First thing you have to do is open up the repeatable by going the normal quests for the mobs you want to grind. Head back to cutthroat pick up the quests you want and head down to a grind spot. For the solo grind spot there might be 2-3 quests you need to do before the repeatable unlocks. As a solo dps it will be fastest for you to grind solo but you wont be helping your healer friends. If you can group up with your lancer and healer buddies and share the love on the BaMs it wont take you too much longer.

My personal favorite repeatable for solo grinding is North Mistmoor. For BaM grinding I have been using Grim Coast which is solid with a group.

It takes 120 tokens to get a full set of armor and weapons which is 4 stacks of the solo repeatable or 3 stacks of the BaM repeatable, 600 Solo mobs or 120 BaMs respectively.

Screenshots below for clarity on grind spots.

[QUOTE=LordZedd;16269]Since I did not see something like this posted yet figured Id share it. This is one of the many reasons I love ventrilo.

Two things that are very useful, so that you don't end up in the middle of a game and someone decides to abuse the functions of Ventrilo (by making events spam is the easiest example, or perhaps someone comes in and plays a screaming loud sound file or pure static).

1. Turn off your events. Go to Setup > Events Tab > 3rd and 4th options down are most important. "Users connect to server" and "Users disconnect from server" select them both and change it from "Wave file" to "Nothing" by using the choices on the right side. Edit the other choices there as you see fit, those 2 are the most irritating in large Ventrilo servers.

2. Create an EQUALIZER for Ventrilo, this is the greatest function of all time for Vent, ever had someone who you could barely hear, and then had someone who was insanely loud? Tired of right clicking someones name > Miscellaneous > Special Effects > Add Volume? Now everyone will be the exact same volume! No matter how loud or quiet they are! Here's what you do.

While connected to a server, click Setup > Stay on the Voice tab > Click the SFX button (it's in the upper right). > Add a "Compressor" option to the "Current" side > Select it and choose Properties.

I'll list the changes of the next options below, so it's easy to view:

Gain - (This is the volume of EVERYONE that you will hear in vent, this depends on a lot of things, start at 6 and work your way up, it is sensitive.)
Attack - 10.00
Release - 500 or so.
Threshold - (-30) That's NEGATIVE 30.
Ratio - 100.0
Pre delay - 4.0

Now all you need to do is adjust Gain to whatever volume you see fit and your Ventrilo has an equalizer! And you can just giggle when people join vent to abuse it, cause it won't affect you! Woot[/QUOTE]

So I tried Tera online for this first time last weekend. I went into the game thinking about how much I HATE asian MMOs, how gay they look, and how horribly grindy they are. so here is my take on what I saw.

1. Looks: Yes the game still looks very homo, you have pedobears, little fairy girls with bunny ears, and lots of different elf looking races that are called by other names.

2. Grind: So far so good, got to 30 in 2 days of playing casual for me which is still quite a bit. If you remember you could easily hit 30+ in aion in 2 days and we all know how the grind ended up in that game so the jury is out on this one.

3. Combat System: The combat system is second only to the original Global Agenda for MMOs. It is a lot like melee in AoC but way more clean and well made. All your skills are aimed and require skill shots other then some of the ranged class skills but in what game isn't ranged made easy mode compared to melee. The game starts off extremely slow in the starter zone so when your fighting these big trees half the time you have them dead before they even get a single skill off. By the time you get to the first real player zone the game speeds up and you actually have to dodge NPC abilities.

4. Game Engine: In major PvP battles and zerged over populated zones there was zero lag which was impressive after playing SWTOR that lags everytime you get a quest update even if you have nobody on your screen. The engine worked extremely well and the world is beautiful. Overall the graphics are much better then swtor, but the anime look of the models just ruins any chance of me saying the game "looks good".

5. UI: The UI is excellent, you can customize every element in the game, move it, resize, ect. It is all built in, no mods required.

6. PvE: The content so far hasn't been anything special, no different then AoC where you gotta avoid stuff without the help of DBM playing the game for you. Boss mobs seem to be the same deal as BAMs in the open world but with a few quirks to their mechanics, like adds ect.

7. PvP: This is going to be the strong part of the game, fully skill based, and even more so it is fully team based. You need to work together to be effective in PvP, if not you will get diced by a well organized team. Our crew was able to easily take groups with double numbers when they were not as skilled/organized.

Overall I really liked the game, one issue that really pissed me off in the game though, and I cannot believe they haven't addressed by now, is 50pct dmg buff per lvl over people. In a game with open world PvP while lvling you would think these tards would have the foresight that people will be within 3 lvls in the same zone at times. Well someone 2 lvls higher does doble dmg to you and has a huge crit chance making pvp vs higher lvls virtually impossible when they 2 shot you. We had guys hitting lower lvls for 20k+, by far one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in a PvP game in my entire life. A far cry from AoC where a lvl 40 could cyclone slash an 80 and kill him in 1 combo if it crit.

The PvP combat system was extremely fun, I really think if they tweek these things a bit more the game is going to be great. As always with any game, the question is end game. Will there be something in end game to keep our ADD asses in it for more then a month.

Voxels are the cooler Brothers of Pixels, that’s the easy explanation. Voxatron will come this year and it will use the voxel technology, to destroy your environment completely and dynamically. it got me already.

VIA: Leakerz.com


Wasn't Red Faction experimenting with tech some time back?

This lucky young man got a copy of Warcraft Cataclysm for Christmas from his wonderful girlfriend. However, it didn’t come without any strings attached. He had to sign this little contract before the installation process could even begin.

Well it’s good Lucasarts has a bit of a sense of humor, which is why they’ve employed the boys at Robot Chicken to craft the latest commercial for The Force Unleashed 2.

The spot actually pokes fun at the ridiculous plot of the second game, which I’m told is leagues behind the first installment, which was actually pretty brilliant. I was hyped up for the sequel, but alas, I’ll have to rent it at Blockbuster a few months from now and beat it in an afternoon.

But in the meantime, I really want to watch the Robot Chicken Star Wars Specials again.

With all of the recent focus on World of Warcraft following its latest expansion, it's no surprise that the industry leader is at the center of another round of "What will topple WoW?" discussions.

In an article on Eurogamer, industry analysts and developers lend their thoughts as to what made World of Warcraft so dang popular to begin with, and what it will take -- if anything -- for another game to beat its popularity, subscription numbers and cultural footprint. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter declared that nothing will top the title for at least 20 years due to an insurmountable lead, although this became debated by the other participants.

Cryptic's Jack Emmert thinks WoW will be "chipped away at" instead of toppled. Age of Conan's Craig Morrison thinks that nobody can consciously plan to overcome WoW's lead saying, "You don't topple a cultural phenomenon. But you can join one." GamersFirst's Bjorn Book-Larsson doesn't think there's a need for WoW to be toppled due to the size of the market.

Codemasters' Dave Solari imagines that the winning formula "would have mass market appeal, with instant accessibility, would work on all platforms, particularly mobile, be incredibly viral and social -- like a feature-rich FarmVille." Undead Labs' Jeff Strain thinks that MMO studios should be looking at it a different way: "They should instead be striving to achieve the same level of success with their own game ideas."

Some even speculate that Blizzard is the only studio capable of besting its own game, perhaps with its second MMO that's due to be announced in 2012.

/cough code name Titan EST 2014 per verified leaked launch schedule

Remember that bit in the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook where that Space Marine went into a Space Marine village and was cornered by a commoner with a yellow exclamation mark above his head? The one who told him to go out to his garden and kill ten snotlings that were terrorising his space-crops? No you don’t, and neither does Mike Maza, creative director on Warhammer 40K MMO Dark Millennium Online.“We just couldn’t wrap our heads around a Space Marine killing ten wolves for their pelts. It’s just not 40K. We don’t want to give those kinds of quests to the players, we think it takes you out of the fiction. The objectives of our quests are far more epic than that.”



Warhammer 40K’s grim future of inter-species war is perhaps the only universe you could get away with a ‘kill except the number would be well into the thousands. But traditional online RPG models – all stilted combat and ritualistic toolbar presses – are anathema to a universe based on the sole unifying principle of smashing the faces off everything that ever existed. Dave Adams, founding father of developers Vigil, adds his perspective: “at first we said ‘let’s make a standard MMO. Guy goes in, dude’s standing there, patrol walks by. I tap, select him, and hit one.’ It was lousy.” It didn’t fit with the game played on tabletops across the world, it didn’t fit the team’s imagined experience, and most importantly, it didn’t fit with 40K’s endless, rapid-fire carnage.

Dave explains his vision of the universe, developed from 25 years of familiarity with Games Workshop products: “We’re designing a cinematic, action-oriented MMO, balanced in terms of player-on-player and player-versus-environment battles. There’s a lot of ranged combat, but also a healthy dose of melee. You’re not gonna have a bunch of static spawns, you’re not gonna have a bunch of random patrols.” Vigil are playing in a universe defined by a quarter of a decade of development, tightened but enhanced by reams of backstory. Were they to produce a retextured WoW, they’d be chainsworded to death by armies of angry fans – and rightly so.



Fortunately, Vigil are aware of this. Dave has got serious complaints about the whole MMO genre. Whole genre, look away now: “You just pretty much hammer on the number keys. They’re the same mechanic over and over again.” Vigil previously worked on console-oriented action beat-’em-up Darksiders. It was heavy on the reactive combat, full of man-stabbing and bloody moments calculated to make people shout “yeah!” and want to play air guitar. Dave argues the team learned more from that experience than they have from their MMO peers. “There’s a lot more finesse in what you do in a console game. The moment-tomoment, the weight of the animations, the response, the effects. It’s really all about the pace.”

Strong words from a team without a finished MMO of their own. But it’s not like they’re novices paddling in the genre pool: Dave himself left online specialists NCsoft in 2005 to found Vigil. I asked him whether he thought any other online worlds got combat right: “It’s just not been a priority for them. A lot more attention is put into console games: if you sit down and you play an MMO, and you actually compared it to a triple-A console game, a lot of the stuff would never fly.”

I asked him why he thought that was. “A lot of developers see that as an opportunity to cut that corner because there’s so much to do on an MMO. They think people care about X, Y and Z. They don’t really care about the feeling of the combat.” But Vigil have to make the same world, the same economy, the same community as other online world- builders – how will their MMO break this apparent corner-cutting culture? “That disparity isn’t going to be tolerated for too long: eventually someone’s going to do it and everyone else is going to have to follow suit. We want to be those people, and that pushed us toward a more action- oriented formula.”

Dave began to describe what he meant by this, but not before sticking a final power-armoured boot into MMO contemporaries. “If you see an MMO 20 feet away you know it’s an MMO. There’s a million icons on the screen, the interface is the same. They’re so predictable. Our goal is when some guy’s walking past DMO they won’t instantly know it’s an MMO. That depends on a minimal interface: it’s not a full FPS but it looks more ‘actiony’.”

Actiony is not a word. Define ‘actiony’, Dave! Mike Maza stepped in to help: “We’ve done away with the action bar icon from the screen – we’ve kept it down to essential elements for ranged combat.” That’s not to suggest that it’s all shooting – half of Warhammer 40K is focused on getting within spitting distance of your enemy and then jabbing the pointiest thing your race knows about into their eye. But Mike says that’s simpler to handle than gunplay. “Melee combat is relatively easy, we have tons of examples of how it’s been done in the past.” It’s similarly easy to see how it’ll be approached in DMO – a middle ground between the kinetic feedback of singleplayer fighting and the arcane dance of MMO combat. How the team will deal with frantic battlefield crossfire is less obvious. Internal discussions are still ongoing about shooting specifics, and subject to rapid change.



John Mueller is DMO’s art director, and gave me an insight on the portions of the gun-game they have locked down, describing the design that’s gone into 40K’s signature sidearm: the Space Marine bolter. “We spend a lot of time just making those feel awesome. It’s really one of the universe’s primary weapons, it’s important for us that it handles and sounds the way we and Games Workshop think it should.”

Space Marines are sorted then, but the still-unannounced races and classes not blessed with such a well-defined firearm won’t be getting cast-offs. John’s art team have spent time poring through the tomes of 40K history for gun-spiration, and crikey, is this a universe that likes its guns. “There’s a lot of documentation about the weapons in 40K, but there’s also things like a belt-fed stubber that might not have been drawn before. With these, we’ll extrapolate it visually from other things in the canon.” New guns will be canonical cannons, then.

Your mouse-handling skills will play more of a role than they would in a standard MMO, but the team agree that it’s not going to be a twitch-centric shooter. Dave clarifies: “It’s still an RPG. There’s still stats. Your ability as a character is related to your level and the kind of loot you have.” Loot! See, other MMOs: DMO might flip its middle finger at you when you turn around, but it’s still one of the guys.

In terms of design, how this pickuppable junk will change your character is defined by GW’s dictation. John explains how the relationship between the companies affects aesthetics: “You have these character archetypes that Games Workshop have set. But at the high levels we want see how far we can go with the awesomeness of the gear.” Calibrate your awesomeositors to register unprecedented awesomeosity.

The intrinsic need for loot and gear means no jettisoning of the usual systems of shopping and crafting – though how they’re going to be portrayed hasn’t been explained yet. I asked John Mueller what Space Marine towns would look like, and his response was simple: “Space Marines don’t have towns. It’s not like our cities are specifically a ‘Space Marine town’, it’s more just like a settlement in the Imperium, instead of a branded area.” Artistically, how do they ensure that a generic settlement stays interesting and true to the fiction? “Everything is really old! That’s what Games Workshop always say, whenever they put something in 40K, just make it look really old.”

As 40K’s overlords, GW are protective of their invention: it wouldn’t do for a tech priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, servants of the Emperor and born from the ancient forge world of Mars to be wearing a funny hat. Space Marines wear power armour; necessity states you could end up looking like your friend if you play the same class. John explains how to get around this problem and still foster a sense of identity. “Character customisation is about progression, where you go and what you do in the world changes how you look. Space Marine armour is so heavily adorned, you can imagine how the progression might go: a marine who’s been on campaigns will make all kinds of adjustments to his armour reflecting his experience.” I’m mentally accessorising my marine already: a nice Tyranid tooth necklace would bring out the red in my power armour.

Continue reading @ http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/12/04/wa...m-dark-future/

KillTenRats, that recently wrote about the recession of Guild Wars 2 news, sat down with developers and community managers in order to speak about Energy Bars, Skills, Dungeons and PvP. They often refer to the designs and mechanics they used in Guild Wars in order to describe the new System. How will the Energy Bar recharge, what influence have the potions and the number you use?

I switched to the topic of epic encounters. The Shatterer was a huge boss where actions like rolling behind the creature to avoid a blow was impossible. The epic encounters are also much longer fights. Peters and Kerstein noted that with the bigger fights there are also many more actions to choose from. Players could help revive downed allies (at no energy cost). They could fire some cannons or deal with some of the enemy spawns harassing the cannons. There was even more room in the event to just run away and take a breather. Ultimately, Cartwright said, there is just more time.

Read the whole article here.

A Gamer spent an amount of $15000 Dollar, to play a game on Asias Second biggest LED Screen in Beijing. The LED Screen Sky is 7.500 square meters large. Whether this was a marketing idea or a dream of a private man is not yet clear.

Blizzard has already changed its stance on race changes from an unpopular position announced earlier today. Blizzard will now be allowing you to get a paid race change to take advantage of the new race/class combinations when patch 4.0.3a drops tomorrow.

We know this is confusing, but this the real deal. Blizzard will let you change to something as awesome as a tauren paladin starting tomorrow.

The full blue statement is as follows:

Bashiok
Paid Race Change to the new class combos will be available as soon as they are available to create (with the release of 4.0.3a)

This is an update to the previous expected functioning of this service. We're in the process of ensuring everyone here has this latest updated information, just know that this is what's now accurate. :)

Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...759?page=6#110

Note, you will not be able to race change to a goblin or worgen until after Cataclysm hits the live servers on Dec. 7 at 12:00 a.m. PST.

Bashiok has announced that the elemental invasion boss portals are open in the capital cities "permanently" (which means they'll likely be going away when the patch hits tomorrow morning). Now is your chance to farm any additional items you want from those bosses or grind out a ton of easy justice points.

The blue announcement is as follows:

Bashiok
Due to your valiant efforts in protecting the key invasion cities, the four boss portals are now 'permanently' open. If you need anything from inside the portals, or maybe you dropped your keys in there, now is the time to go through and get them.

Initial reports from shaman in the area that were available at time of publishing suggest that this is hinting at something far more sinister. One such shaman, a one 'Krunkmaster' from Proudmoore was quoted as saying "This is hinting at something far more sinister."

Chilling!

G4 enlisted adult star Kirsten Price to test the outer limits of Microsoft Kinect. Does it recognize a furry costume? What about a naked lady?

Video Games - E3 2011