Sid

Actually, Catlike Reflexes is neat for soloing, considering three points in it gives your pet 9% to dodge. I once respecced for it to take down some troublesome group quest elites that I didn't feel like finding a party for. Anywhere else, though, and it's a pretty big waste.

The one talent that irks me every time I see it in my combat log is Spirit Bond, though. Sure, 1%/2% health regen for both of you sounds great in theory, but it's every ten seconds, which means if you are in combat for a whole minute you will only regen 12% of your max HP.

In PvP fights tend to last maybe one or two ticks, most likely one of you is going to die, and if you're losing Spirit Bond isn't going to magically save you.

In PvE, there's usually enough time to bandage, eat, or get heals from someone between pulls. Further, Spirit Bond has NO effect at all until you or your pet takes damage, and a healer or Mend Pet acts much faster to top either off and therefore make it useless again.

It would be fine if there weren't almost a dozen other decent lesser talents you can put two points into. Want to increase your range? How about drop the cooldown of Arcane Shot? Get a better Mend Pet? Revive Pet? Chance to daze on normal shots? Chance to stun on Concussive Shot? Even if they don't directly increase damage, I can guarantee you'll see the gain from them much more often than Spirit Bond.

I don't know, but a countdown clock after hearing that Silver members have to wait a week before free content becomes available to them really just makes me want to sigh and shake my head.

The sad thing is, it's not a glitch.

EVE is pretty neat, I've gathered from the trial.

I started using it at 30, but a bunch of stuff turned me off real fast. Suggesting grinding when there are still a handful of quests left just because the quest areas aren't in the "circuit area?" Asking to instance for almost a full level, and not just once? Oh, and don't forget looking at your XP bar on the "this should make you hit XX" bits.

You know what you can use it for? Look at the quest hubs he recommends, and hang out there until you finish everything that isn't too difficult for your level. Then move on to the next, and a couple levels later come back to mop up the leftovers. Don't worry about matching XP bars with him, or even being the same level, just keep progressing.

In hindsight, after I hit 60, I realized that grinding and instances ARE great ways for burning off rest XP, but the first is far too boring and the second generally makes me weep for humanity.

A month ago I did some AVing in the 50-60 bracket for the ammo bag, being the second best one in the game. Every single game was an absolute slaughter, with Horde pushing up to the bridge in Stormpike and Alliance just barely preventing them from taking the aid station. I grabbed the quest to defeat Drek'thar before I even started, and still hadn't finished it by the time I got my ammo bag.

Yesterday I picked up a decent bow, and because it was AV weekend and I STILL had that quest in my log, I popped into the 61-70 bracket figuring I'd at least get bonus rep and honor for the weekend. Well, not only did Alliance win at least four times in a row, but Horde never even got past Stonehearth.

The huge difference is travelling as a group with small groups of people staying by nodes until they finish capping.

"Wow. It's not like every post on the subject says you'll be able to display your rank with an option in the ui. Nope, not at all."

Do you always read only the first half of sentences?

Specifically, there's a lot of talk about new titles for accomplishing certain things, like placing in the arena (which has been confirmed), or becoming exalted with the battlegrounds factions.

No wonder it's the worst Worst Games Ever list, Musashi Samurai Legend didn't even get a mention.

It went for the "in-your-face anime sword guy with rockin' music" idea and failed miserably. Painful voices, no real plot development, forgettable music, slowdown when you do the simplest things, one savepoint in the central hub area coupled with long and incredibly frustrating linear levels that only have one "checkpoint" halfway through, and above all it was milked with a simplistic cellphone tie-in game.

Sadly, it was a sequel to the mostly-unknown PS1 game, Brave Fencer Musashi, which was one of the most charming games I've ever played. Apparently it's okay to take a steaming dump on something to make it "fresh," put it in a DVD case, and sell it on shelves.

I loved the commentary in HL2:Ep1.

The Half-Life series is great in the fact that the player has full control over the character at nearly EVERY point, except for some scenes where they're constricted and even then, there's some degree of movement. I like hearing the developers talk about how they "influence" the player to look in directions at points or figure out puzzles, especially when I just finished the game a short while before, giving me the opportunity to look back and say "you know, they're right about that."

It's all really interesting to me, between the insight into how the game and AI is programmed at times, thoughts about level design, and the difficulties and revisions that were made during playtesting.

I keep my games in an old playing card box. It's ripped so badly that there's probably more tape on it than there is cardboard, but I guess I won't have to worry about it ripping any more than it already is.

Also, mondo-huge bonus points for Brave Fencer.