Letter Never Sent

All you gaming geeks will appreciate this graphic. It shows all the games that have been based on id software’s various 3D rendering engines including Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, and Doom 3. Unfortunately, past success does not guarantee future success, so it will be interesting to see which games use the Doom 3 engine other than Quake 4. Many new games are based on Epic Games’ Unreal / Unreal 2 engine and presumably Valve Software will license their incredible Half Life 2 engine to developers. For a shape of things to come check out some of the screenshots from the Unreal 3 engine.

Last night some guys from work and I grouped up for World of Warcraft. Before I quit for the night we did a bit of dueling and I actually did pretty well, especially considering my heals (healing spells) are pretty weak. Here’s a few good strategies when dueling with an affliction-specced warlock character:

Against warriors:

1. Summon your succubus prior to PvP. When duel countdown begins set her to Seduce the target. She will wind-up Seduction before duel actually begins, which is most likely a bug. When Seduction hits the warrior will be mezzed preventing him from rushing you.
2. Cast a couple of your DoT’s (damage over time spells) like Corruption or Curse of Agony, both of which are instacast (no casting time) with an affliction specification.
3. Before Seduction interrupts from the damage cast Fear, making the warrior run off out of control.



4. Cast any remaining DoT’s like Immolation or Siphon Life while the warrior is Feared.
5. If warrior comes out of Fear, you can fear him again up to a total of three times per duel. This buys you a lot of time. In the mean time, you can also continue to Seduce. It’s all about preventing him from hitting you with a melee attack. Just keep applying the DoT’s while he runs around Feared. Any spells with more damage will interrupt the Fear effect.
6. When the opponent’s hit points get low enough start using Drain Life, which drain the target’s life while adding to your own. By this time you will also need some heals, so use your Health Stone and healing potions or bandages.
7. Eventually, once all the DoT’s stack you will start doing some serious damage. Just keep him out of melee range and under siege the entire time and you will eventually eat through all his armor and hitpoints. This same strategy works pretty well if you summon your Imp, except he will be unable to Seduce.

The WordPress team has released its latest upgrade to the open-source, PHP-based blogging system. The major upgrade seems to do with their new templating system, which seems to be working pretty well, although I had to tweak out a few things to get their default template to work. As you can see, I have modified it a little and will be making more changes to it in the future. I had to turn off pretty permalinks to get the previous entry links to work. I’m using an image rotating script I found to make the header image swap randomly.

A few things are still needing work. For example, the feed links at the bottom of the page are not working correctly, or at least, they’re not for me. One thing I think will really help WordPress is that the new default template is nice. They’ve had trouble competing on the template front, but the adoption of the new templating system should create a lot of interest.