Blog Posts from "Sciar's Game Emporium" - Gameriot.com

Current WoW Arena standings: Main focus Death Knights since I play one

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:28:36 -0400

Arena changes incoming : Hotfixes and you

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:24:42 -0400

With the release of this movie and it getting widespread attention as of yesterday, here's a recent patch note:

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I'm also very curious to see the results of battlegrounds awarding top end gear based on skill not grind time. It's kindof like how some players dont like dedicating all their time to Raiding so they made heroic gear on par with ulduar 25 man. Yknow because we all love playing with retards in greens so we can get our stuff, somebody mail me a bot I need more honor gear.

Why pet classes suck and you should avoid playing one

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:51:11 -0400

Visual proof.

Lock pets are fine

Video details (If you stream and can't see anything) I ran the in game stopwatch, This rogues in mostly S3 gear as he hasn't been played until recently in S4.

From pet open to pet kill 6 seconds, from 1 rogue. Try keeping that thing alive in arenas on a game built around long forms of spammable crowd control. It's only 20% of my incoming damage, my dispel and my counterspell. Yknow the kind of stuff that loses you games if it goes down.

http://files.filefront.com/Lockpetwmv/;11627047;/fileinfo.html

My warlock has 13.5k hp and 503 resilience while still rolling 1250 spell damage. Doesn't mean a thing when my retard pet with 6.5k hp (buffed because of good warlock gear) goes down hard.

Warhammer open Beta update, Let me play damnit

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:08:38 -0400

After finding out a day too late that if you punched in your CE beta key you got into closed beta (My friend just happened to forget to mention this to everyone else and is now being a giant douche rubbing it in everyones face that he got in and we didn't) I anxiously awaited the 15th. It was open beta download day and that meant that sooner rather than later they better open up the damn servers. I paid my $10 preorder I deserve to try out their game to figure out if the rest of the game should be purchased.

Aug 15th rolled around however and the download wasn't available. They figured out that allowing a 10gb file to be downloaded via torrent was a bad idea, I could've told you that but at least Mythic is picking up on these things before they open it up to be a ****hole. So they delayed open beta download till today, monday the 18th.

Perfect I thought they're going to host on their dedicated servers, a few friends of mine already set up a system to get ahold of the beta client so we could be ahead of the game and the 18th seemed like a sign. That's exactly 1 month away from game release, a perfect duration for open beta don't you think? So did I until I logged on vent this morning and saw the channel comment

OPEN BETA STARTS SEPT 7TH!

What kind of crap is this anyways? If I had just plugged in my key I would've gotten into closed beta Aug. 12th with all the other people who thought to use an open beta key 3 months early instead of waiting for open beta like those of us who used logic.

Good thing open beta is going to last a week, great amount of testing don't you think? If anyone knows how to get my CE to let me in as of today please drop a line, either way I thought I could at least inform the general public over at GR that the WAR OB is Sept 7th. I have no idea where this is announced as it doesn't show on warhammeronline.com that I can see, but rest assured if my idiot friends have slapped that comment up they've figured it out from somewhere.

Streak gives first person perspective on PvP (Video)

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:27:55 -0400

Well I talked about this a while back (I believe Roma Victor helped spawn the idea, thanks Roma) about having a PvP match recorded with voices. Well the original concept was to listen to the extreme fighting that goes on with top rated matches but unfortunately I couldn't get this working on the Test Realm when the screaming matches went on. But I did get this up and running I got in a few matches as an example.

Lets face it these are not my shining moments collected over months and months of PvP these are just two quick matches of me winning (Booya?) on a team that frankly we're only 1900 so far, so we're not doing overly well.

What this does offer however is a first person look at how an arena match goes. Our druid just returned to WoW and hardly speaks but instead of some gimmky crap music I decided to feed ventrilo into this. Anyways check it out (I suggest full version I have a widescreen monitor and the UI looks extremely cluttered if you just stream it, but you should still get the idea)

Quick Points
-Yes I opened my bags to bandaid, I'm that awesome
-The beepboop of ventrilo going on means I'm holding my mic button, so when you hear that it's me speaking if you couldn't figure it out already
-My teammates have seen the video but have no idea I'm posting it here, hope they don't mind
-My paladin is named Sciar, warlock is named Streak

Further informed look at Warlocks - Photoshop Tips - Team Fortress 2 and Source

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:28:15 -0400

One thing I'd like to start off by saying, anybody with a beta account please post here somewhere how the pets have changed! Or if you know somewhere that has all this info posted let me know.

First things first, if anybody read my last post stating that at a 1.5s cast haunt is crap well they made it a 2 second cast, I'm considering picking it up for the extra damage, but I have still strongly considered skipping it for 1 more point in fel concentration. Maybe with eradication it will make it useful, who knows but moves that heal you aren't very useful when they require a cast time. (See: Paladins)

I failed to mention last time that amp curses lowers curse global by .5 and adds 15% damage to agony, with improved agony we should be seeing 30% more damage on agony and a whopping 56% bonus spell damage on corruption. This will be some nice damage, stack that up with being able to freecast and ripping a haunt and you'll see some big numbers. I still think having a health return feature is stupid on a 2s cast but whatever maybe its going to be okay if they nerf the crap out of spell interrupts....

This teleport to your demonic circle mixed with soul link and instant cast howl of terror will really add up in long games where the warlock is being trained, unfortunately however until escape artist gets a buff or warlocks get a way to remove movement impairing effects it looks like our support will still be relied on to remove poisons or watch us lose the game.

I'd like to say full affliction will be the spec to be but I'm guessing some sort of demonic empowerment hybrid is going to be the arena way to go. You can pickup the same points in demo as you do today and get that minor pet survivability (Because we all know warlock pets are going to be just as easy to train to death) and you can also get double spell lock. On top of that you can fel dom a new felhunter and spell lock again. That's a solid chunk of time without casting.

With it's 1 minute cooldown my ultimate double felhunter trick will be a thing of the past, welcome to ultimate triple felhunter trick.
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Photoshop is awesome, I'm sure if you don't have a demo or a full version (Ridiculous hope you're profiting) then you've already yoinked a torrent. I hope everyone has access to this software that enjoys any sort of drawing image editing or photomanipulation at all. I've tracked down a few groups of tutorials and seeing as they all have a lot of examples one large cluster is best to be able to sift through. Here are some of the best ones I've found so far:

http://www.5min.com/Video/How-to-Burn-and-Dodge-in-Photoshop-24607817
Simple dodge and burn example, not very in depth but should get you started.

http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/Photoshop-blog/2008/07/09/dreamy-magical-and-lighting-effects-photoshop-tutorials/
Amazing compilation of effects and how to guides to use them

http://www.noupe.com/tutorial/vector-illustration-60-illustrator-tutorials-tips-and-best-practices.html
Want to make a vector drawing? Check this website out as its filled with guides covering most if not all of what you need to know.

http://designreviver.com/freebies/400-high-quality-patterns/
Would love to make an image but need some stock and don't know where to find it? Here ya go

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-5-photoshop-tutorials
A previous compilation of tutorials, the photo fade one with the statue of liberty takes about 2 minutes and looks awesome.

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/how-to-take-portraits-19-portrait-photography-tutorials/
Ugly as **** and want to try and look okay online? Maybe this'll help

One pattern I noticed with popular guides was a lot of crap for editing women in terms of wrinkles, dark spots, freckles, pimples, imperfect skin... It seems like everyone is really interested in mashing out the real them to try and edit a picture to look better, I think if you're interested in this you're full of crap and should get rid of photoshop. Leave manipulating photos to magazines to sell products might as well show your real face, if not you can just steal an image of a celebrity and claim its you.

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So today I bought Team fortress 2 and Day of Defeat, so far I'm a big fan. WoW gets boring from time to time or you have nothing to do and need to find filler time. Gather up your friends or hit me up and well play some source. If you get a few people together that don't suck at video games and you can coordinate trying to win at these FPS games it's a lot of fun. TF2 gets a specific shout out for having so many classes that seem so well balanced (Pyro might be a tad on the strong side but definitely still has its weaknesses). Regardless of what another team tries to do if you can demo their turrets, sap their turrents, uber a pyro/heavy into the other team you can always push forward. I haven't gotten to try any large coordinated games like 2 organized teams but enough people seem to own mics that the general idea gets passed on in public servers.

So far I'm pretty sure my favourite is the sniper because I'm great at it, or the engineer because it's just so easy. Spy is pretty cool too although very frustrating. Give it your own go though, from the looks of things people seem to love demoman, soldier, and pyro (3 of my least favourite) quite a bit though. Probably because bombs don't require much aiming.

Day of defeat is pretty much the same, it seems like the damage on machine guns has been lowered but the maps are still pretty close and the games still a blast. It's a much faster kill system than TF2 however with a very realistic feel to what urban WW2 combat might have been like. Obviously it's still a game but to this day I rank Day of Defeat as one of my favourite shooters. Skill level is pretty high if you want to hold a decent K/D ratio as well as getting points for capping locations.

All done flame away

Cool new warlock abilities already gone, eat nerf bat!

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:29:39 -0400

That's right, if you're playing a warlock and you're all giddy because come WOTLK you can finally spec affliction again and be super cool with cripple and burning 2% mana with corruption ticks... keep dreaming.

Cripple - No cooldown(As first listed in beta application) 1.5s cast target affected becomes immune to melee, still vulnerable to spells, 75% slow and silenced. 1 minute duration (I'm assuming 5-10s in PvP, my suggestion on this when discussing the talent was to make it a 5 second silence followed up by a 10-15 second snare/melee immune effect) 51 point talent affliction
GONE

New talent: Haunt (Aka pile of crap) - 12% of base mana, 1.5s cast 10s cooldown. Infect target for 645-754 shadow damage, increases all dot damage done to target by 15% for 12 seconds. If dispelled or it wears off the haunt returns to you healing 20% of all damage done to the target for the duration of the haunt.

Sounds really nice right? Warlocks healing themselves oh cool super fun arena stuff. Here's my problem, have you ever TRIED casting 1.5s spells when you want to heal yourself? Fear is a pain already having to step cast it 15x just to get a wotf then trinket then vanish. Now try landing a haunt on a target (Pref not the one in your face as melee don't tend to take a lot of dot dmg with removing them every minute and all) while you're getting your face punched in. Great one blizz arena talents focused on PvP requiring cast times. We all know how well classes that rely on that work out... Plus if you're left free to cast as a warlock who cares about hitting for 750 and healing later on down the road it's garbage. I'd much rather land a fear so my dots can murder someone while they run moronically around.

Here's another change I am not pleased with.

Demonic embrace: 15% stamina increase with 5% spirit reduction huzzah spirit sucked so what do I care. It's like when they opened the game with HP/5 for warlocks how'd that system work out? ****ty? Thought so

NEW Demonic embrace: Increases stamina by 15% of your spirit.

Health nerf, unless starts are multiplied insanely (Which will suck because these retards are going to stack spirit on warlock gear despite warlocks only ever caring about stamina and spell dmg for 4 years now.) This means your health is going to take a beatdown as a warlock.

Soul link is losing its 5% damage bonus and its reduction is now 15% slowly being reduced over time, started at 30% it has now lost half of its efficiency. With the change to demon armor adding armor and healing, fel armor is now for PvE. Which means warlocks are losing the spell damage and gaining armor. BUT if your pets alive you're losing 5% damage reduction vs. everything. So you lose 130 spell dmg, and then you get armor. But you lose 5% reduction so effectively warlocks are just staying durable at about a 20% damage reduction (pet takes less I guess that's a boost) but you're losing that spell damage.

Another talent removed I do not like:
Not sure of it's name or the exact percentages but- Burns 10 energy, 6 rage/runic power 2% mana 10% proc chance on each tick of corruption. Plus there was a spell that cast a max rank corruption all around you.
BOTH gone

Another downsie: Improved fear - Because fear is so crucial to actually being able to let dots melt something to death now when it fails miserably from RNG your talent will save you letting you instantly spam another one. Here's an idea make imp fear force the first one to work.

Cool **** for warlocks left?
Metamorphasis- Personally hoping it sucks so I don't have to keep speccing demonology.

Nerfed SL higher in tree- Means you can spec affliction again with still getting master summoner and fel dom so you're retard pet with 6k hp can die twice almost matching your HP without any sort of damage reduction.

Improved felhunter (Affliction)- Expel magic goes to 10s cooldown (Not sure what this is) and gains 33% mana from the dmg of his shadow bite (Something else cool but not sure) these talents could be awesome if they finally actually give the felhunter some real HP. Take your stamina gear and have 75% or a real value carry over to felhunters. They'll be weaker than you they'll have no resilience but at least they can have HP.

Hope it keeps you up to date, all the awesome new stuff has been crapped on. Don't get my complaints wrong on some things, haunt is okay but it is 100% NOT a 51 point talent okay. UA is 10x better and it costs 10 less talent points to get to, and its huge issue is a cast time. Warlocks are great because they don't have to cast much other than fear and if they want burst they can try to cast spells then.

More cast times = STUPID choice in arenas. Hopefully someone important to blizzard sees that sentence and really lets it sink in.

[Edit] Good skill I thought had disappeared as well
Atrocity- corruptions everyone within 15 yards it is still listed there just as a 60 skill. Didn't notice
As of MMO champion haunt is still listed as a skill as well, which is where it should stay.
Other cool thing I found: Sudden fear - Your next fear is instant cast no list on CD on this but that could definitely help out.

Drain mana still sucks hard in case anybody was wondering. 3.2k mana removed on instant cast sting, 1200 mana for 5 second channel for warlocks.

Another worrying point is the gigantic mana costs, I'm sure warlocks will get larger mana pools but 720 mana for a siphon seems awfully high. Currently locks have an issue with gigantic mana costs on all spells requiring you to kick your own ass half the game while being trained just to xfer HP to mana so you can keep rolling 500mana dots off. 1k mana alone on deathcoil, hopefully mana pools will triple with these sorts of numbers.

Directed to a forum link with some other cool stuff (Thanks Socio for the info)
were a few nice additions I hadn't noticed. Imp curse is now passive giving agony 15% more damage and reducing curse global time by .5 seconds. Exhaustion has been boosted to 50% (With agony ripping crazy damage it's going to be super hard to swap over for this one, but 50% at least makes it useful). I'd love to see a decent drain mana for warlocks so I could actually justify exhaustion draining or something.

Still beta hoping for good things, not pleased with what happened though.

Sciar fixes paladins, because he disagrees with others.

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:57:21 -0400

First lets examine the heals other classes use that are successful.

: By far this used to be the strongest spell a paladin had, it was incredible. The old cost was 60 mana and no spells had dispel resist. Currently however? Trash debuffs have been added (Shadows embrace anybody?) so dispelling is more mana tedious than ever, and cleanse doesn't keep up with every other form of dispel at all. It has the potential to remove 3 things (Maybe when DK's are added) but currently you use it for poison very rarely as abolish poison doesn't even get them all sometimes. Magic effects on the other hand you do want to remove. By the time you actually get the sheep off of your allies you've used 1.5k mana and dispelled every single stack of frost debuffs possible. I think it needs either multiple magic removal, or curses added in or both. This spell has like 5 paths it can take to become good again, lower the mana cost to make spamming it useful, double up on magic removal so it can actually get rid of things when needed like priests can do. Or add curses to it so you can remove everything important even if it is one at a time for a huge mana cost. Pick your favourite but this spell is in need of some help.

Just a few quick changes but I'm not inventing some crazy overpowered spell to make pallies useful, I'm leaving the important heal over time aspect to developers and the imagination. Plus honestly how can you compare one healing class with instant casts to someone with 2.5 seconds to pull of their heals. They had to see this one coming, so instead of nerfing the crap out of druids just level the playing field.

Every class with instant casts as their primary anything does extremely well because utilising mobility and lack of stopping them makes them excellent classes. The mage is finally useful in arenas because frankly they finally have a form of damage to throw out instantly plus some crazy burst if allowed to cast. Boomkins suck too much casting, Elemental shamans suck too much casting, the game needs to drift more towards instant cast spells.

Casting times shouldn't be non existant but you can't solely rely on them as blizzards put in way too many interrupts. This is why classes that rely on casting times fail hard in arena.

Magic Keyboard - Fails...

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:37:51 -0400

Spoh transfers the keyboard over to help out with the issues we're seeing at this MLG tournament. Commentators had some faith but it didn't pull through and ORZ wins 3-0.

Great tournament so far, there's a ton of blogs covering it but let me just mention if you're not watching and you like arenas you're crazy. These fights are great.

Where did all the raiding go?

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:53:39 -0400

World of Warcraft: Released on November 23^rd 2004

World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade: Released on January 16^th 2007 three years after the games release, player base hits 7.5 million crushing even more records.

I’m guessing many of you knew this info already, some of you are probably looking at 2004 thinking about where the time has gone. Well today I found some old information about before burning crusade came out. I’m not going to lie I absolutely love arenas. They are my pride and joy of playing games, exactly what I would describe for a competitive MMO. They have their issues but nothing is perfect and I find them endlessly entertaining. Apart from that Burning Crusade has stomped on my fun while enjoying WoW.

Allow me to expand on this, take a look at http://bigkills.com/ Back when I was competitive in raiding this site was amazing I thought the idea was fantastic and it worked excellently, it gives a visual and is far superior to those crappy forum posts people make on the realm thread. Today I’m sure there are many I’m not aware of, but I can tell you there isn’t even remotely close to 31 guilds raiding on Azgalor. Much less 31 guilds sporting 40 members for raids + backups. The guild count is probably more around 10 that can clear more than just Gruul, possibly even less. Where has all the raiding gone?

I have friends who still raid, but I have a lot more who have given it up. Some of us still remain around the game plugging in far less hours as we do some PvP when we can, but mostly these 25 man raids suck. The days of MC and BWL were among my funnest times ever playing an MMO. By now I’m burnt out, tired of WoW and hoping something else will stroll along and show a competitive side that will bring enough of the public to the game to give good competition.

BC reset everybody’s characters ruining all that hard work you built up over the years. They’re about to do it again with wrath of the lich king (Awful idea btw I still hold true to that, as seen with Mythic games you can add more to a character without increasing the PvE level cap, it’s an unnecessary change that ruins your equipment, time, and frustrates people especially new ones that have 80 levels to get now).

Burning crusade introduced the best PvP system an MMO has ever seen with the arenas. No I’m not overselling this, Arenas have prompted more funded tournaments, more competition, and more rewards than ever seen before in a game. With it came one of the most irritating things required as well, battlegrounds for badge gear, and sockets for their new profession jewelcrafting. Jewels added very limited yet expensive customization to add on the annoyance that is enchanting all of your gear. I’m sure I’m not alone when I buy the honor belt before the boots because hell I don’t want to pay the few hundred gold for boar speed. Just to play arena you have to farm BG’s with a bunch of retards, you have to farm gold to pay repair bills (In PvP? Give me a ******* break) and pay for enchants, gems, and respecs required to play.

Now I won’t complain without offering a solution: Make PvP specific PvP stuff that only works for PvP, therefore you can balance PvP items without ruining PvE, you can remove the unnecessary gear perks that cost an arm and a leg and maybe another arm. Split the game in two so you can appeal to both sides, and a player can cross the line at will enjoying themselves thouroughly.

Stop suggesting new things by adding 10 more levels, nobody wants to level up a character anymore it sucks and it’s not fun this many years into an MMO. You can add 10 more talent points by opening talent points at level 1 and bam you have a new system to implement without ruining the work someones previously put in. Yes you expect to eventually replace your equipment but not all of it at the exact same time, it’s stupid and makes your accomplishment feel wasted.

This game was better at 60

WoW Arena Revamped - Mini series for points

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:14:03 -0400

An idea struck today and I think it's a good one, so this deemed it worthy to be shared with the rest of you. WoW Arena has stayed the same for quite some time now and with many issues impossible to fix there could still be a way to improve it one step at a time. My idea you ask?

Each round of an arena queue consists of a mini series, best of 3 wins the game. Think about it when playing a game of minor skill and a lot of chance like rock paper scissors do you leave that up to one go? Hell no your buddy has to top you 2/3 to get dibs on the last cheese curd. So why can't this kind of system be added to arenas. Your points will take a little longer to farm but the chances of some raunchy crit ruining your team and losing you 28 points could be avoided. Now that's not to say it couldn't happen two games in a row but at least this would help your odds if you really can outplay the opposing team.

I think one queue should result in three matches whatever team is victorious in 2/3 of these (It only takes two if you stomp the opposing team twice in a row) gets the points from the other team. This would help eliminate the random, and it would help ease up on the big loss for big teams.

Now now I know what you're thinking! But Sciar what about when you're playing the other team for 0 points and you have to face them twice in a row?!?! Oh well if they're that bad you'll stomp them twice, just imagine if they managed to snake 32 points from you because your priest had a lag spike. Wouldn't it be nicer to get a rematch to win it back. DC'd players could log back on for round two and three if someone goes down and costs you a round. For the few downsides I think it's at least an interesting idea if nothing else.

The arena system is taking a nasty turn to moving terrain and spikes to damage you when they could easily avoid all this unnecessary confusion, stick with a working system and just change around the function. The only downside? Points come a little bit slower, but frankly the time required to invest into arena playing is minimal at best. If I want to play top end arenas I have to spend twice as much time losing to idiots in BG's and farming gold to pay for enchants as I do actually playing the final goal: Arena games.

While we're at it season 2 was by far the most equal, they need to realize that classes with a PvE gear requirement to compete at top end arena need a gear change, and that moving poles and a damaging environment are just going to cause problems. There's already 3 players with tons of cooldowns, incoming spells, 6 health bars, positioning and pets to worry about in an arena. I really don't want to be watching the scoreboard for pillar drop timers as well. (4-10 players depending on size of arena you're playing)

Anyways sharing a thought, flames away!

Diablo III art petition skyrockets - Fans agree

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:53:08 -0400

Already apologize if this is a repost but consider it an update, couldn't find any past news on the subject so I thought I'd bring it into some light for anybody who hasn't seen it yet.

Well I have been keeping up with the news lately one big ticket item is Diablo 3. Frankly a friend of mine mentioned he was disgusted a few days ago about the art and started showing me differences between cartoony pictures and realism that blizzard seems to be drifting away from. Even with their limited graphic capabilities the concept art has always remained extremely high quality and it really shows which direction their game is going to take.

Diablo 3 (Examples below) has stumbled into the same problem that the new starcraft has been showing off although Diablo being a much more sinister game is getting huge media attention over this. Fans posted a petition, which when I first added my name was around 2000 nothing too spectacular.
( http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?d3art )

Now it is up over 20,000 signatures and I think there is an extremely good reason for this. I have loved blizzard games since I first went out and bought Orcs and Humans telling everybody it was the greatest game ever made. Then my friends and I hooked up an old school LAN in their house so we could play Diablo together after school. Hellfire (Sierra port? Still confused as to how this happened) was even fun still have them all in a box in the basement. I think I can safely say I have had plenty of Diablo experience and completely agree with the turn in art style, it's jumping away from the series, the quote from Keith Lee Lead producer for Diablo III shows even he is aware of this intentional change.

“One of the things that we considered when we were working on the visuals for ‘Diablo III’ is the fact that color is your friend. We feel that color actually helps to create a lot of highlights in the game so that there is contrast. A great analogy is like in ‘Lord of the Rings’ — not everything is dark. It allows you to see what a creepy dungeon can be like but if everything is dark it doesn’t allow you to have a lot of contrast.” - The rest of his comments can be found in a great article over at http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/07/02/diablo-iii-art-direction/

The petition has done an excellent job posting requests for changes, why these are made and has added some amazing illustrations to show that blizzard is making happy shiny graphics compared to the old scarred dark and grim show they used to put on. Here are a few of my favorites although more can be seen at the petition linked earlier in the article.

http://i31.tinypic.com/2zta5o7.jpg ;
This is a light source reference to show that D3 doesn't have limited lighting which adds to the effect from previous games in the series.

http://i27.tinypic.com/vep6ix.jpg
Some spell effects and terrain changes show a much crisper style of art.

http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l318/frostwake/Diablo32.jpg
Original almost looks blurry to try and add a smudgy "But I blared the contrast to hide skin blemishes" concept to their art style.

http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l318/frostwake/Diablo31.jpg
This will be my last example and it speaks for itself.

Now it's not just Diablo that's changing its art style we also see Starcraft and obviously WoW sticking towards a brighter less grim lighting effect.

Starcraft 2 concept art (Above)

Original Starcraft game art

I lost the original image I was going to use for a direct comparison but it was of a zealot concept from SC1 and it was incredible how much detail and realism they added to the character. That one looks like a pokemon, Mewtwo doesn't play Starcraft and I don't want to reverse aging to enjoy new game titles. Not to say the new Starcraft wont be excellently made I have good faith in my favorite gaming company to date. However their new style of art is less than impressive in my eyes.

Look how muscular young and vibrant this old chap is, I do say he looks like quite the hero.

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/characters/barbarian.xml

Follow the link, look how old fat and useless he's become, say hello to the future!

References:
http://kotaku.com/5021491/diablo-iii-producer-+-color-is-your-friend
http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/characters/barbarian.xml
http://www.cdaccess.com/gifs/screen/d2barbarian.jpg
http://www.visionfutur.com/img/linux/starcraft1.jpg
http://mystarcraft2.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/starcraft2ca_012.jpg
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?d3art

Three vs. Three competitive scene balance is close

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:56:02 -0400

First I'd like to say this is referring to the arena tournament realms, and the competitive tournaments using the season 2 gear.

There is actually a fair amount of balance rocking out in season 2 and I'd like to share some information with those of you who aren't playing in these tournaments to know. So far I have played against an extremely large range of teams consisting of every single class. Now I do believe that the paladin is going to get stomped before his team reaches the very top tier, but yesterday a few friends of mine logged on the classic warrior shaman paladin team and managed to drop a 15-0 pushing up to 1705. On tournament realm if you crack 1850 you're probably ranging right among the very top teams so there's still a way to go, however anybody cracking 1700 at this point deserves some respect as you can start facing extremely difficult teams right from the get go.

Personally for anybody who actually keeps up with what I write (Thanks you two-three) you might know I've started a warrior rogue druid team while playing the druid for the first time ever. We've actually done pretty well, we did crack 1800 but got a tough lesson in not knowing enough strategies that pushed us back to 1750. While I'm on the topic we've sat at this rating for a long time because of some team conflict so LFRogue/Warlock/Druid amazing player pst.

Back to the post! Happyminti gets some well deserved props here for trying just about everything. I'm pretty sure he's trying to invent a new team comp because they've been playing every weird setup known to man. Yesterday we played with our friend (He's alright but not quite top tier quality) to get some random team fun in while we wait to get our good team up and running again. Anyways these god awful teams we ran constantly bumped into minti and his POM mage team (They did really well for a while then next thing you know they were like 1600 and then the team was double rogue druid I think they found higher brackets more difficult with that comp). Then we played shadowplay (Aff lock/ Shadow Priest / Shaman) which did alright, but once again is incredibly hard to pull through at absolute top tier, their team rating seemed decent though.

After some games against Rogue druid warlock, warlock druid warrior, warrior rogue druid, druid warlock warlock, enh shaman warrior druid, RMP (Obviously), priest warlock rogue (We ran this TR1 it's not a half bad team, unfortunately the RMP tends to win more often vs. this team so the comp had to be scrapped with last TR server being filled to the brim with RMP). I realized something, there are a LOT of viable comps out there to run in season 2 and I'm fairly impressed by the balance I'm seeing. Yes you need certain class compositions and with the friends I've got and the classes we can all play none of the ones I'm comfortable on are going to cut it so I picked up a druid. But all in all you can run a lot of different options. The classic setups that are doing really well are also the classic players that are really comfortable in it. I see a lot of top tier teams running a few different teams as well just to find that comfort zone or possibly counter comp the crap out of people later on, well have to see.

Mario Marathon for Charity

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:14:41 -0400

Just found this hit up over on Kotaku, these guys seem horrendous at these games but the good cause makes their struggle a little more fun.

http://mariomarathon.com/

Check it out 55 hours of 7 Mario games and they're looking for donations for childs play. (Also seen at http://penny-arcade.com and http://childsplaycharity.com)

Realization of mistakes, you do it too.

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:07:53 -0400

So I've been plowing away at this tournament realm realizing at least from my point of view that almost all of the blame gets shifted to me. Warrior gets gibbed, WTF WHERE WAS THE CYCLONE (On a shaman on the 100% opposite end of the bridge as me). Was the spell reflect clutch? Was there an absolutely amazingly timed kick? Maybe a nice pummel could've saved the game. Perhaps a blind, fear, or any other of the so many vast choices you could make at any one time during an arena match.

Maybe I didn't NS heal soon enough, maybe I could've landed a cyclone earlier to dispatch more damage, who knows but at the end of the game apart from terribly obvious mistakes it's very easy to shift the blame to whomever you want because face it. You screw up, every single arena you walk into there is something you could have done better, even if you win the match horrendously there's still probably one situation where a different call might have played out even better in your favor. The fact is that during any organized PvP your judgment calls are what define you as a player. But these judgment calls still leave you ridiculed by others because you will eventually make a bad one. The fact that they aren't monopolized on doesn't change the fact that they are definitely there every single game you play.

Allow me to put this thought into personal experience for you. Playing games (RWD) and we lose. Now I ate a spell lock and then silence from a shadow priest affliction warlock shaman team. I freely admit a god awful team but they managed to beat us, now I made a judgment call. I don't like getting locked against burst teams very early so I stacked the warrior up with 3stack and a rejuv (3 stacks of lifebloom and a rejuv: For anybody who doesn't know is about 600hp/sec with an 800hp/3 sec heal stack, it's fairly strong and should keep most people alive as long as the other team is being controlled at least a little bit). Now the warrior is in zerk taking 10% more damage from incoming dots which lets face it is a LOT of damage from a shadowpriest warlock. He's also at 95% hp so we consider this a safe stance to be in. He drops to about 80% from dot ticks and still with all that healing up I get spell locked. I have NS all ready because obviously this is some incoming burst, but it gets followed by a very nicely timed silence at the final split second of spell lock. I wasn't casting so this is only about 6 seconds of lockdown.

Warrior dies, now the after game wrap up conversation consists of me getting blamed because I should have cycloned their shaman as the warlock hit about 5% HP while he was being spam healed. Unfortunately I see the benefit of landing this clutch move but what I don't see is the application allow me to explain the positioning.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~sciar/BEA1.jpg

Now upon being spell locked I called it on vent, with a little vent delay the warrior responded properly spell reflected and intervened to me then broke LOS. The warlock being focused (By a rogue still) obviously didn't get off any shadowbolts, but with stacks of dots up and a mindblast shadow word death that's about all it took. From playing affliction lock shadowpriest in 2's (Season 2 we did amazingly that team was retardedly strong I miss it) I know that they can tear a warrior apart easily just by stacking dots and there's not much a war can do while you rotate the healer lockdown.

Now what I'm saying is, a cyclone on their shaman would have killed their warlock, I made a judgment call it was impractical to do so as running across the bridge would have most definitely resulted in my warriors death. But the clutch blind, fear, pummel, kick, anything that wasn't on cooldown or even a more appropriately timed spell reflect could have changed the tide of that match as well. Regardless of win or lose, you will make small calls that are mistakes every single game, depending on how you deal with those will show how great of a player you really are.

Oh and for the record druids are amazing, now I feel comfortable to be able to play one at a competitive level. The only thing that sucks is since they're so good 90% of teams out there are druid destroyers. Double rogue druid, RWD, RwarlockD, I think the class is great but until you've competitively run as one never ever underestimate what the people playing it have to invest. With every team designed to ruin you it's an extremely tough job, and with root cyclone more hots choice at every corner it's easily your fault if your teammates decide to view it that way.

The druid thus far

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:37:35 -0400

Well I thought I would contribute with an update on the progress of druid on ATR with a 3's team we're hoping and planning to do quite well on. The first thing I want to point out after playing with some first hand experience on this class, is that every idiot out there who always makes those "LIFEBLOOM LIFEBLOOM LIFEBLOOM" comments on how easy druids are is generally wrong. The odd game of 2's with just a warlock for DPS on the other team = LOTS of lifeblooms. Apart from that I find the class played out a lot like a rogue might be. You have an immense amount of cooldowns to manage, how well you do this will quickly change how well you perform in an arena. The second thing I find extremely important is positioning. If you end up in a bad position as a druid it's over, but if your team can keep you playing offense near some sort of pillar or post of some sort you can be aggravating while maintaining ridiculous survivability.

So far our teams lost a lot of games, but luckily for me we've won even more putting us in around 1716 (or 1714 I can't remember) at the moment. Getting games in has been tough but I'm hoping to see some of you out there today as we hope to play a lot for practice and points. Running against some top rated teams already has shown we've got some potential (We hit 1700 day 1 so we saw some regular faces, I even got a whisper from a certain someone after we beat them that he read my blog about being a brand new druid) hopefully it'll keep up. I wouldn't trade my teammates for anybody in the world as luckily for me I have two of the most skilled players I've ever seen by my side to help out whenever druids need that support. Believe it or not a good peel will change the tide of a match as druids getting trained down by these druid XX double DPS teams are going to die quickly with no help. The synergy isn't quite there as some teams have been teaming up for years, but past game experience is definitely carrying through.

There's a lot of yelling, and a decent amount of fighting but all in all I love this competition. For anybody wondering I'm plugging away on Druid Rogue Warrior under my blog name "Sciar" on the druid. Now for some technical points I'd like to share with those of you who think the class I just picked up is simple.

Most games come down to how good your druid is. As the healing/CC you are the key to the team so I hope you're phenomenal if you're hoping to compete. The big names on some druids I've seen out there lately (Mention to Spoh congrats on winning the MLG amazing play out there) show just how much is required. Even a top notch player can get caught in cheetah and blown up extremely quickly by even a double healer team, so what are your chances against warlock rogue or warrior rogue. It's very little, but managing natures grasp (For me warstomp) cyclones, NS and swiftmend all come down to a very clutch factor in winning the game. Which team murders the druid first will most often be the team bringing home the win. They can immediately turn and start peeling for their druid and with any luck keep 3v2 going. Takes a lot of coordination to play these games and they're really exciting. I think MLG did a great job of showing what top end arena's are like and brought some much needed light to everyones eyes on how difficult it can be to compete in them.

One thing I've been working on (Could never do with my old PC's but my new monster box seems to finally have it down) is recording a match in PvP and recording the games sound while simultaneously recording ventrilo. I got it working yesterday so if anybody does show interest I might be able to compress a few of these matches and release a movie so you can not only hear some arena banter but you could actually really feel the fight from the shoes of the team playing. I haven't seen any big name movies (I obviously don't watch them all) being released where you can actually hear the team talk. I'll have to make sure my teammates don't mind but I think it would be neat to offer the perspective of all three team members from the point of view of the druid. Hearing the input, seeing the clutch plays...

Yesterday I didn't get it on fraps but my warriors very upset, he intervened a blind and then as he popped out reflected a cyclone on to their druid. It was amazing and single handedly won us the game. Moments like that are awesome.

Anyways let me know what you think, and while you're at it if you leave any feedback I'm wondering what the general community thinks about this one as it's sparked a lot of debate on the team. What's better to run for racials, NE/HU/GN or TA/TA/UD for Rogue Warrior Druid. So far I've convinced them I love warstomp but that perception isn't to be taken lightly.

My test for arenas - First time druid

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:10:00 -0400

Alright here it goes, started yesterday and we're going to see how this goes. Now I like many have played and competed in WoW from day 1. I play my holy paladin and my affliction warlock (Recently SL/SL for obvious reasons damn you armor pen). I have gotten countless teams to great ratings and frankly I think I've performed quite well in an arena scene. I left the game for almost a solid year but returned a while back to start getting competitive again.

Last tournament we ran an absurd team of warlock priest rogue, it worked pretty well actually, although some amazing teams out there (DuelistsGFG need special mention, they probably won 3/4 games against us and performed really well) pushed back. It was extremely aggravating to play because we knew that RMP would do much better, but we just threw our more comfortable classes into a team and hopped into a tournament. I was surprised at how well we did until we just flat out stopped playing from some internal team squabbles, mostly consisting of constant arguments about our setup.

What I've put together now is your classic double melee druid team, but the catch from most competitive teams out there is, that while I am a veteran of WoW this is the first time I'm seriously playing and aiming to win on a druid. Within the next month I have to get comfortable enough with the class to get ourselves to the next tournament (That's our goal) and I am playing with two other very skilled players on classes they absolutely excel at. It's a decent amount of pressure but I'm going to see if experience can prevail and put one of the most important classes in the hands of someone with no prior druid play and compete on a top game level. While I'm posting here any experienced druid want to fill me in on their take on NS->X (X being HT MaxRank/Regrowth/Cyclone) I know it's situational but I'm more interested in the heals which do you choose?

So far the results aren't bad, some horrible mistakes but quickly getting the team together and coordinated. I'm not sure 30 days can compete with 4 years, what do you think?

Modesty in a modern world (College and Life)

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:25:11 -0400

Now I'm going to wade deeply into the world of flamers and hatred. This planet is covered in self pity, loathing, and general discontent, it is easily summarized and explained however rarely predictable. This world is known as the internet.

What my visit to this world entails this time is that I'm going to actually write and discuss a very real issue for many of you, as my generation seems to be the middle child of the internet and gaming itself I am probably not alone in this current struggle life has brought forth.

Defense of the Ancients frustration and fun

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:14:52 -0400

Now I'm sure most of you have at some point experienced DOTA in Warcraft III. It has consumed the entire online mode of this great addition to battle.net.

Tonight we all took some time off of MMO's to kick back and enjoy some dota. It seems to be a great way to just plug away an hour, everybody can enjoy it and frankly it's really addictive. You scream on vent when you die, you cheer and gloat when you kill somebody, but it's a great example of a team oriented game that's well balanced (Save for a few heroes *cough*Luna*cough*) which seems to be horribly difficult for any companies in current day games to do. I think balance is primarily concerned with content. The more there is it actually scales to become easier to balance. WoW Has far too few classes that's why everyone screams OP all the time. If blizzard would just implement a real amount of class choices as other games in the past have done (See : Dark age of Camelot) then it might be just as imbalanced but the mix and variation applies equality.

Dota is a 5v5 game played in many leagues and setups to prevent cheating and/or quitting mid game. It takes about 40-60 minutes to complete a game and apart from the odd defense heavy team they will almost consistently land in the exact same time period finishing right around that 60 mark. You pick from one of many (not even going to research the number) heroes and you fight in one of three lanes to push the enemy back.

Each lane is equipped with constant re-spawning creeps (Getting the final hit on them rewards money) and they push against each other. The heroes on your team influence how well each lane does. The eventual goal is to push past the 3 towers each lane has into the enemies base. Once inside their base you destroy the last 2 towers protecting either their tree of life, or frozen throne. Heroes get progressively better as leveling occurs you obtain gold and purchase items. These items combine since War3 only provides 6 item slots you purchase certain bad items and they merge in your inventory forming more powerful ones. If you haven't tried DOTA there's a reason it has taken over War3. Each hero has three unique abilities plus an "ultimate" attained at level 6, the second tier of it at 11 and then finally maxing out at 16. You can also choose stat attributes to get +2 to strength agility and intellect every time you get this bonus. It's a great game and there's a lot of strategy and tactic involved. I know it's kind of old but sometimes you just write about what you did today and if it can entertain me for hours perhaps hearing about it will rekindle an old lost love. Or it could spur some new lust, either way give DOTA a try if you have/haven't before, it's a great way to sink some fun game time.

The best part to this game is that WC3 is synonymous for having people quit mid game for custom games since wins/losses obviously aren't counted for this type. However DXD and TDA have made extensively complex systems so everybody can enjoy DOTA without losing players halfway through these hour long games. So if you have 25 wins (with the same race Icon required) on USeast join the channel "Clan Tda" to play some more competitive games of DOTA. If you quit you will be banned so make sure you have at least an hour to play. Games are hosted LC (Which I wont even begin to understand in my lifetime) so you get less latency, and you whisper the TDA bot so no name spoofers will work to get accounts banned. It's quite the system they've set up.
Same concept for USwest Clan DXD, different system which randomizes the teams but it keeps more stats on your games won and played so you can judge how good you are. If you like competition give this a try once you get tired of watching pub games get ruined.

AoC Female Attack Issue

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:17:07 -0400

First things first, here's where my research started. Betterthanyou posted earlier that female characters were worst at meleeing than male characters. See his comments here: http://www.gameriot.com/blogs/WoW-XXX/Girls-are-Inferior-in-AoC/

After doing a little poking around I found this thread linked below.
No idea if it's going to be taken down soon or not:
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=55674
For those of you who might not be able to login to AoC forums allow me to quote some of the things the Assassin class has noticed with male/female ratio of attacks.

"It's undeniably bugged.
Roll 2 lvl 1s, male and female of same race.

Time 20 seconds of a single directional attack (up left for example). Count how many hits you landed during the 20 seconds.

It will look like this
Male: 27 landed.
Female: 15 landed.

It will also vary depending on the direction (wtf further), and if you're moving (where females catch up slightly, but that hardly helps anything...)."
- Stonedform Aquilonian Assassin

The most shocking info is that the itemization (Which is listed differently per character, not the item itself) is rigged towards males as well. Bearshamans for example have a 2h DPS boost. This shows everytime they click on an item link for a mace it calculates their extra 4DPS from their talent. Well male daggers are posted at 1.20 attack speed. I can vouch that over the past 55 levels I have never seen a dagger listed as anything else.

Female characters however are seeing daggers at 1.46 attack speed.

Apart from accidentally increasing the size of females chests in game, it seems Funcom has indeed actually made male characters more powerful melee damagers. Thanks better for pointing this out, my male assassin is still kicking ass!

I doubt this change is intended or else the stat changes would be referred to somewhere so when choosing your character you can know whether or not to go male/female. If it is intentional however not only will some people be angry but I find it interesting that the females are given lifelike visuals as well as lifelike muscle representation in terms of stabbing something to death. These games are getting neat

Age of Conan and ME!... For you (Level 50 Assassin)

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:19:26 -0400

Personally I'm hooked on this game, I really thought it would be one of those drizzle some time away games, but so far I'm having a blast and leveling steadily every day I can. Since very little seems to be known about the higher up parts of the game and from what I see my character is still considered a pretty high level let me give you some insight on a point of view of a level 50 assassin.

I specced lotus which means I have poison stance and a few utility moves. For the greater portion of the game I've been dealing with bugs and issues, this was definitely NOT tested extensively enough before being released, and the four hours of downtime a day on the servers are fixing maybe 1-2 problems when I encounter 6-8 an hour easily.

Assassins do suck incase anybody was wondering, I disagreed with my friend and rolled one anyways and I am glad I did, however with no snare or CC of any kind they're at an extreme disadvantage that only seems to become more and more relevant as I level up. Rangers are insane, not only are they given very strong ranged damage, but they are awarded with like 6 forms of CC if talented properly and that makes them extremely formidable opponents. Most classes instantly pop some form of crowd control if you attempt to down them making this game quite difficult.

My current PvP stats are about 250-95 K/D. Many deaths are from being graveyard camped although a few of the kills are from repaying the favor. This does go to show that assassins aren't useless in PvP as many people are stating, they're just bad and I have to take special precautions to finish people off. More importantly my deaths are that low because stealth classes are absolutely amazing at escaping, just sprint swap direction and mash hide while they stand 5 feet behind you swinging. If they manage to keep up with a full stamina bar then pop second wind and keep going. It really does give me a running advantage. As well I have a stamina drain combo that if I can land that really quickly while in a fight I can sprint much further than other classes, the problem comes in when they have crowd control, I get blasted to death and there's very little I can do about it. I hear at level 70 I get a fear that does work in PvP so I'm very excited and looking forward to it, however I still get the news that we're godawful at everything around that level.

Snap Kick looks like an amazing talent since it has a knockdown effect and that alone made me think assassins stood a chance, however when trying it out I quickly realized that the kick rarely works in PvP if at all, and cloth wearers are the only people I've ever knocked down so far. Melee classes seem to be a lot of fun (Soldiers) because their insane HP make them stay in the fight forever. All the caster classes tend to have a lot of damage output and the fact that the game doesn't focus on direct target healing means that healers are insanely overpowered in PvP. Keeping up entire groups with ease, and in PvE it's required because their healing is just good enough to handle the damage output of crazy elite mobs on tanks from what I've seen so far. Priests of Mitra and their AOE knockdown are amazing, in large battle PvP it looks like running a competent assist train is going to be amazing compared to cluster**** groups that don't focus since every heal targets everybody splitting damage does almost nothing. It's hilarious to see this light go off from the priest and BOOM people flying everywhere.

I'll touch on PvE quickly before I start trying to finally pay for my mount, from what I see most classes have a pretty easy time. Snap kick sucks in PvP but it is amazing in PvE and the lotus heal assassins get is really really good. Health pots are overpowered so keep them with you while you're playing, and as of right now I can take 3 mobs around 52 if I pop cooldowns but I can also lose to one level 50 mob. It all depends on how my combos go off, where their shielding is and if my offhand procs with crits going off. Assassins can be ridiculous damage, but if it doesn't happen we're so squishy mobs can just demolish you. I often find myself burning cooldowns to stay alive on one easy mob that when I pull a different one I kill and only lose 100hp. One target DPS is really harsh too, when you group with people they just gun down everything in a radius, and you stab one of them to death at a time, it makes you really seems useless. This class is definitely for solo play.

As of 40 I had about 30 silver so my 3g mount wasn't going to be bought anytime soon. Now I'm 50 and I have 1.5g so it's looking a little more prosperous in the future.

If there's anything you'd like to know I'll gladly answer any questions. Oh and if you apprentice some friends they can solo elites easily because they can't be hit. Plus you can zone out and they keep the level. So yesterday I had friends running around in a different zone as 49's owning up every group quest they had. So being a high level can definitely help out others.

Portal, for those who have yet to experience greatness.

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:46:06 -0400

I love puzzle games, they're addicting and fun plus when you get aggravated you can quit if the lasting appeal isn't there for you. Mostly found in flash games and little free online adventures, these games provide countless hours of entertainment. Especially when it's possible to compete (I love competition) against friends on some sort of point system. Anyways I was kicking around break.com one day (a very useful way to kill a lot of time, their frontpage videos are awarded $400 so even when they suck I still find it entertaining that some idiot paid that awful movie $400) and to my surprise there's a games button, never noticed that before.

Top featured game? Flash portal
http://www.break.com/games/portal-flash-version.html

I just write as I think and never bother editing. Hope you enjoyed it.

Age of Conans millionth Gameriot entry, Detailed Combat explanation, and Description of Open World Pvp

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:15:15 -0400

Hope it wasn't too long thanks for reading - Sciar

Imbalance in 2v2 Arena

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:24:30 -0400

So yesterday I reunited with an old friend (Used to run Shadowpriest Warlock on him, did extremely well with the comp) to play some 2's and recover some personal rating. After the point selling fiasco (Which I was only around for 1 week to pull off the amazing profit from) my teams rating was about 600 points above my personal rating.

So we made discipline priest SLSLwarlock, and off we went on our happy day of playing 2's. I quickly realized that there is a problem with this new "Arena balance system" where if your personal rating is 150 points below the team rating you face teams at this bracket. Well my team was rated 2100, so in the process of going 33-0 (not sure on exact numbers it was ridiculous) we went up 100 points by the time we started facing teams with any sort of difficulty tied to them. I died one match and won by a dot tick on a rogue, apart from that my health bar never dropped below 40% in over 30 matches. Normally we were only awarded one point but once you started getting close we'd see more 6-8 point wins and frankly for the difficulty factor it was just too simple to level the team up easily. Once we got into the 2200 bracket and our personal rating was level enough to actually face those teams the win ratio balanced out much more quickly.

Now I'd like to point you to an image really quickly that I'm sure plenty of you have seen something very similar before, but there are bound to be plenty of people who haven't played higher bracket arenas against the oh so agonizing slew of druids and consistent playing of blades edge arena.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~sciar/MC/DruidHealers.jpg

It's a full screenshot of my screen at the end of a game, please take special note of all the stats posted after the match. For anybody terrified of keyloggers or some sort of credit fraud identity scam by usually started by evil WoW playing masterminds let me post them here for you as well.

Diablo 3 Wait time might not be so long

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:43:43 -0400

With Age of Conan being released shortly, and Warhammer following suit a popular debate rises, when will there be an MMO that can challenge the popularity or even success of World of Warcraft. Blizzard will be releasing a new expansion soon (Wrath of the Lich King) to keep their game competitive on a PvP scale for the uncoming release of Warhammer (Scheduled to release around very similar times). However rumors are circling that the third installment which has been promised in the Diablo series will be another MMO.

I highly doubt blizzard has turned a blind eye to their gaming giant WoW and while competing with yourself sounds like it defeats the purpose why not? Joystiq released an article today showing that we might be seeing a new big title in development, the company certainly has the resources.

Hope for good things:

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/05/01/blizzard-acquires-diablo3-com-nothing-to-see/

Follow the link for more info

World of Warcraft Arena PvP Balance issues

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:18:22 -0400

We all know that this wonderful overpopulated game we play has some serious issues with game balancing. Blizzards look from the past has been to supply everybody with the same abilities (See: Shamans on Alliance Pallies on Horde, and Everybody has mortal strike: game = fair). But perhaps as a first hand participant with help from the audience of course (That would be the reader) we can summarize what might be a good solution to balance out the large PvP flaws that some classes are facing and having a hard time with.

I personally really enjoy going in depth and taking a few steps in the developers shoes to try and target some balance ideas to toss in the game, usually with changes or new implemented class abilities. Obviously you try to avoid major changes as they accompany major problems.

I know we've all seen it before but first thing you have to do is use the most realistic demographic of information you can to find the flaws in your program, so without further ado I present the SK100

Class representation for top 100 in the world

24%

Tournament server and the trials it envelops us with

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:14:42 -0400

Well I'm finally able to plug in some decent games with some dedicated time into this arena server and I've got to say I'm pretty excited to get to play. We've been running a rather contestable Warlock DiscPriest Rogue, with obvious specs on the other two.

The teams got some changes to apply rather than the classic RMP (PRM whatever combination of those awful three letters you tend to abbreviate with). and frankly I'm fairly impressed with its success so far. Apart from feeding far too many points to our obvious weakness of Rogue/Rogue/Druid (approx 250 points to the same team in one night, Tag is too ridiculous on the angry queuing) the team holds its own and can dominate pretty much every other setup out there. We've had a difficult time beating every RMP, but depending on how it's played out the match can be pretty close.

On this arena server the main change I'm realizing from live realms is that there is a massive influx of druids. They're everywhere, it seems like every person who has read a forum realizes that the top teams are playing Druid ____ _____ and it's working so they might as well do the same since with the click of a single button you can have a druid ready to go. The changes this pulls with it is that we see a lot of counter druid comps being viable to play (Rogue rogue warlock comes to mind however not as successful with the lack of rogue overpowering armor penetration).

This tournament server seems to be quite a fun way to boost some points, we're only sitting just below 1900 at the moment so we have yet to push anything overly impressive with this team, however I'm very curious to see in the long run of weeks to come how this tournament will play out and who the victor is going to be.

I hope all competitors are ready to queue dodge, and sort out this complicated game of rock paper scissors, there's a lot of money on the line so put your best foot forward and good luck.

Paladins and what's needed to keep them alive

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:12:35 -0400

So here I was after excitedly hearing a rumor that PvE to PvP transfers could possibly sift into the game (By the way thank god please do this I don't know why I took my paladin off a PvP server it was an awful idea let me pay money to rectify it) when I decided I should stockpile arena points on my paladin. Being stuck in the middle of nowhere (Awful server) finding decent teammates is somewhat difficult.

I started this endeavor with my buddy Wonky, who shamefully also placed his paladin on this server. We managed to rig up a 2k 5's team a while back making an RPPve server hold a decent team for once in its life, but after transfers whittling our makeup away, Holy Pally, Holy pally, Resto Shaman, MS War x2 just didn't cut it anymore. So enough side banter, we made up a Paladin Paladin Warrior team.

Luckily an old time friend of ours who is out of 10 I'm going to give him a 6 for warrior skill. In this kind of game of go fish, he's your ace... or whatever card trumps that game. We started off with a fairly decent chunk of 3's games, albeit lower bracket it's nice to see what makeups we can control. The birth of heavy 2 melee healer teams which runs a nice counter comp to these squishy caster oriented teams owning the charts in the past is a breeze. With a team full of plate armor there is little they can do, plus rogues and warriors don't contain that time filled CC that ruins a paladin, and double freedom on our only DPS makes him unstoppable for the most part.

Unfortunately as usual playing my paladin ended with me screaming and cursing and striking all available objects. So the thought started to shift in my head that this class needs to be fixed... and quickly, so I came up with a few ideas to see what others think I thought this blog wouldn't be a bad place to bring them up.

Paladin Class Changes
(Suggestion)

Blessing of Sacrifice
This ability was somewhat recently nerfed. It was nerfed while the paladin class was slightly more popular but nonetheless far too controllable. It went from never having a cooldown in the game to 30 seconds with 30 second duration. This should immediately be lowered if you want to see paladins have some sort of control over CC. I believe the nerf was to keep paladins from being an out of line of sight damage absorber for their entire 5's team, however in the process of evening that out in 2's or 3's paladins who already are probably the most controllable class in the game, lost their vital control over CC like sheep and blind. With blind being removed from poison we can no longer stoneform it (If you're a dwarf) we can't cleanse it, and now we can't sacrifice out of it unless their team is retarded and can't remove a buff twice a minute.
My suggestion, 5 second cooldown. This way you can't load up your team ASAP and be a back seat healer. But at the same time you should usually have the buff up again after it's been purged off of your teammates.

New Damage absorb
I know our entire tree of abilities being CS'd at the same time is a gigantic issue, and while holy shock is a very nice little burst of maybe 1.5k if you're lucky (Assuming you crit and your target is MS'd, Hunter shot, or Wound poisoned) every 15 seconds wont cut it. I'll allow everyone to imagine their own versions of this but basically either a Damage Reduction by X buff, or an actual Damage absorb, we need something to do when counterspell is kicking out ass and crazy DPS is ruining our party. With increased damage output comes relying on new tricks, which pallies have none of.

Holy Shock
Wicked spell, love the new set bonus to incorporate a bigger healing boost on this, however 15 second cooldown means that this is not going to be a useful PvP healing spell to use when you know that if you try anything you're going to be CC'd and counterspelled. A lot of the time you need to heal on the fly and while every healing class out there seems to do this alright (shamans are somewhat limited as well but their grounding, tremor, and ridiculously quick heals with earthshield seem to make up for it). I'd like to see this rocking maybe half the cooldown time. The damage output on it is mostly pathetic, so possibly even less more like every other shock at 6 seconds, I don't think this would be overpowered.

An interrupt
One of the huge problems with the paladin class is that if left alone, not bothered we are quite amazing. So a lot of people assume this is good enough. Well in PvP it's not, we can't assume it's going to happen and tunnel visioning your healing target is too simplistic. I used to impress people on this character by pulling some crazy stunts off in PvE to save raids and that made it fun. In PvP I do this with other classes and primarily Rogues and Druids (Wars a good chunk too) I see do amazing things that spin the tide of the game in a flinch. Paladins can't stop the other team from doing anything, 1 stun a minute just doesn't cut it. An interrupt would help us do something against the other team and would increase the skill required in multitasking that makes arenas fun.

An escape
I think a simple slow would suffice. Justice is great on druids but generally useless apart from that, I'd like to see freedom when combined with something allow paladins to utilize their mobility (Even if their healing wont allow us to). It would be a great benefit to ret pallies who with the small delay and latency on servers can easily have an opponent appear in melee range but be unhittable.

Flash of Light
A new rank, nowhere near as efficient as some of the old ones perhaps, but an actual decent heal that can keep your party alive. At the moment let me play out a tiny scenario seen all too often.
Paladin starts heal... 2.5 seconds of waiting approx 2.1 seconds in paladin gets counter spelled. (Lets say for the story it was an earthshock, nothing with the full 8 second silence) So We wait for the global 2.1 seconds + 1 second, start casting another 2.5 second heal. In that one simple interrupt we just got a 5.6 second cast of a heal. With minor human delay added onto that from the latency we see and the global cooldown. I'm going to assume it just took me 6 seconds to cast 1 single heal on a target getting focused. Now if I get interrupted just one more time I've eaten a full duration blind and then some. I could use my quick heal but lets face it nobody will survive burst with flash of light heals on them.

Lights Grace
Talent in holy tree, 100% chance to reduce holy light casting time by 0.5 seconds after the first holy light you cast. It's a dispellable buff, and it lasts 15 seconds from the first cast and gets refreshed every time you recast. Sounds great, works wonders in PvE but it sucks in Arenas. As I said there are huge bounds of time when paladins get interrupted and having our late talent as a buff means it doesn't kick in when it matters. After that 15 seconds of CC where you desperately need a heal to go off in time we have to cast our first spell without our speed boost. Make this talent naturally reduce the casting time as is the final objective and it would help amazingly.

Forbearance
1 minute prevents double bubble. If you see teams zerg down a paladin the second he comes out of his bubble it's because it's extremely easy, there should be something we can do. I'd like to see this on par with frostmage double iceblock. Drop it to a 30 second debuff.

Alright this post is somewhat long and has some controversial ideas, but lets see what you think of it. Changes, new ideas, lets see what you've got. I'd love to see some love given to paladins to make them useful again. We were gods at 60 for being unlimited mana fiends who could pump heals all day, and this made up for the fact that we could be CC'd. Now we have mana issues just as other classes do and gigantic CC issues, some fixes would be nice.

I'd also like to state that I'd like to see some of these changes implemented, probably not all at once it would give us too much of a power shift.

Death of my Affliction Warlock

no.spam@gameriot.com (Sciar) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:04:10 -0400

I've been Pvping religiously since arena's hit this wonderful game of WoW. I've run two characters, one being more of a joke than anything, ever since the release of TBC my paladin has been nothing more than a fun way to scrap time. However my much more serious character is my warlock, Streak. He's somewhat outgeared nowadays but with work keeping me CB'd I'm forced to use what I've got.

Anyways I noticed a post some ill informed member made on SL warlocks are dead, long live the affliction lock their day has come! Well I'm here to tell you that Affliction locks have had their time, and while all of you have run SLSL I've been true to the spec all along. My warlock started at 70 as Affliction and until the 13th of March he kept that spec.

Why my opinion is valid at all on this class? Well as I said works interfering with my hardcore arena playing as of late, but in the past I've had teams such as Aff/Spriest ranked up as 7th in the battlegroup in 2's (I play on Ruin/ Azgalor). Graghlan (Ex. Shadow Priest) and I did pretty well and were forced to retire the team. Apart from Glickz and Hafu we were only beaten by 2-3 other teams that entire season, all of which were wearing full shadow resist when they saw us enter the game. This was back in season 2, but my affliction warlock did make it all the way up there.

We've run multiple 2100-2200 3's teams playing Spriest warlock mage, where one of my greatest difficulties as an affliction lock was holding back on dotting the sheep target, yet my damage has been unmatched since the start of this game. Most games you see the shadow priest and mage pulling 30k or maybe 40k damage, and mine usually ranked 80-100k damage. It's an extremely impressive spec, and until the detect magic nerf I was considered invincible. Once they realized I wasn't SLSL I started to take more heat, but virtually I usually survived long enough to murder the other team regardless and we still did quite well.

I've been playing the PTR fairly hardcore lately, and found out very quickly, I should probably try out SLSL because nowadays affliction just doesn't cut it. 20% from soul link and another 10% on voidwalkers reducing the damage output of these heavy melee teams is an absolute necessity. I went from playing probably one of the worlds most aggressive warlocks and mashing SB, Coil, Shadowburn for a quick burst kill on a target, to dealing 6k damage and spamming tongues and siphon.

Unfortunately my day of aggressive affliction is gone, I respecced SLSL and have been much more successful with it. I once reined top teams as affliction, but that day is gone.