The action sequences are good and generally exciting, the graphics provided by the Unreal Engine are stunning and smooth and it plays like any cover-based first person shooter. There is some attention to detail, headshots notwithstanding you can make your enemies stumble or fall over by running into them quickly or shooting them in the leg. You have to pay attention to the sounds your character is making, if you run by mistake then you will be heard through walls and doors, gunshots are a real give away. I got very good at hacking control panels to shut off all the red alarts I triggered in the first few missions.

I found sneaking about the place to be the most exciting and satisfying approach, placing great importance on stealth, precision pistol shots (with tranq ammo I hasten to add) and a good old fashioned boot to the face. Others might prefer to go fully gadgeted up, or just wade in like Arnie with the assault rifle blazing. Once you’ve got the ‘awareness’ skill to a level that puts little arrows above each guard’s head, you can have great fun creeping in between guard’s patrol patterns to evade them completely.

Now would be a good time to mention that this is very much an Obsidian game. It’s not polished to perfection like an offering from the likes of Bioware or Valve or Blizzard, this game was written for the consoles and then ported to the PC. Most of the bugs, and there are many, are documented on the official forums, but there are many features that are clearly designed for the lowest common denominator.

The worst offender is the save game system, it’s checkpoint based and is designed to not let you go back and replay each sequence until you get the outcome you had in mind. This has the side effect of making you really value each conversation option, each bullet fired and consumable gadget used, as well as considering which path you’re going to take through each room to avoid the most patrolling guards. It adds about one part excitement and four parts facedesking fustration.

The console style UI makes things like skill and gadget selection harder than it needs to be, so I pretty much just didn’t bother with them apart from using the unbalanced combination of ‘Covert Operative’ and the pistol ‘Chain Shot’ to make boss fights easier than they need be. There are two or three independent menu systems that are easy to get stuck in, the mouse control of the UI is tentative at best and it’s far too easy to press the wrong button in the heat of the action.

It’s a very enjoyable way to spend 12-15 hours once you’ve learned how to play the game and can accept it as an imperfect gem. I’d give it a very solid 7/10 and a great way of passing a rainy week at home.

If you’ve got the patience to wait for the Royal Mail, then Amazon is a good value place to get it, otherwise Steam will save you the trouble. I tried to buy it in an actual shop, I figured a car and a DVD was quicker than my home internet connection, but apparently just about everywhere has stopped selling PC games.

Another of the free online game genres that’s developed over recent times is that of Tower Defense.

I originally met the concept years ago with the seminal Real Time Strategy game Dune 2, from Westwood Studios when I discovered the strategy of defending my base from invading hordes by making walls out of rocket turrets.

Spinning forward from 1992 to 2007 and a flash game was released upon unsuspecting offices worldwide, Desktop Tower Defense. This started a trend of making free flash TD games, including the resource-capturing version Flash Element TD. There was clearly a niche to be carved out because the people behind this have formed the reasonably successful Casual Collective, with the flagship game, multiplayer Desktop TD. One of the winning gameplay elements is one of persistance, you get to have office leaderboards so you compare highscores between friends and refine maze design strategy.

Defense Grid: the Awakening is a 2009 version of the classic TD, but professionally developed and generally turned up to 11.

I discovered it after it got top marks in the January 2009 Indie game Round-up, andbeing distributed through Steam, the free demo was easy to get hold of.

If you haven’t played the genre before, Defense Grid’s first chapter walks you through the concepts and slowly ramps up the difficulty and complexity until you’ve got the hang of it. It was never easy, though, in the way that the free games can be once you’ve worked out a winning maze.

The graphics are 3D and well detailed, which does mean you need a reasonably recent computer to run it. The camera isn’t completely free form, limiting you to 3 isometric viewpoints, but it’s sufficient to let you get a good look at what you’ve constructed as it blows the alien robots to bits. The soundtrack is complete with a rich music layer and some full sound effects. It is fully voice acted with the computer sounding like it was educated at the BBC and it’s got a story overlain to give a bit more depth.

Screenshot

I was surprised by this one. I thought that it wouldn’t add anything more to the free flash versions and was going to be a waste of time, but the professional presentation really added to the immersion and made it a good entertaining addition to the collection. Well worth the £13.

World of Goo is the latest variant on the Crayon Physics game mechanic idea that’s been gaining momentum in the independant games sector for the past year and is a tremendous example of a good idea that’s been executed professionally and is cheap and easy to buy so that people actually will.

For me, at least, it started with the sandbox of Numpty Physics that goes well with a tablet or a touch screen. Then somebody spent some effort on the idea and turned the mechanic into Crayon Physics. Then stir in the game that laid waste to my team’s lunchtimes for over a week, Fantastic Contraption (particularly popular in the Academic Engineering community), sprinkle on some Lemmings (who on earth would write that in javascript!) and you’re left with Goo.

The game is essentially building lots of triangles out of rubber bands to try to cross obstacles. As you progress through the demo, you are gradually taught the various concepts needed to cope when the designers start throwing in complications like gravity and buoyancy. I played through the free demo chapter in about an hour or so and was impressed by both the presentation and the learning curve. Unlike some of the previous incarnations of the genre, where I was left wondering what to do for too long, this game gives you sufficient hints to generally get there in the end but without feeling like you’ve just clicked the i.w.i.n. button. The graphics are slick and attractive, the music is good and the sound effects are sufficiently cute as to give Worms a run for its money (although sadly you don’t get to change the voices to be 007 or Tykes).

Clearly I’m not alone with my opinion of the sound track, apparently enough people pestered the author to publish it and one crazy fan even transcribed it by ear!

World of Goo is available for more than just Windows PCs, presumably because the author didn’t want to restrict his sales, and it’s easy to download either as a one off, or through a framework such as Steam. One of the things I like most about independant games, apart from them actually having fun gameplay like games used to when aye wuz a lad, is that the successful ones spawn community interest. Just digging up the links for this post led me on a merry adventure across the internet.

Go download the demo, it won’t be time wasted.

/run SetAutoLootDefault(1)
/equip Netherstrand Longbow
/use Netherstrand Longbow
/use Bundle of Nether Spikes
/equip Nether Spike
/run SetAutoLootDefault(nil)

You’ll need to click the macro a number of times to make it work, which is a good thing because it makes Bots harder to write, but it does save a lot of fiddling about with paperdolls, backpacks and so forth.

Looking at Google’s stats, there is a great deal of interest in hunter tactics and strategies for some of the mid – end stage raid bosses. I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember in the company of Kael’thas Sunstrider, so here’s the Kael’thas fight from a Hunter’s perspective.

The Hunter class’s biggest contribution to this fight is Misdirection. Getting a misdirect fired on the correct tank on the correct mob at exactly the correct time is crucial to this fight running smoothly. The 2 minute cooldown being what it is, you will need a minimum of two hunters in the raid to pull it off successfully. Afterlife tend to take 3 hunters to Kael’thas, which lets the raid continue in case one of us pushes our i.f.a.i.l. button and dies.

I won’t go into too much detail on this fight because it’s complex and repeated adequately across the whole internet, but here are the key things for hunters to get right on this fight.

Misdirects in order of priority:

1) Warlock tanking Capernian in Phase 1

The 3rd of Kael’thas’ advisors, Capernian, is tanked at the back of the room by a warlock in appropriate gear. Capernian has a number of fire-based abilities that you do not want her to use on anybody the than the warlock and a conflag-eating tank.

You typically have between 1 and 3 seconds between Capernian becoming active and her casting her first fireball. There is some debate over whether you should let her cast this first fireball or not and whether it has an effect on her positioning in relation to her tank. My preference is for her not to cast it because it lets the hunter show they’re paying sufficient attention to stop it.

The object of this exercise is to get Capernian to run from Kael’s side to the back of the room near her Warlock without stopping to incinerate the raid on her way past.

It’s simple enough to do, make sure your misdirection is cast on the warlock before she becomes active, make sure you are the nearest member of the raid to her so you get the initial aggro from a body pull, then get an insta cast shot like arcane or distracting shot fired the instant she becomes an enemy target. Land the remaining two misdirected shots on her as she’s running past. I use a steady and an auto.

2) Warlock tanking Capernian in Phase 3

When you have all of Kael’thas’ advisors back up in phase 3, you will need to make sure that Capernian goes straight for her Warlock tank again, not whoever happens to be standing nearest to her when she fell. If all goes well in phase 1, she’ll be downed near the back wall so the warlock will be able to body pull her, but that gives scope for the healer to yoink early aggro.

Depending on your raid’s dps, this typically means that you have to really leg it down the room from looting your Netherstrand Longbow, spamming your ‘gief legendaries now’ macro as you go. You can head back up to Kael to finish off the weapons after doing your misdirection. Or stay in the middle and lend your dps to Thaladred the Darkener.

3) Pheonixes and tank in Phase 4 and 5

You want to minimise the amount of time the phoenixes run around the raid doing their aoe during phase 4 and, to a lesser extent, phase 5. You get a new phoenix every minute, so you’ll need at least two of you on a rotation misdirecting the newly spawned phoenixes to the designated fireproof tank. I find that a focus target misdirect macro saves valuable clicks here.

4) Spare weapons to offtanks

In phase 2, the weapons will be tanked by certain tanks in the raid. Typically two tanks will take two weapons apiece. The weapons with a higher dps priority will be targeted by the tank, but to avoid the 2nd weapon running amok in the raid, you will have to make sure you misdirect them to the appropriate tank. For Afterlife, that means the Shield and the Staff.

5) Other targets.

You should not need to misdirect Sanquinar or Telonicus to their tanks, although it doesn’t harm to do so. Afterlife do misdirect Sanquinar to their MT because we generally dps him so hard he’s dead by the time he’s in position, so the tank needs a bit of help with the initial aggro.

Other hunter priorities:

a) Tank the bow

The Netherstrand Longbow is a simple ranged tank for the hunter. Make sure that nothing gets on its threat list in melee range or the bow will blink around the room at random. This is typically unhelpful. The bow has a nasty multishot ability that you don’t want firing into the raid, so try to turn the bow away from the raid towards the wall. Remember to remove salvation so you keep on top of the bow’s threat list. A Marksman or Survival hunter is best at this because their shots do more damage than a Beastmaster.

If you’re feeling cunning, you can send your pet into the bow’s melee range when it’s on about 4% health so it blinks to your position for ease of looting.

b) Dps the bow

Sic your pet on something that’s relatively harmless like the Sword or the Dagger and dps the bow like you mean it. The sooner you get it down, the sooner you get your legendary bow and ammo and can start laying down your damage boosting debuff onto the remaining targets.

c) Dps the axe

The axe is typically the last weapon to go down. Afterlife use a bear to tank it near to Kaelthas, well out of range of toons stumbling into its whirlwind and use 2 of the hunters to single-target dps it down after Thaladred is killed in phase 3. If Thaladred is off down the wrong end of the room, don’t waste time on target by following him, change targets and hit something else.

d) Jumpshot

If you haven’t learnt how to do damage whilst moving, this is the fight for you to learn. You could do a lot worse than starting with BRK’s jumpshot videos.

Whether it’s running up and down the room or staying ahead of Thaladred without running into Capernian’s conflag range or avoid the lightning bolts in phase 5, being able to do non-zero dps whilst moving is invalable. This is the typical jump shot for serpent sting and arcane shot. If you’re marks, then Silencing Shot is good for several hundred damage too.

e) Drums

If you’re a leatherworker, don’t forget to use your Drums as often as possible. Most of the guilds I know have a bongo rotation going to make sure their groups are hasted as often as possible.

f) Mind Control curing

The Afterlife hunters try to loot the dagger to help cure mind controlled people in Phase 4. Spamming wingclip does much less damage than a fury warrior or a rogue so doesn’t have the side effect of ganking the person you’re trying to cure. Don’t forget freezing trap and scatter / silencing shot too.

g) Stay alive.

Hunters are remarkably self sufficient creatures. Don’t forget to bandage when you get blasted in phases 4 and 5, your raid healers are going to be exceedingly busy so do what you can to make it easier. Remember healthstones / dark runes / etc .. You have two 2 minute cooldowns and only 1 is used by potions.

Do not stand in the flame patches. Everytime you do, your raid leader dies a little more inside.

If it’s a wipe after you’ve looted the bow, it’s possible to get another set of legendary arrows conjured before you feign death in the corner. Do not get noticed feigning death as some juvenile members of the raid may try to get you killed by standing on you whilst they’re wiping.

It’s a fun fight, although it goes on a big long for my preferences. Any questions, just drop a comment.

Enjoy!

Looking at our trophy cabinet, our last First Boss Kill was Lady Vashj last November so I’ve been getting withdrawal symptoms from the adrenaline-fuelled, zomg-we’ve-crashed-the-teamspeak-server-with-all-the-wooting, team triumphs.

Tamzin’s video guide is easily the best guide to the fight and tactics and is time well spent downloading and watching it.

I thought I did a reasonable job of going all out dps on the closing stages of that fight, but it seems that a hunter doing 924 dps mostly without a pet just does not cut the mustard these days, creeping in a dismal 11th on the damage dealt charts. The full log of the final counter are available on wowwebstats.

The fight itself is easily the most complicated that Blizzard have devised (and I’ve encountered) so far, split up into 5 stages. The overall encounter lasts about 15 minutes, not dissimilar in length to the Al’ar fight but oh, such a long way from the heady days of the 3 stages of Onyxia. The fight essentially boils down to:

a) Fight 4 different mini-bosses one after the other
b) Fight 6 weapon-shaped mini-bosses all at the same time
c) Before you’ve finished the weapons-shaped mini-bosses, the first 4 mini-bosses all have to be fought at the same time, whilst also making sure you loot the weapon-shaped mini-bosses to give you new toys which you must use the abilities of to survive the coming fight.
d) Before you’ve finished off all that lot, the actual boss enters the fray and starts spawning pheonixes, chain lightninging the raid and pyroblasting the tanks.
e) When you get the boss down to 50%, he pauses for a brew, blows the roof off his own palace then you carry on with all that, but gravity becoming more or less optional.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification, as it doesn’t mention the numerical minimums required to finish the fight, things like fireproof warlocks, ‘enough’ dps in the raid, tanks able to take 25k pyroblasts and still cope with normal hits from the boss. It’s a long fight, that requires that pretty much nobody dies, although apparently a corpse makes for a steady camera position for frapsing and that nobody makes any positional mistakes or has a 2 second lag spike at just the wrong moment.

And positioning. It’s all about the positioning.

We had 1 wipe last night because the warlock was about 6 inches too close to Capernian at the start of phase 3 because they weren’t used to having their hunter actually getting their misdirection off in time to count (you’ve got something like 0.5 to 1.5 seconds to get initial aggro onto the warlock before Capernian conflags the nearest toon, typically the hunter trying to misdirect to the lock…).

A number of embarrasing wipes ensued because of variations on:
- 2 of the minibosses from phase 1 died too close together on the floor
- the person kiting Thaladred (it changes every 15 seconds) got too close to Capernian or gets knocked back into Sanguinar during phase 3
- the warlock tanking Capernian managed to get conflagged for no apparent reason so lost aggro and toons in the raid started getting fireballed because they failed to stop dps in time
- the hunter ranged tanking the netherstrand bow stands such that the bow multishots the hunters healer
- a shadowpriest fails to avoid sending their shadowfiend into melee with the netherstrand bow which then teleports all around the room at random
- people not getting out of the way of the big flaming bird things in phase 4
- people not getting out of the way of the big flaming explosion patch things in phase 4
- meleers getting carried away and killing the toons who get mindcontrolled in phases 4 and 5 rather than just dispelling the mind control
- toons getting within 10′ of the ground during the wrong part of the ‘halp no gravities’ phase

etc. etc. etc. etc.

Still, this was our 5th evening of serious raiding on Kael’thas, took us 50ish attempts from getting wtfpwned on the initial pull to having a really clean kill. There was MUCH rejoicing.

Of course with both Kael’thas and Lady Vashj down we managed to have 19 toons attuned to Hyjal Summit, where we got thoroughly spanked by the 4th wave of undead things. Apparently having everybody bouncing like loons after Kael’thas was no barrier to some serious pewpewing, although the best quote of the evening had to be:

Somebody who was paying attention: “Lots of green glowy undeads incoming”
Raid Leader: “Shackle it!”
Priests: “Which one?”
Raid Leader: *looks up* “err, all of it?”

Onwards and upwards

• It was pointed out that my blog reads like a recipe book (err, good?) and hasn’t been updated for too long
• It came up in conversation that if you spend x units of time a week on a hobby, where x is a significant fraction of other, more socially acceptable time sinks, such as working and sleeping, then said hobby is definately a part of your life
• Blizzard are soliciting detailed feedback on all the classes, and dammit, the noobs are hurting the signal to noise ratio in the Hunter feedback threads (US EU).

Hunters, then.

I, along with about 214,647 other people, have a level 70 hunter. Since I first picked up a box in Tesco with World of Warcraft written on the side in 2005, I’ve spent a frankly embarrasing amount of time in the company of my cartoon archer-zookeeper. I’d like to think that with practice, experience of the types of content the game has to offer and a not insignificant amount of playing with spreadsheets that I know the class reasonably well.

That having been said, the amount of whining and unreasonable wishing going on in the feedback threads is really quite annoying. Sieving through the various comments gives two strong trends that I really hope Blizzard can see are the spam that they are:

1. Marksman (and to a lesser extent, Survival) hunters use mana and we’d like not to, please.
2. Marksman and Survival hunters are marginally more complicated to play than standing there and mashing the “I pew pew stuffz” button

I would write a small essay on the subject of why these noobs are not doing the class stereotype any favours, but thankfully BigRedKitty has done it already, suffice to say that hunters have enough going for them already, we have the best burst dps available in the game, we have a pet running around doing a bonus 150-300 melee dps and we wear the second toughest armour and can occasionally tank for a short while in emergencies (Deterrence ftw). If we didn’t get through mana like a consecrating paladin, we’d be so powerful we’d be greeted by cries of ‘Nerf!’ wherever we went.

I mean, look at the difference between a hunter and, say, an arcane/fire mage on taking care of one of the zones of elementals on the Lady Vashj fight? It’s not a complicated job, but it does take some effort to kill one 7.6k health elemental every 8-10 seconds for about 4 minutes without going completely out of mana. I get away with just knocking back a mana potion whenever it’s off cooldown, but the mages have to pause to evocate too, making life busier for the meleers in the middle for those couple of elementals that get through on full health. It’s a bit similar to the arcane flares on Curator but there’s only you doing the dps and it lasts twice as long. Oh, and you might have to stop every 50 seconds to play a bit of netball. And dodge some randomly spawning invaders from mars who send you fleeing for 10-seconds-going-on-eternity.

I think it’s really to do with the current crop of players not having to go through the quest for Rhok’delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers any more, which means people get to the mid to end-game raid content without having learnt how to play things like jump shots and learning the difference between dps and damage dealt.

Ahem, rant off. Normal service will be resumed shortly.