cheap gold services. ... |
Gameplay First: Before anything else, you want to concentrate the game on the fun. All aspects of the game -- the design, the mechanics of encounters, the quests and story are focused on making the game fun to play. Not only fun to play -- but fun to play for players, not developers. The challenge is to keep players jumping through the correct hoops, while making those hoops fun. Sometimes this involves making some changes -- for example, only night elf males could be druids in Warcraft III, but for the sake of making the druid class, something that sounded like all kinds of fun, they had to be made accessible to both genders, and both sides. So the lore was adjusted so that females and tauren could both be druids -- otherwise they couldn't have introduced the class at all. And that wouldn't be any fun.
Continue reading Rob Pardo speaks about Blizzard game design
Filed under: News items
Rob Pardo speaks about Blizzard game design originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This year judges enjoyed spending time in Monaco and Limbo.
It's been a harsh week in my little corner of the world. Between attempting to get up for work, falling back down to sleep for 5 more hours, taking medications that I can't even pronounce the names of, and several other unpleasant things that have been plaguing me for the past five days; there's been little time for actual coherent thought in my life. So forgive me if this week's article is a little short (I can already hear people cheering) and slightly confusing. I promise to try and make this post as readable as possible, but I am bound to ramble on incoherently at some point; though I'm not entirely sure how that's any different from normal.
Last week, Shifting Perspectives took at look at the various possibilities for changing Eclipse. This week, that trend will continue as we explore ways in which or other problem, if less vilified, talent can be adjusted. Yes, folks, I'm talking about Nature's Grace. This long-standing talent that has been a staple in balance builds since WoW was released. Much like Eclipse, Ghostcrawler has already stated that Nature's Grace is high on the list to be changed. Also like Eclipse, many people wonder why Nature's Grace hasn't already been changed as it is so problematic. While Ghostcrawler mentions it's a big deal, many people fail to understand how big of a deal Nature's Grace really is.
Nature's Grace is an awesome talent. It is a tad over-budget, but not nearly as much as Eclipse is, and, honestly, having an over-budget talent here or there isn't necessarily a terrible thing in of itself. The only thing that plagues Nature's Grace is how easily it allows for Wrath to be GCD capped. Again, though, this isn't so terrible of a prospect in of itself. After all, this is a mechanic that balance druids have been dealing with since haste was introduced into the game. Wrath ramming into GCD issues like the Titanic hitting an iceberg only became problematic when balance druids also failed to turn just a little to the left during patch 3.2. Prior to patch 3.2, Wrath was maybe only 10% of our overall damage done, so any scaling issues that it had was fairly trivial. When patch 3.2 came around and Wrath jumped from 10% of our damage, or less, to being 40% or more of our damage, the scaling issues became a real problem.
Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Changing Nature's Grace
Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives
Shifting Perspectives: Changing Nature's Grace originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Chat Guilds and Auction Houses May Be Going Mobile: A new development from one gaming company lets you keep track of your online gaming from your phone.
PvP for a warrior has always been "die ten million times to other classes until you finally get geared enough to get some payback and then get nerfed because they don't like it when their free kill turns around and kills them back" anyway. This is just more of the same and not even really significant more of the same, it's a very minor change that only rankles because it's piled on the back of more significant (and in some cases more ridiculous) nerfs to the class. It irritates me, sure, but let's be honest: that's not terribly hard to accomplish.
Arms in general has been getting the crap end of the stick this expansion. It's ludicrously difficult to gear for it in PvP, it got outperformed by protection for a while, and in PvE you end up as a bleed bot for feral druids while the fury warriors scale better even with all the neat tricks arms can do. Of course, part of this is ye old 'hybrid tax' which penalizes you for playing a class that has a tanking spec. There have been back and forth arguments on that... is it fair, should it exist at all, what would become to pure DPS classes without it (oh, boo hoo, we must protect the poor vulnerable little rogues and mages, let's set up a bloody nature preserve for the precious little darlings so they won't be threatened) etc etc.
This week, I'm not here to debate whether or not it should exist or how it should be applied. It's here, we have to deal with it. Instead, I'm here to argue that due to the fact that it exists, DPS specs for warriors become even more important and must be as viable for as broad an application as possible. The time has come for the warrior to no longer have dedicated trees for specific roles. With the coming of Mastery, we're looking at an opportunity for real, meaningful change to the class that I hope Blizzard embraces. It's time for arms, fury and protection (yes, protection) to be viable tanking and DPS trees.
Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: I cannot see the future
Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Death Knight
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: I cannot see the future originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
