Diablo 3 and Path of Exile compared

I've played a whole lot of Path of Exile, but until recently, I'd only played through Diablo once just after launch and I knew the game had changed substantially since the expansion (Reaper of Souls) was released. That all changed a few weeks ago when I started playing in the recent "Season 3" event of Diablo 3. I leveled two new characters from scratch to max level and got them both geared out for the end-game content: greater rifts. What follows are my impressions of the two games now that I have some more context.

Replayability is a word

I just read the (2010) blog from ben abraham (lowercase from his blog name "ben abraham dot net"), "`Replayability` is NOT a word, so stop using it idiot!" I feel the need to reply to this, because it's a concept that I've come across before, and I'm kind of tired of dictionary thumpers. I don't want you to get the wrong idea, however. I'm glad that he wrote this article. It shows that he's at least thinking about what the video gaming community is. That's a good thing. I just think he's wrong about his conclusions.

Rift Mage: Archon

Archon is one of Rift’s mage souls. It's a versatile soul that brings great benefit to any mage that incorporates it into their build, but it's also a raiding powerhouse when used as the primary soul. In fact, the 51-point Archon is so powerful that in addition to Bard, it's one of the only two souls that are pretty much required in any 20-man raid.

This article is all about the uses of Archon from folding in a zero-point Archon tree to taking advantage of Archon talents in other builds to full 51-point Archon support.

Rift: WoW's next generation

I've been playing Rift of late. In case you're not aware of it, Rift is a massively multiplayer roleplaying game like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online, and so forth. Unlike many other games, however, it's a fairly shameless reproduction of World of Warcraft, in about the same ways that World of Warcraft was a fairly shameless reproduction of EverQuest. Yes, there are massive changes (fewer, I think you could argue, between WoW and Rift than between EQ and WoW), but the core of the games are very, very similar. I believe that Rift uses the Lord of the Rings Online engine, which I think a few other games use as well. Definitely the graphics feel much more like LotRO than WoW.

So, let me review the game in parts.

WoW: Back to my Warlock

It's been a long time since I played my warlock in World of Warcraft. She's currently 82, and and going into a dungeon or two, I realized just how little I knew about the 4.x warlock class, now. World of Warcraft's single biggest problem is that it's a moving target. You need to re-learn your class over and over and over again, every time an expansion or major patch comes out. There are some great addons that help, though, and if you know the right Web sites to look at, you can come up to speed fairly quickly.

Let's start with my UI. Here's my combat UI:

Warlock combat UI against a training dummy.

Some things to cover in terms of addons I'm using. The pile of buttons at the button is Dominos. I have to choose what goes were in each bar, and they're arranged in 3-button-wide columns to match my G15 keyboard.

Next up, there are the buttons along the left side. Those are autobar, and I don't configure them. They contain my potions, food, trade skills, mounts, etc.

The button bar above the center of the screen with bar-graph type indicators hanging down from it is ButtonTimers, a great mod I'm going to get into below. Notice that I keep my target's unit frame near the center of the screen with big debuff markers that show my debuffs. This is crucial for boss fights.

OK, so the first thing I needed to do was find out what my rotations were. "Rotation" is a word that's now misleading. It used to be that all WoW classes with rare exception had a simple rotation of abilities, where you would cast X, Y, Y, Z, X, Y, Y, Z, and repeat (or some other sequence). Usually you had some big cooldowns that you threw in whenever, but the core rotation was what mattered.

Now, everyone has a priority list. For destruction warlocks like myself, this looks like:

• Improved Soul Fire (Keep this buff up!)
• Demon Soul
• Immolate
• Conflagrate
• Bane of Doom
• Corruption
• Shadowflame
• Soul Fire (Empowered Imp)
• Chaos Bolt
• Shadowburn (Sub 20% HP)
• Incinerate

The above quoted from Elitist Jerks, a crucial resource for any class. There are some interesting problems, here. Note that Improved Soul Fire is a self-buff, Immolate puts a debuff on the mob, and Chaos Bolt is just a cooldown-based nuke. So, how do I juggle all these different inputs all the time? This is where ButtonTimers comes into play. Once you install the addon, you get some funky looking free-floating bars. Go to the Interface menu, select the addons tab at the top and then ButtonTimers. You have several options, but start with selecting bars 2, 3 and 4, each in turn and clicking off the "Enable" option for each bar. You just need the one.

OK, now go back to bar 1 and make sure the "lock bar" option is not selected (also unlock your action bars in the normal interfaces/action bars section of the default WoW UI if you have your action bars locked). Click OK and exit the interface menu. Move the bar to a convenient spot on your UI (I suggest targeting yourself while you do this so that you don't overlap your target frame) and then open your spellbook. You want to put the abilities that correspond to each of the items in the priority list into this new bar. I suggest putting long cooldowns on the right and your "bread and butter" abilities on the left. Some, like Improved Soul Fire correspond to a buff, but just put the Soul Fire spell on the bar for now.

Once you have the bar set up, go back to the ButtonTimers menu and select each button from bar 1 in turn. If what you need to track is a long cooldown nuke-type ability (e.g. Chaos Bolt), select "Player" and "Cooldown". If it's a debuff or dot, selelect "Target" and "Aura". If it's a self-buff you need to track, select "Player" and "Aura". For Improved Soul Fire, you want to type the full name of the buff into the "other auras" box, click the "Okay" button below the box and then select the checkbox next to it to show the buff's icon.

Once you 've done this, lock the ButtonTimers bar again and go back to the UI. Go to a training dummy and test it out. You should see bars like the screenshot above has, that will tick down the time until you have to deal with that ability again. With some practice, you'll just have to glace at those bars from time to time, and your situational awareness will be much improved! You can also auto-hide the bar when out of combat.

The other UI elements you'll see are MikScrollingBattleText for the floating damage numbers and alerts. The top damage meter and the one at the bottom are both Skada. However, the one at the top is set to track only the last fight, and during the fight it tracks threat instead of damage. The bottom meter always shows the overall damage meters since the last reset. Skada is probably the best damage meter out there, though I do like recount's graphing.

XPerl is what I use for the unit frames.

Now that I have all of that, I went back to reading the Elitist Jerks forum. There's tons of useful info, there, including glyphs, pet info and so on. Speaking of my pet, make sure you have a macro that can call your pet back. I use one of my basic attack keys. I include a "/petattack [nomodifier]" and then "/petpassive [modifier]" and then "/petassist [modifier]". So, when I control-press, it calls my pet off, but leaves it in "assist" mode so I don't accidentally end up leaving my pet on passive all the time (passive pets used to be a good thing, but assist with active control is a much better model for hunters, warlocks and mages now).

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Resource Building

There's a lot of confusion in the Lord of Ultima (LoU) browser-based, free-to-play MMORTS game. I'm going to set out to resolve some of this confusion in a many-part series which will start with this post. In this post, we're considering resource building, the most fundamental mechanic in LoU.

In the first section, I'll address those who are just starting their first city, and then we'll get into the basic resource building strategies in the second section.

First off, let's destroy a persistent myth. There are lots of old guides out there that talk about building a "grid" of resource buildings. This is old, outdated and wrong information. Ignore such sites. LoU has since moved to a system where you need basic resource nodes (stone, wood, iron, lakes) in order to reach optimal builds.

First up: Starting Out

When you start your first city (log into the game) you have a town hall (level 1) the outline of your city wall (level 0) and, if you're playing on a castles server, your castle (level 1). You can follow the tutorial if you like, but you don't have to. What follows are guidelines for what you do if you do not follow the tutorial, but you can just catch up with this after you finish too.

Gaming gallery needs votes

My gaming gallery of screenshots from World of Warcraft and EverQuest now has voting capabilities. What would really help out a lot is if users who read this blog could vote on the quality of those images. Vote however you like. The results will affect how the auto-generated gallery of top-rated images for all of AJS.COM is put together. Any image that has an average number of stars over 3.5 will show up on the ratings gallery.

Welcome to my Gaming Blog

For those who come here without knowing who I am, I'm the administrator of ajs.com, an avid gamer and author of dozens of articles about video games, board games, role playing games and even card games. Gaming is a huge part of my life, and I try to share what I learn with others. I also try to make what I write accessible to others to contribute as they see fit. My site is a Wiki, so everyone who creates an account can edit it (I use the same technology as Wikipedia; a server called MediaWiki). I also publish almost all of my site under the Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike license, which means that as long as you mention where you got it and allow others the same rights, you can copy the text from my site and use it on your own.

So, what is it that I write about? I'll get into specifics in later posts, but I write about World of Warcraft on my Raiding the Metagame site; I review games like Munchkin on my AJS Reviews site; I discuss Dungeons & Dragons games that I've run and even the ethics of the game for those who might have gotten the wrong idea. I also write tools like my d20 treasure generator for Dungeons & Dragons treasure and my random name generator that can generate names in 15th century French, 1990 U.S., Aztec and lots of other themes.

I'll get into all of this more a bit later, but for now I just wanted to say hi, and get this blog rolling. See you all later!