Forum menus tweaked, cleaner and easier to browse

May 28, 2008

"If you've visited the main page of the official forums lately, you'll notice that things are a little different -- they've replaced the simple links to class, realm, and battlegroup forums with a dynamic interface. All the forums that were there are still there, but the navigation to them is a little faster and less cluttered. It's not Flash or anything fancy, so it should work just fine across any number of widely used browsers. Something like this was probably inevitable, considering how much Blizzard's WoW forums have been multiplying -- there's one for every release, event, and topic Blizzard can think of. And considering they have only so many people running them, it means the threads further off the beaten path, especially realm threads, can run rampant with forum violations. Not that that's a problem -- what's in those threads can be pretty entertaining. But Blizzard moderates the forums for a reason, and the more threads they have, the harder time they'll have moderating them. Chain Lightning, with a 2 second cast and a chance to deal 210% of its regular damage (100% on the first target, 70% on the second and 40% on the third) would probably be the spam of choice for elemental shamans if not for the fact that it has a 6 second cooldown. The typical rotation will be three lightning bolts (with Lightning Mastery reducing cast time to 2 seconds) followed by a Chain. (This is without taking spell haste into account.) PvP caster shamans will most likely use their talents to ensure that they can cast an instant Chain with each hop guaranteed to crit in what is often considered the 'insta-gib' for 3x3 arenas. It can put out an impressive amount of damage to all three of your opponents at once if done properly, making chain lightning a popular option for both PvE and PvP. Okay, we've covered pretty much every direct damage spell shamans have access to.

Next week we'll go more into detail on how the talents in each tree contribute to these spells and abilities. There's a lot of ground to cover, and a plethora (yay, I got to use it in a sentence!) of talents to discuss, so we may have to break it up by spec and focus on elemental first. We'll see how it goes. " "Gamedaily has the report that Xfire, the online service for gamers (that we have coordinated a few events with in the past), has broken a whopping ten million users. That, you'll probably realize, is just as many as World of Warcraft, and in fact, while Xfire apparently has support for over 1,200 games, World of Warcraft always seems to rank pretty high on the list. In fact, our friends at Xfire have another number that they've shared with us: in the month of April alone, Xfire users spent 16,000 years online -- that is, if you add up all the time spent online by all the users of the client just in April, you get a time period longer than pretty much the whole history of civilization on Earth. That's huge. Which makes us wonder just how long players actually spend in WoW -- surely not all WoW players are using Xfire, so the number has to be much bigger than that. At any rate, Xfire is apparently banging, and odds are that WoW is playing a big part. Those of you who have been around for a little while will no doubt know about one of the most useful resources in this World of Warcraft: WoWWiki. wow gold If you're new to the party, let me tell you about it. WoWWiki is, as the name suggests, a wiki about all things Warcraft. From boss strategies to patch history to insanely detailed lore, if it's about the Warcraft series, it's probably on there somewhere.

wow gold And if not, it's a wiki, so you can write it yourself! The occasion for this particular post is that they have just completed some major upgrades to their software and infrastructure. mp3 players Here are the highlights: WoWWiki is now hosted in a distributed fashion across the Wikia network, which should mean more stability and less chance of catastrophic failure. A new default skin, which looks nice and classy. cheap wow gold The OpenSearch plugin is now working again, so you can add WoWWiki as a search engine in Firefox or IE (though I still prefer Firefox's search keywords). Click on the menu by your search field while browsing WoWWiki to check it out. wow gold A proper sidebar menu, with links to important parts of the site. wow gold This fixes my single biggest complaint about the site, which is that it was hard to navigate. "