Guides

Once upon a time, I was teaching a friend how to duel in Age of Wushu. She was easily frustrated by things, and she expressed to me that she felt as if everyone had superhuman reflexes compared to her. Because she was a beginner, I couldn't just convey all the complexity of mind games to her. Explaining all the different options (beyond the basics), weighting them, and explaining the opportunity costs of each was not really an option. She was having trouble even with slightly advanced stuff (which is totally normal), but she also lacked some of the natural "killer instinct" that allows some of my other friends to duel.

At the same time, I had been fighting Zyden, one of the most skilled duelists in English-speaking Age of Wushu. He actually does have near-superhuman reflexes. Earlier that day, though, I had hit him with a very slow-animating feint that he normally interrupts with a stun. Normally, his reactions are superhuman, but there are some times when they aren't. It's not a matter of "off day," either. He just wasn't prepared for me to do what I did right at that moment.

I told my friend, "Outside of a moment, you can only react." Immediately afterwards, I realized just how important those words were.

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Amidst the critiques and patch reviews, the reasons I stick with Star Wars: The Old Republic sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Despite being irritated by the way BioWare handled specific parts of this Star Wars MMORPG, I still find the setting and the storytelling to be superb. These interwoven tales of adventure and chaos provide an incredible platform for my favorite thing to do in an MMO: roleplay.

I've covered several topics about roleplay in this column. From breaking into the community to an RP wishlist to resolving RP-related conflicts, I've might have covered everything except for one of the most basic of roleplay elements: How do you host a roleplay event in SWTOR? Although Star Wars: The Old Republic varies in its presentation and tools, the types of events you can throw are pretty similar to the ones you can throw in any other MMOs. The tiny details vary, but the three basic type of events can be narrowed down to social, PvE, and PvP.

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With Issue #7 A Dream to Kill inching closer and closer, my anticipation for the new auxiliary weapon coming to The Secret World is reaching near impossible heights. I'll admit it: As a pyro at heart, I am giddy with the thought of wrapping my hands around a permanent flamethrower! And I'm certainly not alone in that sentiment, either.

But an excitement for the new weapon doesn't diminish any of the current ones that are already in game; each auxiliary weapon -- the rocket launcher, the chainsaw, the quantum brace, and the whip -- is awesome in its own right with distinct skills and style. Is one right for you? Heck yeah! If you aren't taking advantage of an auxiliary weapon, you are depriving yourself of some extra oomph in your fights, not to mention an eighth active and passive skill on your hot bar.

How do you know which one is better for you? Honestly, you needn't choose just one; as with regular weapons, you can earn all four. But with a hefty price of 35 SP per weapon, payable all at once, it's impossible to get more than one at a time. So which do you choose first? And then how do you go about getting it? This guide will give a general overview of the four current auxiliary weapons and the paths to acquiring them.

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Tech 1 ships in EVE Online used to be arranged in tiers that determined the cost and power of the ship and what level of the appropriate skill was required to fly it. This gave a sense of progression back in 2004 when all we had was frigates, cruisers, and battleships, but developers have since filled in the gaps between ship classes with destroyers, battlecruisers, strategic cruisers, and tech 2 ships of all shapes and sizes. In a recent game design initiative, CCP has been removing the tiers from within each tech 1 ship class by buffing the lower-tier ships up to the same rough power level as the largest ship in its class.

The recent Odyssey expansion saw the humble battleship buffed beyond all recognition. The Megathron, Raven, Tempest, and Apocalypse all became extreme damage-dealing powerhouses, but the Dominix, Scorpion, Typhoon, and Armageddon were buffed the most. Each of them can now fit several monster setups, dealing upward of 1,000 damage per second or completely disabling enemy ships with energy neutralisers and electronic warfare. The build costs of these tier one battleships were more than doubled in the expansion, but prices are only slowly rising due to the existing stock on the market. That makes the tier one battleships incredibly cost-effective PvP powerhouses at the moment, and players are beginning to take advantage of it.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I experiment with PvP setups for the newly revamped Typhoon, Armageddon, Scorpion, and Dominix battleships.

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I find the mainstream success of League of Legends to be extremely baffling. If you break down the skills you need to be an effective player in the MOBA genre, they are daunting. The mechanical skill cap to be acceptable is unacceptably high, and the knowledge burden is enormous. Other MOBAs have dozens of characters and hundreds or thousands of matchups. League of Legends' character pool is so unbelievably large that even professionals cannot grasp the entirety of its design space.

While I can't fathom how normal people find a game this hard fun, I can simply accept it. That makes it quite possible to get our friends and significant others hooked. However, because League is a hard game, it is probably best that we be careful when we try to teach our friends. It's pretty easy to scare them with the enormous difficulty in the game.

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ArenaNet's content train for Guild Wars 2 continues to chug along at full speed, and the next stop is the Dragon Bash festival. Unlike the Dragon Festival of the original Guild Wars, this festival won't find anyone revering dragons. The Elder Dragons put a kibosh on any warm sentiments that the humanoids of Tyria might have had for them in the past. Dragon Bash is all about unifying the races in celebration during these dark and terrifying times by distracting them with fireworks, gambling, and candy-filled dragon piñatas!

The celebrations officially kick off tomorrow, but we have a video preview of the Dragon Bash celebrations to whet your appetite.

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The Odyssey expansion has been live for a couple of days now, but it's already starting to have a massive impact on EVE Online. Traffic through low-security space has increased significantly for the first time in years thanks to explorers hunting data and relic sites, and some players are even hunting asteroid belt NPCs in lowsec for the new security tags. New wars have erupted in nullsec following the redistribution of moon wealth, mining has become a more valuable profession, and the rebalanced battleships feel powerful again.

Unfortunately, Odyssey has seen its fair share of problems too. The new jump effect looks spectacular the first few times you see it, but long-term play is reportedly causing motion sickness in some players. Some players have also been objecting to the ice mining changes, and the revamped radial UI menu hasn't done much to fix the game's usability problems. Explorers in low-security space and nullsec are reporting incomes in the billions of ISK per day range thanks to the scan probe changes and new hacking minigame, but not everyone is happy with the new loot-scattering mechanic.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the early impact of Odyssey on the EVE Online universe and discover the secrets behind collecting all the valuable loot when hacking.

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Leader. Shot caller. Playmaker. The jungler is the heart of a League of Legends team. On both Summoner's Rift and Twisted Treeline, the jungler is the leader of the pack. More than any other role, the jungler is called upon and expected to swing the game in his favor. He's expected to be everywhere at once. If a laning player dies to an enemy jungle gank, it is her jungler's fault for not being there. If a laning player fails to make a kill happen, it's also her jungler's fault. It is any jungler's personal experience that if lost game is not lost in the laning phase or blame cannot be pinned on a specific person, the jungler is always to blame.

With this responsibility comes great power, however. The jungler has the ability to influence a match in numerous covert and overt ways. He can steal enemy creeps to disrupt the opposing jungler or even influence lanes by stealing the enemy blue buff. He can make his presence known via ganks and directly impact the outcome of lane confrontations. Perhaps most notably, the jungler can place wards to warn his teammates of enemy incursions and/or allow them to make better strategic decisions.

While the support can be a team leader as well, the role defaults to the man in the jungle. When he comes from the cover of the trees to strike at his foes, they quake in terror.

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Previously in The Art of Wushu, we discussed the basic combat mechanics in Age of Wushu. If you have played the game for more than a week or so, you are likely familiar with most of it. A basic RPS mechanic is the simplest type of combat design, and many other games, especially those with "robust" melee combat, tend to have some RPS as the basis of its complexity.

However, Age of Wushu focuses a lot on uneven risk and reward. It is not enough to simply have RPS elements. A combat design built around mixups should also have many different options between these mixups that create an inter-RPS. Let me explain broadly: Some rocks beat other rocks, but the other rocks provide better rewards when used against scissors. Some rocks might even provide benefits when used against paper! The series of mindgames interwoven into your attack choice are the focus for this week.

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After last week's edition of the Summoner's Guidebook, I realized that one of the things I sort of take for granted is the advantage of taking many of LoL's different gametypes into account when I value a particular item. For instance, last week we talked a lot about Rabadon's Deathcap, but it (and its sister item Wooglet's Witchcap) has drastically different values in different game modes. It's a lot easier to justify buying a Deathcap when you have easy sources of gold and a lot of time when you're trying to gather it. If you have to fight, more defense becomes an imperative.

If you don't play a lot of Dominion or Twisted Treeline, you might not realize that Bloodthirster and Infinity Edge are hard to buy when fights can erupt faster than ultimate skills can recharge. Expensive items like a Needlessly Large Rod or BF Sword are hard to justify when you can get some interim item that provides more balanced stats and will help win the fights you're fighting now.

Playing other game modes also gives you a broader look at League of Legends. You don't see the value of certain stats -- particularly HP -- until you realize that an extra 200-500 HP can cause a huge swing in the course of an engagement.

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Are you looking for a how-to on Guild Wars 2's Last Stand at Southsun Cove content? You're in luck, because ArenaNet has penned a guide that will point you in the right direction. Depending on your level of spoiler sensitivity, you may want to stick with the Spoiler-Free Mini Guide. If you're more of an all-spoilers-all-the-time type, go ahead and peruse the New Rewards and New Achievements section of the guide while you're at it.

We would tell you more, but then there'd be no reason to click through to the guide itself, now would there?

It's important to get this straight right away: Floid is the horse and Dewitt is the human. And no, I'm not giving you the principle cast of a Saturday morning cartoon; this is one of the more interesting Easter eggs that inhabit Lord of the Rings Online.

Floid the Mighty Steed and Dewitt the Explorer are an adventuring duo in the process of touring all of Middle-earth. Their journeys take them to out-of-the-way places, but if you stumble upon them you'll be given a deed to find the pair in seven different locales. Do so and you'll earn the incredible, the awe-inspiring, the magnificent... title of "the Wanderer." OK, it's just a title, but it's a title and a "Where's Waldo?" hunt for two oddballs. I'll take some time off of plowing through Update 11 to do this, yes sir!

While I've been aware of Floid and Dewitt over the years, I have never taken the time to hunt them down and finish the deed. Well, that ends this week. Come with me as I search high and low until all is revealed!

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Once upon a time (OK, a few weeks ago), I was playing an ARAM as Diana. I had a fairly bad score (I'm passive and don't chase kills), and we lost. One of my teammates blamed me, claiming my item build was awful. It was largely because I didn't build Rabadon's Deathcap.

Deathcap is one of the perennial caster items in League of Legends. Not only does it give an enormous amount of ability power, but it also increases all of your ability power (including what it grants) by a whopping 30%. This seems so ridiculously powerful! Even though it's expensive, 30% increase in AP is such a huge boost to damage that it can't be beaten.

Is this really the case, though? In Summoner's Rift, I completely agree that Deathcap is a great item. In Twisted Treeline, Wooglet's Witchcap (the replacement item for Deathcap) is also incredible. However, in Dominion and ARAM, the fast-paced action and frequent conflicts change the nature of the wizard hats considerably.

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Many readers balked when I said Age of Wushu had the best combat in an MMO ever back when I did my first impressions piece. I admit, it was a bold claim. However, even after playing Guild Wars 2, TERA, and numerous other games with "deep MMO combat," I stand by what I said back then. Age of Wushu's PvP combat is the best in any MMO.

If you're coming from a mostly MMO background, combat in Age of Wushu is a bit daunting at first. It's really nothing like combat in any other MMO. It has a bit slower pace than a typical action-MMO, but it is the first to really employ tempo control. Attacking recklessly is a patch to a quick defeat, forcing players to make tough tactical decisions.

If you're like me and came to MMOs from a fighting game background, things readily click into place. Baiting common reactions and punishing them, punishing actions on reaction, and getting in the head of your opponent is better-rewarded than in any other MMO combat system. I don't want to badmouth games like GW2 that have great combat, so don't get me wrong; many other games have excellent combat. Age of Wushu's battle system is just even more fantastic. When I win a fight against an even-leveled opponent (or higher level, though that's rare) without taking an unblocked hit, I feel like a total beast.

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Lately, there have been a number of topics all vying for my attention here in Tattered Notebook. In a couple of instances, some of them got a little rough and started pushing the others around to try for a better place in line. Yet all the while, EverQuest II's Moonlight Enchantments has been patiently waiting. So as a reward (we do like to reward good behavior here!), that quiet little topic is getting the spotlight in a special bonus edition. And the timing couldn't be more perfect!

You see, initially this guide was just going to focus on speed to help you get through that short two-day event that comes but once a month on the 20th and 21st in EQII. Now, however, we get to delve into the changes and new things coming to the Enchanted Grottoes, from even more housing items (yes, that's on top of the new additions in March) to two new repeatable quests to earn the tokens to buy the items. And with this month's festival right around the corner, having a game plan ready to get the most out of those two days will benefit new and old players alike.

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