Aion 3.0 Chronicles: Debarim the Omnipotent

Since most people scarcely even know this boss isn't a Sandstorm target I figured I'd throw together a handy little guide detailing how to kill him.

Information!
1. You don't need a templar to kill this.
2. He has an enrage timer, do not attempt without a solid set of dps.
3. Sometimes the floor doesn't light up the way it is supposed to, have someone who can see the effect direct the group away from it!
4. His spawn timer is less than 24 hours.
5. He spawns on both channels.
6. Suggested alliance size: 10-12


Guide:
First off, this is the legendary-grade Jotun boss that hangs out in the northernmost hallway of Debarim's Studio in Sarpan (that air PvP zone nobody uses). Getting there is easy as there are no mobs in the hallway leading up to his room.

It is important to note that upon starting this boss encounter the door to the room will close, potentially locking opponents out or separating your group should the boss fight be started accidentally. Also note that you can kisk in this room and should do so to avoid potential wipes.

Phase 1:
Debarim starts off by mixing a long range AoE, which will likely hit the whole group, and a single knockdown skill on the tank. Neither of which does much damage and should cause no stress for the healers or the tank. The AoE hits for roughly 2-3k and the knockdown skill is roughly 3-4k. This phase is rather simple and shouldn't take much time.

Phase 2:
Once Debarim hits 75% health he will cast rage, stunning the group, and begin to use Terraspin. This skill hits everyone in the designated area for roughly 7-8k and should be avoided if at all possible. Thankfully, avoiding this skill is simple as there is always text preceding the skill that will say "The center ground is shaking, move." and it can be either left, right, or center. Simply move out of the lit zone (or follow someone who can actually see it) and you will avoid the damage completely. This phase is made even more simple by the fact that Debarim enters a stunned state for 15 seconds after each Terraspin and is completely vunerable. Rinse and repeat until 50%.

Phase 3:
Debarim will now revert back to his AoEs in addition to using Terraspin every so often, thus making this phase a combination of the previous two. Assuming your group has gotten this far, you should have no trouble dealing with this phase.

Phase 4:
At this point in the fight (25%) text will show on the screen something like "The cave is collapsing! Find safe ground to attack Debarim!" you'll do just that. This time you'll see bright blue circles appear on the floor, do not stand in them as you will take periodic damage. Find a safe spot to continue dpsing Debarim and keep pulling him down. Everyone, including the healers, will need to be moving around to make sure they aren't in any of the circles.

Congratulations on a successful world boss encounter!

Debarim drops eternal level 58(?) earrings and several other blues.

Hope you found this guide helpful!

-Fest

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Aion 3.0 Chronicles: Muada's Trencher

Last night Void decided to take on the other 12-man instance, Muada's Trencher. We didn't know what to expect going in and thought it was an actual instance, however, it turned out to be a single legendary-grade boss. We gave it a few tries to see how the boss worked and if we could handle doing it "legit" or not, we ran into some...issues.

Strategy: The first thing you need to do if you're going to follow this guide is drop a kisk outside of the entrance to the instance. Kisk res'ing during this fight is essential since the healers will already be bombarded with adds and will likely be too busy to res you. This boss also likes to enrage if you don't kill it fast enough, but fear not, there is a way to recover from the enrage.

IMPORTANT NOTE!: Enrage was a problem we ran into frequently, possibly due to our low numbers, and we have a solution for getting enrage off of Muada. We did something similar to the ol' Lannok trick where we had someone sit the first part of the fight out until Muada went nuts and killed everyone. Once everyone dies the buff runs off. Before Muada resets we had the person sitting out grab her to make sure she didn't reset before the rest of the group kisk reses and runs back in. This may not be a problem for full groups of 60's with good gear but we didn't even have a Sorceror with us so this was a necessary part in the fight for us.

Phase One: 100-75%
This is the easiest phase, Muada does a 360 degree AoE (Ray Thorn) that hits everything outside of 20 meters or so of her. To avoid being hit by this ALL party members must be standing close to Muada and the tank will be positioning the boss away from the rest of the group. Muada does some other minor attacks during this phase like projectile vomit but it's nothing terribly dangerous outside of Ray Thorn but be ready to run when phase two begins.

Phase Two: 75-50%
At this point Muada will use a skill called Rage and stun your party briefly, following this stun Muada will spawn a couple elite adds and add spawners. Now, we tried this several different ways and, possibly due to our less-than-average sized group, we were unsuccessful when we tried to burn the adds faster than they were spawning. One or two from each set would be left over and eventually overwhelm us.

To remedy this we decided to have all DPS stick to the boss as the Templar kited it around the circular room. When you do this it causes all of the adds to zerg around after various members of your group so it's important to kite when you've got a large number of adds on you. Moving in a circle prevents both the boss and adds from ever catching you since they are all pretty sluggish (<--Ohohoho so clever). After slowly but surely kiting and DPSing Muada out of this phase you enter phase three.

Side Note: If you feel you can DPS the adds down before more spawn then make sure to prioritize the spawners and be sure to utilize CC's (Unconfirmed, seemed most everything works on them though) and blinds (Confirmed) as both of them work on all of the adds. Also, when the adds die they melt into a puddle of acid and do significant damage to anyone that steps in it so be mindful of your environment.

Phase Three: 50-25%
Before you dig into Muada's health again it is important to kite off the remaining adds, they despawn after a while and no more adds should spawn. Once the adds are down have your tank settle Muada back into the same position as Phase one. The only difference between this phase and the first one is the additional AoE to complement Ray Thorn, Swiping Blow. This AoE hits in a 360 degree zone 15 meters around the boss, this needs to be outranged as it does heavy damage and knocks people down.

Every 20 seconds Muada will alternate between Ray Thorn and Swiping blow. To make sure nobody gets hit you run out of Swiping Blow and immediately back in after it ends to avoid Ray Thorn, repeat until the phase ends. Pretty simple.

Phase Four: 25-0%
Muada will use Rage, same as all new phases, and then burrow underground. Shortly after using this skill the text "Muada has created a giant sand hell, run!" pops up on your screen. Following the disembodied words' instructions quickly run out of the central area and onto the sides. I assume if you fail to do this you die horribly. But it's not hard to get out of so no big deal.

Once you're back on the boss he gets a new skill called Neurotoxin which he will randomly cast on party members. It does a medium amount of damage and puts a status effect on the target that cuts its attack and does damage over time. This is curable so clerics make sure you're dispelling the targets of Neurotoxin.

Muada will stop doing Ray Thorn this phase and will switch back to Projectile Vomit (Frontal Cone) and will continue doing Swiping Blow and Neurotoxin. Make sure to keep out-ranging swiping blow whenever Muada uses it and keep burning him down.

This should finish off the fight! Congratulations on defeating Empress Muada!

For those of you curious about the loot she can drop, there are two eternal necklaces (Caster/Melee) that Muada drops that aren't too shabby for PvE and she drops a fabled hat and shields. We got the fabled cleric shield to drop :3.

Thanks for reading!

-Fest
(Tiamat/Assassin/60)

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The Darkness II: Review

Visceral. Intense. Mind-bending. All of these describe The Darkness II. Continuing where the first game left off, TD2 wastes no time in throwing the player directly into the heat of action as Jackie Estacado is forced to unleash the darkness to fend off the attempts on his life and defend his loved ones. Power comes with a price as Jackie is frequently resisting the darkness inside of him while trying to rescue the imprisoned soul of his lost love. The Darkness II takes us on a journey that phases in and out of reality in a way that really makes the player question what is real and what is an illusion.

Story: 5/5

The plot revolves around the protagonist from the previous game after he successfully "buried" the Darkness deep within himself, refusing to give into the temptation to unleash it. Despite his efforts, Jackie and his "family" (in the context of both blood and mafia family) come under siege from the notorious brotherhood, a secret society bent on world domination and destruction through the utilization of the Darkness. Forced to unleash The Darkness, Jackie rails against The Brotherhood as well as the insidious presence of The Darkness within himself. Jackie's motivation is the final destruction of The Darkness and the salvation of the soul of his lost beloved, Jenny, a victim of one of Jackie's enemies from the original game. After he death The Darkness took her soul and imprisoned it within the abyss, revealing this to Jackie in order to motivate him to prevent The Brotherhood from stealing it. Plagued with guilt, Jackie reluctantly protects The Darkness and fights to free Jenny's soul from its sinister grasp.

Throughout this endeavor Jackie wakes up in a mental institution surrounded by counterparts of his family. Some are doctors, nurses, and other patients, all of which tell Jackie that The Darkness is nothing but a voice in his head, that it isn't real. These trips to the psych ward do a fantastic job of generating the feeling that there is a much more rational reason that all of this is happening, it appeals to the player's rational sense of how the world really works. Putting the supernatural elements of the game into a real world context definitely works well as a story mechanic to both confuse the player and develop Jackie's character who is steadily being driven insane.

I AM The Darkness!

The game is quite short and only sports about four hours of solid campaign game-play which also means the story felt a little cut down. *SPOILER ALERT* when you're finally confronted with the choice between the psych ward and the real world you're actually given a choice which I assume dictates which ending you get (good/bad) I chose the "real" world which involves a powerful scene where Jackie must make the choice to abandon the manifestation of Jenny in front of him, begging him to stay. After making this choice Jackie hurls himself off a building as The Darkness screeches in rage at Jackie's ability to constantly defy it. You wake up in the abyss within The Darkness where you fight to free Jenny's soul through hordes of nightmarish ghouls. Upon finally saving Jenny you hold her one last time, the credits roll, and then there is a special cliffhanger ending afterwards that I won't mention here (Youtube it if you'd like to see it) but this ending ties the story up quite nicely and reveals the Angelus, the counterpart to The Darkness, suggesting a potential Darkness III.

Game-play: 4/5

The Darkness II has a pretty standard setup for its gun-play but the developers fully understand that our ADD society could not possible be satisfied with mere dual wielding capabilities. No, they gave us "quad-wielding". This essentially means that you can dual wield guns and fire both of them while grabbing enemies with one tendril and slashing away with the other. This can be used later in the game to seamlessly fend off enemies both near and far. I definitely enjoyed this system despite its chaotic nature, it definitely forced me to really be engaged and mindful of how I was utilizing what was made available to me. Typically on normal difficulty you can play through by simply using one thing at a time but when you make the jump up to harder difficulties it becomes more essential to use all of Jackie's tools. I only took a point off here due to the aforementioned chaotic nature of this system as it can easily overwhelm new players.

I'm going to shoot you, bite you, and cut you. Not necessarily in that order.

Another factor here is the use of the Darkling, a strangely British side-kick who makes a return from the first game. You'll occasionally take the perspective of this little guy to either save Jackie or open doors that Jackie can't access. He's actually a pretty funny character and frequently makes fun of, pokes, prods, and laughs at your fallen enemies. One thing I loved about this little dude is that he'll go off on his own in combat and tug on your opponent's legs or straight up maul them which is a nice bonus when you've got a lot of enemies firing at you. You can also throw the Darkling at your opponents...or at a wall if you just don't want him around for a while. I had a lot of fun with the explosive perk that causes anything you throw to explode on impact...including the Darkling.

Graphics: 4/5

Alright I need to add in a little disclaimer here, the developers of this game ported the story from a graphic novel and along with it, the art style. The artists working on this game literally hand painted a great deal of it to give it a more authentic look and feel of a comic book. At first I didn't like this style and I frequently found that many of the smaller details in the world looked almost like concept art. Over time, however, the style grew on me and I really enjoyed the mood that this art style created and I think it fit quite well with the game's theme.

Replay Value: Medium

The only reason this even gets a "medium" rating is due to the presence of multiple endings made accessible thanks to the game's incredibly short campaign. In addition to the campaign you're given access to "Vendettas", stories that happen concurrently with the main story, where you play as members of Jackie's organization who run errands for him that are mentioned in the main story. These are kind of nice if not just because they serve to flesh out the main plot a bit more with different perspectives. You choose from one of four agents who have various Darkness abilities and unique weapons. For example: the character I chose was Inugami, a man in possession of the kusanagi blade that feeds on the souls of the wicked. Using a katana in place of tendrils was a nice change of pace and provided a different perspective to view the game from.

Katana in one hand, UZI in the other.

As time marches on so do my expectations. With that being said, I expect new games to be current in all their aspects if I'm going to be expected to pay a full 60 dollars for them. When I look at the various aspects of this game I ultimately can't justify buying this for full price. With a meager four hour campaign this game will only keep you busy for a weekend at best and unless you really like the co-op I don't suggest picking this up for full price. I do, however, recommend playing this game if you've got a strong stomach (it's really brutal) and have access to Gamefly or another game rental service where you aren't required to pay full price.

Final Score: 8.5/10

Thanks for reading!

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A First Look: Asura's Wrath

Keeping with the trend of taking a peek at the upcoming 2012 titles I decided to download a couple demos, which happened to include a game I've been pretty excited for since seeing the reveal trailer some time ago, Asura's Wrath.

Not kidding.

This is not your run of the mill game, like not even close, I mean really, REALLY out in left field. Why is that? Oh I don't know...but the demo involves me punching a giant fat guy to death. By giant I of course mean roughly twice the size of Earth.

I have to give the developers credit for their astoundingly creative ideas. I mean I have certainly had enough of fighting people the same size as me, what fun is that? I am clearly too awesome to demean myself with fighting people sized baddies. Now I expect every game I play in the future to include one boss that is the size of the planet. Step it up people.

(sort of sarcastic....maybe?)

Urf.

The demo consists of two parts, first one was the planet sized baddie as pictured above, which sorta blew my mind, the next was a fight with some regular sized guy who looks like Asura. My trip from fighting a planet sized behemoth is over! Time to have a normal boss fight! Wrong. It's time to go to the moon and have an epic battle with a dude with a sword! He kind of kicks your ass most of the time but at least it looks cool when he makes his sword extend, impales you, and then rams you back down to Earth. Then, as if ramming you through the atmosphere wasn't badass enough for this guy, he impales the entire planet for good measure. I felt like I was watching an episode of Dragon Ball Z where everyone turned red instead of yellow. Awesome.

Enough about the over the top stuff, lets talk about the gameplay. Unfortunately the demo did not feature much average combat and instead decided to show us two boss fights. From what I can gather from other videos; the one vs. many combat plays like a hack n' slash ramped up to epic proportions with a lot of, for lack of a better term, quick-time events. I know QTEs bring up some bitter emotions for people but these are at least a little better if not just because they involve you doing extremely over the top finishers on bosses or blowing up hordes of lil' baddies. The actions they have you do on the controller also correspond to Asura's movements in the game which is a nice touch that makes it feel less arbitrary. For example, when preparing to intercept the poke-o-doom from the big fat guy, the game has you plant Asura's feet by flicking each analogue stick to the side. At least it isn't the infamous "press x to not die" type of QTE.

A lot of the game is cinematic, for sure, but that doesn't mean you can just sit back and watch. Even the cutscenes that aren't combat related give you the option to "Shut _____ up" which causing the dialogue to skip due to Asura launching himself at his opponent. This provides a bit of a new dimension for how you'll experience the game and just how much crap you want to put up with from your condescending opponents. The Wyzen fight (big fat guy) gives you very little control over Asura's movement, aside from strafing left and right while dashing towards Wyzen. Will this lack of control serve to bolster the gameplay or hinder it? Time will tell, it's hard to give my honest opinion right now since I really did enjoy what they showed me but I could also see it getting kind of old if that's what every fight is. We shall see how things pan out.

I know I've used the phrase "over the top" a couple times in this particular write-up but you know, that's exactly what this game is. Every aspect of it has taken the step up to absolutely, impossibly, amazingly, epic. It destroys what we thought was epic before and replaces it with mind-blowing, planet-impaling goodness. I am excited to see how else Asura's Wrath shocks me when it releases on the 21st of February, be sure to check it out! Thanks for reading.

-Fest

P.S.

Come at me bro.

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New Look

As you may have very well noticed I have changed the site quite a bit in the last 24 hours to try and clean it up and make it more accessible for people. I'm not totally done putting in all the changes since I'm a bit new at HTML editing so there will be more changes made in the coming days, but for now everything works except the navigation bar at the top that jokingly describes every category as something Fest related. So giggle at that and ignore it for now. In the future I'll probably use that bar to link to other related sites with relevant gaming information.

That's all for now! More SWTOR stuff later.

-Fest

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Break is over!

As of tomorrow I will be starting my Spring Semester of my "Junior" year of college. Should be tons of fun and I've got high hopes for both my academic success as well as being consistently posting things about various games I'm playing, have played, and am looking forward to playing. I'll try to keep it interesting and really go in depth with whatever I'm talking about which may involve multiple posts discussing one game.

The first thing on my list of stuff I need to write about is the new Star Wars MMO. In case you've been living in a cave/hole/box for the past month or so its basically Bioware's attempt at creating an MMO out of their successful KOTOR franchise. I'm a KOTOR fan and an avid MMO gamer so I hopped right on board the SWTOR train and leveled myself a character to 50 (current cap) over my break. But much more on that later.

Things to look forward to! Woo! I love looking forward to games that are coming out in the coming months its so exciting to see what my future holds in the gaming world. First of all, the Resident Evil 6 trailer ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS_bGpe9qE8 ) can anyone say...HELLLLL YEAAAAAA? I sure can, and I did, many times while watching this reveal. Old heroes, new ones, and zombies! Yay zombies! It looks like they've tweaked a lot of gameplay issues that arose in RE 5 and are kind of implying that this is a climactic conclusion to this saga with mention of a cure and all sorts of other thinly veiled concepts shown in the trailer. Looks epic. In an earlier post I mentioned Darksiders 2 and was all giddy about it and whatnot. Well, I still am giddy but now even more so since they released a full trailer which I will provide a link to once Youtube stops being weird and not letting me sign in...but anyway! Lots of tweaks and improvements appear to have been made and it gives me something to look forward to for a good kickoff to my summer.

What I'm playing right now. Still derping around on SWTOR with PvP and some alts and helping some friends work their way up to cap but I'll probably have very little time for it with the semester starting up, got plenty to write about it anyway :). Also playing through one of my absolute favorite games remade on the 3DS...Ocarina of Time. I have dabbled a little bit with the ICO/Shadow of the Colossus HD remake for the PS3 recently and that is one of many games on my list to complete. Keeping with the fantasy theme I'm also going to dig into Skyward Sword after I finish Ocarina of Time. So many great games to play right now, plenty to keep me busy throughout the next month or so.

Expect much more soon, thanks for reading!

-Fest

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