In any case, our winners were:

1st place – Cradexw – 5000g prize

2nd place – Bakana – 2500g prize

3rd place – Unclaimed – 1000g prize

Stay tuned for more events!

Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is a new game in development by S2 Games. HoN is a stand-alone game based on the popular Warcraft III campaign, Defense of the Ancients. The game is currently in a semi-open beta, and is available for pre-order for $30.

The main goals of HoN was to address many shortcomings of DOTA, specifically limitations imposed by the aging Warcraft III engine. The game has an improved graphics engine, in-game voice, ladder and rating systems, improved online lobby, clan system, and other features.

Story

Part of the storyline and artistic theme appears to be based off S2 Games’ previous efforts, Savage and Savage 2. The two sides to the conflict in HoN are the Legion and the Hellbourne. The Legion have a very elvish theme, with buildings and units that have a nature motif. For example, their melee troops are treants, and their ranged troops appears as elven archers. Their main base is a “Tree of Life.” The Hellbourne have a demonic motif, with an alter as their main base and troops that include a zombie melee troop and warlock ranged troops.

Gameplay

The game play in HoN is taken almost directly from DOTA. The beta currently contains three maps, all of them with a forest terrain type, often with a river running through the center of the map. There are two 5v5 maps and one special 3v3 map.

Each map contains a number of “lanes”, running between the Legion base and the Hellbourne base. Along each lane are a number of defensive towers for each team, that have a large amount of health and deal heavy damage to enemy units in range. At the beginning of each lane, “creeps” are spawned for each team. Creeps are AI controlled troops that attempt to move along the lane and destroy both the defensive towers and the enemy creeps. It normally spawns as four melee troops, one ranged troop, and occasionally a catapult. The creeps progressively gain strength as the game goes on.

The role of the player is to control a Hero, very much like the Heroes in Warcraft III. Each hero has up to 3 normal abilities and one Ultimate. All heroes begin at level 1, and start the game with an “Ability point” to be applied towards their skills. There is also a “stat level-up” skill that puts a +2 bonus to each statistic. The Hero’s Ultimate cannot be accessed till level 6.

Heroes have both health and mana, and up to 6 items that can be purchased from stores. The items convey a range of statistic bonuses, and are highly important to improving the hero’s survivability and damage.

Heroes spend their time attempting to eliminate enemy creeps, allowing them to gain gold and experience, and fighting off the other heroes. A hero is rewarded gold for getting killing blows on enemy creeps and heroes. Experienced is earned whenever the hero is near an enemy that dies. Destroying an enemy tower also rewards gold, which is split amongst the team.

The ultimate goal is to help your creeps eliminate all defensive towers within a lane, or multiple lanes, so that they can begin attacking the enemy’s main base structure. When the main base is destroyed, the game is over.

UI

The UI is very similar to Warcraft III. There is a mini-map in the lower left corner, followed by a information pane for your hero or another selected target. Next is a kind of mini-action bar showing your three skills and ultimate, followed by 6 item slots. The last pane is a kind of targeting frame, showing information on selected enemy units.

The view of the map world is top down, as in Warcraft III. Currently, unlike in WC III, the view is locked, with no zoom options nor the ability to change the viewing angle. This decision seems to be to force all players to have the same sight range around their character, regardless of higher resolutions.

Online Lobby

HoN is an entirely online game with no single player component. The online lobby contains many of the usual features, such as chat channels, “Find Game”, “Create Game”, and so forth. It also has a friend and clan system, allowing groups to display a clan tag. The clan system includes a private chat channel.

Creating and Joining Games

Creating a game is fairly simple but there are a lot of game options, such as whether or not all heroes are available, or if they are limited to the faction they belong. There are game options such as “Single Draft”, where players are presented with 3 heroes to choose, rather than being allowed to choose from the entire list. There are options to restrict a game to “Noobs Only”, which requires a player to be under a certain number of games played, as well as to exclude players who have too many “Leaves”, i.e. leaving a game before it completes.

Games do not have passwords, but can be marked as Private. In this case, the game creator must invite the other players for them to join.

Joining a game is fairly simple. You can search for games with a number of filters, such as “Single Draft” or “No Leavers”, “Noob Only”, etc.  You can also right click the name of a friend or clan member that is online, and choose to join the game they are currently in.

Closing

HoN is currently available for pre-order for $30. I’m somewhat on the fence still, the beta is a lot of fun, but I’m not sure I’d rate the game $30, maybe $20. The graphics and art are nice, but not what I would describe as cutting edge. The game is somewhat of a one trick pony… It does one thing, and does it well, but that’s all it does. There is no single player, and besides a “Deathmatch” mode, no alternative play modes.

Prizes

1st – 5000g
2nd – 2500g
3rd – 1000g

Ticket Cost

50g each

Rules

You can buy as many tickets as you want.  The buying phase of the raffle will go on for 6 days, culminating in a live draw in game on Sunday, August 30th, 10pm (server time).  If you can’t be at the live drawing that’s alright, the prize can be collected any time.  If you win a prize, your tickets are removed from consideration for the subsequent drawing (ex: if you get the first place prize, you’re not eligible for the 2nd or 3rd place stuff).

Proceeds of the ticket buying will go towards funding of future weekly events (I’m not making any profit off of this).  This raffle is open to anyone interested in participating (guilded or not– though I don’t think we get many non-guildies visiting this board anyway).

You can send your gold, and a note of how many tickets you’d like to:

Disciple (H – Mal’Ganis)

A final note about the legality, I consulted with customer service about hosting raffles in WoW, and it’s perfectly acceptable within the ToS.  Feel free to check for yourself if you have any doubts.

I’ve always wanted to play Raiden Fighters naked. However, due to the public nature of arcades and the tendencies for cops to show up with clubs, being naked never happened.

This weekend, my dream came true. Not only did i play Raiden Fighters naked, but I also played Raiden Fighters 2 and Raiden Fighters Jet in an all-inclusive package called Raiden Fighter Aces for the Xbox 360.

Since this is my first Shining Force review, I’ll explain how this is going to work. I’m not going to assign this game a number value that tells you how good it is in less than two digits. I’m simply going to tell you what was WIN and what was FAIL in the game.

Time to get Hordy.

WIN

Arcade Love: As soon as I fired this game up I was surprised at how much it felt like playing in the arcade. On the box, they make it sound like they’ve added a ton of features etc, but they didn’t touch the gameplay or look and feel. You can play the Arcade mode which gives you the option to give yourself limited (or unlimited!) credits and play through the stages normally. You select your fighter and you’re off blowing up everything holy to the enemy and dodging bullets like ex-girlfriends. It’s beautiful.

Jet Sex: If you’ve played any of the Raidens, you probably hopefully know that if you hold down the fire button, you’ll charge a super weapon for your ship. I discovered in two player mode on Raiden Fighters 2 and Raiden Fighters Jet that if you and your buddy charge and fire your super weapon at the same time, you’ll shoot a super WIN-powered hybrid attack that makes you and your buddy invincible while demolishing everything in front of you. This is something I never discovered in the arcade. (The one I played at’s 2nd player buttons never worked.)

Choose your Poison: In each game, there are plenty of ships to choose from that all have their unique special weapons, firing speed, flight speed, etc. You can pick from the chubby-yet-deadly Beast Arrow to the all around killer, the Aegis.

Next Ship Please: When you die enough to get to a continue, you can change to a different ship. This is perfect for certain bosses that require you to dodge like Neo.

Slow Motion: In Practice mode, you can assign a button to activate slow motion. This is perfect for post-pub gaming. I suppose if you wanted to, you could probably also use it to practice. I found it a bit too easy sober.

FAIL

I kill so hard I Die? This isn’t that much of a fail as much as it is irritating to me. I’ll be cruising along in my powered-to-the-MAX ship firing enough bullets and lasers to fill the screen when all of a sudden my ship blows up. WTF? What happens is that there is so much going on that I’ll lose track of one slow moving yellow dot. It and Murphy’s Law then proceed to kick me in the nuts.

Too slow Fatty! I have been using random ships each time, which is highly entertaining, but frustrating on harder difficulties. The heavy-hitter slow ships just don’t have the get-up-and-go to get the hell out of the way of a swarm of Boss bullets. Often times the Boss bullets will not have a dodge-able spread and if you don’t have a fast ship, kiss your credits goodbye.

Devil Badges: In Raiden Fighter Jet, when you destroy a flying enemy, it’ll sometimes drop a triangular badge. (Badges give you extra points.) In the other two games, they will fall straight down and you’ll either pick them up or never see them again. In this one, however, they zoom right at you and stop about a half inch out of reach following you around like that little devil on your shoulder tempting you to catch them by moving into stray bullets.

Why aren’t you DLC my love? This game set is not very large (memory-wise). They should just make it into an Xbox Arcade download to save me from having to get off my arse and put the disc in.

Overall, it’s just as fun as the original. I may even pick up a SFIV fighting stick to make it even more arcade-y. It’s only 20 bucks new and worth every penny. There you have it. The Win. The Fail. Any questions?

If you have suggestions for my next XBOX 360/DSi/PSP review, let me know on the forums.

Raiden Fighters Aces Website

Wings become available at level 10, when you ascend and become a Daeva. Activating your wings has a small cool down, which I believe is under 10 seconds. You have a base flight time limit of approximately one minute, and as soon as you finish flying, it begins to recharge. Various items such as rings or amulets may have stat bonuses such as “Increases flying time by 3%.”, and there are upgraded wings you can purchase for your “Wing” equipment slot, which can double or more your flight time while also providing other bonuses.

Whenever your flight time is about to run out, and potentially drop you like a rock from the sky and kill you, a warning noise will sound. This alert is also heard by your group and/or raid, so that everyone is aware that they may need to stop so a member can rest their flight time. A tone also sounds when your flight activation cool down becomes available again.

Wings can be used in two fashions: Outright flying, and gliding.

Gliding

Gliding is always available, even in zones where flying is disabled. This can be easily activated by simply tabbing the space bar as a kind of double jump. Your wings will come out, and you can glide for a distance until you hit something that stops your forward momentum, like a rise in the ground. The double jump method activates gliding even in zones where you can truly fly.

The standard forward and backward keys (W and S) can be used to tilt forward or backward as you fly, as a way to either dive, or attempt to gain a little altitude. It’s possibly to glide for fairly long distances if you come across a hill or cliff. Gliding is a fair bit faster than walking, and can allow you to skip NPCs you don’t want to fight.

Flying

In early zones, there are many subzones where flying is disabled, but more and more areas become available as you level. In the PVP zones known as the Abyss, flying is always available. Flying can be activated either by a bound “Toggle” key, or clicking an icon on your UI.

Flying works more or less like your flying mount in Warcraft would work, with a few differences. You can control your direction with your mouse (I.e. mouse look), or you can use a bound key for “Fly Up” and another for “Fly Down”. These default to R and F, but as I use those for action bars, I unbound them and just used the mouse. Currently, the space bar will not cause you to fly upward, but NC Soft has reportedly acknowledged this and said they would add it.

While flying, you can use any action you normally could, including attacks and spells. This means flying becomes an important part of PVP, as both an escape mechanism and a way to attack.

Let me start off by noting that I was not involved in the previous five Closed Beta Tests. As a result, I cannot comment on any improvements that have been made by NC Soft between the CBTs, although I personally wish I could as that would help show how well NC Soft is addressing issues. My understanding however is that each CBT has been an clear improvement.

Aion: The Towers of Eternity (Just Aion for North America) is an MMORPG developed and published by NC Soft. This is the same company behind Guild Wars and Lineage, and there is a lot of similarities between those games and Aion in terms of artistic direction and other features.

Aion has been on the market for sometime, originally released in Korea in November 2008, and later in China. The CBTs have been running as version 1.0, but the official retail release in North American will coincide with the release of version 1.5. The release date is currently scheduled for September 22nd. Pre-orders can begin playing on September 20th.

I’m going to start off by describing the game’s background, factions, classes, etc. If you’re already familiar with this, you’ll probably want to skim past, and I’ll start talking about my time playing and some of the major difference I see between the game and World of Warcraft, which has captured a fair number of us for extended periods the past five years.

The Story

The basic story behind Aion is a world that was once self contained. Think of a planet where the people, instead of living on the outside, lived inside the planet. Between the northern and southern hemispheres, the planet was spanned by the Tower of Eternity, a symbol of the god Aion. Aion originally created a race of guardiansm, the Draken, to protect the world and the humans living there, but over the ages they began to become corrupted and prey upon humans, and became known as the Baluar. To combat this, Aion chose twelve humans to become Empyrean Lords. They created a barrier that locked the Baluar away from the humans.

Over time, as a result of the barrier, some humans living within absorbed aether and become Daevas, with wings and powers (Although weaker) similar to the Empyrean Lords. The Lords gathered the Daevas, and began to war with the Baluar, in an attempt to reclaim the areas outside of the barrier. Ultimately, the Lords split, five wanting war, five wanting peace. The two Lords charged with guarding the Tower swayed the vote, and an attempt at peace was made. A meeting was held at the tower, with the Baluar invited.

During the meeting, a Baluar leader was slain, the exact circumstances still unknown. In the fighting that ensued, the tower was destroyed, causing the two hemispheres of the world to drift apart. The Abyss was formed in the middle between the two halfs, and the Baluar reside there. The five Lords who were for war resided on the upper half, which was kept in darkness, while those who sued for peace resided in the lower half, which was bathed in Light. The two Lords who once guarded the tower had died in the fighting.

Those on the upper half became the Asmodians, twisted by their life in the darkness. Those on the lower half became the Elyos.

The Basics

Aion has a maximum level cap of 50, two factions, eight classes, six crafting skills. There are no races beyond the faction choice. Levels are gained through experience, which comes from numerous sources including killing NPCs, completing quests, and performing successful gathering and crafting.

Oh. And you have wings and can fly. More on that later!

Factions

The Elyos and Asmodians have the same classes but different artistic directions. There is no good or evil here, though the Asmodians are cast as being somewhat more cruel or harsh. Elyos are your standard human, with all the normal skin tones and standard features. You can have pointy ears though. Elyos have white wings.

The Asmodians are technically still human, but due to their dark environment and walking on shards of the Tower, they have grown manes, talons on their feet, and eyes that glow in classic D&D infrared style. They have black wings.

There are no real differences between classes for the two factions, except in the case of some special skills. In general though, an Elyos skill might do less damage while providing a small heal to the player who used it, while the Asmodian version drops the heal for raw damage. This doesn’t appear to impact balance very much.

Classes

You start the game out as one of four basic classes: Warrior, Scout, Mage, and Priest. These are pretty clear cut. Warriors have more armor and hit things, scouts are basically rogues to start, mages shoot fire, and priests can heal.

At level ten, when you Ascend and become a Daeva (And gain your wings) you must pick a subclass. Warriors can chose between Templar and Gladiator. Templars are essentially the main tanks of the game, preferring a sword and shield. Gladiators are akin to the Fury warriors of WoW, with a focus on two-handers and AoE damage.

Scout heads down the path of Assassin, which mostly builds on the Scout class, or begins down the path of a Ranger. Rangers are long ranged fighters that can fight up close if they have to do so. The early Scout class tends to focus on melee, so at first a Ranger won’t feel very ranged. As they level and gain more ranged skills this changes though.

Mage becomes either sorcerer or spiritmaster. Sorcerer is your standard glass cannon. Low health, low armor, and a ton of ranged damage. Spiritmaster is the warlock of Aion. You have a choice of four pets based on the elements of fire, air, earth and water. DOTs are your game.

Priest goes to either Cleric or Chanter. Clerics are the top healers, while Chanters drop some of their healing capacity to gain buffs and debuffs.

Crafting

Six crafts. Alchemy (Potions, gems, some random tidbits), Handiwork (Jewelry, bows, etc), Weaponsmithing, Armorsmithing, Sewing (Cloth & Leather), and Cooking. Everyone has gatherering by default, and you can get all crafts if you want to put the time and effort in.

Two major improvements: Crafting gives XP, and there are repeatable “Skill-Up” quests available. Basically you ask the trainer for work, and they say something like “The military needs 6 compasses, here’s the steel rods.”. You might have to buy a secondary component from the store, but then you make them, turn it in for a little experience, and get a random reward. The reward might be more of the store materials, or even a new recipe.

Really this is longer than I expected but I want to cover everything…. Here we begin talking of actual game play…

Combat and Gameplay

I’m going to go over the basic differences with WoW for this section. Combat has no real global cooldown, which is one of the first most obvious differences. It also does not (Yet anyways) have any action queuing, like EQII or LOTRO. Most skills have a built-in cooldown, for example the rogue’s staple attack has a 7 second cooldown, so as soon as you push it, you can hit something else. However a mage’s Flame Bolt has a 1 second cooldown, which acts sort of like a “global cooldown” when you choose to just spam it.

Combo skills are a big part of Aion. Essentially, you have up to 3 or 4 levels in a chain. I’ll use mage as an example since I played it the most. Skill one will be Flame Bolt. This causes Blaze to become usable. Blaze is an instant cast that does damage and applies a debuff lowering magic resistance. It has a 30 second cooldown though. It’s a good opener against the game’s version of elites, allowing any other casters to pour some damage in. These combos are simple 1-2 punch deals to start, but eventually you get multiple choices for the level 2 skill in the chain, and then even third and fourth skills that can be used.

The melee classes, warrior and scout, don’t seem to use mana. They don’t have rage or energy, so for basic attacks and abilities have no downtime beyond their health and bandaging. I know that Scout’s “Hide I” skill uses mana, but their Surprise Attack and such do not.

At the early levels, mages deal considerably more damage than warrior or scout, but have to worry about their mana and the downtime incurred by it. It’s not that bad though, as you can /rest to boost your health and mana regeneration by a considerable amount. By level 10 you also gain some other skills, such as a kind of mini-evocate called Energy Absorption that immediately restores some mana on a one minute cooldown, as well as Mana Treatment I (Think of it like a bandage… but for mana).

Priests, although I didn’t play one, appear to resort to melee combat when not healing, with a few ranged abilities to mix into it. I can’t comment too heavily since I didn’t play one, but I’ve watched a Chanter fight in melee range using a range of attacks, so that appears to be their preferred method.

Stigmas

One thing that will be immediately obvious to a WoW player is… where’s my talent tree? Aion doesn’t have talent trees. Instead, they have Stigmas. You can consider Stigmas something like combining talent trees and glyphs. Now, I’m not saying that, like a warrior’s talent trees in WoW, that a stigma changes you from tank to dps. Being a tank has more to do with gear (i.e. shield and board) and class. Templars are always the top tanks, but Gladiators can off tank in most cases.

Stigmas differ from glyphs in that they don’t improve abilities. There isn’t any stigmas like “Increases flame bolt damage by 2%.” Instead, Stigmas unlock full abilities (Like climbing down the talent tree to get Devastate or Mortal Strike).

For example, one Sorcerer stigma is Curse: Tree I. It’s a crowd control that locks the target down as a tree for 20 seconds, but also boosts their resistances by a large amount. It’s purely to take them out of combat, not to “stun and nuke”.

You gain 2 stigmas at level 20, then 1 more at levels 30, 40 and 50, for a total of five customized abilities. They can be replaced for no cost (To my knowledge).

Some individuals I’ve played with have brought up that this means for the most part, other than an ability or 3 difference, every sorcerer is the same. This is pretty much true. There aren’t arcane or frost sorcerers. While that might appear more simple and plain, it also means the game is considerably more balanced.

Money, Stores, Items, Socketing, Etc, Etc

Money in this game comes in one form. There’s no gold, silver, copper, platinum. Just one denomination, meaning you’ll literally see some items that can cost in the millions. My level 18 sorcerer ended up with around 130,000 by the end of beta, but it didn’t really seem to distract from anything.

Stores are pretty standard. Buying and selling is not instant, it has a kind of shopping card, so you can click a bunch of items, then hit “Buy”. My understanding is that accidental purchases (Maybe all items…?) can be sold back at the same price they were bought for. Selling works the same, click all your junk then click Sell to sell the basket. Shops have tabs such as “One Hand Weapons”, “Magic Weapons”, or “Cloth”, “Leather”, etc.

One nice feature is a “Sell Misc.” button. It automatically puts all “Grey” items into the sell basket, all the things that cannot be used for any craft, aren’t equipment, or quest items. There are no “Grey” quality equipable items so any junk equipment you want to unload you’ll need to handle yourself.

Skills come in the form of skill books, which you purchase at a trainer store, and can buy BEFORE you can use, so if you’re out in the world when you hit the right level, you just click the book and bam, new skill.

Socketing in this game is provided in the form of “Manastones”. Almost all equipment have sockets, and manastones drop off NPCs and as quest rewards. A Manastone might be such as “HP +20″ at the low levels, or “Magic Boost +12″ (Spellpower). To use, simply click and drop on the equipment with a slot. You can also recover mana stones at special NPCs. Some items have multiple slots, but from what I can tell all weapons, chest, legs, gloves, and shoulders have slots. So far, no helmets or belts I found had slots. I believe helmets and belts count as “Accessories”, so don’t have slots.

Equipment slots include two sets of weapons (Think Diablo weapon switching), helmet, amulet, two earrings, two rings, body, legs, gloves, shoulders, waist and feet. There’s also a Wing slot for upgraded wings, and two Power crystal slots, which seem to only help melee characters as they’re a kind of temporary buff that consumes the Power Crystal items when in use… all the ones I saw say “Increases weapon damage”, which doesn’t help a caster.

Your bag is referred to as a Cube, and its kind of “inter dimensional” in theme. Cubes can be expanded by cube artisans for an amount of money, one row of item slots at a time. Banks are called Warehouses, and work the same way, you buy the “next row” of slots. All banks have a private area and an “account wide” area, so you can store items and retrieve them from other characters.

The cube has an auto-sort button that is very useful as well, putting equippable items in front, followed by crafting materials, foodstuffs, potions, junk, then quest items at the end.

Players can create private shops. I’m not sure the location restrictions, etc, but you basically set up a hawking message, choose the items and prices you want them sold at, and your character sits down next to a table (That of course, magically appears), and becomes a store.

PVP

I didn’t get into any PVP, sorry! However, the following is what my friend Nick had to say about it:

While playing last night I had the opportunity to get involved in a very large scale world pvp event. There were easily 100 people involved between the 2 sides. From this involvement I found that each class seemed to have their own little role in the battle.

Templar – Tank style class that would stun, absorb damage, stop spell casters from casting, and be a general nusance to anyone around them.

Gladiator – The big hitter on the field when it came to melee. They would generally follow in behind the tank going for pot shots against Assassins and Rangers. Much of the time they would attempt to get back to the casting ranks as well.

Clerics – The true field medic. Clerics could do both healing and decent amounts of damage. They were also pretty hard to kill as they wear mail in this game and have a shield.

Chanters – Now these guys were truly annoying. While not putting out huge amounts of damage they were impossible to kill with their multiple buffs and healing capabilties.

Rangers – There were not many rangers involved in the pvp that I could see.

Assassins – Similar to rogues in other MMOs they performed the same role here CC and good damage on cloth. Multiple times Zant stopped 30s from running with snares and stuns.

Sorcerors – The ultimate glass cannon. Sorcerors were putting out huge amounts of damage but if anyone got in their face they only had to skills to resort to; a backwards blink and a shield that absorbs minimal damage.

Spirit Masters – Being the pet class in the game pvp was very different in this game. I found myself playing a support style of damage dealer as many of my skills include a snare or slow. I ended up dotting up large numbers of people while my fire elemental was doing respectable damage to other targets. I did find that it was difficult to kill me due to my stigma skill ( a skill that returns a large amount of HP to me ~25% of my HP), my shield, stun, and pet.

Assorted Stuff

Titles are rewarded by completely various quests. Each title provides a small buff, such as more magic boost, run speed, etc. It’s not a huge buff, but just something extra.

The game has a built in quest helper. In the quest text, there will be blue highlighted words, such as items or people that are objectives. Clicking the blue link will pop up a small description and a “Locate” button. This button will put a mark on your map that tells you where to find that objects or person. Only one thing can be located at once though.

You have both a full world map and a map overlay (Same size as world map but transparent).

The minimap is different that WoW’s. You have almost a kind of radar, where enemies near you can be seen as dots up to a certain distance (Like tracking but for everyone). The distance behind and to the side is fairly short, but you can see mobs for a long distance in the cone in front of you. Non-aggressive NPCs are white, friendlies are blue, and aggressives are red.

When you target a red, a small radar will appear on the minimap around them. It’s their aggro range. The radar line that sweeps around the circle is their direction, meaning if you’re quick you CAN sneak into the aggro range (Or squeak by something you don’t want to fight) before they aggro. This is very useful to assassins so they can Surprise Attack without having Hide (Which has a cooldown of a minute).

Channels… The first two zones, levels 1-20 really, are instanced into ten channels. This is to help eleviate load for new players. Usually the first two channels are crowded, but the others more empty, so if you like or dislike the crowd, you can change channels at any time as long as you aren’t in combat.

This stops for the zones above level 20. World PVP also begins in the zones above the first two.

Each zone is VERY large and consists of many subzones. Zones are teleported to from special NPCs, rather than being seamlessly connected. The size of the zones however means you might spend several days in a particular zone before completing it. Sub-zones are well integrated with terrain types changing in a gradual manner that doesn’t leave the disconnect that Warcraft has when green grass abruptly becomes red clay.

Death works differently from World of Warcraft. For one thing, items do not have durability and never get repaired, so that penalty is gone. However, death does have an XP penalty. The penalty can be removed by paying an amount of gold at a Soul Healer. Death also causes a short debuff that lowers movement speed. There isn’t a resurrection timer, because if you release you are brought back to life at your soul bind (Obelisks). There are classes that can rez, as well as items that allow you to rez other people (Goblin Jumper Cables!) and even items that allow you to rez yourself.

Closing

There’s a lot to this game, and I’ll gladly add more to this article if anyone has any questions about specific things. I wanted this to be more organized but I’m just not any good at it, but I tried to cover a lot of the areas.

But to the filling of this order, I give tremendous thanks to a worthy and noble Defac!  Rising above his competitors and obtaining all the ingredients from the original sources is no easy task, so enjoy a hearty pat on the back and the well-earned reward of 10,000 gold!

For any other would-be treasure hunters, fear not, I may yet have need of additional resources from precarious locations…

While the true nature of the items and the manner of their combination remains my closely guarded secret, I am able to share a few of the defining properties of these artifacts.

Elixir Ingredients

• Runic Stone – The runic stone is a rather curious piece of ancient geology.  The unique combination of Silithid construction fluid mixed with the dark magic of C’thun has permeated some of the rocks around the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj.  By grounding up the stone, the properties held within can be harnessed.

• Crocolisk Tail – Surprisingly, the many crocolisk of Azeroth are unable to produce an intact tail when killed.  The bone structure is so tightly infused, that detaching it from the beast is almost certain to destroy it in the process.

• Hourglass Sand – Nefarian’s lair, while now empty and ruinous, was once a gathering of spirts and ghosts, all fallen and reborn to fight anew.  Through this constant struggle of death and rebirth, the denizens of the dungeon would collect the remains of these warriors, which in the lair of dragons, was seldom more than ash.  Now, it’s more conveniently called Hourglass Sand to remind us of what little time one had in the realm of dragons.

Elixir Utensils

• Greater Scarab Coffer Key – The Silithid have a particularly unusual way of protecting valuables.  Once an older member of the hive has past his years of use, the other members will dismember him, while alive, and hollow out the insides to create a makeshift cache.  A key is then forged from the leftover limbs that is unique to the newly crafted husk.  It also makes a good spoon.

• Empty Venom Sac – The problem with holding a mixture of this volatility is that the containers rarely last long before dissolving in a huff of smoke and dust.  This problem can be alleviated by using the very useful venom sac of a scorpid, which when emptied, provides a malleable yet reliable flask.

• Ingenious Toy – I’m sorry but I don’t know much about this item.  I had heard rumours of a relative of Jepetto Joybuzz creating a toy that was quite unlike any toy ever made.  The toy itself was useless of course– but the parts were said to hold a mystery unto themselves.  Unfortunately it disappeared around the time the great plague swept through the Eastern Kingdoms.

• Brilliant Chromatic Scales – I did indeed profuse my respect for the resilience of the scorpid venom sac.  I am however also quite concerned about the uniqueness of the mixture and what strange effects it would have once combined.  A few of the chromatic scales lining the edges should alleviate my worry though, just as a precaution of course.

Now, I don’t deny this is a tall order.  Anyone who is willing to look through vendors, dungeons, and scrupulous traders to meet this request will be amply rewarded.  To the first person who sends a mail with the following to:

Character: Disciple
Server: Mal’ganis
Faction: Horde

• 3 x Runic Stone
• 4 x Crocolisk Tail
• 10 x Hourglass Sand
• 2 x Greater Scarab Coffer Key
• 5 x Empty Venom Sac
• 1 x Ingenious Toy
• 5 x Brilliant Chromatic Scale

I will  reward with 10,000 gold pieces.  Any one else who completes the requisition after the first successful submission may also receive a small consolation for their troubles, to be decided after the completion of the task.

This venture is open to anyone reading this message, and in three days time I will report it’s result.  Should the aforementioned task be incomplete at that time, I will broaden my search for individuals willing to take on this arduous mission.

If you’re interested in writing anything for the blog, or in becoming a regular author, send me a pm on the boards and we can see about working something out.