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Ao Kuang was a popular god in his original incarnation in Smite. A while back, HiRez removed him and replaced him with Kukulkan, giving the new serpent god Ao’s old move-set. However, Ao Kuang is back and better than ever. Playable right now on the Smite Public Test Servers, his kit and appearance have recieved a complete overhaul. Lets take a look at the changes.
Ao Kuang: Dragon-God of the Sea
Passive
Ao Kuang’s sword can hold up to 3 Energy Charges, and regenerates charges while out of combat. Each time Ao Kuang casts an ability, an energy charge will be consumed if available, increasing the damage of the ability. If Ao Kuang is out of mana, he will use Energy Charges to cast abilities instead.
Charge Damage Increase: 5%
Charge Regneration: 5s
1st Ability: Water Illusion
Ao Kuang teleports forward into stealth, leaving behind a watery form of himself. He remains in stealth for 5s or until he attacks or takes damage. Ao Kuang may activate this ability again to detonate the watery form, dealing damage to nearby enemies.
Damage: 90/140/190/240/290 (+70% of your magical power)
Radius: 20
Cost: 70 mana
Range: 30
Cooldown: 15 seconds
2nd Ability: Dragon Call
Ao Kuang summons 6 dragons to his side. For every successful basic attack Ao Kuang makes, a dragon will dive to the target dealing additional damage. This ability ends after all dragons are used, or after 10s. Ao Kuang may activate this ability again to send forward any remaining dragons in a ranged attack. The dragons damage and slow the first enemy they hit.
Attack Damage: 40/60/80/100/120 (+30% of your magical power)
Ranged Damage: 20/30/40/50/60 (+15% of your magical power) per remaining Dragon
Slow: 30%, for 1s +0.25s per remaining Dragon
Range: 55
Cost: 60/65/70/75/80 mana
Cooldown: 15/14/13/12/11 seconds
3rd Ability: Wild Storm
Ao Kuang unleashes a storm of lightning from his sword, damaging all enemies in front of him. This hit is considered a basic attack, and will activate item effects.
Damage: 90/140/190/240/290 (+50% of your magical power)
Range: 30
Cooldown: 5 seconds
Cost: 60/65/70/75/80 mana
Ultimate: King of the Eastern Seas
Ao Kuang selects a single target in melee range and grabs them, dealing damage and knocking them up into the air. If the target is under a health threshold, Ao Kuang will instead reveal his true form, becoming a Dragon and executing them. After transforming Ao Kuang remains in the air, and may then pick a new location to land, dealing damage to enemies within range 20, and fully recharging his Sword.
Damage: 90/140/190/240/290 (+50% of your magical power)
Execute Threshold: 23/26/29/32/35%
Landing Damage: 100/150/200/250/300 (+50% of your magical power)
Landing Range: 200
Cooldown: 90 seconds
Cost: 90/100/110/120/130 mana
If you’re curious as to what the new Ao Kuang looks like in action, I’ve embedded a video of him in action below.
City-builders are in luck. Developers Focus Home are planning to make and release a new version of the Cities XL game they announced today; aptly titled Cities XXL.
As this is just the first announcement details are not really available, but they have said they plan to make use of multi-core CPUs to make sure that a smooth FPS is always available for the player no matter how large or complicated a city might get to be. It’s also yet to be seen what they plan to offer those who purchased Cities XL Platinum released back in February (such as a discount) or indeed if anything will be offered at all.
The announcement was made over Cities XL’s Facebook page:
“We’re thrilled to announced the return of the world’s largest city builder, filled to the brim with new features allowing you to expand the scope of the game further than any Cities XL game before it. Introducing: Cities XXL!
“Create and manage enormous cities on the latest version of the ‘Cities’ engine with multi-core support. With a smooth FPS no matter the size and complexity, there are no longer any limits on the richness and diversity of your sprawling metropolis. New features, buildings, and other details will be revealed over the coming weeks.”
Telltale’s upcoming Game of Thrones games series is obviously drawing a bit of attention, especially from fans of the series both in its book and television program forms. Some people wish that it was taking from the books more than the show, but the decision was probably made due to the fact certain faces are now recognisible as the characters in question.
Or at least that’s what we can take if the leaked screenshots posted on Twitter earlier are actually real.
Eight screenshots were posted in all, in a tweet that was quickly spread around. The account in question, @lifelower, calls themselves the “XBLA watchdog” and even though the tweet has since been removed some people had already copied the images, some of which are included below.
Telltale have neither confirmed or denied the legitimacy of the screenshots but they do appear convincing. However the Internet is rife with hoaxes and even ones that appear credible can sometimes be proven wrong, so we will need to wait to find out if this one is for real or not.
The first episode of the game should be releasing sometime before the end of the year, with five more to follow next year. The game will be set just after the end of the third series and will take place over the course of Series 4 before ending just around the beginning of Series 5. It will follow House Forrester, which hasn’t been touched on greatly in-show yet.
Zombie apocalypse games have been quite popular in the last few years and one of the more unique was definitely DayZ, the game that began life as a mod for the shooter Arma 2. It’s being developed as a standalone game now, although the process is a long one and creator Dean Hall has made it quite clear that if you’re not willing to play a game with bugs – do not buy DayZ yet. It’s still being updated.
One of these updates is going to bring with it an opportunity for many players to answer a common if quite disturbing question that gets asked about apocalypses and especially this type of end of the world situation: if you had to would you turn cannibal?
The community has expressed concern about it encouraging the ‘kill on sight’ reputation that DayZ players have, but Bohemia are addressing that by making it so that there are some fairly dire consequences for consuming your fellow, slightly unluckier man.
Kuru is a brain disease that actually exists in real life. Consuming raw human flesh in the game (although not cooked yet) will have a chance of giving you this disease. The symptoms include uncontrollable laughing, crying, shaking and eventually, death. It’s not pleasant and you better believe that the developers are not encouraging this as an option unless it’s your last resort.
It’s already running on experimental servers and some feedback on it suggest that players feel gun shake should also be a symptom as well as the cooked flesh also having a chance of giving you the disease, albeit a smaller one than the raw flesh would do.
What are your thoughts on this new addition to the game? It just makes me shudder a little bit…
Any big game launch is onset with server issues and lag as many players attempt to log on as soon as possible. Warlords of Draenor was no exception to this, but the problems seem to have lasted a little bit longer than the normal period of initial server issues. It’s apparently not unusual to wait hours to get onto the server, then find yourself DC’d and sent to the back of the queue again.
Blizzard are trying their best to deal with the causes of the issues though and have announced that they’re planning to use the phasing technology first used in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion to essentially phase the entire continent of Draenor – thus allowing them to spread server load across more than one ‘copy’ of Draenor.
European servers were the first to get the fix implemented and the North American, Oceanic and Americas realms were to follow shortly. A few tests were run on selected North American servers and this convinced Blizzard that it was a worthwhile tactic to battle the lag.
