Category Archives: Review

Six games to keep you busy ’til Guild Wars 2 (for free)

After the information flood from this year’s Gamescom in Cologne, I was planning on posting a “little” write-up on the status-quo of Guild Wars 2, maybe highlighting all the good reasons why we can all look forward to this upcoming MMO. The new information out there is numerous and scattered, a little over-whelming and off-putting to a skeptical mind.

A little write-up….yeah, HA-HA! How naive can you be?

That was before I chanced upon this erm “little summary” here which the folks at GW2 Guru put together since the convention. And we have yet to hear what else ArenaNet will reveal at this week’s PAX East. Exciting times.

This convinced me that I should not waste my time with an incomplete list of bullets and rather advise you to go and have a look for yourself. If you require any more reading after that (which I find somehow hard to believe but anyway), Kill Ten Rats have a few more links to interesting reads up. Now, I might revisit my original intention of breaking things down in a short, comprehensive summary, but for the moment timing is not on my side.

That’s not to say of course that I will not write about Guild Wars 2 anyway, because I am really excited (you may have noticed) and after the most recent clips and interviews I’ve watched, I am longing to finally get an ETA. It’s been mentioned that the game is apparently around 65% finished – whatever that means – and I guess even with the most optimistic mind we cannot expect GW2 to be released before coming spring 2012. However, there are reasons which speak against this too, making Q2 or Q3 the more plausible time frame for potential release.

OH NOES! What am I gonna do until then? How will I make it through the dark, cold nights of winter?? I’m fine with not playing anything much during summer time, but after September latest I usually like to know what game I will be playing in the upcoming months. After all, there are preparations to make: reading up and deciding on what to play and which server to roll on. Friends to poke and bombard with links and information, until they finally surrender and get a copy themselves (works every time!). Relatives to contact about that extended journey to Alaska you’ll be taking, where there’s unfortunately no phone line and internet in case they try reaching you during the next few months.

I’ve no idea how to entertain myself game-wise until 2012. Yeah, there’s that list of more oldschool adventures I intend to play through – but online games are where it’s at! And before you mention SWTOR; does not appeal. Not in the slightest. So, what can we do here? I’m sure I’m not the only one currently un-subscribed to WoW or Rift and somewhat hopeless over the lack of prospects. Which is where I like to turn around and ask: what’s worth re-visiting in the world of MMOs, if not paying for straight away? Well, I might just have a few suggestions!

Six games to keep you busy ’til Guild Wars 2 (for free)

  • Sign up for Age of Conan Unchained; with AoC entering the FTP market, this is a great opportunity to have a look at one of the most accomplished MMOs currently out there, besides WoW and Rift. While AoC is by no means a perfect game and dated in many ways, there is a lot to be said for the maps and feel of Hyboria, the solo destiny quest chain, the combat system and refreshing approach to both melee and healing classes. If you know what you are dealing with and can overlook clunky UI functionality, you should find enough to entertain you for a while and maybe even justify a temporary subscription which will allow you to unlock more race-class combinations and more. For the PvPers among you, Funcom recently released their Blood&Glory servers where almost everything goes.
  • Give Allods a chance; yeah, I know Allods’ graphics look a lot like WoW while the game gets grindy fast. Yet, this recommendation is for the shiny-lovers among you: those who love creating characters and race combos at the character screen, test out different starting areas, dig shiny armor and walking around, exploring the world. Allods is free to play and offers eye candy in areas that WoW cannot compete because it’s simply older. And I still hold to the Arisen being the most badass race ever to appear in an MMO. There’s nothing to lose by giving this game a try!
    • Have a first or second look at Final Fantasy 14;  FF14 has been off to a very rocky start, to say the least and has since suffered the full impact of screwing up many things so early into release. You can consider SE’s mistakes unforgivable, or have another look at their popular franchise which has by now undergone a lot of patching for the better, on top of becoming free to play. The game has been streamlined in many aspects of gameplay, from combat to questing and crafting, and supposedly plays a lot smoother and easier overall. No doubt, FF14 is not everyone’s cookie – but it’s still your best shot if you enjoy polished asian/anime-flair MMOs or love Mogs and Chocobos. 

    …Moving on to even more FTPs, they are everywhere now, aren’t they? Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons&Dragons Online have been entertaining their own, enthusiastic audience for a while now:

    • I was very skeptical about LotRO from the beginning (hairy feet!), until I read about Weatherstock and other community events that define this MMO which claims to call the most agreeable crowd of gamers its own. If you’re one for community, lore and traveling the world, LotRO sounds like a fair deal to pass some time in Middle Earth. 
    • DDO is probably one of those MMOs you either love or hate for their oldschool flair. If you can deal with outdated graphics and overall not-so-polished gameplay though, Turbine are ever so busy to release new content for their players to explore. I have a feeling this MMO is very much an acquired taste, but comes with its very own atmosphere and charm.
      • Last but not least: Sign up for Blizzard’s WoW starter edition. Miss Azeroth or Alterac Valley & Co. but don’t care to pay the sub? The new, limitless trial offer let’s you return to the lowbie levels of the game without your account expiring. Up to Draenei and Bloodelves are available for re-discovering WoW’s early content and many of the revamped starting areas and quests. Or you might just want to kill some horde. There are still some heavy restrictions involved, but for some casual free play on the side this might be what you’re looking for.

      Makes you wonder how long it will take for WoW to completely switch over to FTP too? At the rate that things are going, with more and more content being about fast rewards and solo- or pickup-mode, this seems like an inevitable step. Subscriptions revolve around the idea of long-term time investment and heavy cooperation.

      My PVP priest in AoC

      Anyway, these are my personal recommendations for the currently MMO-less among you, in hierarchical order. Obviously, there are many other FTP options out there, but I’m not sure I want to try any of them unless someone convinces me otherwise (consider yourself invited to). Even for more casual testing, quality is a concern (and there are limits!). I have recently resubbed to Age of Conan after a look at the new PvP server – this is the good thing about free to play: play first, make your choice later.

      There’s absolutely no reason not to give older MMOs a go. You know what you are getting here: these games might not be polished diamonds, but they have character; they’ve had a chance to mature, gather a community and offer plenty of gameplay options. At best, you’ll upgrade your account and even use the item store. At worst, you’ve gained some insights on contemporary MMOs – consider it “educational”!

      I know about the anticipated titles for early 2012 and frankly, I am not sure I will subscribe to Diablo III. The Secret World does not look like it’s going to happen for me, either (who wants to do google research quests?). As for Teraboobs, yeah right! It’s going to be a long wait for Guild Wars 2 folks…and winter is coming!

      Trion introducing coin locks

      It appears that ever since Rift launched, there’s been a real pandemic of hacked accounts around – to a degree that is baffling considering this is a new MMO which only just launched a few weeks ago. I’ve not ever had anyone hack accounts of mine in the past, but then I take all sorts of security measures on my PC (as far as that’s possible) and I’ve used a WoW authenticator for years, being paranoid that the same thing might happen to me like to several mates. If you’ve invested a lot of time into an MMO account, it’s a horrible idea that someone else might break into it and tear it apart. I even had a good friend quit the game for good over this.

      Many bloggers have complained about Trion’s lack of security measures for Rift, some blaming them for the 16 characters password limitation. Personally, I don’t think this is the real issue, but then I’m not an expert in password security. I’ve commented a few times on other pages though, that I can’t understand why Trion would launch a new MMO without any security measures or authenticators being in place from the start. Surely, Blizzard’s past troubles in this area have shown everyone else how important this is?

      Anyway, Trion did finally react; the following Email has been sent to Rift subscribers in the past 24 hours, introducing a Coin Lock system for their accounts:

      Users will be coin locked if they log in from a new or different location or computer. When their account is coin locked, they will be sent an email to the address that they have on their account (their login email) with a code to enter into the game.

      Users will see the Coin Locked icon in the spot where their tutorial button shows up. Deactivating the tutorial tips will not turn off the Coin Locked button.

      While in a Coin Locked status, users will have the following limitations:

      • No access to the auction house
      • No ability to SEND mail. Users can still receive and view mail as well as remove items from mail
      • No ability to SELL to vendors. Users can still purchase items from vendors
      • No ability to salvage, runebreak or destroy items
      • No ability to trade
      • Users can continue to play and gain coin and items, but cannot get rid of them.

      If you are Coin Locked, simply click on the Coin Locked icon and enter the code found in your email from Trion. You will only have to enter the code once for each computer at a given location. If you play from multiple locations, or on multiple computers, you will have to enter your code the first time you log in from each new location or computer. If you log in and your account is coin locked, check your email! Someone may have logged in from another location with your account.

      It sounds simple enough – although I’ve no way of judging how secure this really is (am happy to be educated). It appears to be a good way to manage account security to me, without the need of some sort of “hardware” or extra tool involved. That said, they’ve also announced in the Email, that they’re currently looking at options for additional two-factor authentification, in form of a smarthphone app or other. I reckon that will be for free.

      Ever since I subscribed for Rift, I have been spammed “Preorder Registration Information” Emails, coming from a no-reply account at direct2drive; I must have received 50 of them by now and haven’t really found any way to stop this (although I did contact them directly, but received no reply). I don’t assume these are phishing attempts, in all likelihood it’s just a mistake or auto-notification of theirs gone bonkers. Still, I’m really glad to hear Trion finally introduced a coin lock system, for what its worth.

      Rift souls for WoW brains

      I had this long wall of text ready to publish yesterday, on how much I look forward to play future MMOs without the holy trinity – and then blogger ate my post and I couldn’t find any way to recover it – of course. *sigh* That convinced me I should rather be playing Rift than write silly posts, y’know basically a sign from above, and now I’m not even sure whether I have the heart to rewrite it all. I hate it when that happens, where’s the time machine when you really need it?

      Anyway, there I was trying to break down Rift’s class system in a comprehensible way  to one of my mates the other night, feeling ready to jump off the next cliff after approximately 10 minutes. Yeah I get it, the class system is a little more complex than in World of Warcraft – that’s why it’s fun. But it’s really not all that hard to understand, a trained monkey could grasp the concept pretty soon. To which my mate then replied: “what about Warcraft players?”.

      Ummmm..

      Before you reach the inevitable conclusion that said comment was actually offensive, it was made by somebody who’s played WoW himself for a long time – and arguing with such deprecating self-irony is kinda hard. I have also been told that I am made of pure evil for successfully luring people into giving Rift a go, making one of them buy an new shiny PC just to be able to run it properly, so apparently I don’t get to argue. Riiight, don’t blame me now, MMO players are all the same desperate bunch, muah muah!

      I get where this is coming from though: when you jump into Rift, there’s all that talk of callings, souls, roles, subclasses, planar charges and ye olde Warcraft player that you are, you’ve simply forgotten all about how it feels to start a brand new game and that initial confusion is part of the experience (and fun).

      That’s okay! /pat

      There are currently a few Rift resources in the making, but nobody likes to go and search half-baked databases when starting off with a new game. Also: Wiki articles are often cryptic and have the potential to scare you off rather than to help – now that would be a real shame. So, what is it with this class-soul-role mumbo-jumbo in Rift? Here’s my breakdown in 3 easy steps.

      Rift – Callings, Souls and Roles

      • 1. Callings (Azerothian: classes)

      There are 4 main callings or class archetypes in Rift: Warriors, Rogues, Mages and Clerics. This is the initial choice you will make when creating your character and cannot be reversed at any point in the game. Each of these archetypes offers 8 sub-classes or talent trees which are called souls in Rift.

      • 2. Souls (Azerothian: talent trees)

      Your very first quest at level 1 will let you gather your first out of 8 souls. Don’t worry about that choice too much because already at level 13 you will be able to get them all and switch around.

      Your character can equip 3 souls at any given time. That means your talent chart looks very similar to WoW where each class has 3 trees to fill points in. The main difference is that you have 8 trees available in Rift and it’s your choice which ones to play with and when. The game wants classes to have access to a lot of variety in playstyles and encourages you to experiment and respec often.

      So, if you roll cleric in Rift for example, you can play any combination of 8 souls: you can be Druid/Cabalist/Warden or an Inquisitor/Justicar/Sentinel – just to name two options. It’s up to you what “trinity” to set for. That makes for a stunning 56 unique build combinations available (more including PVP souls) per class. And then it’s still up to you how you spread your talent points within those combinations. Ideally, you still want to focus on one main tree at least, in order to get access to the powerful endtalents.

      • 3. Roles (Azerothian: specs)

      At some point you will tire of respeccing in order to switch or re-build your specs; you will want to have different talent and soul combinations ready to play, depending on whether you play solo, in a 5man or PVP. Every Rift class has variety of functions available, from tanking, to dps, support and healing. This is where roles come into play: a role is Rift’s equivalent to WoW’s dualspec, it let’s you save more than one talent spec at a time and switch between them easily, anytime and anywhere. Your first extra role will cost you 30 gold which roughly equals 30 WoW silver – so it’s very cheap.

      You can both respec and purchase extra roles at your class trainer. Note that while you’re leveling up, you must buy your new skill ranks individually for each spec and can only do this while the role is active (so it’s a good idea to switch while you’re at the trainer).
      Furthermore, you do not only have two roles available in Rift, but can get up to a total of 4 saved talent builds which you can re-name individually to keep track. This is another testimony to Rift’s class versatility and flexibility. Knock yourself out!

      Useful resources (Azerothian: wowhead & co.)

      That’s pretty much it! Not so hard now, is it? If you’re still looking for more info on something, have a look at the following, more and less useful Rift resources and Wikis. Keep in mind that the game has only just launched while browsing.

      You might want to visit:

      If anyone is using different pages or has other tips in general, I’m happy to hear about them. I have not actually had the time yet to look into any Rift forums and I don’t even know whether there are official realm and class forums or not. Exciting times! ^^

      Tumbling down the RIFT

      It’s all over blogger town, the new MMO on the block: RIFT by Trion. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, it’s probably had the best timing than any of its brethren over the past 5 years, being released few months into Blizzard’s quickly aging Cataclysm. The MMO market isn’t endless: it’s rather a pie where every contender is greedily trying to lure customers over to his small piece – or at least that’s how it usually is, unless your name is Blizzard and you have such a long history and reputation that you can recruit whole masses of genre-noobs for yourself. This has no doubt always been one of WoW’s greatest achievements. Time to steal some of those people.

      Within the first pre-launch week, RIFT has registered over 1 million player accounts and we’re not even talking official launch yet. You can call that a success or not, it catapults RIFT up there among the other top MMOs which are WoW, Aion and Eve Online. It’s certainly a very promising start and one can only hope that with growing subscriptions the game will continue to get better, which is the endless story and dilemma of online games.

      For those of you that expect their next MMO after WoW to be groundbreakingly different, you’re probably looking for the wrong game though: RIFT is classic. It stays true to the concept and looks that make MMORPGs. Personally, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing considered what Trion is up against and what people want and are used to.

      After playing the open beta and registering for the early launch week, I am still duly impressed: this game is coming with a polish. It looks beautiful and I have yet to see a bug, disconnect or lagspike despite all my settings being maxed (a thing I was never able to do in WoW). This has gotta be the smoothest MMO launch I have ever witnessed from install to ingame, a few crowded servers aside. Gameplay is intuitive and engaging, the class system offers flexibility and variety. The rift events make the world around you feel alive – there’s something happening out there for a change.

      Most of all however, RIFT is that: something new. Not so different maybe, but new and so needed and overdue for the tired and fed up in WoW’s playerbase. A new world to explore, new races, factions, skills, quests. A new take on an old concept. A new surprise around the corner, sometimes familar, sometimes strange. And enough eye candy to go with it, even if I miss proper soundtrack (again) on the side.

      I don’t care if it isn’t mind-blowing, I don’t care it comes in a classic wrap. New is all I want right now.

      Breaking with old habits

      Breaking up and reaching for pastures new has been all over WoW guilds and the blogosphere these past few weeks. It certainly has been all around me and I’ve added my share by kissing my raiding career in WoW goodbye since. The right choice has never been more apparent to me. I need to get away, I need new – so much in fact that my RIFT character turns out to be as diametrically opposed to my old self, as possible: for over 6 years I have played and alliance healer in World of Warcraft. A pale human priestess with dark hair, a healing coordinator, a diplomat, a founder and leader.

      No more. Defiant all the way. I love the drowess I created, tall and dark-skinned with the obligatory white hair and red eyes, the way R. A. Salvatore imagined them and made the race what it is for today’s fantasy genre. I play a potent Pyromancer with some Elementalist and Dominator thrown in the mix. A pure DPS, an offensive mage spec. She looks every bit the way a mage should look: dark, evil and unsettling (and if you prefer your chars to be ugly, you’ve plenty of chances to do that too). The only qualm I have is that I’m still a cloth-wearer or the transformation would be complete.

      I’m enjoying running solo, exploring new maps and joining random groups for rift campaigns. No guild chat, no agenda, no progress list. I haven’t seen much yet by any stretch of the imagination and I’m very curious about the whole PVP side of the game which seems a lot more than just an afterthought. What I have seen so far has pleased me well and I am not in a rush.

      More importantly: there’s not a thing that has managed to annoy or frustrate me yet in RIFT and that counts for something. I don’t care what happens in one month, for now I’m entertained and turn my foes into squirrels (yes you heard that right, squirrels!). I also die quite a lot and am loving every minute of it – well met death, what’s been taking you?

      Pushing all the right buttons

      There are rare artefacts hidden all over the world of Telara which you can pick up and store in your private collection. It’s a tiny thing, a silly trifle and I love it. It screams classic RPG too, the ones I used to play when I was younger – a sparkling bauble randomly found under a rock or stone, a treasure chest buried deep under the sea, a dusty old map lying in a dark corner. No silly tools to go with though, no map markers, no skill-up grind. Just a thing to chance upon.

      And then I ambled into Meridian last night, the main city of the Defiant – turns out there’s an Artefact Master there who will award special currency for your completed artefact sets. The thing you can buy in return: companion pets.

      Damn you, Trion! I dare say I shall play this a little longer. Some habits are hard to break.

      Bugs bugs bugs!!!

      They’re everywhere, have you noticed? Every time I log into WoW since last Wednesday’s patch, I seem to discover something else that is currently broken in the game. I don’t remember when a patch broke so many things in the game before lol – 4.0.1. buggiest patch ever? What’s going on?

      Today several of my guild mates got their characters stuck in limbo while trying to enter instances. Half the time I find myself “not in a guild’ after logging on. I am also wearing a tabard, when really I am not. And I cannot seem to inspect people anymore. There’s something odd going on with guildchat and the guildranks too and the inbuilt item comparison simply ignores stats on some of the gear.

      Then yesterday, I realized that I do not exist in the BGs I’m currently playing in. When trying to find myself on the BG charter to check honor gained or healing done, I do not exist! There is also some weird, small nametag flashing up on my screen during PVP now, overlapping my hotkeys or then moving on top of my minimap….ermm? Apparently I am also the only one with this issue, quite unnerving!

      At least I was able to buy the Wrathful weapon now, after realizing that those angry red tooltips on all the last season PVP gear are simply bugged (yes you can buy everything now, no rank required anymore!).
      Oh and don’t even try to compare your converted points for honor or justice points with other guildmates, because it won’t make any sense!

      In case you hate  the new Blizzard raidframes as much as I do and want to get rid of the minimized tab they leave on the top left of your screen even if disabled, you might wanna macro this command:

      /run CompactRaidFrameManager:UnregisterAllEvents() CompactRaidFrameManager:Hide() CompactRaidFrameContainer:UnregisterAllEvents() CompactRaidFrameContainer:Hide()

      Simply enter this once when inside a raid and the tab will disappear completely. There’s no other way currently to do this, as far as I know.

      ….so much for bugs and post-patch annoyances. That said, I am not actually too annoyed, I find it more amusing than anything to discover more and more bugs as I am playing! =D

      I am a little surprised there was no big hotfix yet this morning though – or maybe that’s bugged too?

      Double Trinity: Priest Chakras explained

      After last week’s initial irritation with the new holy priest talents and spells, I set my mind on understanding Chakra better and making sense of the triple function in combination with Holy Word: Chastise. If this is the new holy priest mechanic for Cataclysm, there’s gotta be a lot more to it than what the confusing and cumbersome explanations on the inet and tooltips inspire you to believe. So I entered a couple of 10mans with my priest to give Chakra ample testing time. I got used to things pretty soon and dare say I understood matters a lot better after playing around with the different states in various boss encounters.

      The main issue with Chakra is that there’s a lot of misinformation around. I’ve come across pages that talk of “stacking chakra” (lol?) or “spamming chakra”….right.
      Also, Blizzard have done a lousy job on the tooltips in my opinion: the wording is often unclear, at least for me, and there’s information missing especially when it comes to Holy Word: Chastise with Revelations. If you haven’t looked into the matter yet before the patch (and possibly even if you have), you’ll spend a lot of time trying to wrap your head around the entire 3-1-3 idea but in essence it’s actually quite simple.

      In the following article I have attempted to simplify the new holy priest Chakra mechanic for all those that feel somewhat overwhelmed or confused with all the tooltips and new names. I will try to explain how Chakra works and what I believe its potential uses in raids might be, in combination with Revelations. I will leave out all unnecessary information, especially the long and clunky names for each of the Revelations effects. Names are great and all, but while learning a new, complex mechanic, I find them obstructive and irritating – makes my head spin!

      Understanding Chakra

      Chakra essentially is a state in which you chose to heal a particular encounter. That state can either empower your HoTs (Renew / green state), your direct healing (Heal / yellow state) or your AoE healing (PoH / blue state) – so depending on the fight and/or your healing assignment, you will chose your Chakra state accordingly.
      The way Blizzard designed the spell, being cheap on mana and fast to re-activate, you should think of Chakra as a mechanic that you frequently use or maintain over an entire bossfight. Switching Chakras makes a lot of sense too, for example if you are healing in a multi-phase encounter with different assignments and a different healing style for each phase.

      There is a self-refreshing element to Chakra: while a particular state lasts 30secs, you will add an extra 4secs to that timer every time you make use of the respective Chakra spell when talented into State of Mind. So let’s say you choose Renew-Chakra, your Renews will heal for 10% more during the next 30secs – but also, you will add another 4 secs (back up to 30secs) every time you cast a Renew. The same for your other two states.

      I’ve tested this and not surprisingly Renew was the easiest of the 3 spells for maintaining Chakra. Not just is Renew the fastest spell of the lot, but obviously also the one that’s most easy to apply on an entire raid. I was able to cast Chakra initially on a bossfight and then maintain it throughout the entire fight via Renew.
      PoH being both more situational and also a lot more expensive, you would certainly let this Chakra state drop more frequently and refresh it if needed. As for Heal, I did not test it as much as the other two, but assuming you’re on focus- or tankhealing during a bossfight and Heal is indeed replacing Flash Heal in Cata, you would probably be able to maintain its state for quite a while before re-casting Chakra.
      That said, you don’t want to forcefully spam costly healing just to maintain your Chakra state as it’s easy and cheaper to re-activate if you’ve dropped it. It’s good to note that it’s possible to prolong though.

      As already mentioned, not all of the 3 Chakra-states are equally mana-efficient and you will have to choose in what “state of mind” to heal each encounter and encounter phase individually for best results. Flexibility will be key here. It does however almost certainly always make sense to use one of the 3 Chakra states to boost your healing powers in bossfights as Chakra in itself is a cheap way of gaining some extra healing.

      Chakra and Revelations

      If you’ve picked up the Revelations talent in the holy tree, your HW:Chastise spell will transform into 3 new healing spells that correspond to one of your 3 Chakra states each. To understand this a little better and see everything at a quick glance, I’ve created the following graphic:

      Click to enlarge

      Please note that all healing numbers correspond with my own holy priest’s stats and spec. I am assuming Tome of Light and State of Mind are talented.

      Revelations basically brings an extra spell to your healing arsenal that further empowers your healing in combination with your chosen Chakra. If you’re using Renew-Chakra during an encounter, HW:Chastise will let you apply yet another HoT to a chosen target beside an instant heal. The mana cost of 386 is cheaper than if you manually cast a Renew and FH yourself. This effect is useful in a variety of situations, as a quick save on yourself or another player, or frequently added on an MT while raidhealing for example.

      The same goes for your PoH-state: HW:Chastise will let you cast an extra AoE healing zone on the ground which makes for some remarkable focus-healing on a certain area or raidgroup in combination with your other, direct AoE heals. I can see potential uses for this on the melee camp where it usually hits MTs too, or if more focused raidhealing is required on a stacked point or ranged group, maybe also in combination with a Disc Priest’s PW:Barrier or a Resto Druid’s Efflorescence.

      Inside Heal-Chakra, you will be able to gain even more single-target Heal power if you combine it with HW:Chastise. This makes for some impressive MT- or focus healing!

      Out of the 3 Revelations, Heal-Chakra will probably make for the most mana-efficient one at lvl 85. Your Renew state takes the middle position while using HW:Chastise during PoH-Chakra is going to cost you a lot. It does however come with the shortest cooldown, so re-positioning the AoE healing zone if needed, is fast.

      Preliminary bottom line

      The extra healing power and tools gained from using and playing your Chakras and Revelations right should be quite remarkable in Cataclysm. Adopting these new mechanics into your standard healing habits and repertoire will take some time and experimenting, but there’s a lot of potential there once you got the hang out of things, know how to combine and when it’s best to use what.
      Holypriests should think of Chakra as their three new healing states of mind, with Revelations bringing you that little extra tool to go with your different states.

      We will see how things work out in Cataclysm: I’m most eager to see Heal come out of the closet especially and I expect some more changes to our talents or at least the numbers. It is yet to be seen how big our mana issues will be which will further impact on Chakra‘s significance in the coming expansion.

      I will look into updating this topic come lvl 85, until then have fun experimenting with your new abilities and feedback is of course welcome!

      Patch me if you can!

      So the big patch of 4.0.1 is finally upon us and you’ve all spent the past 2 days re-speccing and re-glyphing your chars like mad, frowning over those odd stats and mastery on your brand new character pane and trying to figure out reforging. Maybe you’ve also spent half of Wednesday swearing in front of the computer like me, because that damned patch took a lot more space than indicated, so you ended up re-downloading it all and a second time after that, due to some critical errors. Or maybe you’ve been luckier and the patch just slowed down at the strangest time or then the updater did. Patching….it ain’t easy business!

      Syl vs. 4.0.1

      This patch is really a 50-50 deal for me so far, meaning to say I have probably never been more undecided about whether I should hate or love the changes before me. I’m generally a bit of a ranter type when it comes to WoW patches, not because I dislike all change but let’s face it, they often really mess things up! I also naturally focus on negative things a lot more, I see the good for the good but then it’s back to the negative for me, because that’s where things still need to improve and we got work to do!

      Anyways, I’ll be forcefully un-Syl today and start with the good things: I love what they did to glyphs. I can see how the new glyph system will cause scribe whining, but on a general note it’s a great change because we’ll finally have all our glyphs on us, so a lot more accessible than before. I never bothered to switch glyphs much in the past, bagspace being one of the reasons, but now I can see myself using glyphs depending on encounter a lot more.
      I also love the adjustment to mount speed, finally I get to use some of those older mounts again. And the new talent and guild windows are great (yay for the professions tab!), the UI changes seem to be a big improvement altogether.

      And here comes the big but (no, not the bear one): I’ve not been looking forward much to the holy priest changes and I can’t say they blow me away. For one, re-speccing seemed already very dull. Then there’s Chakra which is Blizzard’s way of saying that holy priests are the versatile healers of the game, I know – I just don’t feel the whole triple deal in combination with HW:Chastise is such a wonderful, intuitive mechanic. But I’ll get used to that. Oh and note that Chakra is now down to 30secs!

      Aside of Chakra, nothing is new for holy really. We can’t spec into shiny wings proc yet like the Discpriests, because we lack the points. That aside, I absolutlely HATE what they did to Surge of Light, taking it off general crits, making it exclusive for crappy Heal (crappy for the moment anyway) and Smite instead….I loved to get my SoL procs from almost every CoH, that was so much extra mobility!
      And I really do miss Spiritual healing and Prayer of Spirit, it’s been quite noticeable statwise too…mehhh Blizzard, why did you have to take away all the spirit from this priest?

      Priest Tier 11

      As for our recently published T11, I’m again on the fifty fifty side:
      I love gear and tier sets and once more I find myself thinking “thank you, thank you, whoever designs our sets!” because it’s BLUE! YAY! I was scared to end up with a red and brown, fiery cataclysmic looking set which is great for some classes surely, not so much for a holy healer though. Let’s see what the other colors will be, but this is a great start! It looks very royal with the blue and gold and considering the onion-shaped headpiece and overall theme, it reminds me a lot of some oriental, middle-eastern garment.

      Here comes the first but – the shoulders look like those old Mage T2 water dispensers or then the Harvest Festival shoulder-piece. Either way, they don’t seem to fit the rest of the set at all! What’s up with making priests look like football players?

      The even bigger but: the female tier model is the only one that comes belly-free….did the tailor run out of cloth or something? Oh, get real already! And not just about the usual stupid male designer touch, but seriously: is this what you think of priests Blizzard? The sissies in the raid that go belly-free because really, they aren’t doing that much so why not flaunt their bellies in combat while everyone else is geared up in their battle armor? Let’s tan our tank a little while some blazing AoE of doom is raining down on everybody?? Wut???

      I hope they get a ton of angry emails until Cataclysm! And yes, I will wear a matching shirt!

      The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Or: the fastest way to rekindle your WoW passion

      The good old pre-expansion blues is taking its toll on guilds and WoW players all around the globe. Bloggers struggle to find topics to write about while waiting for new content (or argue a lot more than usual), gamers run the same old 5mans on their alts or hunt for the last achievements they can possibly do. This is the twilight hour of the MMO: the old sun is setting as we wait in darkened shadows holding our breath, longing for the new dawn. But Cataclysm is still a good 2 months away, if we want to believe the optimistic voices.

      For some it’s been too long a wait already. They take their leave from the game or website communities, some to take a hiatus, others with the firm intention never to return. Some question if they still got any future in the world of warcraft.

      Well I have good news for you: if you feel your passion for the game dampened, if you doubt whether you should even bother to play Cataclysm, there is a very quick way to make up your mind. You can do what I’ve done the past few weeks, if you’re hooked to the genre like I am, knowing that you’ll always want to play an MMO because it’s ruined all the single-player games for you anyway.

      It’s simple: go and check out the other MMOs out there. Get a trial subscription or try some of the free MMOs that are supposedly “not too bad”. There is NO better way to rekindle your WoW spark than by looking at what alternatives the market has to offer you.

      Believe me when I say I’ve tried

      The past few weeks and months, I have tried, tried real hard too, to give another MMO a chance. Even if I’ve played and loved WoW since the beta launch, I am not a fanboy, I’m generally equally positive as I am critical of the game which makes it hard for more extreme Nay-sayers or Yes-sayers to place me. I don’t love WoW unconditionally, I have too many comparisons for that. It’s still the best game I ever played and the one that has changed me the most, so that counts for something. I can discuss pros and cons of games in a dispassionate manner and I am open to new things. I am also frankly bored of WoW, so I took some time browsing general MMO sites and talked to friends to make my picks.

      The games I eventually opted for were Allods, Age of Conan, Everquest 2 and Rappelz. I also meant to try FF14 at some point but alas, that ship has sailed. I intended for a mix of MMOs that complement my previous experiences and chose some of the more popular ones as much as a few free games with a small, die-hard player base. I’m not a big fan of micro-transaction MMOs but I’m still interested to see what some of them have to offer in return.

      It was a dizzying and ultimately enlightening journey through the jungle, or should I say “Black Morass” of the MMOs out there. Not that I expected much in the first place, but there were a few surprises along the way, even if the painful experiences outweighed the positive. I am fully aware that I am not the most forgiving customer: if you have a strong WoW background, you’re basically spoiled, you take a lot of features for granted. Many of these MMOs have got between 50’000-100’000 subscribers. For 2010, EQ2 is said to sport approximately 200’000 and AoC around 160’000. That means the vast majority of MMOs has plus-minus 1% of the player base that Blizzard can work with.

      My final judgment can still only be from a very personal and biased viewpoint. This is how new MMOs will have to convince new customers to switch over – they will be measured by what’s considered a standard in 2010+. They don’t have to be perfect and they don’t have to copy WoW (they shouldn’t, in fact), but they will have to deliver good reasons to play them instead of WoW. They will have to deliver a ‘package’, because that is what Blizzard really achieved: neither the best graphics, nor the most content depth, nor the best or most complete features, but A LOT of everything! It’s a well-rounded and coherent world we play in, with a high playability and variety that caters to more than one or two types of gamers. Even if it’s not perfect in every respect, it still achieves to be good or very good in most. When we criticize WoW, we’re criticizing on a very high level.

      So I’m not gonna be particularly forgiving or aim for completeness and fairness when presenting my experiences. I’ll be short (kinda..) and selective in retelling what impression the games I picked made on me during my very first hours of gameplay, because that’s when most of us decide to continue or not. The average MMO player does not grind his way up in hope for entirely different or better endgame and that’s usually not what you’ll find anyway. I am also personally not so interested in the endgame raiding aspect anymore, like I used to be. I’ll try and be specific about why I stopped in each game’s case.
      (Continue reading via the link below)
      The Good…

      As mentioned earlier, I was positively surprised once or twice during my ventures, namely by Age of Conan and Allods Online.

      Allods
      Like Rappelz, Allods is a gpotato deal. I chose to play it because it’s a rather remarkable WoW clone graphically and I was intrigued about the Russian team behind it. As expected the game has huge polish from the second you enter the character creation screen. I loved the style of the different races and even if Allods looks a lot like WoW, it shows originality in character design and other cosmetic aspects like armor and world atmosphere. I absolutely loved the Arisen, this gotta be the coolest race ever! You start your journey in a sort of intro scenario, fighting your way out of your homebase and the game controls are easily handled and intuitive.

      That’s when the grind begins…..you keep doing the same fetch&delivery quests we got bored of in vanilla for a very long time and combat is slow. At some point, even though this is one of the best free MMOs out there, you ask yourself “why am I doing this?”. Why play an MMO that looks like WoW when you can play WoW without the micro-transaction deal and in the company of a lot more people?

      Allods doesn’t only look good, but managed to copy many good aspects of other MMOs while still retaining its own style and unique feel. It runs smoothly and should appeal to a more mass market audience. But it ultimately fails to deliver enough reasons to switch over from WoW. Also, most gamers want to pay subscriptions rather than dabble around with ingame shops all the time.

      Age of Conan
      While Age of Conan drove masses of players away at its launch in 2008, Funcom have continuously improved the game since then. I spent several weeks playing (and paying) it, before I rested my lvl 60 priest for good. AoC manages to provide you with a coherent world and lore like WoW does, with its unique style and graphics that succeed to create an immersive atmosphere of High Adventure set in the more barbaric and rough world of Conan (there will be blood!). After a very elaborate character creation, your journey begins with your character washed up at a shore, trying to remember his past from there. You’ll spend your first 20 levels more or less following your own ‘destiny quests’ before you get tossed out into the actual world. The zones are beautiful and of an epic scale, I loved exploring while listening to some of the wonderful tunes. The pseudo real-time combat is fast (especially for melee) and the solo features in the game are great.

      I had a good time with AoC, but I was surprised at how little care was given to the UI and controls which are highly inflexible. Features like the clunky quest log and grouping tools make it very hard for beginners to find their way around. I was also baffled that an MMO wouldn’t even bother to provide you with proper friendlist functionality. The skills and talent system are rather complex and it took some reading up to work out specs.

      But these are things I can deal with. What really discouraged me and my friends from playing together, was the horribly imbalanced group mechanics and at stages dubious difficulty levels for certain dungeons or zones. It was impossible to group up without an exact number of people and classes present (even for dungeons you should out-skill) and once you managed to find the right pugs to join you, it still ended in a very frustrating experience. The tanking mechanics are supposedly better at max level, but aggro control and CC are hideous when trying to level or pug. And while the healing approach in AoC is really refreshing to a WoW healer, it leaves you tearing your hair out due to the broken group mechanics and balance. Apparently this is also a big issue on the PVP side of the game.

      So while AoC is possibly the most mature and unique MMO besides WoW and should cater to a more grown-up audience too, it is not quite there yet. The good aspects outweigh the bad, but it’s still a trade-off in parts. I might re-visit it at some point though.

      …the Bad…

      Rappelz
      Rappelz is one of many asian, free MMOs that regularly pops up in respective top 3s. While the overall graphics and character design look okay (if not slightly hermaphrodite) compared to others, the world and game play are horribly stale. The maps are boring and the music is either dull or annoying. That’s just the more superficial aspects of a game but they shape your first impressions nonetheless and are rather significant when it comes to atmosphere and immersion.

      The game play does nothing to improve things: you start grinding your way into the first town with two basics skills on your hotbar. 10 levels later, you’re still grinding boring mobs on a boring plain, pushing the same two buttons (attack and smite, yay!). When you finally get to ‘upgrade’ your talent tree and chose a more individual skill path, you get rewarded with a shocking number of 0 new skills or abilities. I kept going until I received my first supposed ‘elite-quest’ and went all “Yay, finally a challenge!”, looking for a group because the NPC told me I’d need one. On my way to find people, I accidentally killed a mob which turned out to be the ‘elite mob’ for my quest…

      But that wasn’t the worst about Rappelz, really. The worst is the controls: no mouse-control or WASD, Rappelz is one of the CLICKY-games! If you want to move your character, point and click the environment is all you’ll get. It annoyed me no end and I cannot fathom why some devs still think this is a good idea in an MMO – gawd what were you thinking??!

      …and the Ugly

      Everquest 2
      EQ2 marks my grande finale. I am still utterly baffled about those that told me EQ2 was “that other game beside WoW” or allude that it’s somehow similar. Now I’ll be fair and say the free-to-play feature of EQ2 is currently in its beta but still, the game was released in 2004! That makes it as old as WoW maybe, but definitely not as good.

      Yeah I care for things like character creation and looks, you know what, it matters! And EQ2 is HIDEOUS!!! I went temp-blind trying to customize one of the TWO available character models for humans and apparently they’re one of the more agreeable races. Seriously Sony, seeeeeeriously??

      Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the green-violet starting area of the silly fairies, but the optic aspects of the game didn’t improve from there. At least you can run the game smoothly, even after you fought and scrolled your way through the gazillion available ingame menus and submenus to max performance. The gameplay wasn’t so bad, it was easy enough to find your way around the UI and first quests which are rather similar to WoW; the beautiful zone map (…) assists you there. Also, EQ2 makes up for all the skills and abilities Rappelz is so reluctant to distribute: for every level gained, you get at least 2 new spells for your hotbar. At level 14, I was already half-way to filling my 3rd, losing track quickly of what each of those buttons do and when I should use which and why. The skill and talent system is equally confusing: 3 different tabs on ‘alternate advancement’ that give you no hint whatsoever on where to start, while the game keeps reminding you that you got unused skill points lying around!

      The game is kinda big for letting you know stuff like that…It also tells you that your two bags are full, after which you will have no peace and won’t be able to loot anything until you found the one vendor NPC that lets you sell trash items. You’ll have to make your way there at reduced speed because apparently walking gets harder after you picked too many flowers and mushrooms.

      And then there’s that pesky annoyance of a pop-up that you’ll get to click away every 10minutes, telling you to upgrade to the game’s “silver version”. Apparently that’s Sony’s subtle way of encouraging their free-version players and trialists to buy the upgrade. I’m sure that works really well……not.
      There’s actually a GOLD version popup following that silver one, I hear!

      If you’ve played WoW for years and decide to test EQ2 nonetheless, I wish you good luck. At least you won’t have to wait for a long install and patching procedure, because the game is smart enough to download most of its ugly maps while you’ve already started playing. That is, if you can get the launcher to run without issues, depending on your windows version. ^^

      A look ahead

      I give every game a chance but I’m merciless if it manages to annoy me already at the start, fails to meet the most basic standards or doesn’t manage to motivate long term game play after several hours. If you want to hook players or lure them over, you better create some motivation quickly! I don’t think I’m harsh, but I got a clear focus on things like overall atmosphere, coherence and playability when having my first look at an MMO. After that, I’d like a new title to feature something unique instead of just copying WoW: it’s not enough to be as good, you’ll need to be better and different! Try and excel where WoW is lacking, have a good look at how the fathers of the genre created content depth. And make sure you’ll deliver a package, because you’ll be dealing with WoW players with a low tolerance for bullshit.

      I would love to give another game a go but looking around, I doubt 2011 will change a lot. Very few games of the past years have shown promise, but they aren’t quite there yet. I have the same feeling about upcoming titles such as SWtoR or The Secret World, even if I’m probably going to look into the latter.
      However, most of the current MMOs out there, free or sub-based, are a waste of space, time and nerves. It’s something Blizzard ultimately benefits from, aside of WoW being the king of MMOs for many other reasons.

      Before I agree to settle for less, look like some ugly hobbit on steroids or move my character around like a unit in some freakin RTS, I pre-order my Cataclysm copy and let it be known: it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely your best bang for the buck folks!

      I don’t want to fight worms in MMOs!

      So I have canceled my pre-order for Square-Enix’ upcoming Final Fantasy 14 two days ago, being utterly put off by their intention to limit gamers playtime via diminishing returns on XP gains. Or rather, they are trying to control character progression by forcing you to switch class every few hours.
      No thanks. While I can understand SE’s endeavor to keep their player base closer together by limiting the time you can spend on your character’s base level each week, I don’t think it’s up to developers to regulate communities in MMOs in such ways. I’m totally aware that this is just my opinion and probably an interesting topic for debate, but I want to level a caster when I feel like it without having to go and knit socks because it’s suddenly “Crafting Time!”.

      The fatigue feature is however only the last straw for me. I admit to having hyped this sequel on other boards, partly because I did play Final Fantasy 11 before WoW and was really excited to hear SE’s focus on more solo-ability in the upcoming game – and also because me and Square-Enix RPGs go a long way back. If there’s any other videogame company besides Blizzard that I trust to design a well-rounded and well-designed MMO with a genuine feeling for fantasy worlds with a unique atmosphere, top graphics and soundtrack to go with, it’s them. They’ve been delivering true fantasy RPG experiences for over 20 years now. If someone knows how to tell a story and deliver polish at the same time, it’s them. After reading the initial FF14 overviews and previews, I was looking foward to see their new concept that aims to learn from previous errors, but it seems that their intention to create a different, more ‘mass market’ MMO is taking it too far for me.

      The combat system in FF14 will not feature the typical real-time action based MMO experience, but rather a mixture of real-time and classic round-base / strategy junction that is apparently inspired by FF13:

      “Contrary to what people thought when news of the game first emerged, battles will occur in real time but will not be ‘action-style’ battles which require on timing and a high tempo. Instead, the new battle system will be heavily strategy based. This is furthered by the Armoury job system which allows players to change classes on the fly thus allowing them to adapt to many different situations.”

      If you watch combat videos from the FF14 beta on youtube, you will notice that the mobs actually wait for their ’round’ and that the combat is going real slow. I’ve talked to several beta testers and they’ve all confirmed that the combat system is horribly boring and clunky at the moment. We’re talking about a game that is due to launch this September 2010. I really can’t relate to this type of slowed combat in an MMO which reminds me too much of the more scripted encounters in round-based offline RPGs.

      And then there’s the worms. Have a look at the following picture:

      This is myself and my party sometime in 2004 trying to battle down a worm. Yes, we are trying to 4-man a single worm. I might wanna add too, that this is inside a dungeon and that we were around level 25 at the time. Which in the original 1.0 version of the game was at a much higher time/level-spent ratio than for example in vanilla WoW. From the very beginning you were battling not just nightcrawlers, but bees, beetles, bats, rats and goddamn sheep! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, these critters aren’t restricted to your newbie areas but will actually re-occur frequently on higher maps of the game with different colors.

      WOW, I get to fight a blue worm with purple stripes this time!!!
      Thanks so much Square-Enix!

      Duhhh… this is really screwed up. I don’t want to fight worms in MMOs, I want something that feels a bit more epic or at least ‘authentic’ to what I, as powerful magic-wielder in a fantasy world, would deem worthy to kill. Let alone with a party. Having watched all these clips on youtube recently, it seems absolutely nothing has changed in that department.

      While we’re at it: I would really like to see Blizzard implement more multiple-mobs fights in World of Warcraft too; I appreciate their effort to create harder mobs in Cataclysm, but I still don’t think a party of 5+ lvl 80 heroes should be hitting on a single target unless it’s a dungeon or raid boss.

      Apparently the devs of the upcoming Star Wars the Old Republic MMO have made this a focus for their featured ingame combat. Too bad the game looks like something Blizzard chewed up and spit out 5 years ago.

      Yours truly,