Send Wu your resume for review in our rigorous application process.
Let’s address the elephant in the room first: Starhawk’s single player campaign is underwhelming. The plot is a string of clichés and the many potential themes are pushed to the periphery, never to be expounded. But it does meet its (small) goal of preparing you for the multiplayer better than other games of late in a similar position. Call of Duty, Battlefield, and other shooters that are ostensibly built around their online play don’t familiarize you with all of the mechanics to be explored with the same economy of Starhawk. By the end you’ll be in a position to strategically employ every structure and control every vehicle, familiar with all of their strengths and weaknesses. Wisely avoiding big-set- piece-fluff and taxing exposition, the campaign aims low and succeeds, creating a positive (if minimal) selling point for the game.
Scientifically Sound Strategies
Starhawk is a bizarre creation, an amalgamation of several different gaming directives cobbled together with uneven success – a little more polish in a few areas would have gone a long way here. As is Starhawk is best played with a concessionary attitude, a conviction that you’ll eventually love everything here once you get past X/Y/Z.
Ormus' Robes sold separately.
This class is built on intentionally dying close to your target, triggering a series of death procs that will finish off your enemy. Although you should still be trying to deal damage yourself, you should be focused on staying as close as possible to your enemy so they eat the maximum amount of damage. What is the source of this post-mortem damage you ask? Rainbow Facets, gems that can be socketed into any piece that will allow them to fire moderately leveled spells capable of bringing your (low level) opponent into the dirt. There’s one for Meteor, Blizzard, Chain Lightning, and Poison Nova, but they’re all similar to this in design:
That’s correct: a Necro that doesn’t take any burdensome summons that will inevitably slow what is otherwise an unholy death machine. Not even a “body guard” golem, zombie Kevin Costner need not apply.
Bone shields SHOULD have been class exclusives for Necro's.
What a first glance resembles an obvious push over that would struggle through the Den of Evil is actually a formidable PVM threat that will do just fine deep into Nightmare difficulty. No, this build won’t win any PVP awards, thanks in large part to its AOE focus and reliance on corpses. That’s fine: the No-Summon Necro is too busy putting MeteOrb Sorcs to shame. Throwing down Lower Resist or Amplify Damage or Decrepify, focus firing a monster with Bone Spear, then finishing ‘em all off with Corpse Explosion is devastating. He’s also well positioned for Nightmare and Hell games thanks to excellent damage diversity, split nicely between magic, fire, and physical. The inherent damage versatility contained within just a few skills translates into an exceptionally economical distribution of points, minimizing wasted skills and keeping you well ahead of the curve post level 18. Gear options are pretty flexible too: since avoiding damage is pretty easy, you don’t have to blow everything in Vitality, letting you drop another 20-30 points into STR or DEX and don Archon Plates etc.
The Holy Shock Paladin rains down the holy wrath of god in PvE, and though it has a tendency to severely drop off against uber resistant monsters in Hell, the Holy Shock Paladin is the ultimate King of Normal and Nightmare difficulties.
The Holy Shock Paladin’s main source of Flash and Flare is his namesake, the Holy Shock aura. Not only does this aura add lightning damage to his attack, it discharges periodic bursts of lightning that damage anything within a certain range. Before long, that range extends well beyond the edge of your screen, and a lot of the time in earlier difficulties the Holy Shock Paladin simply wanders around each act, quizzical and confused, wondering where all of these dead demons came from.
Any monster that manages to pierce your static veil has to contend with the second beauty of this build, the ever useful Zeal. In conjunction with the lightning damage from Holy Shock, the Paladin is capable of unleashing enough electricity to power a time traveling DeLorean.
Weighing the pros and cons of a new console generation by talking points and the sheer weight of a disembodied rationale will only illuminate so much. Different parties have different motivations and prejudices, forming a prism through which they view the forthcoming generation. Let’s look at the different agents involved and phrase the next gen question in terms they find meaningful.
(NOTE: To start the armchair analysis off on the right foot, I’m going to divide the ubiquitous term ‘hardcore gamer’ into ‘production value gamer’ and ‘egalitarian gamer’)
My personal rig
Do ‘PRODUCTION VALUE GAMERS’ want a new shiny new machine built to show off the latest and greatest? The answer is unequivocally yes here, especially since these folk are already used to spending hundreds ever year on gaming hardware. Over the past few years this relatively small set of consumers has seen the graphic and physics capabilities of their cutting edge PC’s sprint past that of their PS3′s and 360′s. The difference between PC and console is night and day for certain games. The PC and its programmable keyboard offers 100 anecdotal advantages on multi-platform games like Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, and even Battlefield 3 – a new generation of consoles offers another crack at mitigating their deficiencies in this area.
The recent bulletins and media bytes scavenged from all the usual suspects offers us a unique opportunity for reflection on The Great Three’s future. With each console maker in serious design and deliberation mode for their next platform, the steady trickle of news and “leaks” start to gain legitimate mass as summer approaches. Before we know it E3 will besiege us with Sony and Microsoft revealing their visions for the future. Until then their teams will scramble to create this coherent plan while everyone else gives in to endless speculation.
Some of the absurd ideas thrown out for the 'Xbox720'
Such fodder provides a rare window into not just the future plans and plights of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, but the video game landscape at large. We know just enough to make some definite projections, but so much is still up in that air that the imagination can run willy nilly. What makes this dynamic more interesting than it’s ever been is the spotless horizon: it’s anyone’s game.