Holiday Hues

Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose, wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose, wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose, panda hippo gnu deer!

How do you spell the color between white and black? Grey? Gray?

Random screenshot

Some of them aren’t even finished.

Next time, on RO History!

No, I didn’t update it. But I figured I’d write up a quick overview of what’s coming up next on the timeline. This next portion covers my entrance into the large-scale WoE scene as a member of Insurrection. A poet, I am not, but I wrote a little something as a preview.

A full year, I think it was.

They say being in Insur changes you,

It drives you into the abyss, to the edge of hell.

I’ve seen the darkness,

Seen others around me embrace it.

Just a spectator, I watched, and I waited,

For the light to pull me from the abyss.

RO History III ! Coming soon to a blog you visit.

Defense of the Ancients

Or DotA for short. As it stands, DotA is one of the main reasons why Warcraft III is still thriving in the midst of more recent games. Draco and I have been playing a variant called DotA: Allstars for a few months already, and quite frankly, it’s been a blast. If I recall correctly, I promised a Warcraft III post some time ago. Of course, I never actually got to writing it because I was busy playing it .-. ! Having recently moved to a new house, Draco is without intarwebs for a week or so, so this is as good a time as any to throw out my raves and rants about it.

Warcraft III was the first in Blizzard’s line of real-time strategy games to offer a new type of unit, the hero class. Heroes were a whole ten steps above normal units, featuring the ability to gain and use items, level up and gain stats, and learn a multitude of skills. With the right items and skills, a single hero can and will decimate an enemy’s forces. Which is fine as you can only have one of a certain type of hero at a time. Heroes became a vital part of early game attacks, being the most powerful force in any stage of the game. Many professional players would even utilize heroes by themselves, independant of the player’s normal units. This in turn led to the precursor of DotA, which focuses on the player’s control of a single hero throughout the game.

The premise of DotA is very simple. Players are split between two teams, the Sentinel and the Scourge. At the beginning of the game, you choose the hero you’ll be using for the rest of the match. The Sentinel and Scourge both have different heroes, so their play styles differ quite a bit. The objective of the game is to destroy the enemy’s primary structure, which is pretty much like an emp in RO terms. However, these primary structures (Sentinel’s is the World Tree, Scourge’s is the Frozen Throne) are invulnerable so long as the towers leading up to it are still active. Between the two team’s bases are three paths which house three towers for each team. These towers serve as your base’s primary defenses and act as a damage barrier which deter the advancement of enemies (because dying is a bad thing in DotA). Although it is possible to sneak deeper into the enemy’s base, doing so to destroy towers would be futile, as towers closer to the enemy’s base are invulnerable until the towers leading up to it are destroyed. So are you supposed to suicide rush these towers ’till they drop? Of course not! At 30 second intervals, three sets of creeps, or normal friendly units, spawn at your base. Each set traverses one of the three paths leading towards the enemy’s base until they encounter either the enemy creeps, a tower, or an enemy hero, at which point the’ll stop to engage the enemy. They’ll continue walking and fighting until they die or destroy the enemy’s emp, whichever comes first (though they’re likely to die). Given a clean game without intervention from heroes, creeps and towers will push each other equally, resulting in a drawn out stalemate. This is where you and your teammates come in.

As a hero, you have access to multiple item shops and a healing fountain back at your spawn point in your base. Instead of the normal 10 level limit in the campaign mode, heroes in DotA have 25 levels, making leveling and farming gold a few of your top priorities. The objective of your base’s creeps may be to destroy the enemy’s emp, but this is a competitive game and as a hero, you are pretty much expected to kill enemy heroes. Skills range from damage dealing skills to support skills and skills that slow the enemies down. Why would you want to slow them down? So you can kill them before they run away. Shocking, I know. In a sense, DotA is much like any other first person shooter.

Draco and I normally don’t play against other players, but against AI players. I personally feel it’s more fun when no real person gets their feelings hurt over a video game. Blah blah blah filler. Because this paragraph is lacking. I’ll work on my RO history later.