Monkey Shines

New Tolkien Book to Rival 'The Hobbit' - Cinematical:

Posted Apr 17th 2007 12:01PM by Erik Davis

It's been thirty years since author J.R.R. Tolkien passed away, but that hasn't stopped a brand new book from hitting shelves with his name on the cover. The Children of Hurin (which hits bookstores today) was pieced together by Tolkien's son Christopher from his father's old manuscripts, and already folks are talking big-screen adaptation. Essentially much darker than The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Hurin was told in fragmentary form in The Silmarillion (originally published in 1977) and its story takes place long before Frodo's famous journey.

Posted by Pragma on Tue, 04/17/2007 - 16:36

Ok, as a warning, the entire article that's to follow is over 1700 lines! There's no official date for when this will go live, but it's already on the Public Test Realms (PTR), so if you want to try them out yourself, you can always try them out for yourself.

Blizzard have a lot of changes in store for us w/ the 2.1 patch. By now, many of us have already read about the profession changes, but in skimming through the notes, I found the following points interesting:

The Black Temple -- the high level instance to beat.
Of interest to hunters, Mend Pet is now an instant cast, heal-over-time spell. It's also been made more effective, doesn't share the global cooldown, has had it's shout animation removed, but can be dispelled. While this sounds like it's out of balance now, the trade-off is that +healing gear no longer increases the amount your pet recovers. I'm sure this is in response to the level 70 hunter who solo'ed the world boss dragon, Azurgos. The hunter had over 1800 +healing and spent over two hours wearing the dragon down, but rather than recognize this guy for his accomplishment, Blizzard have chosen to take nullify the amazing amount of work he put into getting to this point. While I understand their wanting to keep their world bosses sacred, I'm not sure this is the right way to do it.
Druids can now do a quest to get their epic flying mount!
There's now a PVP epic mount that players can get for free in the battlegrounds! Too good to be true? Yep. You only get the mount free; you still need to pay 4000g (?) to learn the riding skill.
For warriors, "Charge", "Intercept" and "Intervene" now suppress all Slowing
effects while charging the target.
Looking for Group channel is back, but you can only join this global channel by using the Looking for Group game mechanic, which is underutilized right now.

Posted by Pragma on Tue, 04/17/2007 - 12:03