No Blog Posts For a Few Days

Just making this quick post to let everyone know that I will be afk for the next few days because I am going on a trip and will not have time to do any posts. I hope everyone has a nice weekend and hopefully I'll be back and able to get a post up by Wednesday.

WoW Patch 4.1 Announced

Today Blizzard announced that patch 4.1 is well underway and soon will be available for testing on the PTR. Apparently Blizzard saw the introduction of a level 85 heroic version of the old instances Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines as a success, something I cannot disagree with as the new Deadmines was a lot of fun, because they are adding in the old troll raids Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman as level 85 five man heroics. These two dungeons will be more challenging than the other 5 mans but will drop epic gear of the 353 item level which is just below current raid loot.

I am not really sure of what to think of this; it does seem like Blizzard just recycling old content but keep in mind in Wrath we didn't see knew heroics until later on so some new stuff is better than none. Also I really enjoyed those raids back in the day and feel they are great instances. One major thing that will excite some people is that new versions of the no longer attainable mounts, the bear, tiger, and raptor will drop in these new heroics. These new mounts will be different in some way from the originals meaning people who own the originals get to keep the unique mount they earned forever ago. As someone who has an Amani War Bear from the timed run back in Burning Crusade I am very happy that they didn't just make the same bear drop.

Moonkin is happy his bear stays unique.

These are not the only additions in 4.1. New raids are expected but have not yet been announced. There are a bunch of class changes incoming and warriors are getting a pretty nifty new ability. The last thing I saw on Blizzard's post is that they are working on an in game looking for guild system; I think this is a great addition especially with the focus on guilds Cataclysm has brought.

The Blizzard blog post can be found at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2356431#blog.

WoW Battleground Win Percentages

Recently MMO-Champion released a graph depicting battleground win percentages for Alliance and Horde. They got these numbers by mass scanning characters on the armory and compiling their battleground statistics. They do note that even though the number of people scanned is huge, don't take the stats as 100% truth; it is very hard to gather large amounts of data from the armory.

Now before you go into a rage over "imbalance" make sure to look at the percents on the left. The lowest is 42% and the highest is 58% meaning the look of the graph is a bit deceiving. Overall Horde only wins about 9% more than alliance but I suppose the old idea that horde is better at PvP is somewhat true. What I find funny is that the most "balanced" battleground, by that I mean the one alliance can actually win at, is Alterac  Valley which just so happens to be the only one without a mirrored map. I'm sorry but Frostwolf Keep is a much bigger pain to defend than Dun Baldar, stupid bridge. AV was my favorite battleground though before they nerfed the crap out of it and turned it into a zergfest.

As horde I find it appropriate to say:

Minecraft Bank Design

A long time ago before my server decided to just use commands to spawn items I constructed a bank for us to store our precious materials; as you can see it is small on the outside but is in fact quite spacious.

Twin staircases lead downward underground to where all the materials are stored.

Above is the main large room with two hallways that branch off to hold more materials, each hallway has a theme that keeps like things in the same place making it easy to find what you are after.

At the end of one hallway is a secret room, normally there is a cobblestone block hiding it but destroy that and there is a ladder downward to where some of the really interesting stuff is kept, stuff only available on the server by using spawn commands.

That's my bank, it isn't the most elaborate but it got the job done. Sometime I'm going to make a huge fancy bank  just for show, full of vaults and all that fun stuff.

How to Nuke as Zerg!

And that's not all, there is so much more that you can do with this awesome thing that Blizzard put into the game that many people are not aware about. All you need is an infestor with neural parasite researched; find a way to neural parasite an SCV that is out of position, mabye one that is out scouting, moving from one expansion to another, or just one from a successfully attacked expansion. Now once the little guy is under your control order him to build a commend center, this will cost you minerals but is definitely worth it. Keep chain neural parasiting him until the command center is finished. If your opponent is smart he will move in to try and save or kill the SCV stopping you, so defend it all all costs!

Once it is done just kill off the SCV, lift the command center off, and drop it somewhere safe. Hell you can drop it at a mineral patch and expand there if you want. You pretty much have a terran army under your command now, all SCVs produced at the CC will be completely under your comtrol, use them to harvest minerals and build things for you! Be aware that all this costs you minerals and supply, but it is well worth it!

Now you can produce whatever terran unit you want, think battlecruisers will compliment your brood lords? Go for it! Having trouble defending your hatcheries? Throw some siege tanks down at them! My favorite has to be ghosts though because nukes are just so damn fun, and the last thing a terran player expects a zerg to do is nuke him! Just build some ghosts and drop some NUCLEAR FRICKEN BOMBS!

Is it the most effective strategy? No, but it sure is fun; a great way to screw with people. And who doesn't love nuclear armaments?

Trick to Harass Siege Tanks as Zerg

Terran players love their siege tanks about as much as they love their wall ins and a line of siege tanks backed up by marines can be tough to crack. I recently found out about a neat trick that will harass and soften up the siege tanks while keeping your forces (mostly) out of harms way. 

The key to the strat is that when sieged up the tanks deal area of effect damage to everything, including friendlies, around their target; that's how they chew holes in your blobs so quickly. To exploit this AoE get a few infestors and research burrow. Burrow them and have them drop some infested terrans, one at a time, into the siege tanks like so:

The tanks will turn around and fire on the egg, damaging friendlies! Keep this up and you can severely soften up or even destroy the Terran forces. It is also quite annoying for the player to deal with.

One thing to note here, send in one infestor at a time or at least keep them spread out. That way the player cannot catch more than one infestor with a scan which will reduce your losses. Do as I say not as I do.

Changes to WoW's Vote to Kick System

There have been lots of complaints concerning the vote to kick system in dungeon groups; a new hotfix recently came out that fixes some problems but also creates another. Here are the "fixes:"

• If a party member remains outside of a dungeon for more than 3 minutes, they become eligible for removal, regardless of other Vote Kick restrictions.
• When players queue as a group with a tank or a healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) within the first 5 minutes, all of the other players who queued with them are removed from the group as well.
• If there is a group of 3 or more friends and someone in that group initiates a Vote Kick of a random party member, it now requires 4 votes to kick the player, instead of the standard 3 votes.
• The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often is not issued to a player who kicks someone with whom they queued for a dungeon (i.e. the party member being selected for removal is not a player randomly selected via the Dungeon Finder).
• The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often will be issued much more quickly to players who join as a party of 4 and kick the randomly selected 5th player.
• The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often will now not allow the player to initiate a Vote Kick for 2 hours, up from 45 minutes.

The first one is great, it fixes the problem of people griefing or just holding the group up so they can finish one more daily.The second is there because, tanks especially, were selling fast ques to dps then dropping group to make some quick cash which was annoying as it held up the other people who legitimately waited out their que. The third change is where problems can arise, if a group of 3 ques and its placed with a group of 2 the 2 can do whatever they want and are immune to kicking. Also it removes majority rule which, in my opinion, should stand in dungeon groups; yes it sucks that groups of 3 are obnoxious sometimes but in my experience it doesn't happen all that often, especially with the penalties for using the kick feature too much.

Fourth change is nice I suppose but it won't effect much, the only time I can remember kicking somebody I grouped with was as a joke and we invited him right back. The last two are tricky to say much on and since I haven't actually pugged anything in the dungeon finder since Wrath (thank god) I can't come up with much of an argument for or against. I will say though that being unable to kick a troll / griefer / ninja / imbecile from your group because of the time restriction is very annoying. I remember in Wrath me and my friends would resort to trolling somebody out of the group, and it worked pretty well sometimes =D.

That's all for today sorry for the late post and no post yesterday; I've been a bit busy recently but I plan to have a good post up everyday this coming week, hopefully a bit earlier too.

Starcraft 2 Hallucination Build

When I play Protoss I love the good ol' four gate build, unfortunately Terran players love to turtle at their ramp which poses a problem and can blunt your four gate assault; here is a strat for dealing with the pesky defense.

This build uses hallucination which was recently buffed reducing the research time allowing you to get it out even faster; make sure to start researching hallucination right after warp gate finishes, the faster you can make your push the better because if the Terran is relying on his bunker at his ramp to hold you off while teching up bypassing it is incredibly powerful. First, get your main army positioned at the bottom of his ramp and in position to make a push up it. Then build a pylon on the low ground outside of his base, close enough to allow warp ins on the high ground but hopefully outside of his vision range. Then use a sentry to spawn a hallucinated colossus by the pylon and run it up into this base. The hallucination provides vision allowing you to warp in four stalkers in the back of his base!

What I like to do next is run the hallucination at my opponent's ramp to buy some time while running the stalkers around the edge of his base and behind his mineral line. The colossus does no damage since it is a hallucination but it should distract his forces just enough to get your stalkers in position. Now start killing SCVs and hopefully he will pull his forces away from his ramp to defend, now run up there with your main army and have fun! This is especially powerful early game when hopefully he will have to remove the marines from his bunker to defend his SCVs. If at first you don't succeed keep pushing from both sides using more hallucinations.

Desktop Dungeons

Desktop Dungeons is a simple yet complex free game that I've found myself wasting a lot of time on. With save files the game only takes up 10 MB of space and runs on pretty much any computer; it is a great flash drive game. It also is great for short play sessions and can be left and came back to at any time. I often play it during downtime during WoW raids.

To start a game you first choose your race, each with specific benefits, your class, which grants you bonuses, and then the level you wish to play; levels include normal, gauntlet, snake pit, library, and more. Races, classes, and levels unlock as you progress and each present a unique challenge.

Each time you start a game you spawn randomly on a randomly generated map of the type you chose as a level one with nothing but two potions; the only thing you keep between games ins gold which caps at 70 anyway. You win the level by finding and killing the level 10 boss; there are several different bosses each with unique buffs or abilities. So in a nutshell you run around exploring the map, finding monsters your level to kill, and leveling up to 9 or 10 then killing the boss.

It is not that simple though. Around the map you can find potions, gold, shops, alters, and glyphs. At shops you can spend gold on random items that may or may not be worth it. Each alter is to a specific god and you can choose one god to worship. Pleasing your god grants piety and angering them subtracts piety and can have other nasty effects. For example, Taurag loved me slaughtering things but he halved my health when I used magic, dick. Also the Glowing Guardian yelled at me whenever I used a potion, prolly shouldn't pick him. Piety can be spent on very powerful upgrades that can make or break you. Taurag gave me an ability that let my attacks pierce all resistances, which was vital in defeating the boss that took 60% less physical damage; I was a warrior meaning magicing the boss wasn't going to be very effective.

Glyphs grant you the ability to cast spells using mana. You can hold up to 3 glyphs at a time, 4 if you are a wizzard. If you do not want a spell destroying the glyph grants you a bonus specific to your race, and can please or anger certain gods. Spells include fireballs, teleports, wall destroyers, wall creators, attack bonuses, and more. Without spells your basic attack is melee which is done by simply clicking or moving into an opponent.

The only way to heal or restore mana in the game is by leveling up, using scarce potions, or exploring unexplored areas. However exploring also heals all enemies so it's best to kill them in one set of attacks. This turns the game into a heavy resource management style of game; every tile you explore while at full health looking for a monster to level on is effectively wasted health. I have often found myself completely unable to complete the level as there is nowhere else to explore, I cannot heal. Enemies also have certain abilities; snakes will poison you, goblins always get the first hit, and warlocks attack with magic. All of this creates a very complex and challenging game, which is fun.

The game is all about managing the your class and race's abilities, the abilities of enemies, the map, spells, and all the other elements and perfecting them. It is surprisingly complex, and abit frustrating, for such a simple looking game. It can be downloaded at http://www.qcfdesign.com/?cat=20.

Athene is the Best Protoss in the World!

A few days ago Athene released a video of his newest shenanigans declaring himself the best protoss in the world and effectively trolling the Starcraft community. If you are unaware of who Athene is he is the best paladin in the world, the best poker player in the world, a rich guy that lives with his mother, the first person to hit 85 in WoW in the world, recently a scientist, and now the best protoss player in the world; did I mention he is also a huge troll? He is hit and miss but I find some of his stuff pretty funny, especially when people take him seriously.

In his newest video, found at the bottom of the page, he trolls it up for a bit stroking his epeen. Then he announces that he got to rank 1 ratio wise in masters league of Starcraft 2 in one day; he has been beating the top 200 players in the world. Don't believe it? Check his screenshot. He then says that if he gets more subscribers he will make Starcraft vids giving tips. While watching this it makes it way funnier when you think about all the people out there that take him seriously and rage at him.

Now if you are wondering what is really going on here then I'll provide some info and you can decide for yourself. Athene apparently is friends with top tier Starcraft player KiwiKaki; when watching replays Athene has released it is noticeable that the keybindings and playstyle of Athene are very similar if not identical to KiwiKaki. So did Athene just learn from his friend or is KiwiKaki helping the troll along and playing for him? Either way it is shaping up to be quite hilarious. Husky casted three of the replays and they are actually very good games, especially the first. You can find them here, here, and here.

Finally here is Athene's troll video:

Latency Improvements To WoW

Recently there were two very interesting blue posts on the WoW forums regarding latency. The first simply explains the change in how latency is displayed in game; contrary to popular belief home does not mean your personal latency and world does not mean Blizzard's latency. Home refers to your connection to the world server, it handles things like chat data, auction house data, addon data, and other small bits. World handles everything else, like combat. The full post can be found here.

The second is far more interesting. To summarize, Blizzard added a change in 4.0.6 that dramatically decreased latency for 99% of players. By dramatically I mean 150 latency to 12, yes, 12. Unfortunately the 1% of users with oversaturated connections, old routers, throttling ISPs, and other nonsense experienced problems with this new system so Blizzard temporarily reverted it. Thankfully, in a future patch Blizzard plans to allow users to manually turn on or off this change which should benefit most people greatly. As someone that raids at around 150-200 latency I cannot wait for this change, even 50 latency would be glorious. The full post can be found here.

Yes, I know it is Moosey Monday and this isn't about moose but I'm eating a bunch of chocolate moose I got for Valentines Day right now...so does that count? Nomnomnomnom.

Primal Carnage

Primal Carnage is a multiplayer FPS currently in development by the indie stuido Lukewarm Media and is currently in Alpha. This game caught my eye because it offers something I haven't seen since some old Turok game I used to play, large scale battles between humans and dinosaurs completely controlled by players.

Currently the Alpha has two game modes, 4 human classes, and 3 dino classes with more on the way including vehicles. Each class fulfills a specific role, for example, raptors are fast and can pounce on targets like Left 4 Dead hunters while dilos can break other dinos out of traps and strike from a distance. Of course the T-rex just stomps around and nomnoms people. The humans have a sniper class, heavy weapons class, trapper class, and a support class.

Beta is coming soon and once it hits anyone can register on their website found here. I'm a big fan of unique inde games so I'll be following this one closely and will provide updates on this blog. I'll end with this cool "trailer" the Primal Carnage team released depicting the newly added T-rex. Keep in mind the game is still in alpha and is not by an AAA studio with publisher money, it's just a project started by a group of friends. Awesome gameplay can make up for lack of graphical and animation quality.

Minecraft Sky City in the Making

A friend of mine, Eaglacius, sent me this screenshot of the sky city he is building in his single player world. Personally I think it is a pretty cool idea and can't wait to see how awesome it looks once he gets it larger. He also sent me another screenshot, apparently he set one tree on fire and it turned into this:

That's all I have for today, expect a longer post tomorrow, thanks for reading!

Great Starcraft 2 Best of 7 Series

Recently Totalbiscuit casted a best of 7 series between LiquidHuk and LiquidTLO (The Little One) who are two of the best Starcraft 2 players in the world! It is a great seven games that any fan of Starcraft 2 will enjoy watching; both of these players played exceptionally using creative strategies and intense micro. My favorite part about TLO is that he plays random, meaning we get to see him play all three races adding a lot of variety; it isn't just one long series of the same matchup. You can watch the full series here.

Starcraft 2 Strat: Tunneling Claws > Forcefields

So a lot of zerg I see / know have trouble with protoss forcefields, especially when they are trying to be aggressive early game. A strategy that can be used to bypass the pesky ramp forcefield tactic is burrow + tunneling claws on roaches. After researching burrow at your lair and tunneling claws at your roach warren your roaches can burrow underground and slide under the forcefields! I like to use this to burrow up the ramp and into their mineral line, then pop up and bam. 

Obviously if your opponent has cannons down or an observer out this isn't nearly as powerful but you can still use it. Burrow your roaches and quickly get them up the ramp past the forcefields then unburrow them and engage.  Hopefully they will not take too much damage in the process; this works great against protoss who feel safe behind the fields and tech up quick instead of building a bigger army.

World of Warcraft Patch 4.0.6 Live!

Today the first patch of Cataclysm, 4.0.6, is live on U.S. servers. One awesome change is the addition of troll and worgen druid flight forms, which are sick. There is also an incredibly long list of class changes so I recommend that anybody that plays WoW should look over these changes and adapt accordingly. I know I'll be getting on to re-reforge all my warriors gear. Check out the full patch notes here.

Boy Saves Sister From Moose Attack with WoW Skills!

So today's Moosey Monday post relates to moose and MMOs, it's a great fit. A 12 year old norwegian boy and his sister were going for a walk in the woods when they were approached by an angry moose. The boy, Hans, acted fast using some skills he learned by playing World of Warcraft. The first skill that came to mind was taunt, this caused the moose to focus it's attention on him allowing his sister to escape. Then he imployed another WoW skill, feign death. It worked just like in WoW and the moose left him alone!

So next time sombody tells you video games are a waste of time show them this! I'm just glad the kid didn't try to mortal strike the moose. To view the full article click here.

WoW Heroics Nerfed in 4.0.6

Well we all knew it was coming, heroics are about to be beaten with the nerfbat this Tuesday. I for one was glad to see a bit of challenge back in the 5 mans, face-rolling Wrath heroics was incredibly boring. First off there is a long list of changes to the heroics, overall the incredibly easy fights are being buffed slightly and the difficult fights are being nerfed. Overall this is a nerf since this "moderate" difficulty Blizzard is trying to set all the fights too really isn't that hard; not to mention that heroics are slowly becoming easier as people learn the fights and acquire more gear.

Now the new recently announced nerf that everybody has been talking about is the luck of the draw change. Luck of the draw is a buff that provides 5% increased damage, healing, and health if you have at least one random player in your group acquired through the dungeon finder. This is being buffed to 5% per random player up to 15%, meaning if your group has at least 3 players found through the dungeon finder the buff will be set to 15%. This will make the heroics substantially easier, much like the ICC buff of Wrath. Blizzard's justification for this change is that random groups lack coordination and this buff makes up for that. To read the full post by Ghostcrawler and to read some player reactions click here.

New Offical Starcraft 2 Custom Game: Starjeweled

First off, sorry for the late post today I've been busy. Now continuing with my look at Blizzard's three new custom Starcraft 2 games. Out of the three I'd say Starjeweled is my favorite simply because I love Bejeweled, and I love Starcraft; so mixing the two creates something awesome.

The game is a pretty simple 2v2 setup, the map is one long strip with a command building at each end and two sets of two cannons along the way for each team. The goal is to beat your way through your opponents cannons and destroy their building. You do this by spending energy on units which will automatically spawn from your command building and head towards your opponents, you can also buy and cast spells like psi-storm or a heal. Basic marines will constantly spawn from your building to act as cannon fodder. The twist is that you must gain energy by playing Bejeweled on the right side of your screen; the better combos you get the more energy you get and thus more units.

The game takes a lot of attention and focus, because not only must you play Bejeweled like mad to gain energy but you also have to be paying attention to the battlefield to spawn appropriate counters to the units your opponents are spawning. I often found myself spending too much time surveying the battlefield deciding what counters to spawn that I fell behind in energy. Overall it's a lot of fun!

Cool WoW / Starcraft 2 Wallpaper

Hello everyone I don't have much time today so I'll share this awesome wallpaper I found quick; I got it from the Blizzard fanart gallery and it is fantastic for any Starcraft 2 or WoW fan. If you like it you can find it here.

Duty Calls, a Call of Duty Parody

Recently Epic Games released a new game called Duty Calls which can be downloaded free from their site. The game is 10 minutes of sillyness with plenty of jokes mocking Call of Duty. You are tasked with finding the "blahblahblah secret base, blahblahblah nuclear missle bomb, blahblahblah counting on you." When shot you are greated with "BLOOODY SCREEN, SOOOO REAAAAL!" As you dispatch dumb enemies you rank up with incredbly x-treme sound ranks such as "Seargent Seargeant Master Seargeant Shooter Person." The game ends with a trailer for Epic Game's upcoming game, Bulletstorm. So really this whole Duty Calls thing is just an EA marketing ploy, but a damn good one at that.

The game doesn't take long to play and is definetly worth it for the laughs. Download it here.

If you would rather watch someone else play it, Totalbiscuit did a "Wtf is" video of it found here.

How to Use Invedit in Minecraft

I play Minecraft multiplayer only these days so I can just use commands to spawn items, however, for those of you that play single player I had Tormented Ghost write up a guide on how to use Invedit; it is a program that spawns items for you allowing you to focus on building and not on gathering. Here is his guide, if it leaves any questions unanswered you can read the instructions on the download page or ask in the comments.

"To download Invedit click here.

This is the beginning screen to Invedit, basic and understandable. All you gotta do is open your world.

And it opens a grid the size of your inventory.

Then grab something from the right bar, and drag it into one of the squares. You can put armor right into their squares.

You can adjust the count and how much damage it has ( you can go negative)

Max Count: 255

Minimum damage -32657

Then you save back to the world via the save button and open Minecraft. It may look like you only have one of an item but you actually have 255. And with all that you get:

This world is going to be the start of a sort of lets build just comment ideas of something for me to build and I will try and build it and take screen shots after a while (when I get bored) I will make some sort of competition and give the world away."

There you go, Tormented Ghost's guide to Invedit.