This first post in my week of Guest Posts is brought to you by Haemon Shadowind, known generally as Shad: tree healer extraordinaire, occasional tank, distributor of

GC has been posting on the forums, mostly about the needed buff to Protection Warriors sustained damage, but he’s also touched on the AE aspect of tanking. Let’s break down what the Crab has communicated.

EDIT: Apparently this post is nearly identical to one posted by Rilgon over at SES. So… you can read that one instead and basically get the exact same message

I’ve been seeing a lot of different MMOs over the past 2 years crop up and fall to shit simply because there’s no innovation. Everything seems to be copying the same model and trying to throw own different little gimmicks that don’t ever mesh well with the trinity of MMORPGs (Healers, Tanks, DPS)

Ah, the Oculus. The bane of every PUG’s existence since Wrath launch. Not a bad instance, just loaded with too many gimmicks and not exactly friendly to ..

This post was inspired by a post I saw on Chris Brogan ’s blog. I figured it’d encompass most important raiding aspects nicely. Do your raiders believe they know all that

Player Spotlight: Maalakai of Premonition Maalakai is considered by many in the WoW community as one of the best PVE warlocks in the game.? He’s the warlock officer in , the top-ranked U.S. guild and has been a part of numerous world-first boss kills and 17 U.S

Those of you who actually played UO will consider this a silly question. Ultima Online not only definitely is a MMORPG, it also is one of the more important milestones of MMORPG history. So why the question

Two weeks ago, in response to my bitter grumblings about the continued nerfs to World of Warcraft’s Ulduar raid instance, a commenter asked me a relatively simple question: “I am a bit curious: what kind of fight [made] TBC raid[s] harder in your opinion?” While a basic answer is relatively easy to come up with – “less margin for error” – it is probably worth examining the various components and game mechanics that are used when crafting raid encounters. (Note: WoW encounters will be used as examples where possible.) The Basics The vast majority of MMOs are dominated by the so-called “holy trinity” model of encounter design.

Wrath has been out about 7 or 8 months now. Some players are just now reaching level 80.

This installment of All the World’s a Stage diverges from the series of roleplaying guides about how to roleplay your race, class, and professions, in order to have a closer look at different layers of social interaction in roleplaying, and see in which ways you can tailor your character for each one.

In the open Sunday thread there was quite an interesting discussion whether massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG) shouldn’t have more “roleplaying” in the sense of “theatrics” in them. That discussion is actually over 20 years old, because even when people were still playing roleplaying games without computers there was a wide range from players solely occupied with tactics, stats and gear to players running through woods in costumes wielding foam swords (you could say the swords had been nerfed ). Of course either form of roleplaying is completely valid.

Filed under: World of Warcraft , Fantasy , Game mechanics , MMO industry , Quests , PvE , Opinion At GDC09 , we got to talk with many people and listened to a variety of panels on all aspects of game design.