Cataclysm Beta Masteries

Ok, I am not sure entirely how many of these masteries were changed from the original versions but I am going to comment on each specifically, obviously I will say more for classes I am actually familiar with but ye I'll try to be fair.

Deathknights:

Blood - Each time you heal with your Death-Strike Ability you gain 50+x% of the heal as an absortion shield

This is clearly a lovely mastery for blood dk tanks, as of now they (and druids) would be very much sponge tanks without this sort of mechanic either through talents or this mastery bonus. I personally like the feel of this mastery, it feels very akin to blood and well ye it feels like a lovely tanking bonus

Frost - Increases Frost Damage done by 20+x%.

I feel like this is a really lacklustre mastery, it doesn't really have a cool gimic or change the way the class behaves and is just basically +20% damage you gain at lvl 75, which doesnt sound fun to me at least. I personally feel like if they tied it into weapon damage and make it feel dual wield-esque that it would be much more awesome.

Unholy - Increases damage done by your diseases by 20+x%

This is a little better than the frost mastery, it at least makes diseases much more important and may change gameplay somewhat, it also feels unholy, although I feel like an increase to pet (ghoul+gargoyle) should also be baked into the mastery to feel completely unholy-esque.

Druids:

Balance: Increases the Bonus Damage from Eclipse by 12+x%

Definitely a good mastery, makes proccing eclipse that much more needed when levelling as well as the new eclipse mechanic just being plain cool.

Feral : Increases damage absorbed by Savage Defense by 32+x% and increases your cat-form bleeds by 20+x%

Another good solid mastery that enhances the essence of cat damage, same with the bear mastery with a similar description to the blood mastery behind why this is good.

Resto: Increases Healing from hots by (20+x)*y%, where y is a number based on how much hp the target has, (y gets bigger the lower hp the target has).

This is a lovely healing mastery, it obviously brings out the strength and say "perk" of being a druid healer and also gives them new mechanics that they are more powerful the lower the targets are, overall a very nice mastery.

Hunters:

Beastmaster: Increases damage done by pets by 20+x%

Again, rather generic mastery but overall expected, perhaps I would like to see another go for the throat type mastery thrown in there like your pets also gain a 10% chance to gain 20+x focus on a hit, or something like that. I don't play a hunter but I think that would be cool

Marksman: Grants a 16+x% chance on ranged attack to automatically fire a shot that hits for 80% of a normal attack.

Again, nice mastery, obviously en-corperating wild quiver into this talent but it does get across what marksmanship is all about in my opinion so it is a good mastery.

Survival: Increases Elemental damage by 20%.

Personally I think this is a good/bad mastery, although this is more to do with survival playstyle than the mastery itself, this is a good mastery for the spec (although boring) but I feel like survival should be about tracking and traps more than about shots than it is today, it would be awesome to see a spec that was all about trap launcher and traps especially, I know black arrow is meant to facilitate this but with the introduction of trap launcher i feel like that should become a signature ability of the survival hunter.

Mage:

Arcane: Increases the amount of damage done by the mage by (12+x)*y% with y based on how much mana the mage has unspent.

Whilst I actually love this talent and it feels very arcaney to have to manage mana within your spec, not to go oom but to maximise damage, I just feel its going to be hard to balance unless it has a minimum point like, say once you get to around 60% mana it always does 6+x% damage or something, so that stuff like Evocation and Mana gem give you significant damage boosts but you can balance the mage about having this consistent damage buff up say 70% or whatever it works out to be time.

Fire: Causes your non periodic Spells to do 10+x% extra damage over 4 seconds.

Again this is just Ignite, but it's a cool way to basically add 10% extra damage to a class, even if it will always work out less than that unless it ends up double dipping on encounters like Blood Queen lanathel etc.

Frost: Causes victims of your Frostbolt to take 12+x% increased damage from your spells

Again another unique way to staple frostbolt as a signature move and to just add damage % to a class, I don't know if this has a timer or not on live not sure if it needs one or not.

Paladin:

Holy: Causes your heals to place a shield on the target absorbing 8+x% of the amount healed

Personally, I love this mastery, it's great to see valanyr encorperated into a Holy Paladin, I always felt that having only 1 class bring definitive absorbs is too much of an imbalance to balance, but having a Paladin have a reliable absorb aswell as this mastery means that Holy Paladins have a good damage reduction. I always felt shamans would get this sort of mastery over a Holy Paladin, but I do like this mastery alot.

Protection: Increases your chance to block melee attacks by 16+x%

A bit generic, I always saw that with wrath you wanted to make like Druids the BIG ARMOR TANK, Warriors the block less but block for more tank and Paladins the BLOCK ALOT but for less tank, this sort of confirms that. Bit torn on how I feel about it, 16% seems quite a large baseline amount though tbh.

Ret: Increases all Holy Damage Done by 20+x%

Again, really generic and imo doesn't get what the Retribution Paladin class is about, I personally feel it should be your Judgement increases holy damage done by 20+x% since thats the staple move of the retribution paladin imo, but yeh not exactly game or decision changing. Although I DO NOT LIKE how a paladin without this mastery and zealotry is losing 40% of their damage until they get it.

Priest:

Discipline: Increases the potency of your absorption spells by 20+x%

Nice healing mastery, Definitely encompasses what the discipline class is about and well yeh theres not much more to say about it, good generic mastery

Holy: Your Direct healing spells also heal the target for 10+x% over 6 seconds

Again a nice mastery, fits in with the healing class and is a much nicer way of showing the player 10% extra healing, it also gives priests more arsenal than just renew as a hot.

Shadow: You have a 10% chance for SW;P and Mind Flay to Grant a Shadow Orb, which increases the damage of Mind Blast and Mind Spike by 20+x%

Personally I feel like there should be more of these type of masteries, stuff that are really integral to the playstyle of the class and are fun, diversifying the classes more than they are today. This mastery is one of the best on the beta tbh and I hope some of the +20% generic masteries get reworked to something like this.

Rogue:

Assasination: Increases your poison damage by 20+x%

Nice mastery, outlines that assasination is about poisons and ye is just a good mastery, bit generic but good.

Combat: Your Main hand attacks have a 10+x% chance to trigger an extra off-hand attack

Again, nice mastery fits in well with the rogue class and with the combat spec in general

Subtlety: Increases the damage of your finishing moves by 20+x%

Staples subtlety as the spec that has the high finishing moves, which is definitely a good thing, considering hardly anybody plays subtlety at the moment, having it become the spec which hits the hardest is only a good thing.

Shaman:

Elemental: Grants a 20+x% chance for your Lightning Bolt/Lava Burst/Chain Lightning to send out a second similar spell causing 60% of the damage.

Very nice mastery, sure it's just a remake of elemental overload but that talent was awesome and having it become a mastery is definitely a great thing.

Enhancement: Increases your elemental damage by 20+x%.

Again, really generic I'd personally like something that staples Dual Wield with the mastery rather than just a generic +DAMAGE modifier.

Restoration: Increases your direct healing spells by (20+x)*y%

Similar mastery to the resto druid, but tbh they are good masteries that affect gameplay somewhat and it gets across that shaman are somewhat masters of direct healing, which is good.

Warlock:

Affliction: Increases all periodic shadow damage by 13+x%

Good generic Mastery, gets across that affliction is all about periodic damage, as an aside to this, I would like some way for dots to be more effective when questing at low level at least, they always seem far too wasteful and mana burning, a way of transferring dots to another target like rogues were/are getting for combo points would be really nice.

Demonology: Increases damage done by your demon and in Metamorphisis by 12+x%.

Excellent generic Mastery again.. not much to be said other than I wish we had more shadow priest esque masteries :).

Destruction: Increases fire damage you deal by 10+x%

More boring generic mastery but I suppose its good for its purpose

Warrior:

Arms: Grants a 16+x% to your melee attacks to trigger an extra melee attack for 50% of the damage.

Awesome Mastery, a little repeated across the classes but it definitely suits all the classes it was given to and especially arms, also nice for the old sword spec to get a return, hopefully this doesnt get a massive internal cooldown D:.

Fury: Improves abilities that cause you or require you to be enraged by 80+x%.

Really awesome mastery: gets across what the fury spec is all about being like RAWR DAMAGE!!?!?!?!, also like how it will benefit stuff like blood craze and frenzied regeneration aswell, which is kinda sweet

Protection: Increases your chance to block and to critically block by 10+x%

I feel like Critical block should be the mastery on it's Own, although I believe thats bad wording of the mastery and actually you only can critically block with the mastery, which is much nicer tbh. A good mastery if critical block is only available with it, otherwise dull and generic.

Overall I think there are far too many generic masteries at the moment, personally I don't like seeing those pure +% things, they are dull and I feel like, well if everything is meant to do +20% damage or w/e anyway why not just bake it into the talents instead of making a level 75 20% MORE POWERFUL than a level 74, obviously the less generic talents may have a similar effect but its a more fun way, something that staples the rotation or SIGNATURE MOVE of the class should really be the mastery

I do have to say that all the healing masteries are good, I don't mind that some are a little generic they are functional and healers should have more PROCY/FUN masteries that provide rng to healing, there isn't a place for that in healing in my opinion.

Mission 03: Zero Hour.

Ok, Basically this mission attempts to teach you about Base Defense (frankly I think it does a bad job at that because it is easier to just macro up a force). Basically there are a few things you are introduced to on this mission 1) Turrets, 2) Engineering Bay (UPGRADES!!!!!) 3) Bunkers, and 4) Reactor add-on.

Turrets are sort of Obvious, on most missions you don't need them, they are cheaper than bunkers and, more powerful, most of the time you don't need detection in your base. The main thing this mission tries to teach you is that turrets=good against Mutalisks (the flying zerg units) but it does a bad job at explaining it in my opinion since 4 mutalisks take down a turret and the ai barely sends any against you, unless you are going for the DON'T LOSE ANY STRUCTURES achievement it is not worth making any more, and even so it probably isn't as well positioned bunkers are more versatile against the waves the ai sends against you. I think they should have put burrowed roaches in this mission to teach people that turrets give detection, but yeh thats a different story. Basically if I were to take anything from this mission into multiplayer its that Turrets=Detection against cloaked/burrowed units.

Engineering Bay enables you to make missile turrets so you are granted one on this mission. This is where you get your Upgrades, these are important and remember that 1 armor means your units take 1 less damage per hit and 1 attack means your units do 1 more damage per attack. Whatever mission you are doing you should always try to get upgrades, depending on what type of army you are constructing.

Bunkers, these are the core of Terran Defense: They provide your infantry complete immunity to attacks whilst the bunker is up. Basically its like adding 350 hit points to your marines, definitly a good thing. You can also salvage bunkers so basically as long as they don't die to enemy attacks they are free so they are almost always worth it.

Lastly we have the reactor addon. Now you can add-on a reactor to your Barracks (and later factories/Starports). This enables you to produce 2 units at a time at said Barracks, however you can only produce units that don't require a tech lab (Marines, Medics (with the purchased upgrade), Vultures, Hellions, Vikings, Medivacs) Note that Medics and Vultures aren't available in Multiplayer. The point about a reactor is that you have to give up 50 seconds of unit-producing time to make double the amount of units. With a barracks this evens out after 100 seconds, with a Factory and Starport this evens out over a longer period of time. Remember that you don't HAVE to make a Reactor or a Tech Lab, 2 barracks produce units just as fast as 1 barracks with a reactor!

Ok, with the new stuff out of the way lets get the Mission Objectives out here..

Mission Objectives:

Main: Hold out for Extraction (20 minute timer)

Bonus: Rescue the Rebels (3)

Achievements: Complete Mission without Losing or Salvaging a Single Structure on Normal

Destroy 4 Hatcheries on Hard

Ok a few comments first: I am going to do a strategy that is good for both completing the mission on hard and can do the achievement on hard difficulty, this involves purposfully salvaging bunkers and is no good for those wanting to do the normal achievement.My advice is if you want to do this achievement, just do it on normal, make around 3-4 bunkers on the left entrance and 2-3 on the right entrance and have 2 scvs at each end of the base. Have a small mobile force to engage each side appropriately.

Right. So to start things off you are given 4 Bunkers, 16 marines, 1 command centre, 1 engineering bay, 4 turrets, 3 depots and 5 scvs.

Firstly do a standard opening, make an scv from your command centre, a marine from 1 of the barracks, and reactor the second barracks, hotkey your command centre and barracks.

After this salvage all 4 bunkers and move all your marines to the high ground just in front of your barracks, macro up your army following the guide below,

22 Reactor (1st Barracks)

26 Barracks

31 Depot

37 (1st Rebel callout) Depot

48 Depot

51 Refinery

52 Tech Lab

56 Depot

64 Depot

66 (2nd Rebel callout)

72 (stop scv Production) Depot (constant depot production after this)

75 Reactor (3rd Barracks)

83 Skip 1 round of Medics to get Armor Upgrade

85 move out with around half your force and save 1st and second rebel groups (not if doing achievement)

98 Barracks

110 Reactor (4th Barracks), Attack Upgrade

120 Move out to gain last force (this is when you want to move out and get the other 2 forces if doing the hard achievement)

From then on its just macroing out of the 4 barracks and keeping your units on the ramp. You might think you want to add a 5th barracks but you don't, certainly not reactored anyway.

Now, this mission is actually only hard if you rely on barracks and only make marines for the barracks you make, and the fact you end up splitting up your army, which is never really good when doing a mass defend operation.

The Idea behind the hard achievement is you move out at around the 9 minute 30 mark, right before you hear the third guy, leave around 10 marines at home and a medic and take everything else with you sweep around the first 2 rebel camps and then to last rebel camp, attack-move microing everything. Once you get to the last camp, get whatever you made from your barracks during that time and regroup, now go west of the 3rd rebel group and there is a zerg base, attack-move micro till most of your forces are up the ramp, and take out the 3 hatcheries, all whilst making more and more units from your barracks. Once the base is taken out move out of there back to the third rebel site. (Note: if your force got totally overwhelmed here it means one of 3 things 1: you forgot to upgrade, or 2: you moved out too soon3:lost too many forces going to save the rebels. I would advise saving before you plan on moving out, if it's an utter disaster, wait another couple of rounds of marines/medics and then move out. As long as you are taking out the hatcheries before 3 minutes left you won't completely die.

Once you have taken out those 3 hatcheries, continue to macro up an army till around the 3-4 minute left mark, after that you can either leave some force behind (if you actually want to complete the mission) or send everything you have to the north of the 3rd rebel camp and basically focus down 1 hatchery. Once you have done this you are granted the achievement immedietly, Note: that I was able to complete the mission AND do this achievement following the above strategy, I got completely overrun at the end and surrounded the artifact with my scvs so it wouldnt get killed and just made it, but still it is tricky to do this achievement and finish the mission, if you want to guarentee getting the achievement just mass-suicide your army.

Another note about the normal achievement: DO NOT build anything around the original bunker on the east bridge, specifically to the south west of that bunker, a nydus worm pops up during the cut-scene and if you have a building there it is automatically destroyed and you lose the achievement.

Hopefully you completed mar-sara missions and got onto the Hyperion and earned yourself the Adjutant Portrait.

A few notes about the campaign proper at the end of this: 1) I will tell you which upgrades are the best and list what you get and when, 2) Same goes with Research. 3) I highly recommend talking with everyone whenever you see a label on them, one because you can learn more about the story and two because you can get a few extra achievements.

After this mission you have access to the armory and the bridge, basically you can upgrade Medics, Bunkers and Marines.

I'll list the Upgrades here.

Marines : Stimpack - At the cost of 10 hp the Marine gains a 50% increase in attack speed and movement speed (50,000)

Combat Shield - Marines gain 10 hp (60,000)

Medics: Stabilizer Medpacks - Medics Heal 25% faster and for 33% less energy (105,000)

Advanced Medic Facilities - Medics can be trained without a tech lab (60,000)

Bunkers: Neosteel Bunker - Bunkers can hold 2 additional People (50,000)

Projectile Accelerator - Units inside the bunker gain 1 additional range (40,000)

From the first 3 missions you get 100,000 so you can get 1-2 upgrades here.

Stimpack is definitly the first thing you should upgrade, along with the Neosteel Bunker upgrade. Stimpack is great for alot of things, fast re-inforcing, massive damage. You can also use stimpack inside a bunker, which is definitly a good thing.

The extra bunker spaces is just a nice addition to base defense and useful in both the next 2 missions.

Next 2 mission options are available, personally I do smash and grab first for a few reasons 1) Firebats are pretty terrible without both of their upgrades, 2) Marauders are soooooo good and useful for the evacuation mission, 3) There may or may not be a bug where you replay this mission and continue to get protoss artifact benefits and money (it works when you are maxed on zerg/protoss artifacts and can get infinite money via it). If it does work then I recommend breezing through that specific mission on casual and max out protoss artifacts and get enough money to get full upgrades, I'll confirm and deny this in the post about it.

NB/ Durotar write up will be done tomorrow, first 3 missions took around 4 hours to write so don't really have time.

NB2/ If said bug exists in last paragraph I will still continue to do the campaign without it, and recommend upgrades based on that, regardless the campaign is obviously much easier with the protoss upgrades early along with every upgrade.

NB3/ OH YES MASTERIES POST, will do that before going to bed :D

Mission 02: The Outlaws

Onto the Second Mission: which basically covers Base and unit production, again this mission is pretty simple but here are a few habits that are good to practice for the basics of Macro in the game.

1) Hotkey your Command Centre, on pretty much every mission involving base construction you want to constantly produce scvs till you have around 2.5 per patch and 3 per gas, after that you can stop making scvs if you don't plan on expanding. I usually hotkey my Command Centre to 5, and try to get used to the hotkey for producing scvs. Just try and remember to press Hotkey->S every 15 seconds or so, if you want to cut down on the multi-tasking then just queue up scvs and do it every 45seconds to 1 minute, but remember doing this means you are going to be 100-200 minerals short of what you could ideally be.

2) Hotkey Barracks/Factories and Starports. Obviously the game hasn't introduced you to Factories or Starports yet but you should hotkey your barracks in this mission at least. Again Remember Hotkeys, Marine is A and Medic is E (these are very useful to know because you can probably win around 80% of missions with just these 2 units). I usually hotkey my Production facilities all to the same hotkey and use tab to cycle through the different buildings, but it can be beneficial to say have all barracks on 1 key, all factories on another and all starports on another.

3) Supply, The number in the top right corner is supply: you can have a max of 200 and it is increased by 8 per supply depot you make and 11? per command centre. I personally struggle alot with being supply capped, but you want to get into a good habit of making depots before you get "supply blocked", ie you have minerals to produce units but you can't make them because you don't have the available supply. Remember Scvs take 1 supply and marines also take 1 supply, so you want to be making depots around 3 supply before you get capped (IE 32/35) adding an additional 2 supply per barracks, so if you have like 3 barracks you want to be making you supply depots pretty much 1 after the other (ie 7 in advance).

4) Optimising your Resources. In-game what you want to do is keep your money low (especially in multiplayer, but in singleplayer it is useful too) If you see your money spiking and you are not supply capped and are producing from all of your structures you should put money into more unit producing structures. For this first mission I'll just say when I was spiking (supply number) and produced my next unit producing structure, for clarity, and will continue to do so, hopefully after a few missions you will see when to do it yourself without further guidance.

5) Finally, Upgrades are awesome, if you get an engineering bay then I would upgrade as soon as possible, perhaps skipping a round of units once you hit around 50 food or so, In the early missions you only have access to +1 attack/ +1 armor but later on you can get +3 attack/+3 armor for all the different types of units you get.

Remember if you want to ensure success in the campaign and you are not on a timed mission amass the biggest force possible before moving out to be safe, this is similar but different to multiplayer, in multiplayer the opposing enemy is also making units so waiting till you have 200/200 army isn't always the smartest thing to do.

OK.. onto the actual mission after the lengthy talks about macro basics, I'll be frank and say most of those aren't needed for the campaign, especially on normal difficulty and probably not on hard either but they make a big difference and really help the transition to multiplayer. Oh I also would say that if the gameplay speed is set to "normal" or "fast" in options->gameplay, set it to faster asap: this is the speed at which multiplayer is played at and overall it is better to learn the game at this speed. If you are having difficulty with a mission because you fell behind with your multi-tasking by all means put it down to normal speed or so but its really better to learn at faster than learn at normal and be thrown off by the faster paced multiplayer if you want to go into that.

First off the Mission Objectives.

Main: Destroy the Dominion Base

Bonus: Rescue the Rebels

Achievements: Collect all cash drops on Normal Difficulty

Complete the Mission in Under 15 minutes on Hard Difficulty.

Now off the bat I will say that you can probably do both achievements in 1 run but its harder to do both, I'll simply do the Normal achievement because well its easier to write a walkthrough for that, but the strategy for the Hard Difficulty is the same you just move out much earlier.

Ok, off the bat you are given a Command Centre, 8 scvs, a Barracks, 6 marines and a supply Depot. Firstly train an scv from the Command Centre and put all your scvs on minerals (select them all and right click a mineral patch). Then Select your Barracks and train a Marine. Select your command centre and right click on a mineral patch so that all your scvs go on minerals and then hotkey both your command centre and your barracks and "macro" up your army.

A few check off points:

17 Supply Depot

24 Barracks

25 Supply Depot

31 Refinery

32 Supply Depot

36 Supply Depot

37 Tech Lab

38 Barracks

45 Supply Depot

49 Barracks

50 Stop Making Scvs

53 Supply Depot (Constantly Make New Depots From this point on with 1 scv)

60 Barracks (last Barracks)

Basically you want to constantly make medics with your tech labbed Barracks and marines from all the others. If you aren't going for the timed mission just wait till you get to around 170 supply army and move out, if you are going for timed you should move out at around 50-60 food and remember to constantly produce from your barracks whilst attacking.

You should have a maxed 200/200 army just when your resources run out if you did it like this, onto the actual stuff in the mission, just north of your base are 2 cash rewards, a gas and a mineral. There is nothing to the right on the road so head west. You will come to a path that heads up to the north. Go up there to kill 3 marines and collect 3 mineral cash rewards. Go back to the road and continue west until you are forced to go south, go down here and kill the pathetic force trying to kill the rebel outpost and move onto the green sign on the floor. You gain an extra barracks, which you don't need and a couple of depots and like 4 marines and 3 medics, if you were maxed you are now oversupply, which is only a good thing :). There are 2 mineral and 2 gas cash reward scattered around the rebel base (that's the last of them), after that continue on the dirt track towards the dominion base. You will be greeted by a couple of Hellions, these are very good against your light infantry, but you should easily walk over their force. Moving further along you will see a bunker, just attack it, attack-move micro helps here but with a 200/200 army its not needed (or indeed 210/200). Just move into the dominion base and wipe everything out.

Just a note: if you find yourself at a 200/200 max army, if you don't have limited resources then you should just throw down a extra unit producing structures so that if your army gets whittled down you can get it back up to 200/200 much faster.

Doing this mission timed is harder because you have to push out that much faster, but it isn't that hard, just push out at around 50-60 food and continue to make marines/medics and rally them to your army (select your barracks and right click them on your army) This is much easier if you have hotkeys setup, you can simply press your barracks hotkey (6 in my case) and press E A A A, to make 3 marines and 1 medic without having to go back to your base.

On to the last mission (actually a little tough)

Starcraft 2 Mission 1 - Liberation Day

Ok, so now onto some sort of walkthrough of the campaign (Bear in Mind that I am in no way shape or form a good Starcraft 2 player, I know the basics and thats about it, I probably have around 60-100 apm, which is pretty average: however better than some new player to RTS and will attempt to make these walkthroughs fairly accesible.

Firstly, this will mostly be worded, I might add in some screenshots later when I upload them at some point, but for an original pass this will be mostly words.

Onto the mission though, this mission basically lets you lose with Marines and the main character Raynor (that is actually who you are meant to be in the campaign). A few things to note that will help with this mission:

1) Raynor has 1 extra range than your marines, so for optimum damage keeping him 1 line behind your front marines is optimal.

I.E: XXXX

X R X

2) Attack-move micro or Hold Position micro, these are 2 very basic concepts of micro-managing your units, the reasoning behind doing this micro is basically so that all your units can damage your opponent, Hold position micro is probably slightly easier than attack-move micro but makes casters and melee units vastly less effective.

Basically the idea is that you "time" movements with the shot time of your units, I.E say you have a unit that does an attack every 2 seconds, when it attacks you can then move that unit for 2 seconds and not lose dps before wanting to have it shoot again. With units like marines they shoot very fast so you are losing dps of your front marines by doing this micro against ground targets, but you are enabling the back marines to hit, so basically once all your marines can hit the enemy, doing micro like this becomes pointless and actually increases your time.

How do you do this micro? Well it's pretty simple.

1) Select all your units (ideally make them a control group like 1 or 2, or whatever you fancy (not required for micro but a good habit to get into))

2) Initiate a Move Order to your units by right clicking on the ground

3) Then either press the H key (For hold position micro) or a and left click on the same piece of ground for your units (For attack-move micro) to start attacking.

4) With Marines you want to do this very fast, with slower fire units like Marauders and Hellions (introduced later) you can do this much slower and achieve similar results.

Once all your units are attacking you don't need to micro anymore, for this first mission you can just attack-move across the map basically and win but on later missions micro like this can mean the difference between victory and death.

The final thing that is very important to remember is that a marine on 1 hp does the same damage as a marine on full hp: you want to keep your marines alive, in a fight if you notice that 1 marine is being focus fired: pull it back so the enemies dont hit on it anymore then have it re-engage.

When moving out on the map try and keep the lower hp marines at the back with raynor so the full hp marines take the brunt of the damage. Also remember that raynor has around 4x the hp of the marines so putting him up front is never that bad just remember that he can't die so if he gets below 100 hp I would put him at the back just to be safe.

Ok, onto the actual Mission: Lets outline the Objectives and Achievements.

Mission Objectives:

Main: Destroy the Logistic Headquarters

Raynor Must Survive

Bonus: Destroy the Dominion Holoboards (6)

Achievements: Have Raynor get 5 kills on Normal Difficulty

Destroy all Dominion Forces on Hard Difficulty.

Ok, so you have your cutscenes and stuff and get dropped in with 5 marines and Raynor. Position your marines so they surround Raynor like shown in my bad picture above and move across the map until you get to a civilian who is like "DONT GO UP THAT ROAD", which you obviously have little choice but to go up that road, but you get to encounter your first enemies. You encounter 3 marines, this might be lower on normal or casual difficulty but ye.. Basic Micro wins agains them easy.

You will probably find one of your marines is low so just switch him to the back and bring a full hp marine forward. Go up the Road and see a holoboard (your bonus objective) just kill it and move on :).

Coming up to the next bend you encounter 2 more marines, just wipe them out with basic micro. Again you probably have 2 marines in the red now so just have them at the back so they don't die, moving into the big square area you will see a mass of dominion marines, wait for the air drop and just attack move your marines and Raynor in there wiping out all the dominion and collecting the survivors. I ended up with 9 marines at this point and Raynor of course. From now on re-arranging is fine if you want to do it but completely unecessary for completing the mission, it is a good habit to get into though if you don't have medics.

Kill the Holoboard in the centre of the square and move South-East and take out the 2 marines and the holoboard here. Move south-west and kill the lone holoboard here.

Now take the path West out of the square and you will see a cut scene and be rushed by around 5 marines, just attack-move micro them and kill the building with a cannon on it and the holoboard. Moving down the ramp and there is the last Holoboard.. Kill it, with the civilian help and just move your way through town killing all dominion located there. The civilians basically solo it so the mission is kinda won at this point.

With no Particular special attention on my runthrough Raynor got 10 kills, I don't think it is possible to really fail with this achievement, but if you do just make him solo some of the stuff at the end with the civilians, he wont die really. If you followed the guide you killed everything in the mission so ye that achievement is done.

ONTO MISSION 2 O:

LOL STARCRAFT 2 (+beta patch changes :))

Kay, so It's been a week and starcraft 2 has taken up FAR too much of my time with its engrossing campaign that is diverse in pretty much all of its missions and tbh I had such a fun time playing it I had to play it and get all the achievements, I might write up a guide to all the missions on hard, going to start doing them on Brutal to get the Kerrigan Portrait at some point, but I thought: OMG not posted on my blog for like a week and although nobody reads it :DDD, I kinda like to get my thoughts down on like some sort of "paper".

Ok, so over the next few days I hope to finish my Durotar write up, I have all the screenshots and did all the missions I just never got around to writing it up. I also hope to write up all the Mar Sara Missions. They are pretty easy but they are great missions for practicing very simple Micro and Macro.

Haven't done my ladder games yet, waiting for a few friends to get into starcraft 2 so i can play more custom multiplayer games with them and then move into Multiplayer.

I want to make a comment on the new patch notes for the beta, since I might aswell make them in this post: I'll discuss the new masteries in a separate post but on talent and spell changes there are a few things I want to comment on.

First I'll comment on the druid changes since this was the first char I was levelling in my endeavour: Mostly all the feral changes are either mixing in old talents into new talents like Survival of the fittest into thick hide and stuff and rebalancing old 5 point talents into 3 point talents. The only major change is to Heart of the Wild and I presume the reduction of intellect is because it is a subspec possibility and anything too high would make it mandatory and too powerful for Resto and Balance, since it would have been 12% spellpower (or close to it) increase to both specs.

The Balance Druid changes are again very similar, obviously wanting to tone down the power of the lunar guidance talent by baking in the lunar/solar power generation into the spell, making the balance druid levelling experience that much smoother. Same thing with Nature's Grace, I personally much prefer talents that are like 100% proc and the effect is increased per point rather than points which are like MAX EFFECT but 33/66/100% chance to proc, because at max level they do the same thing but the chance to proc is much more annoying to the lower level player, especially with the new point system where you now have to wait a good 6-ish levels to get the full experience of the talent, Pain and Suffering in the priest tree is another talent I wish was changed to a 100% chance to proc and if it remained a 3 point talent make it like (INCREASES DURATION OF SW:P BY 5/10/15 SECONDS) although perhaps people could get away with 2 points there but regardless. I digress.

I won't comment too much on Hunter changes, it looks like they are very much playing around with the focus costs of some spells and focus generation of the class, the arcane shot change is probably aimed to help out lower level players but ye.. nothing much I can comment on balance wise since I don't play a hunter anyway :).

Similar thing with Mage changes, definitly playing around with how the mage gets their spells, getting water elemental early seems to be very nice and stuff like Reactive Barrier seem very nice aswell for frost, meaning in pve you won't have to spend a global on your ice barrier if you suddenly take lots of damage and weren't expecting it and in pvp meaning you get your shield up even if you are silenced, which is very nice. There was a separate post on upcoming fire tree changes, and personally what I would like to see impact get is some sort of spawn phoenix ability, I always wanted fire mages to get a fire elemental spawning type thing, I am not sure what the phoenix would do, but personally I always loved the phoenix in warcraft 3 and it would be nice to see it come into wow, it could be a lovely reactive spell so like if you fire blast the phoenix becomes like a searing totem if you blink it like increases your run speed, that sort of thing, Idk I think it would be pretty cool and iconic even if it would be hard to balance, it also could bring more variety to the fire mage rotation since you would want to proc it at some point and this sort of thing.

Only thing I want to say about the Paladin changes is 1) If Protector of the Innocent makes it to tier 1, so should Pursuit of Justice: I want to have that choice of Utility vs. Utility and without moving Pursuit of Justice to tier 1 I feel like my 10 points outside of Holy would be totally set in stone. 2) I liked the Idea of Protection choosing between threat and dr, but now they are choosing between threat,dr and self healing. It's too much unless you double the holy power regen. I know it's been said you are trying to get shield of the righteous to refresh holy shield with holy power, but then whats the point of Holy Shield, you might aswell just roll them into one anyway, It would be cool say if you could make a rotation where you went 3->DR->3-> Threat/Heal -> 3 -> DR by somewhat doubling holy power generation so you choose between threat and self heal, or you could make it a choice between holy shield and self heal and threat being a constant but choosing between 3 things is almost always too much since 1 will always get left out (mostly).

Last changes I will comment on are the warriors, since the other classes had nothing substantial changed. I am really liking the sounds of Colossus Smash, one because the name is just awesome and 2 because it seems to have synergy, my thoughts on it though are a little: Well it will probably only be used with M.S/Bloodthirst so why bother putting all the other stuff on it, but ye, idk. The best change however is that, FINALLY, fury warriors got some kind of easier to manage emergency cooldown/aggro drop in die to the sword. My god I always hated how fury was a class that was all about taking a little more damage when dpsing but also to not have an emergency cooldown other than complicated shield wall macros that take far too long to activate sometimes, was just really irritating. I also like how fury is really going back to its essence with it all being about enrages and all that jazz.

So anyway that was a quick overview of my thoughts on that patch, I'll try and dish out some more posts today on both Durotar and Mar Sara Missions