Tensei

Blizzard made that picture themselves.

TANK ARGONIAN LFG Alduin's Lair

Phantom Lancer! Might be one of my favorite designs yet. Too bad the hero is kinda boring.

So I was watching Kingravens stream (an extreme rager with an inflated ego to boot who is only fun to watch for the schadenfreude), and to my surprise I saw Sensai playing on his team, clantag and everything. I hope it wasn't too terrible of an experience.

I prefer this one

No new hero this week unfortunately, but a UI overhaul and new item icons instead. Image here. Oh, and Lion gets a new model.

One thing I liked a lot is that they announced that the drops from bosses won't be better than those from uniques/champions. No more mindless Baalrun grinding!

If you think the text in this image is too small, you might have a problem with your eyesight. Also, I went from sceptical to cautiously optimistic after playing through the beta twice. I think the game will have plenty of depth even with the simplified skill system, mostly because of the randomized loot and maps. I'm already liking how the damage of skills is affected by your gear, rather than the amount of points you put into it (+synergy), because it pretty much means that every skill will remain viable at every level.

I think you need to get your eyes checked.

This game is a pleasant surprise so far. Graphics were a huge turnoff early on (models look very low-detail), but once I started going all Fist of the North Star on the zombies with my Monk, it was very gratifying due to all the physics and sound-effects. It definitely FEELS like Diablo. I'm a bit sceptical about the skill systems apparent simplicity, but I did like how it handled the Monk skills, where the left-click enhances your melee attack in all kinds of ways.

Pretty sure that 'Pandaren' is a placeholder or a result of directly copypasting skill descriptions, otherwise yeah, I could see Valve getting in trouble for that.

http://www.playdota.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=2364&pictureid=39373 Brewmasterrrrr. He's a pretty awesome anti-carry, mostly popular in the Chinese scene. Also, new Shadow Fiend ult animation:

Haven't there been multiple pro players that pretty much soloqueued their way to the top? I know chu8 did it with Maokai, so it's not like the system intends for everyone to stay sub 1400.

Ok if it actually actively finds bad team members for you when you're on a winning streak then it's a pretty dumb system (cause you're getting punished for doing well). I assumed it worked similarly to HoN (and I guess Dota 2 as well) where if you win a game your rating/ELO gets increased and you simply get put in games with a higher average skill level. If you can't keep up and you lose, your skill rating will drop again. Point is that after x amount of games you should always average out without the game intentionally stacking odds against you.

ELO hell doesn't exist. If you play enough games, the amount of times that you get feeders/trolls on your team will be balanced out by the amount of times that they are on the enemy team. The only common factor between those games is yourself, so if you average out to a 50/50 win/loss ratio, you pretty much are where you belong skillwise.

I've randomed Razor like twice and he's now at like 5 stars for me too. For some reason I just stomp games with him even though I don't particularly like the hero. Also, Jeremy Lin plays Dota 2!

The better question is "Why is that sword not a giant carrot?"

This week in Dota 2. BURRS! Sillybear is the only hero with a summonable unit that has 6 fully functional item slots.

Nothing here yet, but I heard they're handing out new keys per region so they might not have done EU yet. So how about that Lycan? The performance tracking is also a pretty neat addition, it displays how well you do with a particular hero relative to other players at your skill level: (not mine) Also, this was an amazing game yesterday:

Not a photoshop.

Riot's treatment of Shaco is just so...Riot. "This champ is very strong in earlygame but he scales poorly, NEEDS TO BE REBALANCED."

It's fine haha, I installed it now so I should be good for voicechat next time.

oh, duh

For one, they're fucking huge. Seriously, there is probably more to do in BG2/ToB than there is in Skyrim (barring the infinitely repeatable quests), and the quality feels much more consistent throughout. Dungeons like Spellhold, The Underdark, Watcher's Keep (not to mention the huge sewer system underneath Athkatla) are all super memorable and had tons of awesome setpieces and little subplots contained within. The only thing in recent memory that comes close to rivaling that experience are the Deep Roads in Dragon Age but that still wasn't quite the same. What's more is that the quality of sidequests was just as good, if not better than the main plot. Umar Hills, the Dragons Den, the Cult of the Eyeless, etc. were all skippable, but were just so elaborate and rewarding that it was almost never worth doing so unless you were explicitly trying to speedrun the game. The combat system was pretty damn solid for the time too, having a good balance of complexity and playability, though due to its very open nature it was possible to cheese a lot of the tougher fights with summons etc. The plot wasn't much better than a typical fantasy novel, but for a videogame that's still a pretty damn high standard, and it served its purpose well enough. Irenicus, for example, was just a really effective antagonist when taken in the context of a videogame, especially considering that due to the technical limitations of using a 2D engine, his entire character hinged on the writing. That said, I don't think it's really fair to compare videogame writing to novels or movies because those media have had a lot more time to establish themselves, and the narrative is typically the main focus, rather than just a single aspect of the experience like in the case of videogames. E: What am I even talking about. Name me one RPG that lets you be a mage class that has a random chance of completely borking a spell and getting a random effect along the lines of blowing yourself up or temporarily changing your gender.

day 1 purchase/preorder for me. I gotta wonder to what degree it'll be 'enhanced' though. I suppose it will be more like an HD version rather than some crazy full-on 3D remake.