Friday with(out) Means - April 29th, 2011

Kintaii this week fills in for Means:

"Aight folks, I ain't gonna lie - It's been a long, hectic, crazy, tiring month, and my rant juices are just about depleted so this is gonna be a short one. Or, well, short for me.

Work on the new Pandemonium raid encounter is coming along swimmingly, with the final design decisions in place and the worldbuilding beginning next week. The design document is being polished up today by myself, and I think that we've really got something interesting in this one. Looking forward to getting it out there. =)

Most of the week for Means was taken up in meetings with Genele and Macrosun, making some pretty major decisions regarding the code changes needed for the Rebalancing. Some of this stuff is pretty major, like "wait, really, we're doing that?" kinda major. Here's a teaser: map navigation as a skill is disappearing, and all RK maps (as well as some of the upgrades) will be automatically applied to all characters. That's really just the tip of the iceberg, with some other large surprises in store later. 

Sith Warrior Progression Trailer

Bioware and LucasArts have released a new trailer featuring the Sith Warrior. The video shows off Sith Warrior armor and powers progression. Included is a terrific look at the types of armor classes and various abilities players can expect as their rank and level increases as well as the two advanced classes, the Sith Marauder and Sith Juggernaut.

Patch 4.1 on Live Servers this Week

"We will be extending maintenance for all realms for 1 hour 30 minutes and anticipate they will be available for play at 12:30 PDT. We will provide additional updates as necessary". This of course was after the already planned downtime for the patch.

• Dungeon Call To Arms Interface/Mechanics.
• New Valor Points and Daily Dungeons gains.
• New Dungeons - Zul'aman and Zul'gurb (Heroic 5-Man).
• Heirloom Tanking Items.
• Maelstrom Crystals and Honor/Justice conversion.
• Guild Challenges.
• New Archaeology Rewards.
• Poseidus and Reins of Poseidus.
• Cooking and Fishing Daily Quests.

Nothing really stands out to me except for the Warlock class changes. I am still not a fan of running old content as "new" content such as ZA/ZG, and I never liked ZG to begin with.

On another note, our guild killed Cho'Gall for the second time after many bloody attempts. He dropped a Vanquisher token, Caster ring and a 2-handed Axe. The ring is nice, but sad to say it's not really an upgrade.

All the new features/changes are here and here 

Happy Easter!!

I hope you all had a safe and enjoyable Easter holiday!

The Journey

Ragnar Tørnquist recently sat down with Gaming Nexus for an interview. A great read if you are wondering about "The Journey" of The Secret World..

"Our role-playing and combat systems are radically different from other games in the genre. Our focus is total freedom of play, without classes and levels, and a completely skill-based progression. Players can start out focusing on one weapon, one direction, but as they earn XP and buy more powers, they can expand their arsenal -- their decks -- and create unique hybrid characters capable of handling different situations and encounters, playing different roles as required by their team or cabal. And there will be more than five hundred powers to purchase at launch, which means that the combinations are endless. No two characters will be alike."

Read the full interview.

New Gaming Rig

Finally received all my parts late yesterday. The motherboard took almost 2 weeks to deliver since they were out of stock. I took advantage of a non work day and a non raid night to assemble it (it couldn't have come on a better day). It's amazing how dusty the inside of the case was after my last 3 month dust cleaning session. I made sure everything was spotless inside the case before putting my new hardware in.

Assemble took a couple hours and made sure everything was in working order.

Intel Core i5-2500 3.3GHz second gen
x2 4gb Corsair Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 TI 1024 MB GDDR5 Video Card
ASUS P8H67-M LE B3 Intel H67 Motherboard
Windows 7 64-bit

I am keeping my 650w PSU and my 2 500gb Hard Drives from my other build.

Previous build was:

Duo Core E7200
2gb Ram
GeFore 9800 GT
Asus Motherboard
Windows 7 32-bit

Huge upgrade!

Looking forward to blowing games away :D

TSW - Dev Blog - Characters

"The characters in The Secret World are there to guide you through the game, give you context and help you interpret the world, as well as being a catalyst of intriguing missions and gameplay. They are your window into our world, the engine that drives it forward, the corner pieces of the grand puzzle, and the shovel we give you with which to dig.

When talking about the story in The Secret World, we’re talking about a few different things. There’s the setting, which is a contemporary world where myth and legend combine with modern themes and ancient conspiracies. There’s the history, which is the timeline of events that has brought us to the point where the dark days are coming. And, last but not least, there’s the in-game narrative; the events that unfold and beg the players to intervene and react."

More about TSW's characters.

Environment Polish - ToR

"As an Environment Artist, I love having time to polish the work that our team has put into the game. Quite often, assets and lighting may be completed months or years prior to the game’s release, so when we have time to polish this allows us to update and unify the game to the ever changing, growing, and evolving demands of development. This is especially true on an MMO like The Old Republic, where hundreds of different elements are interacting to make the multiplayer experience work correctly. When one element of the game changes, it can impact many others, so we may be required to polish the art in a certain part of the game, so that the story still works and the performance of the game is still optimal."

There is also a community Q&A from the Devs. The full news article can be read here.

Some awesome looking detail in The Old republic. Hope to see much more like this!

Revisting Rubi-Ka

Actually, I've been playing Anarchy Online on my 2 Froob accounts for the past couple weeks, tearing up missions as a 130 MP and 130 Engi. Froob means, "free noob" and you get to play basic AO levels 1-200 without expansion packs minus Notum Wars. There are a decent number of Froobs running around, and the Froob experience is actually pretty good.

There is still a decent player base on the Atlantean server, with a great community. People are still using raid bots for farming Alien Playfields, Pandemonium, 12mans and more. This is a good thing, because the majority of the guilds are fairly small, some using chat bots to connect guild chats together.

After some thinking, I decided to re sub for a month and see how it goes. Logged in to find exactly where I logged out, right in front of my player shop and I had 250 million credits waiting for me, which is great, because I was broke! Next, I spent an hour moving my UI and setting up my bars and learning how to play my Bureaucrat again.

I figured the best way to relearn how to play was to run some inferno missions (who doesn't want a Crat in their team?). Easy stuff, everything came back to me pretty quickly, regarding nanos, perks, pets and general game play. Good to go, I decided to solo an alien ground city raid. Having all my endgame nanos and a lot of decent gear, it was fairly easy. Of course the alien General dropped total crap.

I needed more credits to buy better gear and since the RK1 market is so inflated, 250m wasn't going to do much. Ice Golem patterns used to sell for around 20-30m in the shops, so I figured I would farm a few of them. Next stop, Adonis catacombs, which is so easy for a Crat - yay calms. Bosses down there aren't for the feint of heart for soloing, but for Crat, it's cake. Crats can solo pretty much anything with all their Init debuffs. First boss in the catacombs dropped the Yomi page and quickly left. I had a bunch of insignias to summon Cama. I quickly ran to the Redeemed temple and Cama's placeholder was up. Killed it, and then talked to the npc to summon Cama. Took about 10 minutes to solo Cama, but it was fairly easy. Dropped the Heart I needed and ran to the Unredeemed temple. Traded in all the parts and I received the Complete Ice Golem Pattern. Portaled back to RK and sold it within the first 10 minutes for 60m! Not bad for 30 minutes of work.

I spent the majority of the weekend farming pocket boss patterns to sell symbiants, raiding using public bots and re-acquainting myself with the rest of the AO expacks.

My characters are:

level/ai/research

Crat - 220/22/59
Doctor - 215/10/12
Soldier - 214/12/10
Martial Artist - 181/7/10
Engineer - 150/4/5
and a couple other lowbies.

My Crat still needs some AI levels and research and the daily missions is a great source for free "level" for a short amount of time invested.

Revenant revealed - TSW

"Amongst the ranks of the living dead, the Revenant holds a special place. No mere reanimated corpse, the Revenant has formed from the restless fragments of those who, in life, did great evil. Devious and clever, the Revenants serve no master, no greater plan or intelligent design."
 
More about The Revenant

 

The state of Black Prophecy

I recently picked up a closed beta key for upcoming sci-fi MMO, Black Prophecy. I haven't had the chance to play it yet, but here is a quick update on the game.

By Patrick Streppel, member of the executive board at gamigo AG

"Three weeks have gone by since the release of Black Prophecy in Europe and we would like to present a brief update as well as some insight into what you can expect from Black Prophecy in the future.

The current state
For an MMOG of Black Prophecy’s scale, the European launch went down very smoothly; no severe technical issues occurred and the servers were, and continue to be, stable. We were also able to start North American closed beta testing and are looking forward to giving the green light for release very soon (the current performance issues are hardware-related and solving them should not take long). The translation into French has begun and further language versions such as Spanish, Russian and even Chinese are already in discussion.

But, as with any MMOG, there can be difficulties with the performance of the starting sectors (the Open World Sectors), especially so soon after the game’s launch when many new players populate the same areas for the first time. These sectors have already been optimized during beta testing and the development team will continue to improve performance as time goes by. Please stay with us on this.

Upon the announcement of the game’s launch, certain voices in the community suggested that the game was not yet “finished” and that more development time was required. We take these concerns very seriously and are happy to discuss with you what you think is missing but ask you to keep the feedback constructive. I might be getting ahead of myself here but a lot of mission content, PvP elements and other features are already on the way to fulfill the promises we made.

Some have compared Black Prophecy with an unpolished diamond. This comparison gets closer to the heart of it. The decision to release Black Prophecy at this point in time was agreed upon by both Reakktor Media and gamigo. Many obstacles have been overcome in the past few years to get this far and we are extremely happy and proud of the result. No MMOG sees the light of day completely polished and perfectly working, but be assured that all involved parties are 100% dedicated not only to perfecting the current game but to bringing so much more to it."

WoW - Patch 4.1 Public Test Realm Notes

Warlocks

• Dark Intent: The friendly target of this ability now receives 1% (stacking 3 times to 3%) periodic spell damage and healing bonus instead of 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%). The casting Warlock still receives 3% (stacking 3 times to 9%).
• Rain of Fire damage has been increased by 25%.
• Seed of Corruption damage has been increased by 20%   

Affliction

• Haunt damage has been increased by 30%.
• Shadow Mastery (passive) has been increased to 30%, up from 25%.
• Unstable Affliction damage done when it is dispelled has been doubled, but this damage can no longer be critical.

Demonology       

• Mana Feed now restores more mana (four times as much) when the warlock is using a Felguard or Felhunter.
• Doomguard's damage has been increased by 50%. The Doomguard is intended to be the best guardian for single-target damage, and the Infernal the best when there are multiple targets.
• Lash of Pain (Succubus) damage now scales with level, reducing the damage done at lower levels such that it will deal 50% damage at level 20, and 100% damage at level 80 and above.
• Shadow Bite (Felhunter) damage and effect has doubled.

Glyphs 

• Glyph of Soul Swap now increases the cooldown of Soul Swap by 15 seconds, up from 10 seconds.

Since I only play Lanfear these days, these are the only class change notes I care about  I've been neglecting my off-spec for raiding lately, but these changes might make me switch to Affliction a little more. Not that Affliction is a bad spec, but since Cata, Destro is the highest dps, though lately Destro is starting to get a little boring.

The Return of Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub... seriously!? I'm getting a little tired of Blizzard recycling old content. I hated ZG so much I wanted to tear my eyes out with a dull spoon. ZA wasn't all that bad and ran it a bunch of times, but never got the mount. I'm not looking forward to running these instances again.

I'm not a huge fan of PvP anymore, but "The rate at which Honor Points are earned has been doubled." might get me doing some PvP'ing again when I'm bored.

Nothing in the patch notes that makes Cata raiding more "easier" or fun for the casual raiders except for Atramedes and Cho'gall's mind control will be more interruptable. with knockbacks..

Interesting to see how the Guild Challenges work out as well. Getting close to guild level 20!

The complete 4.1 patch notes can be read here.

ToR - Advanced Classes Update

"Advanced Classes (often abbreviated ACs) are chosen on your faction’s capital world – either Coruscant or Dromund Kaas - when your character reaches level 10 or above. Each base class gets a choice of two Advanced Classes; for example if you are playing a Jedi Knight, you will be able to choose to play the Jedi Guardian or Jedi Sentinel Advanced Class.

Choosing an Advanced Class is very important in The Old Republic, as within your Advanced Class, your character will reach their full potential. Your Advanced Class choice dramatically alters the gameplay experience of your base class by providing access to two exclusive skill trees per Advanced Class, with a third being shared between both Advanced Classes."

This is an awesome update and gave me a better idea what classes there will be. I'm leaning towards playing a Sith Sorcerer.

Check out the entire Dev blog here! It's definitely worth a read.

7 years of content planned

"The second you start playing The Secret World you'll actually see hints at where the content is going and what it's going to be. And we really wanted to get a head start of that. We have content, a significant amount we're planning to release after launch. How long that's going to take is really hard to say - it really depends on what players want. But yeah, it's ready to go!

"We have plans for seven years after launch for both the content and the story and of course cool new features as well," he added. "The game is just starting when we launch." 

Read more.

Everything Is True

The Secret World's latest trailer.

"Regardless of your faction choice, your story arc, Tornquist informs us, will have a beginning, a middle and an end. Sort of. "Players will have an arc to follow, through the story mission that begins with the origin story and the first visit to their hub city, and carries on through every location in the game, leading to an epic conclusion...and cliffhanger." He tells us they already have a few years' worth of post-release content planned out (and some even currently in production). This includes new powers, just in case you somehow manage to learn all 500 within like three days."

Full article.

Rogers throttles World of Warcraft across Canada

"In an effort to control what applications and services are used on the network, some Canadian ISPs are shaping internet traffic and throttling bandwidth.

This type of app discrimination started to become apparent a few years ago when Skype was launched in Canada. Floods of users reported that for whatever reason, the application wasn’t working properly on their desktops. And the cause? Rogers was intentionally jamming the pipes."

I just read this article the other day and this really pisses me off. Being a Rogers customer myself, I find this totally unacceptable.

Rogers is also trying to push the idea of charging people per byte rather then a flat fee per month. What?! Once Bell has Fibre internet available in my area, I am switching ISP providers. I've had enough with all the Rogers issues lately. Bell is cheaper and in most cases, faster.

The story behind The Secret World

Ragnar Tørnquist has written a new blog post on The Secret World's official site that deals with the story behind the game.

"Everything in The Secret World -- everything -- is infused with story. Everything has context. Everything has meaning. And it all adds up to this vast and complex jigsaw puzzle that, at launch, through the actions of the entire player base, will only be partly pieced together. You will start to see patterns emerging, hinting at some deeper, darker truth, but a massively multiplayer game is just beginning when it's released upon the world. Our story -- past, present and future -- has been designed to bring players through and give context to not just the initial batch of content, but also through constant content upgrades and future expansion packs."

Read more here.

Great read. Looking forward to hearing more about the story/lore.

Who says 2 heads are better then one?

Bastion of Twilight cleared!

After several days and many hours of worth of attempts, The Cerulean Vanguard defeated Cho'gall. So much random elements is pure suck.

This was a much needed kill since we haven't killed a new boss since the end of February. Hopefully this boosted some morale within the guild.

I was too tired to really enjoy this kill.

Loot was:

• Twilight's Hammer
• Helm of Maddening Whispers
• Mantle of the Forlorn Vanquisher

Too bad end bosses in 10man only drops the one token.

One down, 2 to go.

Awesome!

Welcome to Nova's Blog!

Hello everyone, welcome to the first of many entries of my online adventures.

A little about myself. I am a 28 year-old self employed contractor who lives in Ontario, Canada. When I'm not at work, I spend most of my day playing PC games, mostly MMO's. With all this time I have, I figured I would put some of it to use and make a blog about the games I play and games I'm waiting on.

I started in the gaming industry in the mid '90's and my first "online" game was Duke Nukem 3D and Quake on an old DOS computer with a 14.4k baud modem and a cheesy dial-up ISP. Good times.

I think in early 2000 (after enough headaches and slowness of the dial-up), I upgraded to Cable internet and hosted my own Half Life: TFC server and ran my own guild for a little bit.

Consoles? Never been a fan of playing console games. I played games on an old Atari system, NES, SNES and that was it for me and never looked back since I started playing PC games. Nothing compares a great game on a computer, and I don't care what you say!

My first big leap into the mmo industry was a memorable Anarchy Online. I had some really great adventures and made some great friends, some of which I still keep in contact with. From this day,. nothing brings me back to older games as much as AO does; it's truly unique. Recently, I've thought about revisiting Rubi-Ka - stay tuned!

Currently, I am  playing World of Warcraft (since release) and a little Eve-Online (also since release) on the side. Waiting for a few sci-fi mmo's  to come out, but most of all, I am anxiously anticipating Star Wars: The Old Republic. Played a bunch of other mmo's in the past, and probably too many to list. I am so sick of the Fantasy genre and they need to STOP developing them. Please, please, please!?!

I hope you all enjoy my blogs and find them useful for fellow gamers out there.