Debesun

If you're not listening to William Tell Overture: Final when the gates to AV open, you're doing it completely wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7O91GDWGPU

"you basically yield all ownership of the writing to them for perpetuity and they can use, edit or even sell it as they see fit."

Well, it is their universe / IP that you're going to be using. What could you otherwise gain if you were to write a short story about WoW, SC or Diablo and not submit it to the contest in comparison to the grand prize / runner up prizes?

At least this way, you can get your name out, some official recognition, and goodies if they believe your story is good enough. It would seem to be a more productive use of time if you submitted it than if you were to just stick the story on the forums or a personal website only to be recognised as another fan fiction and forgotten some time later.

Well I have no idea why I called Half-Life and Portal 'Franchises' as they're just a series of games. Damn you film industry and blurring the line between the terms 'series' and 'franchise'.

And Team Fortress 2 might be another game you may have heard about that they have been involved with. It's been getting a bit more attention lately since it went free to play not too long ago.

Well, I assume the most obvious way to relate him to something that you may have heard about is that it is his company that was behind the development of the Portal, and Half-Life franchise.

To go into slightly more detail...

He's the managing director of Valve Software (which is also behind the leading video game digital distributing service, 'Steam'). People have many reasons as to why they think he's awesome, but for me at least, it's because he's one of the very few people in the video game development industry where despite how much the company has grown, they've pretty much stayed true to their roots of giving people actual quality games, in the face of more and more companies falling into a more 'modern' practice of top end development companies being bought out by publishers and pushing out titles annually and pretty much milking franchises.

They're also one of very few big development companies that is still privately held and do not sell their stock publicly (they don't need to keep shareholders happy, etc). As well as not being owned by a publishing company such as EA, Activision, etc.

He's also very supportive of the mod and independent (indy) game development community with a history of hiring developers of popular mods to (re)make their game with their tools and support.

And some cool stories about him from "The Final Hours of Portal 2"

http://i.imgur.com/TKE9p.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/CrlU8.jpg

Total bro.

*The last section

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/encyclopedia/429.xml

The last paragraph should give you some insight about how they dealt with their magic addiction.

Should the current loot table for Ragnaros be considered final as of this current point of time?

I’m curious because it seems quite silly to attempt to balance multiple specs, but only give certain specs access to more powerful weaponry. I don’t have a problem with legendary drops giving the wielder a boost to their own damage seeing as it’s more of a flavour item. Neither do I have a problem with the final boss of a raid instance having loot of higher item-level than other bosses. I do have a problem though with the current available drops from Ragnaros that are of higher item level as shown on both wowhead and the armoury only being usable for certain specs.

The trinkets are generally usable by all specs, but it’s the weapons and armour where things start to irk me. Feral, rogues, enhance and 1h frost / fury have no weapon, whereas cloth wearing DPS specs have access to a weapon and 2 pieces of cloth armour (one could argue that rogues have access to the bow, but you can easily imagine the bitching that would be caused from that. Much like that when a hunter is given equal priority of a melee weapon with a feral, rogue, etc).

Why didn’t Blizzard just use the same idea that they used on Arthas where he dropped weapons that everyone could use (with the only spec being given the short end of the stick being frost DK’s with no usable weapon for their spec from that specific boss)?

Am I the only person that’s slightly annoyed with this? It just seems to make fine-tuned balancing and making sure classes are scaling correctly redundant when they don’t give equal distribution of loot for weapons that generally give most classes a fairly substantial gain in DPS.

Then again, I don’t really have to worry about that for a while. I just need to redirect my rage at the bug that is constantly changing my intended target to one that I was previously attacking / targeted, and not being able to interrupt certain mobs in cat form because there isn’t a path available for the little charge, therefore the entire ability is cancelled, and I cop a face full of spell stuff.

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

@WaterRouge

Zanzil? ¯\(°_o)/¯

He's the only boss in ZG whose voice immediately came to me as memorable and managed to fit in quite well.

To me at least.