Falling Damage
What do you get when you combine free-for-all PvP, collision detection so players can’t walk through one another, and mounted combat? Perhaps something like this, from Age of Conan:
Ouch.
rob’s cryptic life
Sylva’s Links For Bear Druid Cubs
Recently my WoW guild (The Shortbread Army) made a group effort to start characters on the Horde side. For me, and probably others, this was a great excuse to try out a class or two that we had never played extensively before. Since my main on the Alliance side is a bear druid and a few of my guildmates have started them on the Horde side, I thought I would post some links and comments here for them and anyone else who might be starting a cub of their own.
As always, I must put a disclaimer here and say that I’m not really a “hardcore” player, I don’t raid or PvP, so my knowledge of the endgame pretty much stops at high level 5-mans. If you want to look me up on the Armory and make fun of my gear, please note that I don’t care, and if you don’t see tanking gear it means I logged out in my cat form set, not that I suck even worse than I already admit.
One of the best references for druid theorycrafting and information is the Druid Wiki. Originally I had a bunch of stuff written here with tips for new druids, but then I realized that the Druid Wiki does it much better and in more detail. Start with their game mechanics page for more detail than you ever wanted to know about stats and mechanics of the druid. The druid facts page is also interesting, with a collection of random tidbits you might not find elsewhere.
Another absolutely indispensable reference, once you get near the end of your leveling career at least, is Emmerald’s feral druid gear lists. Here you will find lists of high-level and endgame gear for both bear and cat forms, ranked by effectiveness for tanking or DPS as appropriate, and sorted by equipment slot.
Finally, a couple of blogs. First I’d like to mention WoW Insider which is chock full of good information for all classes; the Shifting Perspectives feature is specifically for druids, and includes posts such as this one about talent specs for leveling. Another one I like is the Big Bear Butt Blogger who has been writing about druids for quite a while. For example, this post on multiple pull tanking is recommended reading for everyone who is a bear tank or groups with one. (And yes, I admit I’m not all that great at actually implementing what I’ve learned here. Oh well, it wouldn’t be a SBA run without a few wipes, now would it?)
See you in game, whether you’re behind my big bear butt, or I’m behind yours…
Musings of a Carebear: Age of Conan Classes
Originally I had a long post here covering my first impressions of Age of Conan, the new MMORPG that launched last week, but the I realized that I’d never finish and post it. Instead, I’m just going to comment on one aspect of the game, and if I never get around to posting the rest, oh well.
First I should insert a disclaimer: I am not a real game reviewer, I did not play in the AoC beta, I don’t have a level 80 character already, and I generally don’t like PvP. I’m mostly an explorer and socializer who tends to fill his entire character roster with alts before even one of them reaches maximum level. So if you’re looking for fairness, PvP stuff, or anything about high-end play, please look elsewhere.
The single aspect of Age of Conan I have chosen to comment on today is its class choices. There are twelve available classes, divided into three each in the archetypes of soldier, priest, rogue, and mage. The archetypes are not just a convenient descriptive tool; each archetype shares a feat tree (feats are similar to talents in World of Warcraft) as well as having a different path through the story-related “destiny” quests. (Warriors break a lot of heads, rogues sneak and spy and assassinate, and so forth.)
With so many classes, there is plenty of room for both traditional and non-traditional interpretations of the standard MMORPG roles. One of my favorites, for example, is the Herald of Xotli, one of the “mage” classes. Xotli — an alien god borrowed in concept from the Cthulhu Mythos, apparently — doesn’t go for the finger-waggling type of mage at all. His servants prefer to wade into close combat swinging a big two-handed sword, bringing with them a torrent of magical flame. Sure, they can bring down a pillar of hellfire to burn everything around them, but they do it along with a powerful melee combo instead of a spell. For short periods, they can even transform into the avatar of one of Xotli’s lesser servants to become more resilient and powerful. And yes, since Heralds of Xotli are mages, they melee in cloth armor. If you play one, you die quickly — but you also cut through swaths of enemies like butter while doing so. Fun? You bet!
Another example of an interesting hybrid class is the Bear Shaman, one of the priest classes. Priests who melee aren’t exactly new to the genre, but the Bear Shaman is the first one I can remember that actually heals by melee. A lot of his healing and buffing power comes from reactive abilities that trigger and spread while he’s fighting. The shaman has buff A on himself, which gives a chance to place debuff B on the enemy when he hits it, which causes anyone else attacking it to gain buff C, which gives extra healing to spell D. That sort of thing. Unlike the other game we all probably play, being a healing or casting hybrid in Age of Conan doesn’t mean choosing between healing and something else — sure, you can customize yourself to boost one or the other aspect of your class, but in the end you can and should do everything if you want to be playing at your best.
Let’s say you’re looking for a stealth class. In Age of Conan, every class can sneak, if they spend points in the Hide skill, and rather than basing stealth solely on your class it also factors in lighting and equipped armor. Of course, the three classes under the “rogue” archetype are the most dedicated to sneakiness, and you get to choose from the combat-focused Barbarian, the Assassin, who had best kill his enemy from stealth or die trying, and the Ranger, who actually gets to sneak attack with his bow. I’m not sure why more games don’t have a bow-using class that can actually play the stealthy sniper, so I have to give Funcom some credit for including it here.
Class customization uses a feat tree very similar to the talents in World of Warcraft, except that each class only has two trees and they are deeper than the ones in WoW. A third tree is shared between the classes in each archetype, which I think works well because it allows the main trees to be completely devoted to class-specific abilities, while “generic” talents — mana and health regeneration, defense boosts, and the like — can be factored out.
One of my big concerns with Age of Conan, however, is how well its original class designs and abilities will hold up over time, give that it has a heavy emphasis on PvP. Anyone who has followed World of Warcraft for a while knows exactly how many nerfs and buffs are the direct result of PvP imbalances, and how often those nerfs and buffs screw up something in PvE. Can Funcom avoid the same problems Blizzard has had with class balance over the years? I can only hope…
Kindle Cases From Waterfield
I’ve had a look at the latest Waterfield cases for the Kindle and posted my thoughts at The Gadgeteer. Waterfield has three Kindle cases: a basic open-ended sleeve, a sleeve with flap and back pocket, and a travel case with room for the Kindle and a bunch of accessories. Check out my review for pictures and more details…
Redesign With the 960 Grid System
As you can see, I have redesigned the theme of my blog. I’m not entirely happy with the color scheme, such as it is. I was kind of hoping for a look that was more subtle than the Web 2.0 pastels everyone uses these days, but I might end up switching from warm to cool colors soon. The body text face is intended to be Calibri, one of the new set that comes with Vista and the latest versions of Office. I was hoping to put Constantia with it as the serif face, but for some reason neither Safari nor Camino were rendering some characters correctly.
The main reason I’m even bothering to write about this is that I want to plug the 960 Grid System by Nathan Smith, which I am using here. It’s based on the idea that 960 pixels is not only a nice width for a web page — it fits on a 1024×768 display and is not too wide for comfort — but it can be easily subdivided into 12 or 16 chunks to build a page layout. So, you can easily have 2, 3, or 4 equal-width columns, or a combination of unequally-sized ones sized in units of 1/12th or 1/16th the width of the page. The base stylesheet for this defines classes you can apply to divs to produce whatever column layout you want, including stacking different column widths in different vertical parts of the page. It’s really quite simple and surprise-free, and the styles and demo code are available freely under both the GPL and MIT licenses.
World of Warcraft Addons: Introduction
In an effort to revitalize this blog, I have decided to write about one of my favorite things: World of Warcraft. (Thanks to Dan for suggesting the topic of my first few posts!) To start off, I’d like to talk about WoW interface addons; this post will be the first in what will probably be a fairly long series describing my favorite addons and how they enhance the WoW gameplay experience.
For those new to WoW, perhaps I should back up a moment and describe what an interface addon is. One of Blizzard’s most interesting and forward-thinking decisions in the design of WoW was to make its client scriptable. Most games let you customize their interface a little by rearranging windows, graphical skinning, and the like, but WoW goes much farther than that by embedding a complete programming language in the client so that its behavior can be drastically changed or extended.
To be honest, the availability of this degree of customization is one reason I keep coming back to World of Warcraft. I’ve been spoiled — every time I play some other game, I keep finding small inconveniences or wishing for new features, and in the back of my head I can’t help but think “if this was WoW, there would be an addon for this”. (And if there wasn’t, I could probably write one.) So, over the next few weeks or months, I’m going to talk about my favorite addons, why I like them, and how to tweak them to your liking. And since I have so many, this will probably be quite a long series of posts…
Happy Kindle Day To Me
My Amazon Kindle arrived today — thanks Julie! — and I’m eagerly putting it through its paces for an upcoming Gadgeteer review. Earlier this year I reviewed the Sony Reader and I’m looking forward to comparing the two. (The Kindle is definitely in the lead so far.)
I don’t want to spoil my review too much by talking about the Kindle here yet, but I do have a few first impressions.
Amazon Whispernet (the Kindle’s wireless service) actually works at my home, and quite well at that. Considering that it’s supposed to be based on Sprint EVDO, this surprises me greatly. I suspect it’s roaming on Verizon, unless Sprint lit up a tower close by very recently. If it’s roaming, I have to give Amazon props for allowing that — it makes the Kindle much more useful for those of us who live a bit outside the city.
A hardware tidbit: check the system/logs directory of the Kindle’s internal storage. Mine had a boot log showing that it uses a Linux 2.6 kernel on a 400 MHz PXA255 with 64MB of RAM, and EVDO module from AnyData. The software seems to be Java based with a plugin architecture so they can add more applications later, like the ones under the “Experimental” menu. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack it for user-installed apps, though I don’t have any more hope for that than I do for it on the iPhone.
I’m also pleased by the fact that the Kindle has native support for unencrypted PalmDocs. Although the Kindle’s native format for DRMed books is something new, its format for unencrypted documents is MobiPocket, which is essentially HTML wrapped in a PalmDoc container. Plain text PalmDocs work just fine too. Just make sure the file name extension is .prc, not .pdb — just go ahead and rename it, as the file format is the same inside. Other than plain text, those are the only formats it supports directly right now, but at least Amazon offers a conversion service which is free via email, or 10 cents if you email it a document to be sent wirelessly to the Kindle. Or, on Windows, you can use Mobipocket’s own conversion tools. From where I sit, this is far easier than dealing with the Sony because all of my books are on my Mac, and many of them are already PalmDocs.
And yes, this probably means that Pyrite Publisher is about to rise from the grave. I think this incarnation will be a Kindle-supporting e-book librarian though…
Saitek Profile for Tabula Rasa
It’s now a few weeks since the launch of Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit — in small doses, at least. It’s sort of a hybrid game, combining the character development and gear collection of an MMORPG with continuous action combat that draws by the FPS genre. As such, it’s even more amenable to use with an extension controller than MMOs already are, since being able to move and access a bunch of skills and weapons at the same time is not just a nice idea, it’s a necessity. So, here’s my profile for the Saitek Pro Gamer Command Unit, without which the Bane would kick my ass far more often than they already do.
Instructions after the jump.
Tombs of New Orleans, Part 1
Last month, I went on a two-day trip to New Orleans with friends. We spent the first day at cemeteries, and then walked around the French Quarter and Garden District the next morning. In case you don’t know why cemeteries in New Orleans are special, it’s because they consist entirely of above-ground tombs — because New Orleans is below sea level, they can’t bury the dead in the ground.
This first batch of pictures is from St. Louis Cemetery #1, which is quite old and contains tombs dating back at least to the Revolutionary War. It also holds the tomb of famous Voudou priestess Marie Laveau; to this day, followers pay their respects by making markings on her tomb and leaving offerings around it.
Predictions About the iPhone SDK
Now that we know an iPhone SDK is coming, here are my predictions about it based on all of His Holiness’ statements about “security” and “protecting the network”:
Prediction One. No retail iPhone will run unsigned apps, ever, at all. There will be no possibility to install them by clicking through warning dialogs, as you can on Windows Mobile and Series 60.
Prediction Two. The only way to load apps onto a retail iPhone will be through iTunes (okay, that part’s a no-brainer), and the only way to get loadable apps into iTunes will be to buy them from the iTunes Store.
Prediction Three. To get an app signed and listed in the iTunes store, developers will be required to submit it for approval and certification. Not only Apple, but their carrier partners on a country-by-country basis will have veto power over which applications appear in the store.
Prediction Four. Apple will set the prices for iPhone apps. Either they will all be a flat rate, or more likely they will have several tiers of pricing. Which tier an app ends up in will depend on Apple, the carriers, and what kind of app it is; developers won’t be able to choose.
Prediction Five. Out of the price for iPhone apps, both Apple and the carrier will get a cut, the total of which will be larger than the fees typically charged by shareware registration services.
Prediction Six. The means used by developers to test their apps on real hardware may be hackable, but will not work for general app distribution. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a method that involves ADC membership with a signature that allows app updates to only work with a specific registered iPhone.
Prediction Seven. The SDK will not be free; it will either be sold separately at a price commensurate with other pro development tools, or (more likely) require a paid ADC membership.
Prediction Eight. If there is a way to develop iPhone apps that doesn’t have these restrictions, it will be based on Dashboard widgets, and widgets will be sandboxed at least as restrictively as Java applets in a browser.
So, I guess I’ll revisit this post in February and see how close I got…
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