Thursday, April 21, 2011

Anatomy of a WoW character

Reality is a horrible place that only those who are dead inside enjoy. Even if you're not into gaming per say there is something in everyone's life that helps them cope with the outside world by way of imagination. My current addiction, just like twelve million other people, is World of Warcraft. While basically everyone has heard of it, most don't understand it which seems like a perfect opportunity to show everyone the anatomy of a WoW character. (Not the actual physical anatomy... Let's be real here, that'd be weird.)




The first and best part about the game is probably the sweet looking gear you can collect throughout a career of questing your way around the world and battling those who'd seek to destroy it. This is my most recent character, a warrior named Hamoorabi (pun totally intended). Out of the six years playing the game and trying just about every class I decided to get back to my beginings and reroll another warrior. My old account got permabanned for credit card theft because I gave it to a friend during one of my quitting phases and so I had to rebuild at the beginning of the previous expansion. Anywho, the picture above shows off the neat visual aspect of my character's gear.





This next part is where things get a bit tricky. See generally each class has three different sets of talent tree's that help determine what role your character will play. My spec (specialization) above is built for Tanking which basically means that I stand in front of the group and cause enough threat to get baddies to attack me instead of the group. Now for most that would seem counter intuitive right? Getting hit is bad? Well normally you'd be correct except that tanks are built to withstand the hardest hits in the game and with the help of a few good teammates live through the encounters. A Tank's job is to hold the attention of enemies and mitigate as much damage as possible with stats like Block, Dodge, Parry, and Stamina but we'll get to those in a minute.




Stats are the biggest part of the game. You can't kill anything unless your stats are built the right way. That being said my warrior's stats (shown above) are relatively average or slightly above average. Stats vary from Strength and Stamina to Intellect and Spirit all the way to more intricate things like Hit Rating and Expertise. Now I won't get too technical here because this is supposed to be for people who don't know anything about WoW but I will say that this part of the game is the most intense. Boss fights? Pretty interesting. Game mechanics? Challenging. Abilities and skills? Tough to learn but simple once understood. Character stats? Nerdgasm. Imagine a gearhead tuning his car to run better on an open downpipe to make it faster. That's the general idea behind character stats. The more you understand and fine tune them the better your character will be.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Rainmeter and Objectdock create interesting visuals



There are a number of cool visual effects in just about everything except radio and to be honest, I'm a huge fan of neat looking things. The picture above is a few tweaks I made to my desktop interface which you might think "That doesn't seem too impressive..." but what you may not know is that its actually running Windows 7.

Rainmeter is responsible for all the need gadgets in the top right corner which are actually functional widgets form fit to what I want to know about my system. The big gauge looking thing is actually a clock that displays the time and date. Next to it are a few other gadgets like network traffic and ram/cpu usage along with hard drive activity.






Along with the neat visual effects of the desktop, switching between windows in full screen is subject to the classic alt tab function OR you can use the windows key + tab which is much cooler in my opinion. (Windows key + tab function shown above)




This is the interface I set up for my laptop. Same thing as the one at the top utilizing Rainmeter and Objectdock, though the dock and the icons are much cooler on this one in my opinion.

There are plenty of resources out there on the web about how to build your own Rainmeter gadgets and where to find premades. The same applies to Objectdock.