Wouldn't following a previously tread path such as the Death Knight be the less creative option? This paladin is a new race with new lore if not new abilities. Making Death Knights would do nothing for the complaints about balance between the two factions.
The Lost Ones are Draenei and they are shamanistic already. How is it a stretch of the imagination that thier uncorrupted brethren could be shamanistic as well? The Official lore implies that the uncorrupted Draenei learned shamanism from the same prophet as the Lost Ones.
Actually Paladins harness the power of thier spirit to mainifest thier abilities. The Light is just the path that allowed them to learn to harness it. They were taught originally by the Naaru who are the first and most powerful Light users. The Blood Elves kidnapped a Naaru and have imprisoned it with demonic powers in order to feed on it's power.
I think in many ways the sound track of Diablo is really what made it disturbing. In the cathedral areas if you turned the sound up you could hear what sounded like babies crying in despair. I never noticed anything quite so disturbing in Diablo 2. Also some of the monsters could be ridiculously deadly when found in boss packs, like the acid spitters. After a couple of those you would turn every corner in trepidation.
On a side not, in World of Warcraft there are a few areas in Elwynn forest that have some disturbing sounds and images. Children who all stand in a pentacle formation staring off in the same direction, and on a tiny island in one of the lakes is a disturbing voice that comes out of nowhere whispering strange words. Good stuff.
VMotion allows you to do just that. A typical setup will involve multiple nodes, keep one node redundant for moving shells to while doing maintenance on another node. As far as the end user is concerned the system never shut down. It does require a SAN set up in order to move shells without shutting them down.
The phrase "left over Halloween candy" clearly implies post halloween enjoyment of the game. So you would obviously have done one or more of the above in order to have left overs. Time to take Reading Comprehension 101 again.
Blizzard is still owned by Vivendi. They tried to sell it off a while back, but that was before WoW. Pretty sure Vivendi is eager to hang on to it now.
Yeah, I agree on the green items. Though they really only used the suffixes from Diablo. I would have loved to see some more interesting mechanics like the life/mana drain. And perhaps less escalation in power on items of the same level, this whole tier0-tier3 thing really bugs me, especially in a PvP environment. PvP combat is over in an eyeblink in the 60s brackets, you have little time to enjoy the conflict before one of you is dead. I too am waiting eagerly for a new D3 to see what happens next, and I really hope they bring back more of the creepy atmosphere from Diablo I. I will probably check out Hellgate: London since it's from a lot of former Diablo developers and has kind of a modern take on the Diablo theme.
I think the main reason that Blizzard has designed limited options into WoW is because of the fact that they have integrated PvP so deeply into the game. PvP was a quaint afterthought in Diablo, there was never any pretense at class balance in PvP, therefore they only had to worry about cooperative PvE play to balance. In WoW, the fewer play styles players can adopt, the easier it is to keep the classes relatively balanced. Obviously the final result will never be perfectly balanced because players are very adept at finding game mechanics to abuse. I don't think WoW should necessarily be more like Diablo, but i definitely don't want to see Diablo turned into another flavor of WoW. I like the fact that Diablo offers a ridiculous number of cool items to find and so many dramatically different play styles within the classes, and that is only viable in a small scale cooperative PvE environment.
While those elements are similar, the vast number of viable gear options and skill sets in Diablo, along with the painless levelling really make it a much more dynamic game. It had its issues with hacks and cheats, but so does WoW. WoW is a lot of fun, but it funnels players into specific talent builds and gear sets in order to succeed at different aspects of the game. With the right gear and skill combo you could make a melee sorceress that could do massive fire damage with her sword in Diablo. In WoW you really can't do anything that off the wall and expect to advance anywhere in the game. The itemization and talent options just don't support anything like that.
Since it's pretty easy to level in Diablo, it's really more of a run-kill-collect game with 90% of the emphasis on the collect part. One thing Diablo had the WoW does not was a huge flexibility in how you built your character when you combined different items classes and skills. Since it was never really intended as a PvP game balancing classes against each other wasn't really an issue. I played both games extensively and they are very different in almost every possible way. i for one would prefer to see Diablo 3 follow the same model of cooperative play with hundreds of possible build combinations that are fun to experiment with. WoW discourages experimentation due to the expense of respeccing and the timesink of getting another character to 60 (I have done three so far).
My guess is that this is more likely an allowance for hybrids rather than Priuses specifically, which again removes the specific vendor from the equation.
Hybrids are the new black.
RTFA. The device has no physical interactions that could destroy data on drive failure. Memory is non-volatile with no heads to crash. If the drive fails you just plug the ferro-optical disk into a different one to read it.
I find it interesting that having members of a species not procreate would be considered a disorder. Ants, bees, termites, and many other very successful species show the fallacy of your argument here. They have *one* breeding female and hundreds of thousands if non-breeding individuals, yet they have been successful species on this planet far longer than we have.
So, how can you be sure that homosexuals do not serve a role the long term survival of the species? Nature has adopted numerous strategies throughout natural history to promote survival.
Your arguments are just as subjective and flawed as the ones you are debating, and as I am sure mine are as well. We view the world through our beliefs and it will forever be tinted by them.
What about Down's Syndrome and Autism? Are they not genetic? Why haven't they 'terminated' themselves? You argue that genetic disorders, such as alcoholism, must terminate themselves, and yet throughout history you can trace alcoholism being dramatically more prevalent in certain ethnic groups, e.g. Native Americans, Russians, Irish. However, there is also a great deal of evidence that the genes that cause alcohol susceptibility also give greater endurance and disease resistance. Sickle cell anemia kills only one ethnic group of humans of African descent, yet the same genes that can cause it are also linked to a far lower rate of malarial infection. There is new evidence that the genes that help people become analytical also inhibit the learning of social skills, and may be the precursors of Autism.
The things we call disorders now, under other circumstances were likely to have been survival factors. If two genes are beneficial separately but become deadly in combination it does not logically mean that the two genes will cease to exist, merely that the individuals unlucky enough to get that combination of genes will likely not procreate.
I am not claiming that homosexuality is genetic or environmental, and frankly much like the rest of your personality I am sure it is a combination of both factors, however, I refute your logic that because it has not 'terminated' itself it cannot be genetic.
The evidence for genetics having an impact on our preferences is not small, however. Many studies have been done on separated twins that found uncanny similarities in their lives and personalities, despite having been raised in different environments, by the same token personality cannot be 100% genetically determined or those twins would have identical preferences and personalities, which of course they do not.
You make it obvious what your beliefs are however, and as such I have no illusions that any argument however persuasive will ever change your mind, as that would call your faith into question. God forbid that should happen, quite literally.
The only people I have ever met in my life that believed homosexuality could be cured were also religious zealots who believe that Intelligent Design is science.
It would be nice if Blizzard would create an actual functional means to organize a 40 man raid *inside* the game. I should not have to join a guild that can afford a website and a dedicated teamspeak server in order to enjoy content. Grouping tools in WoW are sadly non-existant and leaving out voice chat was a horrible oversight.
In WoW, all the really good items are bound to the character as soon as it is looted. So rarity of those items has zero effect on the gold economy, but it has a huge effect on PvP game play.
How is playing with 5 or 6 good friends of less value than playing with 39 other people you don't even know? I am in a raiding guild and frankly the drama and whining is not fun, nor are the raids themselves. But having 70+ played days on my main there isn't anything else to do. There is absolutely no reason they can't make smaller dungeons on timers so they can't be farmed, with extremely difficult pulls and a collection scheme a'la Zul'Gurub. Hell, Molten Core is a 40 man that is farmed endlessly.
You don't even have to put purple gear in there, just *blue* gear of the equivalent level. You have level 83 epics in AQ, but where are the level 83 rare items? Blizz has a budget system worked out already they just need to use it to it's full potential. The way the raiding guilds farm MC already has made 'epic' items seem less than epic when IF is full of people decked out in full tier 1 gear. You can hardly tell one warrior from another anymore, they all wear the exact same gear.
I laugh in the face of people that say more people required = harder content. Zul'Gurub is a 20 person raid that requires concentration and coordination most of the time. Molten Core is 40 man, but I can go auto-follow for 30 minutes and never even be missed. The only thing epic about 40 man raids is the bellyaching over who got what item.
There is another piece to the puzzle that Tigole didn't even address there, and that's PVP. It is utterly broken as far as gear is concerned, raiding guilds field teams of players who PvP fairly little, yet they mop up the guilds who are primarily PvP oriented since they have access to superior gear. So your average player enters a battleground only to spend his time being one and two shotted by epic geared players. Kinda kills the fun when you spend more time waiting to be rezzed than you do playing.
A simple solution would be to make all skills and talents have 1/2 the normal effect inside BGs. This would shrink the gap between the haves and have nots, who would at least have time to get a few hits in before dying to that warrior with the Windseeker sword.
And who would get to decide who could be in this elite caste allowed immortality drugs? If it is not universally available it will go to the rich, not the exceptionally bright. While there is overlap there I think you will find that the average person will not welcome their new immortal corporate overlords.
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Wouldn't following a previously tread path such as the Death Knight be the less creative option? This paladin is a new race with new lore if not new abilities. Making Death Knights would do nothing for the complaints about balance between the two factions.
The Lost Ones are Draenei and they are shamanistic already. How is it a stretch of the imagination that thier uncorrupted brethren could be shamanistic as well? The Official lore implies that the uncorrupted Draenei learned shamanism from the same prophet as the Lost Ones.
Actually Paladins harness the power of thier spirit to mainifest thier abilities. The Light is just the path that allowed them to learn to harness it. They were taught originally by the Naaru who are the first and most powerful Light users. The Blood Elves kidnapped a Naaru and have imprisoned it with demonic powers in order to feed on it's power.
Yeah. Playing Diablo in the dark with the sound high enough to hear the details made for a tense gaming session. I thoroughly enjoyed both games.
I think in many ways the sound track of Diablo is really what made it disturbing. In the cathedral areas if you turned the sound up you could hear what sounded like babies crying in despair. I never noticed anything quite so disturbing in Diablo 2. Also some of the monsters could be ridiculously deadly when found in boss packs, like the acid spitters. After a couple of those you would turn every corner in trepidation. On a side not, in World of Warcraft there are a few areas in Elwynn forest that have some disturbing sounds and images. Children who all stand in a pentacle formation staring off in the same direction, and on a tiny island in one of the lakes is a disturbing voice that comes out of nowhere whispering strange words. Good stuff.
VMotion allows you to do just that. A typical setup will involve multiple nodes, keep one node redundant for moving shells to while doing maintenance on another node. As far as the end user is concerned the system never shut down. It does require a SAN set up in order to move shells without shutting them down.
If I climb up the Parent links I can get to it still. It's at a -1 though so perhaps your threshold is too high?
Touche!
The phrase "left over Halloween candy" clearly implies post halloween enjoyment of the game. So you would obviously have done one or more of the above in order to have left overs. Time to take Reading Comprehension 101 again.
Blizzard is still owned by Vivendi. They tried to sell it off a while back, but that was before WoW. Pretty sure Vivendi is eager to hang on to it now.
Yeah, I agree on the green items. Though they really only used the suffixes from Diablo. I would have loved to see some more interesting mechanics like the life/mana drain. And perhaps less escalation in power on items of the same level, this whole tier0-tier3 thing really bugs me, especially in a PvP environment. PvP combat is over in an eyeblink in the 60s brackets, you have little time to enjoy the conflict before one of you is dead. I too am waiting eagerly for a new D3 to see what happens next, and I really hope they bring back more of the creepy atmosphere from Diablo I. I will probably check out Hellgate: London since it's from a lot of former Diablo developers and has kind of a modern take on the Diablo theme.
I think the main reason that Blizzard has designed limited options into WoW is because of the fact that they have integrated PvP so deeply into the game. PvP was a quaint afterthought in Diablo, there was never any pretense at class balance in PvP, therefore they only had to worry about cooperative PvE play to balance. In WoW, the fewer play styles players can adopt, the easier it is to keep the classes relatively balanced. Obviously the final result will never be perfectly balanced because players are very adept at finding game mechanics to abuse. I don't think WoW should necessarily be more like Diablo, but i definitely don't want to see Diablo turned into another flavor of WoW. I like the fact that Diablo offers a ridiculous number of cool items to find and so many dramatically different play styles within the classes, and that is only viable in a small scale cooperative PvE environment.
While those elements are similar, the vast number of viable gear options and skill sets in Diablo, along with the painless levelling really make it a much more dynamic game. It had its issues with hacks and cheats, but so does WoW. WoW is a lot of fun, but it funnels players into specific talent builds and gear sets in order to succeed at different aspects of the game. With the right gear and skill combo you could make a melee sorceress that could do massive fire damage with her sword in Diablo. In WoW you really can't do anything that off the wall and expect to advance anywhere in the game. The itemization and talent options just don't support anything like that.
Since it's pretty easy to level in Diablo, it's really more of a run-kill-collect game with 90% of the emphasis on the collect part. One thing Diablo had the WoW does not was a huge flexibility in how you built your character when you combined different items classes and skills. Since it was never really intended as a PvP game balancing classes against each other wasn't really an issue. I played both games extensively and they are very different in almost every possible way. i for one would prefer to see Diablo 3 follow the same model of cooperative play with hundreds of possible build combinations that are fun to experiment with. WoW discourages experimentation due to the expense of respeccing and the timesink of getting another character to 60 (I have done three so far).
My guess is that this is more likely an allowance for hybrids rather than Priuses specifically, which again removes the specific vendor from the equation. Hybrids are the new black.
RTFA. The device has no physical interactions that could destroy data on drive failure. Memory is non-volatile with no heads to crash. If the drive fails you just plug the ferro-optical disk into a different one to read it.
In the end that only reinforces the statement. :-)
I find it interesting that having members of a species not procreate would be considered a disorder. Ants, bees, termites, and many other very successful species show the fallacy of your argument here. They have *one* breeding female and hundreds of thousands if non-breeding individuals, yet they have been successful species on this planet far longer than we have.
So, how can you be sure that homosexuals do not serve a role the long term survival of the species? Nature has adopted numerous strategies throughout natural history to promote survival.
Your arguments are just as subjective and flawed as the ones you are debating, and as I am sure mine are as well. We view the world through our beliefs and it will forever be tinted by them.
The things we call disorders now, under other circumstances were likely to have been survival factors. If two genes are beneficial separately but become deadly in combination it does not logically mean that the two genes will cease to exist, merely that the individuals unlucky enough to get that combination of genes will likely not procreate.
I am not claiming that homosexuality is genetic or environmental, and frankly much like the rest of your personality I am sure it is a combination of both factors, however, I refute your logic that because it has not 'terminated' itself it cannot be genetic.
The evidence for genetics having an impact on our preferences is not small, however. Many studies have been done on separated twins that found uncanny similarities in their lives and personalities, despite having been raised in different environments, by the same token personality cannot be 100% genetically determined or those twins would have identical preferences and personalities, which of course they do not.
You make it obvious what your beliefs are however, and as such I have no illusions that any argument however persuasive will ever change your mind, as that would call your faith into question. God forbid that should happen, quite literally.
The only people I have ever met in my life that believed homosexuality could be cured were also religious zealots who believe that Intelligent Design is science.
It would be nice if Blizzard would create an actual functional means to organize a 40 man raid *inside* the game. I should not have to join a guild that can afford a website and a dedicated teamspeak server in order to enjoy content. Grouping tools in WoW are sadly non-existant and leaving out voice chat was a horrible oversight.
In WoW, all the really good items are bound to the character as soon as it is looted. So rarity of those items has zero effect on the gold economy, but it has a huge effect on PvP game play.
How is playing with 5 or 6 good friends of less value than playing with 39 other people you don't even know? I am in a raiding guild and frankly the drama and whining is not fun, nor are the raids themselves. But having 70+ played days on my main there isn't anything else to do. There is absolutely no reason they can't make smaller dungeons on timers so they can't be farmed, with extremely difficult pulls and a collection scheme a'la Zul'Gurub. Hell, Molten Core is a 40 man that is farmed endlessly.
You don't even have to put purple gear in there, just *blue* gear of the equivalent level. You have level 83 epics in AQ, but where are the level 83 rare items? Blizz has a budget system worked out already they just need to use it to it's full potential. The way the raiding guilds farm MC already has made 'epic' items seem less than epic when IF is full of people decked out in full tier 1 gear. You can hardly tell one warrior from another anymore, they all wear the exact same gear.
I laugh in the face of people that say more people required = harder content. Zul'Gurub is a 20 person raid that requires concentration and coordination most of the time. Molten Core is 40 man, but I can go auto-follow for 30 minutes and never even be missed. The only thing epic about 40 man raids is the bellyaching over who got what item.
There is another piece to the puzzle that Tigole didn't even address there, and that's PVP. It is utterly broken as far as gear is concerned, raiding guilds field teams of players who PvP fairly little, yet they mop up the guilds who are primarily PvP oriented since they have access to superior gear. So your average player enters a battleground only to spend his time being one and two shotted by epic geared players. Kinda kills the fun when you spend more time waiting to be rezzed than you do playing.
A simple solution would be to make all skills and talents have 1/2 the normal effect inside BGs. This would shrink the gap between the haves and have nots, who would at least have time to get a few hits in before dying to that warrior with the Windseeker sword.
William Faulkner and John Steinbeck for two.
*sigh* Ain't that the truth! Travel here sucks, and the reality of it is we are no safer than we were before 9/11.
And who would get to decide who could be in this elite caste allowed immortality drugs? If it is not universally available it will go to the rich, not the exceptionally bright. While there is overlap there I think you will find that the average person will not welcome their new immortal corporate overlords.