The new way to play Ench Shammies! Use magic DPS?! Huh…

So lately I read something about ench shammys wanting to use, well dual wield fast caster weapons for the extra spell dmg that we can all of a sudden burst out. When I use to play my shaman, me and a Xei would talk about how cool it would be if I could dual wield caster maces or something so I can do leet dps and leet melee dps! But it never worked out because dual wield is too far down the ench tree and I would gimp myself more then help myself.

It would’ve been really cool, and not that idea seems to have become what people are doing in beta…well what they want to do in WoTLK. I think the idea seems cool but I don’t think its too viable as a real playing spec. I mean, if you think about it, you wouldn’t have full AP, and you wouldn’t have full Spell power. Unless you dress in half caster, half AP armor. You would still be gimping yourself. Unless I’ve missed something really important, then this idea isn’t as viable as people seem to think it is. Even with the added dual flametounge enchants, it still lacks enough power.

Now I haven’t read the fourms or read what other people have to say about this but hey, I don’t have THAT much time hehe. Unless there are weapons with both AP and spellpower then I this would flop faster then pancakes.

Anyways, sorry for the lack of posts and this short one, I seem to be doing that a lot whenever I post, say sorry because I’ve been abit too busy.

Hopefully, I’ll have more time very soon, and you’ll be reading, a full look at the WoLTK Armor Sets, American vs Korean games and the new mounts in WoTLK!

- Iternal

AoE tanking: what it means to WoW’s tank classes in Wotlk

One of Blizzard’s primary goals that they’ve stated since the beginning of Wotlk beta was that they wanted to close the distant gap between the capabilities of certain classes versus another in terms of how well they can perform their role. In the case of the tanks, in TBC there were three types of tanks and each one of them was specialized in tanking under certain conditions.

Protection warriors had been considered a staple tank for boss fights ever since classic WoW thanks to their wide range of benficial debuffs they can apply to the boss to reduce incoming damage/increase overall raid dps, and one of their largest advantage in TBC was their ability to easily reach crushing blow immunity thanks to Shield Block, which increases their block rating by 75% for a short duration, but the skill was spammable.

Feral druids have the advantage of being able to reach the armor cap and have a high dodge rate, which are offset by their lack of block and parry. Still, feral druids excelled in boss fights where crushing blow did not exist and against bosses who dealt physical damage at an extremely fast rate that would otherwise eat through Shield Block/Holy Shield charges that make the plate tanks crush immune.

Protection paladins are specialized in AoE tanking thanks to their ability to generate threat on an unlimited number of targets with Consecration. They also have an advantage in fights against bosses that are demon/undead. Also their damage scaled by far the best out of the three tanks in TBC since their threat came directly from holy damage which they could get from their gear.

Paladins were definately the undisputed king of AoE tanking in TBC, but this can very much change with the coming of Wotlk as a recent change to each tank’s AoE tanking ability have been altered. The prediction for Wotlk on what the core AoE tanking ability each tank will have looks like this: warrior – Thunderclap, paladin – Consecration, druid – Swipe, death knight – Death and Decay. Now Consecration and Death and Decay never had a target cap on them and so they are definately considered AoE skills, but Thunderclap and Swipe were severely hampered by a tight target cap back in TBC with both only affecting up to 4 targets. This effectively put paladins as the tank to go to in pure AoE tanking situations such as the trash waves in Hyjal where any other tank simply cannot get the job done.

With this recent change, all tanks are now on an even playing field in terms of AoE tanking, and as a warrior tank, the additional boosting of the new Damage Shield talent simply makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. My dreams of AoE tanking down Hyjal can finally be achieved!

- Xei

Disgaea DS, first impressions

Sorry for the lack of posts, been a bit busy. So being a Disgaea fan, I just had to get the DS version of the game. I was expecting a great game like always, but I think this time, Nippon Ichi did a pretty lazy job. Right off the bat, the first thing I noticed was that Etna’s voice was horrible. It sounds like a cheerleader. Which I didn’t really like. After the little intro thing, I got finally got control of Laharl, and I noticed something else, the music wasn’t as good. Maybe it was because of the DS speaker, but I don’t really mind the music. So it didn’t bother me much. Anyways… I went to do the tutorial, when I noticed that the there wasn’t any voice acting. I was okay with the music, but the lack of voice acting really disappointed me.

(Japanese Version) This part has no voice acting. But in the PSP/PS2 version, there is voice acting at this part.

But, aside from the fact that this game lacks some of the features that made the game feel more alive and quirky. I was pretty impressed. I can understand that probably adding voice acting into a DS game would be too heavy on the size so its understandable that there is not any voice acting. Maybe a little bit more would’ve been great. Compared to the the other versions you have way more characters to unlock now. You can unlock Adell and Rozalin from Disgaea 2, and you can also unlock Plenair.

Yeah, I heard a lot of people like her.

Other then that, there is also a new feature called Prinny Commentary. Where a Prinny talks about the chapter your in. I don’t know the details, since I haven’t unlocked it yet. Basically, this game is like the PSP version, but without the voice acting and bad quality music which can easily be remedied with headphones plugged into the DS.

I didn’t expect this game to be bad. I heard that the cart size of Disgaea DS is pretty small, so why didn’t Nippon Ichi fit in the rest of the content? Well, I guess they wanted to save money, lets hope that they’ll port Disgaea 2 into the DS.

- Kricu

Fury may be nice, but Arms still got it baby!

So with my last post concerning warriors, I talked about some of the results I found on the beta servers with the PvP fury build I had and the damage I was able to deal on various level mobs. Well this time around, the PTR realms finally have the pre-Wotlk patch up and running and now players have access to all the news talents in the expansion, so essentially you were playing half of Wotlk there already.

With that I decided that I just had to try out the talents on my own characters, so I decided to copy over two of my higher level characters, my main a lvl 70 Orc warrior and a lvl 69 Blood Elf warlock with the warrior on PvP and warlock on PvE realm (hey, he’s not geared!) I wanted to really test out the capabilities of my warrior with the new talents in PvP so I first specced as PvP fury with Titans Grip dual wielding my Stormherald with Executioner enchant and my old Gladiator’s Greatsword with Savagery enchant on off-hand. Unfortunately being only at lvl 70, I couldn’t reach deep enough into Arms tree for Impale which hampers my critical hits by a noticeable bit actually, one of the things that annoyed me. Other than the change of weapons, I was using the same PvP gear (combination of s3/s2 gear). With all of that, i joined an Alterac Valley battleground and at first I thought the damage I was doing was decent, but soon it felt that both weapons were doing signficantly less damage than they would if I was using only one. Resilience also seems to hamper Titan’s Grip by quite a bit. With the new change to Rampage, I was getting 41.5% critical rate but even with that, it didn’t seem like I was landing all that many crits.

Mobility is definately improved in the Fury tree though with Heroic Leap changed into Heroic Fury, basically a combination of a trinket and refreshes your Intercept cooldown. But with all that mobility, I find that deep fury PvP still lacks a bit of damage, at least at lvl 70 anyways. Furious Attacks also did not proc all that much as I’ve previously mentioned before which may still make it not that reliable for arena play.

After testing out fury PvP, I decided to give Arms some testing too, hoping that it would give me some better damage, and I must say that even at lvl 70 it didn’t disappoint. The main focus of fury versus arms is probably Titan’s Grip versus Bladestorm, and especially with the recent patches, Bladestorm definately wins out in being the more worthy 51 point PvP talent. The talent has improved dramatically over the course of the beta, now it costs 25 rage making you immune to all CC effects for the duration of 6 seconds while using a whirlwind every second giving you 6 whirlwinds in total. If there ever was a talent to make your warrior feel like a wrecking crew this is it.

My favorite time of using this is when I find large groups of allies in stalemate moments in AV, I charge into their healers and casters, switch to Berserker stance and unleash this attack. Since you’ll most likely die within a few moments, you may as well go in there and do as much damage as you can to everything around you. My only complain about Bladestorm is that when you’re already CCed, for example you’re rooted by Frost Nova, you can’t break out of it by using Bladestorm. If Blizzard decides to add a CC breaking component to Bladestorm, I will definately be sticking with Arms for PvP in Wotlk!

- Xei

Heroic Leap?! Change L-E-A-P to F-U-R-Y and you have your new skill!

Hey all, been really busy lately, haven’t had time to post much. Actually we’ve all been pretty busy therefore lack of content hehe. Anyways I wanted to post something real quick about what Blizzard removed.

They removed… Heroic Leap WTF?! Seriously?! COME ON leetness move EVER and its gone. Horrible! I was hoping to leap around like a rabbit on drugs with extra shockwave power. Ok I know Blizzard removed it for a reason but its always fun to talk about it. From what I recall, they replaced it with Heroic Fury, which is like a trinket and also refresh your Intercept, I’m not sure on this so don’t quote me. I’m sure this is way more useful then jumping around inflicting minor damage to mobs but still…it was freaking awsome watching your buff’ed out warrior leaping heights of which no warrior has gone before! Like leaping off a tower into your possible doom!

But seriously, I think the change is decent, I mean I don’t play warrior very often but I think the new Heroic Fury will prove to be more useful in PvP then being able to leap over your opponent. I would guess you would fly over him and miss him more often then actually hitting him on target. I bet you can cook dinner and come back and your leap will probably only landed once out of 1 billiion times.

I have nothing against the change, besides the obvious reasons because I can’t become Superwarrior anymore hehe.

Anyways, sorry for the short post! I’ll write up on all the things I was suppose to follow up on soon. Espescially my American MMORPGs V.S. Korean MMORPGS.

Oh forgot to mention that we’re also on Digg! If you guys got time, go digg us.. I think thats how it goes? Even though it sounds real dirty… anyways heres the link for this blog

Heroic Leap? Change L-E-A-P to F-U-R-Y and you have your new skill!

Peace!

- Iternal

Need a ride? Sure, hop on!

Azeroth's new cab service has just arrived!

With the introduction of the latest patch on the Wrath beta servers, various new mounts have been added and some have received a graphic update. Screenshots of the new proto-drakes, which are flying mounts can now be seen on the front page of mmochampions and while they certainly have their “coolness” factor, the new war mammoth mounts are also very interesting and brings about a new unique way to travel in WoW. These mammoth mounts function just like your typical 100% land speed mounts, however their new feature is the ability to allow the rider to pick up two other passengers onto the mount and ride along with the owner.

This unique feature to the war mammoth mounts will certainly bring some interesting possibilities around. Imagine players offering Taxi services all over Azeroth, more specifically in lowbie zones where new lowbies who won’t have access to their own mounts until level 30 can catch rides from high level players. Also the possibilities for role-playing will be interesting to see to say the least (use your imaginations people!) Taxi rides are probably just one of the wild and wacky ideas that will come from role-playing. Another possibility is for those multi-boxers or recent “refer-a-friend” users who can now give their leveling lowbie alts personal limo services with their high level toon who owns a mammoth mount.

While I personally have not tried these war mammoth mounts out myself, I must say that I am looking forward to seeing all the interesting possibilities that can come from owning this mount. It will definately create some new ways of interaction between WoW players!

(Screenshot credited to MMO-Champion)

- Xei

The spec of the Gods!…What? Its Shaman Resto Spec!

I believe in one of my previous posts I talked about Ele and Ench spec for a shaman. I decided to look into the new resto talents that will be released in WoTLK. Mind you, I don’t play a resto shaman, so if the things I say isn’t right or I’m totally off, well too bad, your not the one writing it! Haha I’m just kidding. I’ll try my best to keep it “right”.

So my experience with a resto shaman was… well non-existant. The deepest I’ve gone into the resto tree was to get Nature Swiftness for the clutch heals or clutch dps I wanted to pull off. I, myself don’t like to play as a healer because well…I just don’t really like playing as a healer. Healing means I have to pay attention to people’s HP and whats happening in the game. When I’m dpsing I can turn around and watch TV or do something else. This makes me sound like such a bad player! Anyways, I always liked when a shaman heals because the healing is pretty powerful. Espescially chain heal. I think chain heal is such a powerful heal, everytime I see it go off, its like instant epic pwnage. Even when it doesn’t hit me, I’m like “YEAH CHAINHEAL!” Ok… maybe not.

So new talents that I’ve seen in the resto tree are as follows. 

• Tidal Force
• Improved Water Shield
• Cleanse Spirit
• Blessing of the Eternals
• Improved Earth Shield
• Ancestral Awakening
• Tidal Waves
• Riptide

Wow that’s a lot of talents added. Some of the talents seem to be useful while others don’t seem to be too useful. Improved Water Shield allows you to consume a water shield orb instantly by 33% if and when your healing wave or lesser healing wave crits. This is only one point into the talent. This talent is a 3 point talent and at 3/3, the percentage becomes 100%. I can see how this can be useful because you could probably cast a heal and end up with some of the mana you just used if not all of it. Since this talent isn’t very deep into the tree I can see this to be useful even in other specs like Ele and ench.

The next talent is Tidal Force which is a 1 point talent and is a instant. This is actually a spell you gain which has a 3 minute cooldown. That seems a bit too long for a spell like this. Maybe 2 minutes but 3 minutes seems to be a bit too much. The spell increases the critcal effect of your Healing Wave, Lesser Wave, and Chain heal by 60%. It also says each heal you crit with will reduce the chance by 20%. This spell last 20 seconds. If this spell last 30 seconds and had the 3 minute cooldown I think it would be ok. I mean I think the only time this will be used a lot is during clutch healing moments where you need your heals to crit to set off a chain reaction.

Cleanse Spirit is…well what does it sound like? You cleanse someones spirit. Can’t be anymore straight forward then that! So it costs 7% of your base mana and is a instant cast. It removes 1 poison, 1 dieases and 1 curse effect from a friendly target. This seems to be useful, mind you, seem is the keyword but it requires you to have the 5 point talent Purification maxed. It probably is worth it as Purification increase your healing spells effectiveness by 2%. When it is maxed, it increases it by 10%.

Blesssing of the Eternals is a 2 point talent and it is a passive talent. It increases your critcal chance of all your spells by 2% and when it is maxed it will be 4%. It also increases the chance to apply a Earthliving HoT on a target by 40% when they are at or under 35% total health. When it is maxed it is 80% to cast the HoT on a target. The total health stays the same. I think this is a very useful talent because not only do you get a spell critcal increase but you also get a chance to cast a HoT on someone so you don’t have to pay attention to them for a while. I could be wrong but…anyways…

Improved Earth Shield…come on seriously do I have to go into real detail? Its quite obvious. Improves your earth shield! This is a 2 point talent and is passive. It increases the charges of your earth shield by 1 and when it is maxed it becomes 2. It also increases the healing done by the shield by 5% and then 10%. I think this is a cool talent, seems to be a bit of a waste but its always good to get more charges and get healed for more. I mean I can remember the times when a shaman casts earth shield on me and I’m like OH YEAH 10 charges! and then I find out 10 isn’t enough and I die.

Ancestral Awakening is a 3 point talent and is also a passive talent. The effect is when you critically heal with your healing wave or lesser healing wave, you summon a Ancestral Spirit to help you out with the heals! It will instantly heal the lowest percentage friendly party or raid target within 40 yards and it starts out as 10% healed and shoots up to 30% at rank 3. I can really see this being useful as a raid talent. I mean if you happen to crit heal a lot you’ll be seeing your little ancestral buddy a lot and he’ll help you heal the lowest HP player. This I believe will make your life a bit easier because you also gain more time to fully heal the target that your little buddy just healed. WOOT raids wiping will never be yout fault again! Blame the Ancestral Spirit. “What it wasn’t my fault! He didn’t heal you I wasn’t your healer! He was!”.

Tidal Waves is a 5 point talent and it seems to be passive. The talent is you have 20% (It shoots up to 100%) chance after you cast Chain Heal to lower the cast time of your next lesser healing or healing wave by 30% which stays the same as you get higher in rank. Also your healing wave will gain 4% which becomes 20% when its maxed of your bonus healing effects and your lesser healing wave will gain 2-10% bonus healing effects. Whew, this talent seems a bit weird to me. It seems to be quite viable in a raid and also in healing instances. It also seems to be very powerful because of the added bonus healing after you cast a chain heal.

The final talent I’ll be discussing is called Riptide. I know they took out a previous 51pt talent for this one but I don’t remember what it was. So Riptide is a 1 point talent and is a spell. It requires you to have 1 point into improved chain heal. This spell is a instant cast and costs 18% of your base mana. It has a 40 yard range and has a 6 second cooldown. This heals a friendly target for 764 to 826 and another 795 over 15 seconds. This is awsome, its like a heal + a HoT. But wait it gets better! I think…Your next chain heal cast on that target within 15 seconds will consume the HoT but increaes the amount of the chain heal by 25%.

From what I can tell, you seem to learn Riptide before the 51pt talent but I’m not too quite sure on that so don’t quote me. If someone does know please leave a comment or send us a email! Woul dbe awsome. Anyways, I think the Riptide talent seems to be a real nice talent for resto shamans. Espescially for raiding.

Overall after reading about the new talents for resto shamans, it does spark some interest for me to change my ele to a resto shaman just to try out all these talents. Possibly I’ll pay more attention when I heal so I don’t get yelled at for not healing hehe. Most of the talents created are very well done in my opinion by Blizzard. I applaud them for them making resto into a better spec then the rest of the shamans. They should call shamans, to Healmans, haha I’m kidding.

Thats all I gotta say about resto spec, if I missed anything or if you have anything to say leave me (or us because there are 2 other bloggers here) a comment! Peace!

- Iternal

Pokemon, will Nintendo ever learn?

So you may or may not know, but Pokemon games are starting to get extremely repetitive. When I say repetitive I mean the same kind of storyline. There would be a group of evil people trying to revive/obtain some kind of legendary pokemon which in the end, you would either have to defeat it or catch it. A huge example of this is Pokemon Emerald – Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. These two games are prime examples of what I’m talking about. Now, the Pokemon series wasn’t always this boring. Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal were amazing pokemon games because of the things you can do besides just catching pokemon and fighting badguys. I don’t exactly remember, but I think you can do bug catching contests and travel back to Kanto. (Pokemon Red/Blue/Green/Yellow’s Region) The rival in Pokemon Crystal was one of the meanest/most interesting rival in the pokemon series in my opinion. Why? Because he is actually mean haha mean?. In all of the Pokemon games I play, most of the rivals are nice and uneventful, but the rival in Pokemon GSC was really mean. He stole pokemon and stuff.

Now, if Nintendo ever wants to get more money, they should make a remake of Pokemon GSC. Right now all the Pokemon games are probably targeted at the little kids. The story is so boring and bland but kids don’t care. Heck, they probably buy the game because it has “Pokemon” on it. A lot of the older people who played pokemon stopped because the storyline was getting repetitive and boring. If Nintendo made a remake, they could probably get sales from the old and younger audiences. But they never do this, instead they keep making Pokemon games with the reused storyline over and over. The only reason why I buy the latest Pokemon games is because of the new Pokemon. I’m curious to see what the new Pokemon look like.

A man can dream can't he?

From what I can tell, the image above is a fake one. But if Nintendo really made remakes for Pokemon GSC, then maybe I would buy their games for the story. Many others would probably buy the game for the story too, except little kids. They’d still buy it because it has “Pokemon” as it’s title.

- Kricu

WoTLK Armor sets, ugly? YEAH! Ok maybe its just me…probably..

Ok so I’ve been pretty busy past 2 days, been painting my basement trying to finish it up so I can move my stuff down there. You know smelling paint fumes, awsome stuff!

So today will be a short blog. About what.. hmm. I saw most of the armor sets that are going to be dropped in the Nax 10 and 25 man. My impression on them, stats wise was pretty cool. The sets offer a lot of cool stats for different classes and pretty nice bonuses. Now how they look is a different story. Some of the sets just don’t look right. For example, because I play a shaman, I usually look at shaman stuff first. The Nax 25 man armor skins look pretty decent, I mean I think the colors are nice and how its designed is pretty good. The Nax 10 man one is the exact same but its colored in dark blue and other blue. Now I think the blue looks pretty bland. I honestly think that each type of shaman spec should have its own armor. I mean seeing a resto shaman in pointy spikey armor doesn’t seem TOO right. Whats with the dress style armor for shamans are the time. You know how hard it would be to melee someone with a dress? A slight breeze and you’ll be grabbing more then just your weapons.

I’m not knocking all the armor skins, some of them look really cool. For example the Death Knight one looks really cool and more like what a DK would really wear. The warlock armor skin looks decent also. I’m sorry I can’t post any pictures up right now, but I’ll post some in my next blog as I go more in depth into the armor sets.

One more thing that always bothered me when I look at new upcoming armors. Why oh why does the armor HAVE to be on humans or a night elf male? SERIOUSLY! Is it because they have “perfect” posture? I don’t want to see a ugly human and a ugly night elf wearing a armor which MIGHT look WAYY cooler on a tauren or a orc or a BE and a UD. Humans already look ugly in WoW, no reason to make the armor look ugly.

Anyways I promise I’ll go more in depth, possibly tomorrow!

- Iternal

Brawl, hidden messages?

While I was playing Brawl, I was looking at some of the characters and Wario caught my eye. Now usually, I don’t really play Wario, but I was bored so why not? So I picked him and the computer I was playing against was Ness. I used Wario and grabbed him and started pummeling. What I noticed shocked me. Wario was using his two fingers to smack the place where the sun don’t shine. I was shocked, but that didn’t stop me from finishing my throw, so I press the back and executed a B-Throw. Wario smacked Ness with his butt. Yes, his butt. Now, I know this game is rated T. But seriously, who follows the rating nowadays? I see little kids talking about guns and violent games that are rated M. So, it seems to me that Sakurai was obviously trying to teach kids to smack people with there butts.

Um... Yeah...

Now.. Wario not only has inappropriate grab attacks, he also has his fart. Yes, he farts. During the match, he would gradually charge up a fart which can be used to hit someone off the screen. Sakurai was trying to tell kids to fart at people to fix all there problems. Nice job Sakurai, your great with the hidden messages. But wait! Wario isn’t the only nasty person in this game. But Jigglypuff, yes, Jigglypuff. She isn’t all that nasty, but she has this one move that seems pretty wrong. She would rub her body on you. Yeah, crazy eh? Now, I know smart kids won’t imitate stuff like this, but dumb kids might. A prime example of a dumb kid is here. Rightttt here. I do feel sorry for him, but I’m just trying to prove my point, so don’t hate me for doing this! Sakurai could have at least think through the character attacks, he could have considered the fact that kids do play games that they aren’t supposed to play.

Toot toot

I’m not saying that Sakurai made a mistake, I think it’s pretty hillarious how Jigglypuff and Wario has these kinds of attacks. I’m saying that he could have thought it through, maybe he could’ve made it a bit more hard to see. Normally Wario is nasty, but seriously, his grab pummel is horrible. I always feel weird when I’m using it. Other characters have butt moves too. Like Peach. She rams her butt against her enemies which is pretty nasty. But most of all the other characters are fine.

Poor Mario.

Well that’s about it. Sakurai did a pretty good job at this game, but next time he should check his character’s moves. Cause if I was a kid I would go infront of people and start farting in there faces so they would go away. So, if your a kid an your reading this, farting in people’s faces is very rude.

- Kricu