A lot of things to get to on here. Since a lot of info has come out about the campaign mechanics here’s a small listing.

The main change is the role of Kerrigan as a hero unit that will be used in most missions. Blizzard gives her a feeling of massive power due to her higher stats, unique spells, and a new RPG feature. You can choose a “Battle Focus” that determines her statistics, spells, and passive boosts and level up your Kerrigan.

Battle Focuses can be changed between missions, and they are thinking about allowing it mid mission as well. So far there are 4 shown and only two were available. Spec Ops is more spell oriented, giving you a AoE attack, a boost to your energy, and a hallucination of herself that can deal half damage. Corruption is defense based giving extra armor. For commands it gives you Spawn Broodling, which turns the targeted non massive/hero unit into 5 broodlings and instantly kills it. Corrosive Spores is another AoE attack that grants temporary damage increases from all attackers against the targets as well as damaging them.

The last two Battle Focuses have nothing shown. Since the 4 core attributes shown are Energy, Armor, Strength, and HP are shown, it’s likely that Strength will give passive boosts to damage and close range abilities while HP will probably be designed with HP boosts and spells to heal and protect Kerrigan from damage.

The other most interesting thing revealed is how regular units in your army will be more customizable. Wings of Liberty allowed you to get Tech Lab upgrades and unique to the campaign upgrades that would be kept from mission to mission. Heart of The Swarm seems to have that same feature for the Zerg Units using the Evolution Chamber. However, the truly interesting this is that you will be able to evolve each unit. Zerglings can turn into Swarmlings (Spawn 3 Zerglings at a time instead of 2) or Raptors (which get a 10 HP boost and a Zealot Charge like leap onto nearby enemies). These effects are permanent like the Research Path in Wings of Liberty and must be chosen carefully. Below are the list of known units.

Zerglings

Swarmlings:

Spawns 3 Zerglings at a time instead of 2 at no additional cost.

Raptor:

Leap at nearby enemies and gain 10 additional HP.

Banelings

Splitterling:

A special Baneling that’s explosion splits it into two smaller units. Those smaller units have the same attack but the splitting ability stops after the smaller ones explode.

Gorgeling:

Buildings destroyed by them are turned into collectable resources.

Roaches

Prowler:

Basically the Roach with the Tunneling Claws ability, Prowlers currently can move while burrowed.

Leech:

Gain +10 life per kill (up to 6 times) and gain more HP regeneration while burrowed.

The gameplay video above also shows of some of the first two missions. “War For The Brood” takes place on Char and pits Kerrigan against a Brood Mother who denies her right to be Queen of Blades. “Silence Their Cries” takes place on a world making use of the hidden Iceworld tileset from Wings of Liberty. Kerrigan seeks out another Brood Mother but ends up fighting against the Protoss. This mission has a environment mechanic like in Devil’s Playground from Wings of Liberty with the lava, except in this case you see units being slowly frozen and thawed from the world’s dangerous weather.

Anyhow, here are the results from last month’s poll. I have to disagree with the majority as I enjoyed Starjeweled more than Left 2 Die. Aiur Chef being last doesn’t surprise me, but if you haven’t played that yet you should try it just to hear the voice acting’s hilarity.

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This month’s poll asks whether or not you will be picking up a copy of Heart of The Swarm when it comes out, and if so whether or not you get the Collector’s Edition.

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Thanks to Dr. Bob for sending it in.

Blizzard officially released three of the four Custom Maps they announced at Blizzcon for SCII.

Aiur Chef is a game where you have three rounds to compete against the other players, gathering ingredients across the map and fighting each. The person who nets the most points from making the most recipes wins. The voice acting in this one is pretty damn funny.

StarJeweled is a puzzle/tug of war game. The screen is divided in two, with StarCraft units battling it out on the left, and a puzzle game on the right. You need to switch pieces around while forming chains of 3 or more pieces in order to gain energy, which can be spent on more powerful units and for casting spells.

Left 2 Die is the last one that has been released at this time. It is essentially the campaign mission Outbreak, but with some stronger enemies and an another player slot for an ally.

The last unreleased map is StarCraft II Defense of The Ancients (DoTA, as it’s known on WarCraft III), which will be a team game that pits heroes from Blizzard games against eachother in a hack and slash RPG nature.

Interestingly, the first 3 maps mentioned above which have been released have a new incentive to get players to try them out: Achievements. There’s a ton of achievement points to be racked up playing these custom games. There’s also 3 new Portraits:

You can earn the Zealot Chef from Aiur Chef by making each of the three recipes each round (Easy way to do this is to play with a friend.). Ornatus is earned from StarJeweled by casting the spell Healing Wave enough times to have healed 3,000 HP in one game (You can do this by playing against a friend or an easy computer. If you feel your units are overpowering them, Psi Storm your own units to keep the game going.). And the last portrait is the Stank (Sorry, I haven’t earned it just yet), which is a “Special Infected” from the Left 2 Die map. You need to kill one without losing any units (People recommend Siege tanks behind a Planetary Fortress wall.). Good Luck!

Since we’re in the middle of April already our newest Poll will run until the end of May.

The results of our old poll are below.

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I’m glad people have been enjoying the maps on there. There are a lot of fun ones that I’m impressed with too.

Our newest poll asks which Blizzard Custom Map you like that most.

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So there hasn’t been too much in the way of news for StarCraft II lately. We did find a little bit of info on other things aside from chat rooms for the 1.2 patch.

- Roach range will be increased.

- Fungal Growth will temporarily disable Blink when used on Stalkers.

- The Barracks will now require a Supply Depot.

- Reaper’s Speed upgrade will require the Factory.

- Increased HP to Zerg buildings.

So clearly they want to help out the Zerg players and try to do some nerfs to Terran.

And for you obsessed SCII people who want every Decal and Portrait, you will have to buy a BlizzCon ticket for your Web Browser/DirecTV. They announced that players who buy a ticket will recieve a Murloc Marine Portrait and Deep Sea decals.

Hey there everyone!

Looks like there’s a new email scam going around, so please be careful. The sender’s name is wowaccountadmin and tries to make up some excuse that there might be an issue with your battle.net account and they need your account information to fix whatever the issue might be. DO NOT FALL FOR THIS. I wouldn’t want to see any of our members or anyone else get caught by this scheme. There’s also a thread about this right now on the WoW forums in case anyone would like more information about this scam. Here’s the link to the thread:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=17367978428&sid=1

That is all.