All Things Awesome Episode 5, Part 3: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition

And here's part 3, with an extensive discussion of 4th Edition now that's we've actually played the thing.

Download it here: All Things Awesome Episode #5-3 (right click and save as)
(recorded: Sunday 7/27, hosts: Schmitty, Mike, Foz, Tim, Shawn, Judge) duration: 55 minutes, 26.3mb)

0:00 - 11:00: Tim's racism drives Schmitty off, is 4th Edition still D&D?, thoughts on the new power system - does it focus the game on "roll" playing?, is 4th too complex for newbies?

11:00 - 20:00: Some praise for the new DMG, more role vs. roll playing discussion

20:00 - 29:00: Love for the new D&D monsters, turn flow and death and dying in 4E, using power cards

29:00 - 35:30: More monster talk - bemoaning the lack of flavor in the MM, stupid Gricks, Bulettes in the restroom

35:30 - 49:00: 4E miniatures, individual highs and lows of 4E, 4E "blockiness" too intimidating?

49:00 - 54:45: Some parting comments: why the lack of gnomes, etc.

All Things Awesome Episode 5, Part 2: Video Games

Here's part 2 of episode 5, featuring lots of general video game/E3 talk as well as some WoW discussion.

Download it here: All Things Awesome Episode #5-2 (right click and save as)
(recorded: Sunday 7/27, hosts: Schmitty, Mike, Foz, Tim, Shawn, Judge) duration: 50 minutes, 22.8mb)

0:00 - 9:00: Ambivalence for Final Fantasy XIII on 360, is Sony getting scared yet?, why bother with Lips when you could play Rock Band?, ambivalence about Gears II and FPS games, please let Mirror's Edge be better than Assassin's Creed

9:00 - 16:00: Diablo III talk - it's got colors!, we lavish praise on Blizzard, PHYSICS!, how to break the WoW addiction

16:00 - 20:30: Back to E3 talk with Fallout 3, some Spore talk, more drooling over Left 4 Dead

20:30 - 26:00: GTA IV: The Best GTA IV yet, the no-PS2 club

26:00 - 31:30: DS games: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, The World Ends With You

31:30 - 35:00: The Penny Arcade game is fun time (especially if you like dick jokes), Garfield is dead?

35:00 - 42:00: WoW talk, MRS' first Gruul kill/25-man experience, why people like raiding, the evolution of instances

42:00 - 49:50: Wrath of the Lich King discussion: the return of Naxx, gear changes post-70, excitement over the universal 10-man content, Blizz continues to polish class balance

All Things Awesome Episode 5, Part 1: Movies

Download it here: All Things Awesome Episode #5-1 (right click and save as)
(recorded: Sunday 7/27, hosts: Schmitty, Mike, Foz, Tim, Shawn, Judge) duration: 50 minutes, 22.8mb)

Could it be? Our very first tecnnical issues-free podcast? Huzzah! Since we had a lot to catch up on and a big cast, we went pretty long this week, so we'll be dividing this episode up into 3 parts posted over the next few days. Stay tuned, and enjoy!

0:00 – 1:00: We’re back!

1:00 – 7:00: Movie trailers, no one wants to watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Watchmen trailer gave everyone giant boners, Zack Snyder done good? (well except making women in look dumb in 300)

7:00 – 16:30: Hollywood’s getting comic movies right… why?, the new generation of comic movie makers and fans, we need a hero ‘cause the world sucks?

16:30 – 22:45: Marvel remaking failed properties: new Hulk, new Punisher, etc., diluting the marvel brand name? Pushing the Avengers Initiative

22:45 – 32:00: Heath Ledger a shoe-in for a posthumous Oscar?, different takes on the Joker (check out the NPR In Character podcast), there were some other actors in The Dark Knight too…

32:00 – 36:15: WALL-E and other movies without much dialogue, environmental undertones dividing the audience

36:15 – 41:00: Indy 4 sucked!: our picks for worst parts, the power of Shia LeBeouf’s hair, George Lucas, please stop raping our childhoods

41:00 – 44:45: More Uwe Boll hating on the Dungeon Siege movie, Postal may be good?, pissing on Gary Coleman

44:45 – 50:00: X-Files’ anti-Catholic, anti-homosexual agenda, anyway, The Happening 2: What a Twist!, … annnd racism!

A Look at WotLK Paladins Part II: Holy

I've been a dedicated healing Paladin for a little over a year now. I had originally rolled my Paladin to fix two glaring shortages in my guild: a shortage of tanks, and a shortage of Paladins. These days, you can't throw a rock without hitting a Blood Elf Pally in the head, but right after Burning Crusade hit, every Horde guild in the world was hurting for some blessing action.

Anyway, after my second Karazhan run as a tank, we ended up with a different problem: a lack of healers. Being the good raid leader that I am, I cobbled together a passable healing set from reputation rewards and the auction house, and never turned back. I still throw on the old tanking gear when the occasion arises, but I'm pretty much Holy for life now, and I don't know that I'd go back even if I had the chance.

So, what does Wrath of the Lich King bring to World of Warcraft's most potent tank healers? Since Paladins (along with Hunters) were the last to have their new talents and abilities revealed, there was a lot of build-up and a lot of hype. Initially, of the 3 Pally trees, I was least impressed by what Holy had to offer. Fortunately, some recently revealed changes may just change that impression.

Let's look over the tree, tier by tier. Feel free to pull up the new talent trees and follow along!
- Tier 1: No major changes here. Improved Seal of Righteousness has been expanded to additional seals and moved up a tier, but this is of little use to a dedicated healer.
- Tier 2: Divine Intellect has been moved down a tier, but has also been buffed. Still an obvious choice for a Holy Paladin. Healing Light has been moved up to this tier, which, when combined with Illumination being moved up to Tier 3, will make it easier for Protection and especially Retribution Paladins to be effective off-healers
- Tier 3: Aside from the aforementioned Illumination change, note that Lay on Hands is now on a 30/22 minute cooldown (as opposed to 60/40), and it's armor bonus has been improved to 50% when fully talented. This talent is much stronger now - not only does not it not feel like such a huge waste if you blow it but still lose the fight, but the armor buff makes it a much better emergency button altogether.
- Tier 4: Improved Concentration Aura, which a lot of Holy Paladins specced into anyway, is now in the proper tree. Good deal, especially considering that Retribution will now be the more likely choice for a minor.
- Tier 5: The new "Blessed Hands" seems like a PvP oriented talent, making your Hands of Freedom and Protection more resistant to disruption. Not much a PvPer myself, so no comment here. A nice, if minor change is that Sanctified Light now also affects Holy Shock - which combined with the new Infusion of Light talent and improvements to Holy Shock, is a pretty nice buff!
- Tier 6: No change here. Holy Power all the way.
- Tier 7: No changes here either. However, it was recently revealed that Holy Shock has had it's healing buffed by about 75%, making it a significantly more powerful healing spell. The cooldown is also being reduced from 15 seconds to 6, which will make it far more reliable and a much more powerful grinding tool. I might not even have to spec out of Holy to level to 80! Perhaps best yet, Wowhead indicates that Holy Shock now has a 40 yard range (up from 20, which basically made it useless most of the time). If all of these changes make it through, the life of a Holy Paladin will get so much easier. Woo!
- Tier 8: Infusion of Light, with all the improvements to Holy Shock, can give a Pally a much needed emergency button. A crit Holy Shock followed by an instant Holy Light should get your tank back in the green in no time. It's a bit unpredictable, but could prove very useful.
- Tier 9: Sacred Cleansing is an interesting talent. I could imagine it being useful in some fights where a boss spams some sort of debuff, but it'd be rather mediocre the rest of the time, since most debuffs simply aren't applied that rapidly. Seems touchy, I'd like to see it in action. Enlightened Judgements is a nice move toward making it easier for a Holy Paladin to maintain a judgement. Running in every 20 seconds is just too much of a hassle, so even improving this by just 10 yards will make both judging and adding a little ranged DPS much more convenient.
Tier 10: Judgements of the Pure is nice, but seems dangerous for your mana conservation. The buff does last for 30 seconds, which is nice, but I could see getting distracted by trying to keep the buff active and screwing up your heals.
Tier 11: Beacon of Light. This is the answer to Paladin AoE healing, finally. Well, I don't really like it. The max rank is roughly a full quarter of my mana pool (I imagine it'll be less at 80, but still), and it's not affected by Illumination. What really kind of turns me off to the spell is it's limited range. It's only 10 yards around the target - since so many raid fights demand that the raid spread out, usually to 15 yards or greater, it seems it'll be often worthless, or worse still, dangerous - you tell your raid to group up only to be blasted by some AoE. I'd like to see the range increased to 20 yards, but maybe limit the healing to hitting only the 5 lower health people or something.

Lastly, the new level 80 Holy ability is worth a note. Sacred Shield is WotLK's answer to the lack of a Paladin heal over time spell. In some ways it's nicer than a HoT, as you're never really "wasting it" unless your tank isn't being hit. It's also nice in that it gives Holy Paladins something else to do aside from spamming Flash of Light. It's a very cheap spell as it stands now, so even if it's not affected by spell power, 35 mana will be worth the 2,000+ damage prevention it offers. If it is affected by spell power then it'll simply be amazing. Between this new ability, Beacon of Light, and to a lesser extent the Holy Shock/Infusion of Light changes, all the Paladin's concerns have been answered: we gain area healing, a heal over time, and a bit more mobility.

Perhaps the most interesting Holy talent isn't even in the Holy tree. Sheath of Light, a Tier 5 Retribution talent, combined with Ret staple Conviction (which now affects spells as well as melee attacks) offers a serious temptation to skip Beacon of Light altogether. If I were to be using this talent right now on my current level 70 Paladin, I'd be gaining about 125 extra spell power, and my Holy Light crit heals on tanks would be generating 4,200 point heal over times for free. I think going the Sheath route will be the best choice by far for Paladins who are primarily tank healers. Assuming there's no huge changes, I'll most likely be going with this build for my Paladin once we're back in the raid game.

Next up: a slightly less in-depth look at Protection.

-- Schmitty

Well, MTGO v3 sucks.

I'm pretty much out of the world of Magic: the Gathering... something I wish I could've said about $1,500 ago (if not more). The majority of that money was spent on Magic Online, the direct digital translation of the cardboard game. For those who are unaware of what a ridiculous money-making scheme this is, Magic Online (MTGO for short) charges you full retail price for a digital version of the same booster packs you'd buy in stores. You don't get actual, physical cards, but instead you "own" digital representations of the cards. It sounds ridiculous at first glance (but not so ridiculous when you consider how much a piece of cardboard is worth anyway) but it's been massively successful because it allows Magic players to find a game whenever they want. The game also rewards prizes (more digital cards, of course) for winning tournaments, adding a small but hard to resist element of gambling to the whole package.

Despite being riddled with bugs, general shoddy performance, and occasional server instability, Magic Online remains massively popular. A few months ago, they "upgraded" from MTGO v2 to v3 - a more or less complete overhaul of the interface (the gameplay, predictably, remains the same, based exactly on its cardboard sibling).

Right about the time v2 went down for the transition, I decided to sell all my cards. Now that v3 finally launched, I've just set about doing that in the past couple of weeks. At first glance, v3 was looking pretty snazzy. The new splash screens were pretty, and the game's initial loading screen was reminiscent of a proper video game... but it was pretty much downhill from there.

The v2 interface was no jewel, but v3 is just a mess. It's just plain ass-ugly, it responds painfully slowly to your clicks, and the navigation is not nearly as intuitive as it should be. The marketplace used to buy, sell and trade cards was once just simple but functional, but v3 has made it both uglier and harder to use. Listing are no longer sorted by buying and selling, so if you want to search for a specific card, you'll have to scour through players both selling and buying the card. Trading cards still works largely the same, but I was extremely disappointed to discover that the limit of 32 cards at a time in v2 has not been changed in v3. There are bots offering to buy your commons 200+ for a ticket (roughly $1 in actual currency), but between having to open 8 different trades and wait through all the interface lag to actually get your measly $1, it's scarcely worth it. I have over 10,000 commons to sell but it just seems like a waste of time!

Now, I haven't actually played a game in v3... I'm hoping I can resist the urge to do so altogether. One might hope that WotC put all their work into that aspect of the program, but I sincerely doubt that it functions any better than v2 did. Shoddy work, WotC - and kind of ridiculous considering the minimal overhead that MTGO must take to run. Let's hope D&D Insider turns out better.

-- Schmitty

Contrary to popular belief...

Killing Nazis does eventually get boring. Even ones who are empowered by occult magic and/or scientific experiments gone awry. Can you believe they're making another Wolfenstein game? I'm not usually a hater, but I'm so underwhelmed by this announcement. The whole venture just seems doomed to mediocrity. First of all, the game was already remade in the early aughts. To be fair, the remake was only 9 years after the groundbreaking original, but when the press release says things like:

"From id Software’s critically-acclaimed and multi-million unit selling Wolfenstein universe"

it sounds like they're trying a little to hard. First of all, Id's game was based on Castle Wolfenstein, a 1982 computer game that was arguably more innovative in the first place. Not to take anything away from Id here - they've always been ahead of the curve technology-wise, but for the most part their game design is pretty mediocre. Wolf3d had all of 5 different types of enemies, one of which is pretty much just a reskin of the basic guard. Honestly now, I think the original Super Mario Brothers had more than that in the first level.

Anyway, my point was that it's scarcely a franchise. The 2001 remake was overseen, but not developed by Id, and this game looks to be the same sort of operation. On the plus, I'm inclined to trust Raven, who are at the helm of the new game, more than the since-absorbed Grey Matter (who were responsible both for the actually very solid Kingpin game as well as the unfortunate Redneck Rampage games)... but Raven is not exactly known for their innovation. Heretic was just a good Doom retread, Hexen was just a good Heretic retread, and Quake 4 was just a good Quake 2 retread. With the exception of the X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance series, when's the last time you even heard of another Raven game mentioned?

I have little doubt that Wolfenstein will be at least an okay, if not altogether good game, much like Quake 4 before it (they're even based on the same engine). But even with all the fun Nazi occultism and sci-fi elements, and fuzzy memories of playing Wolf3d on high school computers, I doubt I'll be willing to shell out for anything more than a rental come release.

-- Schmitty

A Look at Wrath of the Lich King Paladins, Part I

I'd like to take a moment to thank Blizzard for not sending me a Wrath of the Lich King beta key. I've already spent hours poring over new data from MMO-Champion, Deathknight.info, and Wowhead, who knows what sort of abyss I'd fall into were I actually playing the damn thing. I was frighteningly close to giving my account information up to some sketchy website scam. Fortunately for me, I can't even begin to consider something like this, seeing as how I'm dead broke.

My primary character being a Paladin, I was excited to finally get some information on what's going on with Warcraft's holy warriors. Starting with the general and moving to the specific:

- Seals and Judgments: Details seem sketchy at the moment, but it seems like this system has been reworked. Based on some Wowhead entries, it looks like we might be trading in our standard Judgement spell in for 3 seperate Judgements: of Light, of Wisdom and of Justice. If my guesswork is right, you'll be able to keep your primary damage seal up, and the new Judgements will grant the standard damage burst as well as the appropriate utility effect. Then again, the data files for the normal seals of Wisdom, Light and Justice are still in the data files for WotLK, so it's tough to say for sure.

- Blessings and Hands: Sacrifice, Freedom, Protection and most interestingly Salvation have been converted to a new type of spell called Hands. Seems the primary reason for this to allow the use of these spells without overwriting the current Blessing, which is a good start. In PvE, Hand of Sacrifice will likely see more use than it's forebear - the old blessing was rarely used outside of PvP or a few specialty fights. The new version might allow a Pally to mitigate some of the damage coming to a tank during a particularly nasty phase of a boss fight.

The change to Salvation no doubt shocked and dismayed a lot of DPSers, but from what I understand threat in WotLK is generally being reworked. This is a sensible change, since as it currently stands Salvation is almost a necessity. If a DPS class can never afford to forgo Salv, then the ability only exists to punish those without access to it. The new Salv looks more like an emergency button that hopefully will only need to used during tank transitions and the like.

These improvements are pretty minor, but they are improvements (if not necessarily buffs). I'll get into the real good stuff with and give you my take on some of the new Pally talents and revamped trees next pass.

-- Schmitty

Episode #5 soon!

ATA Episode #5 is scheduled for recording on July 27th. It's been a long and largely unintentional hiatus. For the most part, we just couldn't find a weekend where everyone was free. Hopefully we can get back on something resembling a bi-weekly or at least semi-bi-weekly schedule, but I'm not making any promises.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try and keep the site moving between episodes, if for no other reason than to legitimize the fact that I actually bought a domain name and server space for this. More soon.