Druids Gaining Maelstrom Weapon

Predatory Strikes now has a 3/3 20% per combo point of removing the cast time of the next less than 10 seconds cast time nature spell. Instant cast cyclone cc anyone?

Feral druids have always been limited in crowd control viable abilities due to the ones that they have while in caster form. The problem with giving feral druids a deep talent CC much like Repentance for Ret paladins was that they would still have access to the other two major CC's of their class. Blizzard could have turned both Cyclone and Roots into low end Balance and Restoration tree talents, but that just looks way too complicated and it still wouldn't solve the issue of ferals not having any.

Blizzard went with the best solution here. Feral druids are allowed to keep their damage and healing and forms while at the same time now gaining the ability to effectively use CC at the cost of additional mana, much like most of the hybrid classes right now. This change will allow feral druids a much greater amount of freedom in 2v2 arenas, and should let them compete near high end in 3v3. I don't see feral druids popping up in tournaments any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the number 1 3v3 teams on a few servers started having them. Because what else does a feral druid bring to the table? Yeah, Innervate. Throw an Innervate on your disc priest after covering him in hots and everything imaginable, or just setting up the recharge, and you have incredible longevity. I may be wrong on Innervate, and feral druids need to use it on themselves... but just having the option of giving it to your healer instead of yourself is major.

Ferals have needed this CC to put them on par with other melee DPS classes. They now have all the necessary tools to be great at arena PvP. High damage, defensive CD's they can burn through, major mobility in both feral charge and shifting out of snares, passive stun defense while in their vulnerable cat form, and instant cast CC at a rate of every 6 to 9 seconds. And they still have Mangle and bash as interrupts.

I wish I wasn't so tired so I could write this up better. Feral druids are about to outclass Rets. There may be more Rets playing at the moment, but power wise, feral druids are now stronger.

Rated Battlegrounds in Cataclysm

The biggest news out of Blizzcon for me was the addition of rated battlegrounds in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. I was pretty much ecstatic. I have long rallied for the arena system of old where by there were no rating requirements, but ratings determined how many points you achieved a week. Those with poor ratings often could not gain more than 200 or points a week, which meant 6 to 8 weeks of arena just to get a pair of pants!

Blizzard got it completely wrong, I'm not afraid to say it. They blame the failure of interest in TBC raiding on the easy access of arena gear. TBC raiding failed because of the massive system shock to guilds, both from the initial cut of numbers from 40 to 25, and then the progression path that involved a 10 man raid. The jump from easy mode Karahzan to SSC/TK definitely didn't help the issue.

Gaining gear through arenas was often called "welfare", but it was damn hard to get at the same time. By their own word, the majority of players were at 1500 rating. The system was a bell curve. If Blizzard felt that players were getting gear too quickly, then all they had to do was raise the cost of pieces of arena gear. Instead they added the horrible rating system, trying to promote raiding by removing access to weapons. The archaic concept of raiding in order to gain upgrades to weapons was pulled straight from someones ass.

Honestly, not much has changed with the inclusion of the rating system. The same players still gain the same approximate amount of upgrades as if there weren't rating requirements at all, they're just limited to gloves and legs instead of getting to choose from the entire 5 peice set. The bigger problem is the removal of accessable weapons to players who don't want to PvE.

Back to the topic though. The rated battlegrounds aren't actually worth... anything. So far there's no conclusion on if players will gain seperate rating for bg's then their arena ratings, but the general consensus looks like it is tied to your arena rating. Many people are throwing around the idea that rated bg's will up your arena rating, and that's how you will gain bonus arena points. I can't believe that that is the system, but knowing Blizzard, these people may be right.

Two huge problems with rated battlegrounds that I can't believe Blizzard is stupid enough to implement. 1) You are only allowed to play around 6 game a week. What? What in the world is the point then? Why only 6 games, the entire point of rated battle grounds was to let players enjoy battle grounds and get back into the PvP progression path that arenas blocked them from. Then there's the even bigger issue. 2) No PuG's. Only full teams of 10, 15, or whatever the number of people play an AV match is, can queue for a rated BG. So close Blizzard, so close yet so stupidly far. All that is needed is the no rating change if you lose concept, coupled with a BG MMR and normal rating system, and you end up in a situation where people can PuG to their hearts content and progress in your game.

Rated battlegrounds at this point in time are nothing more than a gimmick. They aren't meant for the casual player to have a means of end game progression, they aren't meant for BG lovers to have a means of end game progression, it's nothing but hot air to make their expansion look better if you don't do your research. Just reading the info on MMO-Champ about rated BG's will leave you nowhere near the actual idea.

Blizzard, you need to bring back PvP progression for casual players. Does everyone deserve all the best gear? No. Does everyone deserve a chance at that gear? Yes. I still feel that Season 2 arena was the best PvP progression path WoW has ever shown. The old argument that shoulders are seen and worth something is actually really bad these days, with how horrible and small the shoulders look, they just aren't as big as they used to be back in Season 3. Rating should determine how many arena points you gain, the speed at which you can aquire PvP gear. A 1500 rated player should be able to accomplish 2 pieces of season gear through arenas by 80% of the way through the season if they play every day. An 1800 rated player should accomplish 4 pieces by 80%. A 2k+ player should accomplish all 5 pieces by 75%. And that's not even including the weapons. An arena weapon for a 1500 rated player, back in Season 2, would take over 50% of the season to gain enough points.

It looks like I'll be picking WoW back up anyway, and I'll try my best at 3v3 arenas, hopefully my priest will take me back and they'll kick their rogue, but who knows. I can just BG too, and thankfully they're reintroducing a PvP honor weapon this coming season... last I heard anyway. It's always fun wrecking max pvp geared arena players in BG's because they're terrible at anything outside of a box. Just like I'm terrible inside a box.

Eve Online Free Trial Review

So I recently signed up for a free trial of Eve Online made by CCP games. Best known for Eve Online, best known as "that Icelandic company." I have it from a reliable source that Icelandic Bacon Chips are incredibly tasty. You can sign up for the 14 day free trial here if you want to test it out yourself.

I will be honest, I spent a total of 3 hours playing around with it. That's typically not enough for a review, but when you get as bored as I did... Obviously Eve Online has a ton of people who love it, according to Edge Online they've surpassed 300,000. I did have the game on my system for over 48 hours, I just spent about an hour when I initially downloaded it, and then another 2 hours the next day. I then went about cleaning games I consider bad off my system and well, Eve Online was one of the many.

I had heard a few months ago that Eve had put together a tutorial for new players so they wouldn't be bombarded by all the info. I still felt bombarded. The tutorial was okay, but the pacing was very off. I was trying to complete the "learn a skill" quest and I had to sit there for 20 minutes inside a space station waiting before I could continue down the tutorial. This is not good, because as I discovered, once you log out in the middle of the tutorial, it can get hung up and you will never be able to complete it. I logged out after finishing the first Agent mission, and then logged back in the next day and tried to complete the second Agent mission. I hadn't even accepted the second mission before I logged out previously, but the Tutorial completely bugged out on me and I spent another 20 minutes docking in and out of the space station trying to fix it. It never fixed. I ended up having to cancel the tutorial and miss out on whatever information there was after it. I did complete the second mission.

The quest system is so straightforward that it begs the question of how can it even be considered a quest. In most MMO games, and I know that's the cream about Eve is that it isn't, but bear with me. In most MMO games when you are given a quest, you have to work your way towards the destination, fighting through mobs, doing Something. In eve online you right click on an empty piece of space, scroll down to the Agent option, then left click... and you warp to your location and yay, it's all done.

If only navigating space the rest of the time was that easy. I was very disappointed that the camera is not a full rotational camera. Yes you can look at your ship for all 360 degrees, but the camera hits a wall and you have to go in the opposite direction 359 degrees to get to that new angle. When I discovered that, the flat plane of space suddenly felt much more confining. And Eve is flat from what I could see.

Also, playing the game at a resolution less than 1440x900 is not recommended. I prefer to play games windowed and smaller so I can do other things during the boring bits, and while this is my own fault having a monitor that only allows me 1440x900 or 1040x800 or whatever, trying to play Eve at that small of a resolution was near impossible. The menu's take up the entire screen, and there are a ton of them. Just doing the tutorial I was dealing with 5 menu's open at once, as in, the entire screen was filled and all the menu's were overlapping. At one point the game kept telling me to open my cargo bay and I kept clicking on my cargo bay but nothing would happen. Turns out the button I was pressing was from the chat menu that had been placed exactly on top of where the tutorial was telling me to click. Once I minimized it, there was my cargo bay button. Now, there's nothing wrong with Menu's like this, except that they don't function how you would expect. Each menu seems to have a layer value, and so if you open a menu that has a lower layer value then what you have already open, you can't see it, it just opens up underneath everything else and you can't interact with it. Very... very poor vision there, or something. I felt that 1440x900 was also too small to really play the game, but it felt more manageable.

Combat in Eve Online is not the high point, at least from what I gathered. The entire concept of getting your things looted, your ship destroyed, are what you try to stay away from. Even in the 3 hours I played it felt like there wasn't going to be any PvP. Perhaps after people get the in game currency to the point where they can afford a million deaths, they don't mind PvP'ing. But if that's the case, then why does it matter if someone blasts down your cargo? The core of Eve Online is definitely the interaction aspect. The Massively part. Making corporations, Alliances, etc... They could have called it Space Guild Wars and it probably would have made more sense... in no reference to the game Guild Wars, but because your corporation is basically just a guild that fights over imagineary monetary property with outer guilds.

Normally I would never try to review a game after just 3 hours, especially an MMO. MMO games are known for taking 20 hours or so to get to a point where it really kicks in and bites you, and then you still have 100 hours to go before you really get the game. Even though it's an MMO, for every hour the game taxes you instead of bites you, you're going to lose more interest. There was one MMO that I logged into and logged out less than 30 seconds later, it was just that bad. One of those Freemium MMO games.

Finally. The game looks pretty for the most part. Except when I warp drived through a planet. Scale is incredibly off, planets look like nothing more than asteroids that you aren't allowed to get closer to, there's no real sense of depth to the game. Sometimes you'll see something floating in outer space and you'll fly 30 seconds to get there just to discover that it barely grows in size. The lack of interactivity with a lot of the game is truly annoying. Finding a mining colony space station and then having zero interaction with it? What the hell is going on, I can't even fly my tiny little ship to it because my ship is just as large as the entire asteroid field apparently. And I know the ship is just supposed to house one person. It's not like there were any other ships flying to this remote mine field station in the middle of nowhere, so what were they mining and why?

Eve is a game where there is no story for you, you have to make your own story. The problem is that the tools you are given are incredibly shallow for game interaction, and really only work towards social interaction. If you enjoy that kind of thing, table top role playing, RPG's like dungeons and dragons, except doing it on a large scale, kind of like LARP'ing without the L, if you always find yourself on the RP server of an MMO, then Eve may be for you. You have to make your own destiny, and it will be interesting to see how Biowares new Star Wars MMO completely crushes Eve's free mode with their over the top drawn out story telling just because they have an iconic name behind them.

And one last thing. Seriously? No WoD? WoD actually sounds awesome. Vampires and werewolves as playable characters? How many MMO's have that? Everquest and like, that's it. Dust 514 just doesn't look to me like it will be noteworthy. It's an interesting tactic, but I feel the problem is that the majority of xbox gamers who enjoy the FPS side of things in Dust, aren't going to enjoy the free mode lack of destination Massively part of Eve.

It's one thing to play with other people in a game. It's completely different to be expected to talk to them.