Aaron's Gaming Blog

Rift Raiding: Just the Buffs

2012-02-07T16:05:00.000-05:00

Note: This is currently a work in progress. I'm posting this because it's useful, even in its unfinished state, and because I'm looking for feedback. Post your corrections or comments, below. Bluedot has a great buff/debuff list up on his site, but it's lacking some crucial information that I constantly find myself needing in order to resolve who should cast what in raids. This is his list of

Rift Mage: 1.7 Update

2012-02-03T18:56:00.003-05:00

Since I first published my How To Do It All Wrong and Win article about pyrolock mage dps, I've done a fair amount of raiding, dungeons, solo and PvP. I have some new info to share with you, and some updates to that article. First off, the build has changed slightly, as have the macros. I no longer blend in Archon except as a zero-point tree (my fellow guildie, Calvnan, suggested this, and while

Rift: Max-level and raiding compared to WoW

2012-01-23T09:01:00.001-05:00

A while back, I posted a comparison between Rift and World of Warcraft. At the time, I'd just started playing Rift after a brief period away from WoW, and wanted to write down what I thought about the two. It's not really meant to be a "rah, rah, go team!" sort of piece, but an honest comparison of my experiences. This is my followup in very much the same vein, but based on my experiences since

Rift Mage: How to do it all wrong and win

2012-01-02T19:04:00.001-05:00

To skip ahead a bit in my Mage tutorial, let's talk about Parcholock Glass Cannon. I don't want this series to be about me telling you how to play, so consider this an object lesson, rather than "the answer". Really, what this post is about is the idea that a viable build is more about your ability to play and enjoy it than it is about theorycrafting numbers. This is my primary single-target,

Rift: Macros for mages

2011-12-31T15:46:00.000-05:00

Rift has amazing macro capabilities. In some ways, not quite as good as WoW, but in other ways, orders of magnitude better. The primary difference is that in Rift, you can place as many spells in a single macro as you like, and the first one that is currently castable will be the one that is activated when you press the button. This tutorial isn't about cookie-cutter macros. The macros below

Rift: Crafting the perfect mage

2011-12-29T14:01:00.001-05:00

Mage builds abound on the Web for players of the MMO, Rift, but there's precious little I can find that tells prospective players about the class in detailed and complete terms. I'm going to try to do that, here. Each post will be tagged with "Riftmage" so you can follow that tag to find all of them. Let me just spend a paragraph on those who don't play Rift yet: mage is one of the four "classes

Warcraft Lore: Who is the most powerful being?

2011-11-17T22:00:00.006-05:00

Sargeras concept art, Wowwiki Someone recently asked on the MMO-Champion forums, "who is the most powerful being in WoW?" Predictably, this spawned a long thread, the consensus of which seems to be that the correct answer is Sargeras. I'm not so sure. Here's my response to that thread: Sargeras isn't the most powerful, lore-wise. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that he was corrupted by

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria and race choices

2011-10-22T12:18:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of (sadly predictable) rage going on right now in the WoW community about the new race in Mists of Pandaria (the next expansion): Pandarens. Of course, the Pandarens have been around since the start and there's long been an unconfirmed rumor that they were slated to be the alliance race in the first expansion (confirmed, now, by the way at this year's Bizzcon). I want to put the

What can PvP teach us about the economy?

2011-10-06T12:52:00.000-04:00

I've been doing warfronts in Rift quite a bit of late (battlegrounds to the WoWers out there), and PvP with pickup groups teaches me quite a lot about social dynamics, and I think it's given me a moment of clarity about the economy. The invisible hand is an old economics concept, defined as: "a social mechanism that channeled ambition toward meeting the needs of society, even if the ambitious had

Rift: WoW's next generation

2011-09-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

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

What is eye candy?

2011-08-23T14:23:00.000-04:00

A really interesting thread was deleted on the World of Warcraft forums today, which I think is sad, and a general comment on why you can't use the official forums in a useful way these days. The thread started as a request for "eye candy for female WoW players." It quickly developed many of the standard sorts of threads of comment that you'd expect. There were men posting (half jokingly) that no

WoW: Back to my Warlock

2011-07-29T19:02:00.001-04:00

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

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Raiding for Resources

2011-06-06T15:32:00.000-04:00

In a previous Lord of Ultima (LoU) article, I went into how you should build resource cities. As with many other aspects of the game, resources are something that you can deal with in multiple ways. You could build nothing but gold cities (see the building layout article) and buy from other players, but that's risky. What happens when no one is selling iron and you desperately need some to

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Planning Your Empire

2011-05-15T14:19:00.002-04:00

A castle with supporting cities. Lord of Ultima is a game that's entirely about planning and long-term strategy. Once you build your second city, you're well on your way to the mid-game: expanding your empire and building support structures for the conflicts that will ultimately come. I could fill volumes of articles with tips on how to play the mid-game, but this article will only seek to

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Building Layout

2011-05-11T13:15:00.006-04:00

A town center in Lord of Ultima We've been over how to lay out your buildings for ideal resource gathering, in a previous article. Now, I want to discuss all the other kinds of buildings and how they fit into your plans. Lord of Ultima has 23 building types. 4 of those are basic resource buildings (e.g. quarry); 4 are resource multipliers (e.g. stonemason); 8 are unit generators (e.g. training

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Troop Building

2011-05-05T13:08:00.004-04:00

My recent Lord of Ultima article about resource building was mostly aimed at those who have just started the game, or haven't figured out the basics of resource positioning. Troop building is a trickier art. First off, you have to decide what kind of player you want to be: offensive or defensive. Also, the game changes quite a lot as it goes on, and what's safe when everyone is starting out isn't

Lord of Ultima (LoU): Resource Building

2011-05-03T23:34:00.006-04:00

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

Attention lame Web site password management

2011-02-19T02:16:00.002-05:00

If your browser-based program, Web site, or other Web service requires me to create an account with a password, then I will fire up Password Safe and generate a password for it. If your horrible little toy of a password management tool can't handle a randomly generated ~32-character string of whatever random noise I throw at it, then I won't use it. If it requires that I enter my password in a

An open suggestion to Blizzard: WoW needs pullers

2011-02-16T19:00:00.001-05:00

There was something about the feel of EverQuest that's different from the feel in World of Warcraft. What was it? I'm beginning to think that it wasn't just playing a bard and having about 20 polygons per character. I think it was the fact that EverQuest actually had three consistent roles: healer, dps (damage-dealer), tank and puller. Yep, monks and to a lesser extent, necromancers were

On the origins of Harmil

2011-02-11T19:00:00.001-05:00

SPAM is a Hormel trademark. No confusion is intended. It gets asked sometimes: where do my character names come from? Some are simple like Miskaton or Himalountain which are references to works of fiction (Lovecraft and Lucy: Daughter of the Devil, respectively). Some are just names based on role like Smitina the Paladin or Zot the Mage. However, across a wide variety of games and online

Protoss + Human = Titan?

2011-02-10T19:00:00.003-05:00

Protoss as they appear in Starcraft II Many have pointed out that the Zerg of Starcraft and the Old Gods of Warcraft have much in common, though obviously, the Old Gods are far more powerful than the Zerg. However, I've never seen it pointed out that the architecture and technology of the Titans in Warcraft closely resembles a hybrid of Protoss and Human from Starcraft. If we read really far

No mods? No MMO!

2011-01-24T20:00:00.022-05:00

I'm getting tired of people announcing MMOs. Can we please come up with a name for, "a game where many thousands of people can play in the same world, but where the UI is created solely by the publisher, and user interface mods cannot be written? How about Online Large Dynamic game or "OLD game"? I've heard a lot of feedback around this point, so let me summarize all of the discussion that

Thinking ahead in WoW: Post-Cataclysm instances

2011-01-04T19:00:00.033-05:00

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm ("Cata" is how I'll abbreviate this from here on, and could Blizzard please think about how people are going to abbreviate their expansion names from here on in?) is a great expansion. People are fired up about the new content, the new trade skill, the art... basically everything. The only problem I see is that instances aren't all that fun. There are some great

Paizo RPG Superstar Competition

2010-11-16T19:00:00.001-05:00

Paizo is holding their annual RPG Superstar competition, and the first entry deadline is in early December. I was excited about working on an entry, but sadly I noticed the side-bar about auto-rejecting entries a bit too late. Oh well... my first entry will now remain a Web-published curiosity: Gozreh’s BaresmanI thought it might be fun to look into how I created this item, so here you go: My

How roleplayers see Romeo and Juliet

2010-11-13T10:19:00.000-05:00

Romeo and Juliet is, perhaps, the best known play in the world. We all know many of the lines like: "What's in a name," "A plague o' both your houses!" But have you ever thought about how this play would have turned out, had Shakespeare been a roleplayer? Well, here you go: If Shakespeare played White Wolf's World of Darkness Actually, I think he would have written the play pretty much as-is,