Posts with tag cool

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me with any questions or article suggestions you'd like to see covered here.

You don't have to be good at math to play a rogue. Anyone can log into WoW and create a rogue. You can get all the way to level 90 and into raids without ever having to do any addition or long division. You can do dailies and dungeons simply by using the highest ilvl gear available and ignoring everything else. Rogues are played with a keyboard and mouse, not a pen and paper.

However, if you want to wring every last drop of DPS out of the class, you're going to have to get your hands dirty with numbers. I love when a class' design forces the player to make tough choices. The choices that we make as rogues, when you think about it, are really just math problems. The secret to making good choices is to do the math ahead of time. You don't want to be faced with an unexpected set of fractions in the middle of a tough raid encounter.

I don't know about you, but I sure am feeling validated after watching John Seely Brown explain why he'd rather hire a WoW leader over a generic MBA. While his bold claim might sound cheesy to those of us in the know, his logic presents the same, sound argument we've been making for ages.

Essentially, everything about building a guild, succeeding in WoW, and accomplishing anything in the game mirrors corporate challenges. Build a group structure, measure, adjust, and incorporate thousands of new ideas every day. Brown even quotes a favorite gamer line: "If I ain't learning, it ain't fun."

While this is probably an old argument for most of us around here, this will be a favorite video to bust out for new job interviews in the future.

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Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

Drama Mama Lisa got a letter from a fan, and we've stolen it for this week's drama.

Hi Lisa

My name is Joe. I'm a 15 year old student from the UK. I've been a reading of your blog for a long time now and have been enjoying it for just as long. I'm writing to you today with a WoW related issue that I need advice on and I've come to you as not only do I want a experienced professional but also long-period, friendly WoW gamer.

I played World of Warcraft for around 2 years, then I quit but got back into it. Last December I quit my subscription again and haven't played since. I have only recently began reading Wowinsider again and have been engrossed with the posts for 2 weeks. Now, I'm also watching cinematic videos, gameplay videos and anything recently on Wowinsider. This has confused me about whether or not to re-join the World of Warcraft community. I really need some advice.

Serthida has posted a set of pictures that serve as a perfect reminder of the Raid for the Cure coming up this weekend: she's finished the pink moonkin plushie that they're going to be giving away in the raffle (with the winner chosen from donations to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation). We've collected them in an easy-to-browse gallery below for your perusing pleasure.

As you can see, she says she used the same pattern as the other plush mookin she made, though of course it's all done up in pink fur from this fabric site. "The horns, beak, claws, and feet," she tells us, "are made of fleece, and inside each leg there is a packet of plastic pellets to give it some additional weight." It's all handsewn, as doing it with a machine is apparently tougher with all of that fur flying. And she says that "the eyes are some pearly buttons I found at the craft store. They just looked neat." Neat indeed; while it's weird to see a pink moonkin, the idea definitely works for the cause. Don't forget -- Raid for the Cure is going down this coming weekend, November 14th, on the Kael'thas realm.



[via BBB]

Yo dawg, we heard you like Arenas, so we put an Arena in your Arena! Behold, WoW's Circle of Blood Arena map, transformed into a Team Fortress 2 map. Sure, it might not have the subtlety of Dustbowl or Well, but as a reproduction, it looks terrific. They even got the starting areas working right. And look at that sky!

You can download this map for TF2 and a very similar one for Counter-Strike: Source over at the creator's blog. I doubt it'll jump to the top of any major playlists any time soon, but if your usual group of TF2 friends also have spent some time in the Arenas, they'll probably get a kick out of it.

Of all the recurring topics Blizzard faces on the forums, player housing might be the most recurring-- since many other MMOs are more than happy to offer customizable spaces to their players in the game world, a lot of players continually ask Blizzard why they haven't. And the answer is only partially unclear: as you might expect, Blizzard isn't interested in doing something if they can't do it better than everyone else, and at this point they just haven't figured out exactly how to do it their own polished way.

But in its current iteration on the forums, there's a bit of a surprise: many players don't care about player housing in the first place. As Drysc says, "support is not widespread," and considering everything that Blizzard is working on, there's no way they're going to jump into something as big as player housing without having a large portion of the player base behind them.

Then again, players are always in favor of customizing their characters-- look at the hairstyles coming up in the next expansion. If Blizzard can figure out a way to give players a customizable space that was both great looking and easy to customize-- something players could show off to each other and store achievements in-- then there's no doubt that most players would probably jump at the chance.

Just a quick technical note (thanks to WorldofWar for the heads up): both of the major graphics card makers have released brand new drivers for their video cards recently. Even if you're not technically inclined, all you need to know is that the newer the version of video card drivers you have running, the better your 3D videogames (of which WoW is one) will look.

If you're running Nvidia cards, you can get the latest version right here. And those with ATI cards can find their new drivers over on their site. Just download the right file for your operating system, run it (you'll probably have to restart your system, so save your work), and then marvel at... OK, it probably won't look too different, but trust me when I tell you you want to be running the newest drivers possible. In fact, if anything will fix those graphical problems people have been seeing in the last patch, this probably will.

But Mike, you say, what if I don't know what kind of card I have? For Windows XP, just right click on My Computer and go to Properties. Choose the Hardware tab, then Device Manager, and then look for the "Display Adapters" menu in the list-- that should tell you the build and brand of your video card. For Mac OS X, you don't have to worry-- Apple updates your drivers for you with Software Update. And for Linux-- well, if you're running WoW on Linux, I'll assume you already know what you're doing, because I sure don't (though you can probably find help here if you need it). And yes, you technically inclined and sharp-eyed ladies and gents, I do call my custom-built, lightning fast XP box "Refridgerator." Why? Because it's freakin' cool, man.