Northern Durotar

Ok, remember no screens in this write-up for the moment. I will upload screens later and stuff, but write now I want to get my feedback down on paper or what have you.

Right, so I left the durotar action having dinged level 10 and been sent back to Razor hill after doing the awesome lil' patrol quest hub. Like I mentioned in the previous feedback module for this quest hub there was one early quest you got in razor hill that was away from the patrol area of quests, so I skipped it, and in retrospect I regret skipping it, as it was just a one-off quest in that area.

Basically you head up to the east side on top of the canyon to this cave controlled by the burning blade. The orcs of Razor hill want to know what they are up to and such, this quest is awesome though, the burning blade cult put this debuff on you, Fel flame I believe or well it's fel something, and basically every time you kill a mob you get an extra stack of this debuff, until you get enough that you transform into METAMORPHOSIS form, which I mean, is so awesome. Especially as cat cos like the animation makes the form take off and land. I mean small debuffs and stuff like this are really awesome, especially because that illidan form is so iconic from warcraft 3, and only available to those lucky demo warlocks. /envy.

Right, so like I said this quest is like a one-off, kinda annoying imo. I feel like you should only get this quest and come back and get the patrol quests OR the quests up north, like choice wise, so its natural for the player to go to the closer patrol quests. A quest could easily be added to the goblin female gail nozzywigg questline in the burning blade cave before sending you to the patrol hub in order to facilitate the questing experience better.

However, the guys at Razor hill are like OMG BURNING BLADE ACTIVITY TO THE NORTH, go and reinforce the Dranosh'ar barricade (bad spelling no doubt) and inform the superiors there of the burning blade activity.

Now on the way you meet a goblin npc with quests to kill harpies and pick up some random objects. This is purely identical to the quests in vanilla, so I am not sure if these quests are meant to be here, I presume they are because well no other quests involve the harpy area, but it would be nice if these quests got a bit of a makeover, they are just a purely generic kill quest and gather quest whilst you are out there. However, they break the quest flow of the burning blade cult, which would be nice to continue rather than be interrupted by dumb steamwheedle goblins :<.

However, you eventually arive at like the Barricade, and a big dialogue ensues between the far-seer (READ PRO THRALL) and the commander (READ PRO GARROSH), which is basically a thrall vs. garrosh type dialogue with insults thrown about the opposing side etc, however I really love this immersion factor, it really gets you into the tensions within the horde right now. Especially coupled with the troll starting area, to really set the scene for the horde sort of SETTING in cataclysm, which is really important in a starting zone imo.

Ok, so we get to this sort of quest which puts you in a wolf vehicle to sort of tell a parable. This quest is really awesome, but its really weird.. in the build that I did this quest you had pure control of the wolf and had no real direction as to where to go. I feel like this is a bug and you shouldn't be controlling it, considering the amount of yellow emotes triggered whilst moving and total lack of directions. However, the overall sense of this quest is awesome and I really enjoy these types of quest.

I also LOVE the ending of this quest where the commander in chief is like IGNORE THE WARNINGS GO KILL SHIT :D, type message and you are sent out to go kill stuff and retrieve this orb from one of the burning blade camps that got destroyed in the cataclysm. Along with making the waters safe by discharging some thunder kodos. I do like the realism factor here, I mean THUNDER LIZARDS GOT FLOODED, of course we need to make the water somewhat safe to swim in, or at the very least collect the lightning discharges.

Killing the elementals is nice because you see the first sign that the elementals are actually fighting each other and not just the denizens of Azeroth, which is a sort of nice introduction to cataclysm again. Like said you go to the now flooded Thunder ridge and tether some thunder lizards so peons can drag them out of the water. We also go grab this orb, the interaction on this quest is awesome, basically its like THE GOBLINS HAND CLUTCHES ONTO THE ORB IN DEATH, and like you just rip his arm off to get the orb anyway, awesome stuff :D.

Also the quest reward text for the orb is like U GAVE ME A HAND (lol pun) so allow me to return the favour, and he gives you some glove rewards, I love those little puns, even if a little cheesy. They give you reason to read some of the quest text, rather than just the story :).

You get a breadcrumb to go to azshara here, when I first levelled a tauren here I did wonder where that breadcrumb was, but suffice to say I won't be going to azshara with this character because the zone is very GOBLIN orientated, so it makes more sense to go there with the goblins.

Instead you get sent out to find another shaman near some more burning blade :), who asks you to go get some collars. He has a companion who tells you to go to the coast, to do some AWESOME quests, where basically you are killing 3 opponents, all with increasing difficulty. It gives the player a great chance to test their soloing capabilities and a sense of progression and accomplishment. The last fight was actually really tough to solo as a feral druid, and I was like YES I DOWNED IT when i killed it, which I mean for a starting level quest is a really good thing to accomplish.

I also dinged level 11 here, obviously the numbers for this zone are a little off as you should be getting around level 10 after this zone, and I ended up around 11 and a half at the end of the zone. So, obviously a few numbers need to be tweaked, but yeh onto the last quests of the zone.. you go to the cave (WITH THE SAME AWESOME METAMORPHOSIS DEBUFF :DDD) and its a generic kill quest. This is basically the last quest of Durotar, the follow-ups send you to Orgrimmar and then breadcrumbs to Northern Barrens.

Nothing really happens, with these breadcrumbs, which is a little bit of a shame. I presume the like BURNING BLADE QUESTLINE, would get resolved in Ragefire Chasm, but since you can't really go till level 15, it's kinda like a bit annoying you have a break in the chain of events.

My overall thoughts on the zone: AN AWESOME AWESOME STARTING ZONE, the opening zone is great for tutorial style levelling and lore, the quest flow is really nice, the quests themselves are well-designed, other than the few quest flaws i stated previously and those weird goblin quests that are really just "there".

Definitly a good zone though, not much I would change besides numbers for quests, the patrol quest order type thing and those goblin quests in the middle of nowhere really.

Onto the Northern Barrens (probably going to write this up tomorrow and do Ashenvale tonight)

Here's all the screenshots for Durotar on My Druid if you want to Browse through quests and stuff.

Druid Mastery Specialisations

Ok, so right now I am figuring that hey.. why don't you just write up your feedback and put the damm screenshots and all this jazz on the blog later, makes perfect sense right?

So what I am going to do, from now on, is basically write up zones as soon as I have finished them and/or topics of feedback and then every week, maybe a friday or something, go and fish around and put together the composition screenshots so the posts look prettier, the feedback overall is more crisp and actually some things make more sense for other viewers (LIKE THERE ARE ANY).

Ok, so tonight is going to be a very busy write up for me, Yesterday I finished the Northern Barrens (although 1 level short of 20, not sure why or if I missed some quests, but regardless). So I have around 6-7 posts incoming tonight with Northern Barrens and Northern Durotar Feedback.

Firstly though, some feedback on the Druid Specialisations you are presented with at level 10.

When dinging you are greeted with the UNLOCK FEATURE: TALENTS, on that little animation thing, quite cool I think, and like on live the talent button on the bar starts flickering when you ding to indicate you should click it.

When clicked you are prompted to choose your specialisation, you are presented with a summary of the specialisation spells and the signature spell in the middle, you can also view the talent trees by clicking the button saying "VIEW TALENT TREES"

Some comments on this generic feature.. GOOD :), overall, perhaps revolve a class quest around choosing your specialisation. (If a class quest has a place in wow I really think one based on choosing your specialisation would be great).

If we move onto the Druid specifics of the specialisations, we obviously have the 3 trees: Balance, Feral and Resto.

As Balance we get the ability Starsurge, a new ability in cataclysm, that does arcane/fire damage (can't remember the precise term used) and is going to be essential for generating eclipse procs by moving the eclipse bar by 10 each way.

We also get dreamstate to increase mana-regen for the spec and I think the last point is the eclipse bar, but it might be spell pushback for wrath,starfire etc. Whatever it is, its baked in stuff thats good for Balance Druids :).

Overall I think these are decent spells, can't argue with the smaller passive spells at all, definitly completely mandatory talents you would have to take anyway, so it's nice to have them baked into the specialisation.

As for the signature move, I'm a little half/half right now. Obviously I haven't played as a Moonkin on the Beta so I've no idea how crucial starsurge is to the rotation, Presumably it will work like you want to use it on cooldown, and inbetween you will want to proc eclipse with wrath and then move to spamming starfire as much as possible without triggering a solar eclipse early etc.

So I mean, there are arguments for and against it, It will be a signature ability of the balance druid, but I mean, when you think balance you think BOOMKIN, so I would really think moonkin form should be the specialised form, considering blizzard wants to appeal that resto is the spec without the dedicated form. I feel like boomkin should be given at level 10, and starsurge a talent in boomkins place.

However opposing this view is the fact that balance become very accustomed to the eclipse bar and starsurge mechanics from level 10 onwards, but I just feel that boomkin would be just so much more iconic as a specialisation ability.

Onto Feral Druids, we get some passive modifiers, (reducing rage/energy costs, 15% more damage and stuff), the vengeance mechanic for all tanks for bears. Pretty much most trees I think these passive stuff are good things, that you WOULD take and are rather boring talents.

The signature ability of Feral druids is mangle, definitely the right choice here in terms of both levelling progression and the fact that it has good crossover between tanking and dpsing. I mean the only other ability they could have used was like.. berserk, and a cooldown is something I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WANT as a signature move, I mean a cooldown is almost always attrocious for levelling, because using it on mobs that die in like 5 seconds always feels superfluous. Obviously an ability that has a cooldown is fine, if it does damage and is like less than 30 seconds, but beyond that I always feel that a cooldown is like something you feel like you want to save and things die to quickly for the cooldown to be useful.

Lastly we have Resto, again the minor passives are good for the tree. However, I disagree with Swiftmend being the signature ability. I disagree with it because it has no damage output, I mean it accomplishes nothing to help soloing for levelling. Whilst I do agree that this is probably the best thing that druids could get as a signature ability, I feel like that it could be so much more awesome like if say it could also consume a moonfire on the target to do instant damage. I don't know if this sort of change would have pvp balance issues, however in terms of making resto more level friendly, this change to swiftmend would be awesome imo.

So finally onto my choice: I picked Feral (if it wasn't obvious by the screens :)) because well I think its much easier to level as feral compared to say balance, I don't really like casters so much because they always feel so much more vulnerable if you multipull.

I also chose it for the 30% movement speed increase you get as feral constantly, however I might add that actually feral has felt extremely weak when playing through northern barrens, having to swap out of cat form multiple times to heal and basically dying to any sort of chain pulling, where you just take too much damage. I may switch to balance for the next 10 levels or so to see if it feels stronger and isn't too bad mana wise.

I also want to test out the new eclipse bar, which I obviously haven't tried out yet :).

Anyway, moving on to the Northern Durotar write-up

Random Thoughts

Ok, haven't done anything today really, feeling kinda bad but hey I was like LOLTIRED and just meh felt so UN-INTO anything I tried to do. I thought I'd get some random ramblings out of the way in a post, and since this blog is mostly for my benefit... cos I mean, it's not like anyone else reads this at the moment, maybe if I'm lucky Blizzard bookmarked this page and was like YE FEEDBACK :DDD, but I doubt that somehow, I'm cool with that though cos like I like to get my ramblings down.

Maybe I will be less "SCARED" of public criticism of this blog, and start "tagging" posts so people in searches would randomly find this blog, but hey personally I just like writing stuff down in my twisted vision of well almost everything and well, having freedom instead of getting shut down, which inevitably i almost always get :D.

Anyway, onto ramblings on some current TOPICS in both my life, forums I read and such and I wanted to discuss a few things to myself and get my thoughts down on well a post :).

TOPIC NUMBER 1: WHINING

Ok, so I am pretty well mystified I guess is the best way to describe it at how some people have a constant ability to whine about almost anything, regardless of what happens. You have some people who whine about insignificant things like, idk, a model of a unit or npc or something and are like RAWR DON'T LIKE, and actually these sort of things are legit in my opinion, because hey thes insignificant whines are all about subject matter which is purely subjective. I mean, if I like something because it's pink/purple, I can tell you not everyone will. It's a world of free will after all so everyone has an opinion on well.. everything.

However we get to say more SIGNIFICANT WHINING, I mean at the moment I am experiencing this on 2 fronts: on Starcraft 2 balance and wow cataclysm balance. I'll start of f with the Starcraft 2 balance, because it is probably the least flawed of the 2 types.

At the moment theres alot of whine from people who are like TERRAN IS IMBALANCED!!??!?!?! both from zerg and protoss opponents, who seem to think terran is some kinda juggernaut that is impossible to take down. Firstly, I would like to state that I think nothing is imbalanced in this game, there are powerful things (LIKE EMP VS. PROTOSS) and there are also weak things, but nothing is so strong that it is "IMBA".

With that out of the way, I find it increasingly irritating that people claim that terran is imbalanced and whatever they do they are defeated by it. Firstly, lets just state some statistics, we have 6000 terrans 7250 protoss 5000 zerg 2000 Random in the diamond league across all regions approximatly.

People who have played over 100 games in diamond we have 1350 Terran, 1800 Protoss, 1200 Zerg, 100 random.

So we see that firstly in ladder Protoss is the most played and that Terran is second and Zerg is third most played. Again this doesn't say much other than perhaps protoss is slightly easier or more fun to play (you could draw either conclusion with different explanations easily).

However, they are pretty even mostly.

Now the biggest problem I have with say the whining is because people always seem to approach a problem with 0 creativity, they are like RAWR THIS IS OVERPOWERED, perhaps they even think they are some sort of god playing and won't dare look at their own play before looking at the opposing players.

What I mean by this is that they will be beaten by something they believed to be overpowered, maybe like EMP in a pvt matchup, but they won't approach the problem by like saying HUH? what can I do to make this thing less powerful, is there anyway I could have won, was it actually just inevitable I would lose because I got behind in the game.

Like they will look OUTWARDS, before looking INWARDS, also they will be like HUH WELL I FELT FORCED TO DO THIS AND THEN THIS GOT OWNED, like say zerg feel like they have to expand early vs. terran/protoss and obviously this leaves them open to early timing attacks, now sure you could argue this is a flaw with zerg mechanics, but a 1-basing zerg is going to be stronger than a ONLY JUST EXPANDED 2-basing zerg.

People want to whine that terran is "IMBALANCED" because they can do 50 different openings, and pretty much they are all viable, but I mean that is because protoss/zerg feel like they HAVE TO expand vs. Terran, so of course your army is going to be weaker and are going to be vulnerable to early timing attacks.

HOWEVER, my biggest concern rather than specifics, is the fact that people won't back up their facts with credible evidence, they back it up with anecdotal evidence, and because we are all human (hopefully) naturally everybody remembers the NEGATIVE EVENTS, over the positives, like say you go EXACTLY 50-50 in a matchup, you feel like you probably went 40-60 because you don't remember the wins unless they were like EPIC but you remember losses because LOL LOSS, so you end-up feeling you are playing against imbalance.

The next most annoying concern is that most people who complain haven't explored trying options against a certain tactic, like they think something is IMBA, but will keep throwing the same tactic against it and be like Huh? a build that defeats my build IMPOSSIBLE!?!?!, I remember a wise-man once saying that progress in builds goes like this you have a winning strategy, and then it gets stopped. The natural progression of this is to try your strategy but with MORE STRUCTURES or MORE UNITS, for an example of this see 3-gate -> 4-gate -> 5-gate all-in plays.

IF A STRAT DOESNT WORK BRUTE FORCE MAKES IT WORK!!!!

So yeh, people refuse to be creative and try out new things, its dangerous and stuff and somehow impossible, because the opposing player can somehow magically have every single unit en-masse in every single game at every single point. Somehow the opponent always dictates what you do, (this is the case in vs. Zerg really, but that's cos that is how zerg work) but yeh, sometimes the explanations are ludicrous.

One of the last things I don't like about whining is how like... people refuse to give in.. to whatever you do or say or suggest. THEY ARE RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG. Doesn't matter how legitimate or cool you are, unless you agree with them they are never happy, now in starcraft this whine is made prominent by suggesting strategies and stuff to combat this and it's immedietly rejected with either a petty pop at me/the suggester or it is deflected and replaced with BUT THIS IS IMBALANCED.

So you are left with these people are like, no matter what happens this is imbalanced in its current state and "WHATEVER THEY DO" (which is usually 1 thing every game) they lose to it.

Maybe you would ask, what would make an ability or unit imbalanced? well I would say a unit or ability is imbalanced, if like it meets a few criteria.

1) YOU HAVE TO USE IT, ie in a certain matchup you have to use it, or would be foolish not to. Lets say a ghost in TvP, I mean emp is very powerful so you would be foolish not to use it vs. Protoss.

2) You are in a scenario where like you have an army x and an army y, normally x beats y, adding the "imbalance" makes y beat x, and whatever you add to x can't turn the tables on y.

This second point is my major criterion for imbalance, and I don't think anything satisfies this, like lets say we have army x and army y, being like Army X is like 2 Ultralisks and Army Y is 10 marines, firstly X beats Y, now we add stim to marines and micro and (I BELIEVE) that 10 marines with stim and micro will beat 2 ultralisks but we can add infestors with fungal growth to stop the micro and again ultralisks win. This goes on forever basically, but the point is, there is nothing that beats something ALL THE TIME REGARDLESS.

The only thing that comes close is like maybe 15-20 void rays, which will demolish almost everything.

3) If in an even game, lets say nobody attacked and the 2 players macrod identically off of 2 bases, this 1 player can make this 1 unit or ability that is the other player cannot do anything about at that stage even if it was scouted.

What I am talking about here is, say somebody made like a mothership, and the fleet beacon was scouted early, and both players had the same resource income, the opposing player could not do ANYTHING, and it was basically an automatic loss. This could mean the player had to micro the unit, but basically if he did that it was an auto-win.

The idea is that although there is something you can do to combat the strategy and you saw the strategy, you don't have enough time or enough macro to beat it when the opposing player can get access to it.

There are probably more criteria, but I can't think of them right now, these are 3 fairly good stepping stones and note they ALL NEED TO BE satisfied for something to be deemed overpowered.

THINGS THAT DONT MAKE SOMETHING IMBALANCED:

1) If something you need to do to beat something requires more skill than the other player

Sure you are putting in more micro to beat something, but hey thats part of the game. (HOWEVER if say one race required more micro and more macro to be EVEN with another race that would be imbalanced, but only if it was in like 70%+ of scenarios imo)

2) It beat a strategy that was scouted.

3) You scouted it and still lost

(Yes this is controversial maybe but the point is, if you scout say LOTS OF HELLIONS and make LOTS OF ZERGLINGS, yes you are going to lose that battle.)

4) If something is unbeatable by YOUR BUILD.

Yeh, there are other criterion.. of course there are like playstyle choices and all that jazz, but hey, I hate the talk of imbalance, really I don't think anything is truly imbalanced unless it meets those criteria above, which nothing does really.

Think this post satisfied my rambling nature though, maybe i'll make another post about how I hate how much wow players whine and people whine in general, but hey it would probably turn into some 20,000 word thesis, and I'm not in the mood for writing THAT MUCH.

Hoping to start laddering in starcraft 2 later, urgh scary tiems :<. LOSING SUCKS IMBALANCED etc will be incoming :)).

Cataclysm Finally Re-installed

YES IT FINALLY REINSTALLED, 15gb download is seriously... way too much :<, although about 4.2gb hasn't been downloaded, not sure why but hell I can play so thats cool. Although I haven't uploaded the specialisation of druids or the last part of durotar... IM IN THE MOOD for blasting through barrens and ashenvale tomorrow, so I am going to do that.

GOING TO TAKE ME FOREVER TO WRITE UP ALL OF IT, but hey, better I get all the content done and then take 3 hours per area (ye.. it probably takes at least that long) to write it up. I am tempted to get to like around 55 or 60 and just take 2 days and write it all up, which might be cool and like CONDENSED so all the feedback is in consecutive posts.

But ye.. gonna be sort of MEGA CHINA LEVELLING/FEEDBACK GATHERING over the next few days, obviously testing the zone rigorously and taking screenshots means I probably end up taking around 3x longer in a zone than I normally would, tbh I would say I was a pretty damm fast leveller so maybe that's not that much longer for the average player.

Anyway, watching a bunch of starcraft 2 tournaments at the moment, my boyfriend entered a starcraft 2 tournament for tomorrow :OOOOO gonna try and support him and stuff, (he isn't actually that bad, hes like diamond level :<). Also going to a bbq tomorrow so WOAH BUSY DAY, but ye gonna try and post some stuff tomorrow, hopefully finished durotar + druid specialisation post.

Cataclysm Download Testing

Ok, so lets get some testing thoughts out here, 1) like the gnome starting area is here.. (and u don't have to do special stuff to test it) so I decided to just make a gnome char to test out the download.

Basically it took the download about 10 minutes on my shitty 5MBit/s connection (at best :/) downloading at around 300kb/s to able to play, (after having to install a 600mb part, which I presume

When going to the character selection screen it took around 10-15 seconds for the character stuff to be downloaded and to see a picture of my character on the generic background, if I selected a different character and went back to that character the background would be loaded after around 5-10 seconds. Overall pretty easy. When creating a char each specific "face" or facet of the char creation process took around 1 second to be loaded, it was pretty streamlined and you couldn't really notice you weren't playing the complete game.

When loading up into the game it took around 2-3 minutes for everything to be streamed properly, I presume this was like the animations of the races and this sort of thing, so I could have a streamlined experience. However, once all that loaded and I was in the game, it ran pretty much smoothly at around 300ms. I presume this was at the cost of downloading the overall game, but tbh I couldn't notice whether it was downloaded or full ingame.

All the sound files were present, and all this jazz. I couldn't put a finger on anything i saw that was missing, other than like the FINAL POLISH, but then I play on low graphics anyway (although all my screenshots previously were on ultra settings :D) so I doubt this change really affects me at all.

I really am liking this downloader, it is very impressive to be able to play after around 5 minutes of a 15.5gb (SERIOUSLY WTF!??!!??!) download, and currently my downloader is on like 6% and I can't really notice any difference.

Going to hold off on levelling the druid until after the download is complete in case questing is actually affected in someway, like missing textures for those awesome portrait things or perhaps missing animations.

Regardless though BIG THUMBS UP for this new downloader, although having to re-install the beta is rough and annoying as hell, I much prefer being able to play with seemlessly little interruption in play (apart from world server going down :DDDD) and surprisingly little lag. Kudos tbh.

Today O:

Just posting to say that I probably won't be writing anything today... mainly because all my bandwidth is going to be taken up by downloading Cataclysm beta.. again. Maybe if it's quick I'll do Mission 06 in my walkthrough, I might also comment on the patch changes for beta, again using my amazing (WAIT WHAT?) knowledge of classes :).

Depends though, mixed reports on how easy it is to download the client. I am gonna try and test out some simple gameplay whilst its downloading, but realistically I don't have good enough bandwidth to play.

Research Discussion

Right so in the Starcraft 2 Campaign there are Protoss Research upgrades and Zerg Research upgrades, 20 in total for each side, but you can only choose 10, and they come in pairs so you choose between 2 similar upgrades and decide what is best.

Basically the way it works out is that the "LEFT" side is the offensive option and the "RIGHT" side is the defensive option in a pair.

Firstly lets go on about Protoss Research

Ultra Capacitors - Your Attack upgrades now increase your unit's attack speed by 5% per upgrade

Vanadium Plating - Your Armor Upgrades now increase your unit's Hp by 5% per upgrade.

Now, this depends on your playstyle really, if you are ultra aggresive, I.E YOU WANT TO RUSH AND NOT TURTLE SO MUCH, then it actually turns out the life upgrade is better, it means you can move out that much faster.

If you want to turtle in your campaign, use bunkers, siege tanks etc to defend then the attack speed upgrade is better, because they mean you fire more often before the enemy hits you, and because you are in bunkers or your tanks are in entrenched positions, their hp doesn't matter so much.

This upgrade is entirely up to the individual player, I personally prefer the attack speed upgrade, I would recommend it if you like Siege tanks in anyway shape or form :D.

Orbital Depots - Supply Depots now Drop in "Instantly"

Micro-Filtering - Your Refineries now harvest gas 25% faster.

This research is more dependent on how "good" you are, if you are bad, like me, Orbital depots is BY FAR the best option, it means you don't have to constantly produce depots and can just produce 2-3 at a time by 1 scv every so often and not be supply blocked.

If though you are good at managing your supply, then Micro-filtering is better, but to be honest I have gone through all missions and there was no mission I really thought I needed my gas 25% faster, considering medic marine is like such a powerful strategy, you just don't need this upgrade unless you have no use for Orbital Depots because you are awesome :D.

Automated Refinery - Your Refineries now harvest Vespene Gas Automatically

Command Centre Reactor - Your Command Centres can now Produce 2 Scvs simultaneously.

Ok, this choice is pretty simple to me: AUTOMATED REFINERY, every time. Although the reactor is useful, the point is that on alot of missions you can't produce 2 scvs at a time at the start anyway because you don't have the mineral income to support it. Also the Automated Refinery means you usually get a few free scvs per mission because they were given to you to go on gas ideally at the start, but now you can put them on minerals instead.

There is also one mission, Supernova, that having the automated Refinery is just SO USEFUL. In my opinion this upgrade is mandatory.

Raven - Drops PDD, Turret and can use Hunter Seeker Missiles, Detector

Science Vessel - Can use Irradiate, Repairs Vehicles!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, Detector.

Now although you can't get science vessels in multiplayer, my god I wish you could, they are amazing, there is no choice here you HAVE to get vessels here in my opinion, the raven is just not worth the money in single player, it requires too much micro to be good, but to have a free heal on your mechanical units (IT DOESNT COST EXTRA MINERALS/GAS :D) from science vessels makes this upgrade pretty mandatory imo. Once you get vessels you will be making them, pretty much asap.

If you want to practice "TERRAN PLAYSTYLE" for multiplayer then get a raven sure, but science vessels are like 9000% better :D.

Tech Reactor - Combines the Tech Lab and the Reactor

Orbital Strike - Units from your barracks now arrive in drop-in pods at your barracks' rally point.

Now, this depends on your style, if you are protoss, or like their style over terrans. Orbital strike basically converts barracks into Warpgates, although you still queue, you get to reinforce anywhere, you can basically drop in a force anywhere on the map, which can be awesome for certain missions, Shatter the sky for one. It's also awesome if you basically only want to go medic/marine since you just need reactored barracks for that strategy (later on).

However, I personally prefer lots of siege tanks, banshees, medics and marines. So I would go for the tech reactor as it allows multiple siege tank and banshee production. It also means I don't have to buy the medic upgrade of course. This is really down to personal taste, neither of these are mandatory.

Right. ONTO THE ZERG UPGRADES.

Shrike Turret - Adds a turret to your bunkers that attacks ground and air.

Fortified Bunker - Adds 150 life to your bunkers.

There isn't much in this really, It really depends how you use your bunkers, if you use them primarily for defense, alone, then you are probably better with the Shrike Turret. If you use them, like I do, as like a stopper for your Siege Tanks to obliterate your enemy when defending then the Fortified Bunker is a better upgrade.

Really though, the differences here are minor, just go with what you feel like :D.

Planetary Fortress - Allows your Command Centre to be outfitted with a cannon at the expense of being able to lift

Perdition Turret - Flame Turret

This is again optional, HOWEVER, I will say that the final mission is MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH easier by going with the Planetary Fortress option, The Perdition turret is just really weak in the final mission compared to the fortress. The Perdition Turret has more uses in like other missions than the fortress does though, since mostly you can't expand on most maps in the campaign, where the fortress shines in multiplayer.

However I would personally go for PLANETARY FORTRESS, just because it makes the last mission so much easier.

Predator - Anti-Infantry Cat like Vehicle

Hercules Transport - Massive Transport that unloads units almost instantly

The difference between these 2 are minor, Hercules takes alot of tech to use and isn't that useful in most missions, however I would say it was better than the Predator because it means you can ignore medivacs in the campaign.

The predator is only really useful in like one mission (welcome to the jungle) otherwise it just isn't that great, you really won't make them once you can make siege tanks.

But again, it doesn't matter: neither play a pivotal part in the campaign, just go with how you feel.

Cellular Reactor - All units start with +100 Energy and +100 Maximum Energy

Regenerative Bio-Steel - All Mechanical units slowly regen life.

Basically: TAKE CELLULAR REACTOR, if you followed my advice and took the science vessel.

Regenerative Bio-Steel is kinda useless if you have a science vessel able to heal your units with your mech units. Cellular Reactor means all your energy units have 125 energy+ out of the gate, which is just immense and means they can use their abilities right at the start, it's particularly useful on the mission "Supernova" and on other missions aswell.

Hive Mind Emulator - Allows you to mind control zerg units in a SMALLLLLLLL!!!! radius around the target.

Psi Disruptor - Slows nearby zerg AND THEIR ATTACK SPEED by 50%.

Do not be conned by the hive mind emulator into thinking that it is cool, although you might want a pet ultralisk, on most missions they die too fast or don't go in range of your stinking emulator for you to be able to use it. Basically the Psi Disruptor is SOOOOOOOOOOOOO good, it means that the zerg units are 50% slower so your siege tanks have twice as long to kill them before they reach your lines, (Or even your bunkers).

So yeh take the Psi Disruptor, it is SOOOOOO useful, on sooo many missions (wherever you will be attacked by zerg) the hive emulator is too gimmicky to be of any real use D:.

a TLDR of Sorts will be listed here:

Protoss: Ultra Capacitors, Orbital Depots, Automated Refinery, Science Vessels, Tech Reactor

Zerg: Fortified Bunker, Planetary Fortress, Hercules Transport, Cellular Reactor, Psi-Disruptor.