zircon

But I think the items would have been MORE relevant if they could be used more frequently in combat. For example, the Whip is pretty much only for puzzles. So are the clawshots. I would be interested in seeing fights that could be approached using not just the sword but other tools as well. Yeah, I know there are enemies like the hopping head guys that require the bellows, but I suppose what I want to see would be fights that can be done in a number of ways. That's why I like the bow & arrow.

How to make awesome, big drums with inexpensive samples (I'm using the most excellent Goldbaby sample sets here) and cheap/free plugins in FL Studio 10. Simple as that! Don't spend hundreds of dollars on the overcompressed Vengeance stuff.

Glad you're liking it! I forget my PSN thing but I think it's zirconst.. will have to double check next time I'm on. I did the Natsu and Zwei stage themes (as well as Elysium like you said), plus the intro cinematic that plays after the first 10 seconds or so. The one where Sieg fights Nightmare and wins. I also did the character creation music, so sorry in advance if you hear it 5000 times Jill co-wrote the end credits and also performed on one of the story mode cinematics.

LoL is more farm-centric but the rate of kills occurring is just as high if not higher than what I remember from HoN (which, as I understand it, is even faster than Dota2). The #1 thing that drives me crazy about Dota2 btw is just the ridiculously long animations. I can't stand how long it takes for attacks and spells to go off and I really don't want to spend months and months learning yet another full game's worth of animation times. With LoL, stuff happens more or less instantly. With HoN, the animations seemed very obvious and easy to see, whereas in Dota2, with heroes that are in some cases the same size or smaller than creeps it's just harder to see what's going on. Hate that shit. I'll take worse graphics any day of the weak if animations are fast and clear.

Yeah and honestly you can just spend $20-30 to get the boxed edition, which gives you a TON of champions plus RP to buy even more. Just like how HoN was (not the entire cast, but still, quite a big chunk.)

This is my favorite: I plan on doing an atmospheric drum n' bass remix.

IMO it's WAY more exciting than HoN/Dota2, even in bot lane. Because mana is easier to come by, people are more encouraged to go for harass and kill attempts. Much like how Super Street Fighter IV discouraged defensive play in SFIV by reducing damage across the board (ENCOURAGING more combos and offense). It is not uncommon to see 10-15 kills within 10 minutes. Even if I'm in a relatively passive bottom farming lane I'm constantly going for harass and kills, particularly if we have a gank from jungle or mid. While HoN/DotA do encourage more roaming, LoL definitely has a ton of offensive play. In fact at IEM Kiev games were clocking in at like... 30 minutes on average because so much was happening early. Play with me sometime and I'll show you. Also, Ziggs looks really fun. His passive is boring but his abilities do reflect a nice change in design. I love that they are all skillshots and can be used for multiple purposes, particularly his satchel charge.

Well the problem isn't clearing minions, really. Tons of champs can kill minions really quickly with minimal damage to friendly minions. The problem is doing fast, reliable damage to towers. In HoN/DotA, you have heroes that can do intense damage to towers with abilities, sometimes from a pretty long range. There are also heroes with pets or minions that can severely damage the tower at no risk to the heroes. You're basically forcing a teamfight because if the defenders don't react, their tower will go down very quickly. The other thing is that LoL towers (a) do a lot more damage than in HoN, ( get an armor bonus with no minions around, and © snowball in damage when attacking the same target. So all of these things make it much harder to have any sort of pushing strategy.

But that's not really true, as recent tournaments have shown. For example Vlad and Morde were often overlooked as being weaker than champs like Brand or Cass, but are now becoming more popular and viable as people realize what they bring to the table can be gamechanging. Likewise, M5 with their AD Kennen strategy is turning out to be on the level of HoN's Electrician craze, Shyvana (previously thought to be low tier) is suddenly dominating, etc. I can't think of many champions that are simply worse than others. Even AD carries like Miss Fortune, considered to be generally not as good as Vayne, Graves etc. have a place in high-level play (countering heal-heavy compositions). Riot's recent champions have been generally boring but everyone agrees with that, even Riot. They said as of this next champion they're trying to bring in more interesting abilities/mechanics and kits. I guess we'll see if that's true.

Haha. I agree with a good chunk of that, but to be fair, the game is fairly balanced competitively. The top tier of champions is pretty big and there aren't a whole lot that are just bad picks. Even ones like Vlad and Morde, previously thought of as underpowered, have been used with success. HoN and DotA's hero rosters are all over the place which seems to be more of a balance challenge, considering HoN has always had major balance problems. Haven't played enough DotA/2 to speak to that, though.

For what it's worth, I had LA and OoA and was not able to beat either. This was when I was much younger of course (particularly with LA) but I remember getting frustrated. Where do I go? What do I do? I think there's a middle ground between that and Skyward Sword.

Leona is arguably a support champion too. Their explanation for not adding more is that you can really only have one support on a team at a time, while the other four slots can be bruisers, ranged AD, junglers, AP carries, etc. Not to mention some comps don't have any support at all making it a pretty underplayed role. I kind of agree with that logic, but I think the solution is to make champs that CAN be played as support and do a lot to help the lane without being heal/stun bots. As for balance/rework stuff I get the impression that Riot has a pretty big roster of designers split between different teams. I don't think it's as easy as one person wanting to make a change and that change getting implemented. With as many players as they have they are probably very sensitive to anything they do, and I'm sure each change has to go through layers and levels of approval and testing before it can be even considered as a live change.

You do get used to the controls. I assume you're having trouble with the sword stuff? The key is to not make huge exaggerated motions which can mess up the sensor, and also to not move super fast. You need to be quick, but also deliberate and not jerky. Once you get used to it there's a certain elegance to the swordplay.

Well, numbers can be tweaked, but the basic idea is that you get gold as you hit minions regardless of when you hit them. Balancing for AOE skills could be done by reducing gold gain from AOE skills, or just see what happens since doing that will push your lane severely and make you more vulnerable to ganks. At least IMO, and I think the author of the original proposal would disagree, the idea isn't to take away actions/decisions from the laning phase but rather allow the player to focus their attention more on game objectives like killing the opponents and pushing towers as opposed to just running around waiting for life bars to be in the right spot. It's sort of an absurd little minigame if you think about it. They're definitely moving toward making roamers more viable and bringing down overly powerful jungling champions. Though I didn't have the chance to watch the games, apparently the IEM was dominated by a team using a crazy strategy that didn't fit in the meta at all. There's still room for it. Yeah, at lower level games everyone does standard 1-1-2 but I remember pretty distinctly that HoN was the same way. 99% of games had very similar lane setups.

I came up with an idea while playing HoN frequently which was basically like this: * Creeps have a last hit gold award, and a gold bank. The last hit gold award is about 50% of what it is now. The gold bank is 75% of the present last hit bonus. * Once a creep drops below 50% health, any damage done to it by a player will proportionally award gold from the creep's bank to that player. If multiple players hit the creep, the gold is split. The gold is actually given on creep death. For example, let's take a blue caster minion and assume it's worth 25g right now. In the new system, whoever last hits the creep will receive about 12g. However, the creep also has about 19g in its bank which you can only get by whittling down its life. Here's a hypothetical situation with underlying math: * Creep hits 300/600 health (50% of max health). * Ezreal last hits creep from 60 health to nothing. 60 health is 20% of 300, so Ezreal gets the last hit bonus (12g) as well as 20% of the gold bank (4g) for a total of 16g. * But what if Janna did 100 damage to the creep before Ez killed it? In this case, Janna would get 33% of the bank (100/300 health) or about 6g. This doesn't affect Ezreal's gold at all. * Alternatively, Brand AOEs a creep wave (6 creeps) doing 75% of max health in damage. Since this brings them to 1/4 health (25% below the halfway point) he would get 25% of the bank gold for each creep, or 28 gold. It's still beneficial for him to try and finish/last hit but if he messes up his last hitting somewhat then he'll still have secured some kind of reward. Obviously numbers can be tweaked, but the idea is to have something of a compromise between the old system and new. For example the last-hit bonus could be much lower if we wanted to de-emphasize that, and the gold bank made bigger. Or the gold bank could start from 100% health instead of 50% (but I think that would encourage too much pushing.) The end goal is to reduce reliance on last hitting while also allowing supports to get a bit of extra gold by playing a little more offensively and doing some damage to creeps too. It would in particular reward champs like Leona, Lux and Galio who normally aren't fantastic supports, but with this new system would be able to accumulate extra gold through their AOE abilities while the carry still gets last hits. It doesn't detract from the positioning aspect of the game or the tactical decisions.

Jill and I just beat the game. We probably had 80-85%ish completion. Didn't have every upgrade/item or heart piece, and there were sidequests undone. But we completed it. Overall I would give the game an 8/10 on a TRUE 1-10 scale (5 being an average fun game with flaws, 10 being perfect, 1 being garbage, and I would only give a couple of games a 10.) Here are my thoughts (spoilers, obviously, so highlight!) There was a whole lot to like with this game. The strongest element was the story, surprisingly. Lots of emotional parts and it was a bit different than "Zelda gets kidnapped, beat Ganon!" The puzzles were all excellent and well-thought out. Combat was also a big step up from some previous Zelda games. The music was fantastic, though the inclusion of some cheesy MIDI stuff in key scenes was a bit confusing. Graphics were pretty good too despite the non-HD aspect, with some really beautiful environments. Controls were unfortunately not quite perfect. I definitely had a lot of trouble in certain spots, even on mundane monsters, due to not being able to execute a thrust or a precise slash. For some reason it wasn't as much of an issue on bosses, but primarily Mokoblins. Also, having to recenter the Wiimote constantly with Down was really annoying in a couple of spots. Not a dealbreaker but these things did annoy me several times as Jill can attest. We didn't really have a problem with the pacing of the game, aside from the aforementioned obvious dialogue/hints from Fi about where to go and what to do. Things got a lot better in the last quarter of the game or so, in that respect. Also, I really didn't have any problem with the linearity of the game. It always seemed like there was stuff to do in Skyloft, or with backtracking. But that does bring me to my biggest complaint, and the main reason why I wouldn't rate the game higher: There is way too much reuse of the same content. You're essentially going back to three core areas of the game THREE TIMES, four times if you count the final dungeon! I'm not really talking about this from a gameplay perspective, since obviously the puzzles were fresh each time, there are new challenges, etc. But it just struck me as less than interesting to backtrack to Faron Woods for the 3rd time. I was hoping for new environments and enemies, especially since stuff like Mokoblins and Keese got reused so many times even in the first three. Basically, once we were in the midst of a new dungeon, solving puzzles and fighting enemies, things were great. There was just a sense of "Oh, I have to go there AGAIN?" later on as you honed in on your new objective. I have to wonder whether this was really an intentional choice, or a cost-saving measure because they didn't want to create entirely new sets of enemies and environments. Of course it was really clever how they reused the same settings the 3rd time around, but even so, it felt overused. There were a few other minor annoyances sprinkled throughout, such as having to sit through tons of dialog/cutscenes to redo minigames, for example, or the stupid shock enemies. Also, the upgrade system was a neat idea, but the distribution of items was ultra-lopsided. I couldn't upgrade most of my stuff for most of the game because I was missing supposedly common items like Tumbleweed, Monster Claws and Ornamental Skulls and didn't want to farm for them (who does?) On the other hand, I had tons of specific bugs/items and even supposedly rare stuff like Goddess Plumes and Dusk Relics. I think the rates could have been a bit better thought out. I've never actually beaten a Zelda game before - never played WW, 5 minutes of TP, Water Temple in OoT and maybe halfway through LttP. So, it felt really good to complete this game and see the resolution of the story. I felt like a badass beating the last boss, who was appropriately hard (killed me once) until I figured out the proper rhythm to blocking. Most of the puzzles were genuinely challenging and whether it was Jill or I that solved them, we both felt really smart and accomplished afterwards. Anyway, all in all, we really enjoyed the game and will have many memories of playing it together. All the niggles and complaints I've listed don't detract from the sum of experiences we had playing it. I hope some of you had as much fun as we did.

At first I thought that AD build was really weird. The cost of Zerker Greaves, 3x Doran's and Wriggle's would be 3945 gold, not counting pots and wards. For that you're getting 2 movements, 25% AS, 300 health, 24% lifesteal, 30 armor, 53 AD and extra creep damage/free ward. Not too bad, but what about your next 2k gold? At most you're just getting the BF Sword, so that's another 45 AD. My build is typically Doran's, Zerker, BF Sword, Vamp Scepter first. That's 3475g. Once I'm at 6k gold, I have my Infinity Edge. So comparing the two builds: 25% AS, 300 health, 24% lifesteal, 30 armor, 98AD, extra creep dmg/free ward. vs. 25% AS, 100 health, 15% lifesteal, 90 AD, 25% crit, +50% crit damage. This was definitely a surprise comparison. Your build offers quite a bit more utility + survivability and more lifesteal. It IS less damage overall when you factor in crit, but a lot better for farming. I should start doing this. I guess you start selling Doran's for IE components? With regards to top lane, how do you feel about Tryndamere, Ryze and Gangplank? Tryn seems to be a very hard counter to a lot of tops, since he just does so much damage and has excellent sustain. He can force people out at level 1-3 better than most anyone. Ryze is fairly safe (hard to kill) and a great pusher/farmer when he wants to be. Gangplank is one that I often see dominating, but I can't seem to do well with him at top. It's not all that hard to harass him and he's very mana-reliant.

I'd like to pick your brain about a few things Zero, build-wise. First off, Cait, Vayne, Graves bot. What's your preferred order, runes and masteries? Here's what I do: * 6 Arpen reds * 3 AD reds * 3 AD quints * 9 mana regen/lvl yellows * 9 MR/level blues Here's my reasoning. Arpen is better than AD later on, but raw AD helps last hitting + harassing early, and improves AD-scaling skills. I play cautiously enough to avoid getting harassed much and thus don't bother with armor or flat MR. On the other hand, I like to spam harass and need a constant stream of mana to do so. Exception is having a Soraka lanemate but I can't often depend on that. * 21/0/9 masteries Same reasoning as above. I like offense and the extra mana from Utility. Buildwise, I almost always start with Doran's Blade, which with the above masteries puts me at 70-80 starting AD - very healthy. Then, if I'm doing really well, I get BF sword + T1 boots on my first back. If the lane is tricky and I get forced back or die, I will get another Doran's, T1 boots and Vamp Scepter before doing anything else. Next up is finishing IE and Zerker Greaves, followed by either Bloodthirster or Zeal. After that is finishing Phantom Dancer, then Last Whisper. The final slot could either be another Bloodthirster or Banshee's Veil depending on how badly I'm being focused and how much CC they have. Thoughts on that? I wouldn't necessarily do this on ALL ranged AD, for example on Corki I like to get an early Sheen and build Zerker's -> Triforce -> BT first.

Posted some thoughts on item rebalancing over on Reddit... I guess nobody liked the ideas though, heh. http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/ouow5/item_rebalance_patch_notces_what_id_like_to_see/

Yeah, I think vocal music has always been extraordinarily popular.

I think their balance is good, but yea, Udyr is insanely OP. Trundle is good too, but at least one tier below. He is even more of a beast than Udyr when his ult is up, at which point he's basically unkillable, but his damage output is not as high, and he doesn't have any AOE damage. Still, good luck running from a Trundle with Frozen Mallet, his Contaminate on the ground, and Pillar of Filth. On the other hand, if his ult is down, he's not too hard to 1v1 (though he can always pillar + run at the end). His damage is just too low.

Just in case it isn't abundantly clear... Every U.S. citizen on this forum needs to vote for people that DON'T support bills like this, SOPA, and PIPA. Please. VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION.

There are plenty of Netflix-esque streaming services for music, not to mention custom download stuff. Rhapsody, Napster, Grooveshark, and Spotify to name a few, while Pandora is quite similar. It's... OK. In my experience, the old model is still WAY better. I've made very little from streaming services relative to selling albums on iTunes. I'm 100% opposed to SOPA but let's be real for a second here. First of all, at most, typical mainstream CDs were only about $20 if you got them at the absolute highest price. You could usually get them cheaper. Second, the cost of the materials has almost nothing to do with the cost of a CD, and that "argument" is one of the very worst I've ever seen. It would make sense if record labels were selling blank CDs, but in actuality CDs have content (music) on them. That music takes money to produce. There are the main performers, songwriters, producer(s), engineer(s), studio owners, etc., to say nothing of the business/marketing components. This was even more true in the 80s and 90s when music production was way more expensive than it is now (and now, music is cheaper, so...)

Is that sarcasm? Pretty sure he didn't veto it, he just threatened to, and only because it didn't give the executive branch enough power. Anyway, so far today I've: * Called both my district representatives (one of them picked up and hung up immediately, the other said they don't support it) * Emailed both senators Interestingly, one of the reps said BOTH bills had been pulled. Source?

I disagree quite a bit with that post. I think combat is fun/varied, the world is gorgeous (and fun to travel through), there's tons of customization, etc. He's right that the dungeon design is a little lame since there are few archetypes, but given how good everything else is... I can't complain. Easily one of the best games I've played in awhile.