The MMO Notebook

The folks at Sony gave Vanguard a big update while I was away from the game.  I had completely forgotten about it until it came time to buy my new spells.  I dinged level 15 while whacking gremlins, so I went over to the Nakai Dojo to see what was available.

I hit up the Druid spell vendor and that is when I remembered the game update.  There were several spells for the levels I had already gone through as well as some nice ones for my current level.  Some of the highlights for me were:

- Lifestream 1: AOE Heal

- Rampant Roots: AOE Root

- Ire II: Arcane Direct Damage

- Wolf Shape: Turns me into a wolf

- Ant Shape: Turns me into an invisible ant for 3 minutes

- Starfall: 1982-2087 Direct Damage

For soloing, the two that really stand out for me are Ant Shape and Starfall.  Ant Shape is really just a fancy way of granting invisibility.  I turn into a small ant that I can see but enemies can’t see.  Three minutes isn’t very long, but it is nice to know when it will wear off.  It also has a five minute refresh before you can use it again.

The other great spell is Starfall.  With the damage is produces, I am able to one-shot kill orcs with ease.  The one limiting factor to Starfall is that it uses Phenomena points.  You have a set number of points and each time you cast Starfall is subtracts from that total.  Once you use up those points, you must wait for them to refresh.  I believe it takes 1 hour for used points to refresh.

They claim that there were some graphical performance tweaks in the update, but everything seems the same for me.  It runs just like it did in January.  Things still hitch and I still have to use the /flush command every now and then to get performance back.  They claim that a fix for the hitching is on the way.  Let’s hope so.  As a reminder, my PC is an AMD X2 6000+, 3gb RAM, and a Nvidia 8600GT 512mb video card.