How Spiderman and SPs are the same!…oh yeah and WotLK release date…

Woah, Wrath of the Lich King, release date is here! Offical!

woot! Its offical release date! Who can wait? I can...Why? No money.

Anyways onwards !. So today I decided to not play WotLK beta and went on normal WoW. Right.. normal WoW? whats up with that, anyways, apperntly there was a patch today that went to PTR. It was patch 3.0.2 and I went and looked into it to see what kind of changes were made before WotLK is released. I grazed through some of the different class changes until I hit Priests. I also have a level 70 Shadow Priest along with my Shaman. Boy, some of the changes for priests were just eyebrow raising. Kinda like The Rock, you know that wreslter who is now a movie actor…ok maybe its just me who what I’m talking about.

One of the changes that caught my eye was the Shadowform change, we have no 30% threat reduction when in Shadowform! woot! Now I won’t pull stuff off tanks who can’t tank when I start my rotation. By no means am I saying that I am leet uber shadow priest. This is just my opinion. Another change that caught my eye was the removal of the GCD of Silence. Now I can cast something and silence at the same time! I think…No more seeing the little dark shadow going clockwise and hearing the phrase, “I can’t use that yet” or something along those lines. (Yeah I don’t remember what they say, sue me)

I think the most useless, well to me anyways change was the change to Lightwell. Ok really, who uses that? Maybe it has its uses but I really haven’t found a use for it nor have I heard one. Maybe the occsaionaly use for healing. Sometimes I see it dropped during AV for some odd reason and its always fun to see. The change was this

“Lightwell (Holy): Cast time reduced to .5 sec, down from 1.5 sec. Charges increased to 10, up from 5. Now breaks from any attack that hits you for 30% or more of your total health. Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5.”

Maybe now it has more uses then to light up a dark area of the map during a raid, but I still don’t see it too viable for anything else. But hey, feel free to disagree and tell me its real use! Besides lighting a room.

Another change/add for priests that caught my eye were these 2 adds.

“Enlightenment: Increases your total Stamina, Spirit and Spell haste by 1/2/3/4/5%.”

“New Talent: Twin Faiths (Discipline) – Increases your damage and healing by 1/2/3/4/5%.”

Since the new thing in the sunwell patch is spell haste, I think this revamp of the talent will benefit and mesh in well with a priest. This talent used to be deep into the discipline tree but now it has been moved to   to the middle of the discipline talent tree. Sadly this makes me want to change to a disc priest, but if I do that I will not have my awsome shadowform. Who doesn’t love to press the shadowform button and see your priest change to a figure of darkness?! Its like when spiderman turns into black spiderman, but less crazy and much more epic! The second change is a new talent that Blizzard added that also resides in the discipline tree. Its Twin Faiths. I think this will greatly benefit a priest with the spell and healing department. Its something that I would love to have as a disc priest. Wait..how come every cool thing seems to be for the disc priest, Blizzard must not like the specs I play, first shaman, now priest? Come on!

Ok ok I know, I’m wrong about this because in WotLK there are some awsome changes for priests. Few adds that come to mind, is Improved Fade, Improved Shadowform, and Dispersion. Thoses talents seem awsome for a shadow priest.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll give the WotLK priest a try and I’ll see how much I like it or hate it. Then again just changing into shadowform will make any change good or bad oboslete. Ok I’m just joking but… come on spiderman?! It would be like…

“Shadowpriest, Shadowpriest, does whatever a discipline priest can, throws a dot, and a couple more, will facepwn you and some more, look out!, here comes the shadowpriest in shadowform!!!”

Anyways…lack of sleep really does make you do stupid stuff. Please don’t hold it against me :p

- Iternal

Objection! Wait… nevermind…

Today, I’ll be talking about one of my favorite games I had just recently finished. The game is called Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Basically it’s about you being a lawyer named Phoenix Wright, and you save people from being falsely accused of murder/crime. Now, you probably won’t see any of these things happening in the real courtroom but that shouldn’t make you stray away from this amazing game. I’ll be talking about the things I really liked in this game. I’ll talk about the story first.

The story was… amazing. The twists and turns when your in the courtroom is overwhelming. Words fail to describe the feeling I had while playing this game. I know I may sound a bit over dramatic but you should play the game before judging comments. But I dare you to play it and attempt not to like it. Trust me. It’ll be hard unless you totally hate lawyers. Most of the the cases you’ll be playing through will have some kind of amazing story to it. But some of the cases in the series are really boring, but trust me, the last case is always epic. So remember, if the case is boring, fear not! The last case will make you feel good about yourself!

Other than the story there are tons of other features that make this game so epic. The character development is superb. There really isn’t much to talk about, but Capcom did an amazing job making you feel like Phoenix Wright and how he portrays his ingame feelings. You also dig into his into his past in the first and third game making things more interesting. Not only does Capcom allow you player to indulge into the protagonist’s past, but they also talked about the prosecutors and other minor characters. (ex. Edgeworth, Godot, and Maya). So I thought it was pretty nifty of them to do that.

How could this be a review without talking about gameplay! The gameplay, like everything else, is great. Not only do you get to be a lawyer, but you also investigate the crime scenes for evidence you can use in the court. This game forces you actually think about things and be smart about your decisions. Although the evidence you have to present in the court never changes, the gameplay is still fun for one playthrough.  Anyways… during your investigation, you can find evidence and talk to people/suspects related to the crime. The special item Phoenix Wright obtains (a Magatama) allows you get to wriggle out people’s lies with evidence. After the investigation, you go into court and face the prosecutor in an epic war where you hit each other with words. But before that, you have a suspect testify what they saw during the crime, and thats when you present evidence to make them break/tell the truth. And after you do that, you’ll most likely start saying my favorite line in this game..

This always brings tears to my eyes..

Then you and the prosecutor start arguing it out. Oh yeah, the prosecutor is usually different in every game. One of my favorite prosecutors would be Godot, he’s so cool.

See, look how badass he is.

But don’t worry, you’ll beat him. I just know it.

Anyways… Thats all from me, remember, get this game. It’s a great game even if you don’t like lawyers. You shouldn’t hesitate to try it. And if you don’t like it, go die in a fire give it to someone else. Maybe they’ll enjoy the game more than you’ll be able to. Don’t come blaming me when your friend starts pointing his finger at you and shouting “OBJECTION!”

- Kricu

Prot warriors in pvp?! Madness! Madness? THIS IS WOTLK!!

You'll do him proud!!

Any competant warrior whose played TBC can tell you that out of the three warrior talent trees, a hybrid build between Arms and the Fury tree is the way to go for PvP. It’s generally the 35/23/3 or the 33/28/0 build, both are pretty standard with the PvP warrior. However, when it comes to the Protection tree, most of the warrior population simply brush it off as a PvE tanking tree, and for good reasons as well. In TBC, the Protection tree does its job relatively well as a main tank build, but in terms of PvP it is extremely lackluster. With the majority of the talents being useless or of little use in PvP, a Prot warrior facing off against another player is really nothing more than a minor annoyance, something along the lines of a cockroach, equally hard to kill but doesn’t really do anything to you.

Generally most warriors have by now come to accept that Protection simply has no place in a serious PvP environment, but Blizzard is looking to change that with the coming of Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard’s vision for the expansion is that each class’ talent trees is able to perform in any given environment, with some talent trees edging out to be slightly better suited for certain tasks. In the warrior’s case, the traditional Arms-PvP, Fury-PvEdps, Prot-PvEtank undergone some drastic changes in the Wotlk beta.

Fury is now capable of performing competitively in a PvP environment with the introduction of a core mechanic that has been exclusive to the Arms tree for all of legacy WoW and TBC. Furious Attacks packs the effect of Mortal Strike into the deep Fury tree allowing the effect to have a chance to proc on hit. The effect stacks twice giving a total of 50% healing reduction (same as MS). Titan’s Grip is another brand new mechanic that allows Fury warriors to dual wield two handed weapons (think Diablo II Barbarians). This effectively increases the Fury warrior’s burst damage potential in PvP which they lacked before. Thus Fury warriors who used to be laughed at in any serious PvP environment may now actually be considered.

The changes to the Arms tree is less dramatic and generally consists of improvements made to previous useless mechanics such as bleed effects (Rend?!? What is that??) now scales much better with attack power, and tanking talents added into lower tiers of the tree to help with off-spec tanking. Bladestorm finally gives the Arms warrior a somewhat different version of the Beast Within add on multiple whirlwind hits. Furthering the idea of a wrecking train warrior.

The major changes to Prot is what this post is mainly about. Many talents caught my eyes when I first saw them. Talents like Warbringer and Safeguard just screams PvP. Warbringer is a deep Prot talent that allows Charge to be used in ANY stances AND in combat! That alone is a dream come true to PvP warriors. Then you have Safeguard which in addition to reducing damage takent of your Intervene’s target by 60%, it also removes all movement imparing effects. This combined with the talented Charge makes the Prot warrior possibly one of the most mobile characters in the game. Then you have talents such as Toughness which in addition to its old +10% armor value, it now reduces all movement slowing effects by 50% when fully talented. These three solid talents alone covers up one of the warrior’s biggest weakness, their suceptibility to kiting.

It would also seem that the new Prot warrior specced with PvP in mind will also become more resillient to spell damage. With talents such as Improved Spell Reflection reducing the cooldown of Spell Reflection by half, thats twice as many spells a warrior will now be able to reflect back to those pesky casters. Gag Order along with Heroic Throw gives warriors a ranged silence skill, perfect for when you’re rooted.

Perhaps now with all these new and improved talents in the Prot tree boosting the critical chance and damage (Incite, Gag Order, Critical Block, Sword and Board) to previously “tanking skills” such as Shield Slam and Concussion Blow (its damage now scales with attack power) a shield bearing, sword wielding warrior will finally become more than a minor annoyance on the PvP scene. Warriors may finally be able to Shield Slam the Frost mage’s face in Leonidas style!

- Xei