Vanguard: On The Way To Halgarad
My Dahknarg adventures eventually lead me to the Silvermane house where I am supposed to find a Vulmane named Hador. He tells me that I need to select a clan and gives me choices. There is the Ghostclaw, which is adept at casting, Swiftfang, which is adept with light weapons and armor, and Nighthunters, adept at heavy combat. Naturally, as a druid, I chose the Ghostclaw clan.
They want me to prove myself to my new clan, so I am sent to find a Vulmane named Gnakel, who is under the influence of a Bloodhowler. I am to slay him and wash my hands in his blood. Gnakel is under guard at the campfire near the center of town. It was an easy fight, which is good, because his guards didn’t help me. My reward from this quest was 60 copper and 1459 experience points.
Next up was the Okhnom’s Supplies quest. My suggestion is to save this quest until you have finished all of the other Dahknarg quests. You’ll need the levels and it leads you to your next city and quest hub which is Halgarad. I had to take some supplies to Shalen who is out on the road some ways east of the gnoll cave. I found her standing next to a large boulder cowering in fear. Turns out there is a band of bloodhowlers up ahead and she is too scared to go on. She wants me to kill a bunch of them and then go find a guy named Armol Furth who should be further up the road.
The bloodhowler’s are 3-dot mobs, so they are a little tougher than the standard ones. You can pull singles if you are careful. I knocked off the required amount and then went past their camp in search for Furth.
I found Furth a good ways up the road. He had fallen on tough times because the bloodhowler’s invaded him, tore up his wagon and stole his supplies. He wants me to go slay the bloodhowler’s that did this and get back his supplies. I found them just up the road from him in a camp on the right-hand side of the road. The very first gnoll that I pulled dropped the supplies.
After recovering the stolen supplies, I was tasked with taking them on to the city of Halgarad.
–Wolfen
Read MoreVanguard: Starting A Vulmane
So I moved to the Xeth server to join a guild with some online friends. As mentioned earlier, I decided to start another druid, but this time I chose the race of Vulmane. This will show me how a starting area on the Thestra continent varies from Kojan.
The Vulmane starting area is called Spirit’s Rest and it definitely has the feel of a wilderness outpost. The surrounding land is beautiful to look at and I instantly preferred this area over the Kojani style.
The first questgiver I see is Swiftfang Kover. He gives a couple quests that have me kill some whelps located right outside the camp and to steal food from the Broken Fang gnoll camps. They each gave a few copper and experience points. There is also a general goods vendor that gives a quest called Young Bear Pelts. The title says it all. I killed a few bears and brought back the pelts for a few copper and experience.
Ghostclaw Grimaw has a couple quests as well. He is too old to harvest the spirit blossom herbs anymore, so he sends me out to harvest some for him. Once that is completed he sends me to see my spellcaster trainer who is located inside a tent. She tells me the basics of being a spellcaster and gives me my level 2 spell Piercing Roots I.
I am then sent off to a cave northwest of camp to assist the Spiritragers found within. Spiritrager Volsar tells me the history of the Vulmane and gives me The Essence of Souls quest. I had to kill some Seething Souls and collect a Seething Essence. I thought the essence would be found on the corpses of the souls, but it turned out that I had to click on a wooden stake leaning out from a wooden wall to get it. Doing this gave 40 copper and 78 experience points.
Spiritrager Jalgresh wants me to do the Hunt The Soul Eater quest. The Soul Eater is a big crab found in various spots within the cave. This quest gives 10 copper 78 experience and Ghostclaw Boots.
The last quest in the cave is given by Spiritrager Jurkar, which is Soul Suffering. This required me to kill Splintering Souls, which are little balls of light that are found throughout the cave. I got 40 copper and 78 expererience for doing it.
Back at the camp, Nighthunter Karnor gives the Broken Fang Alpha quest. After killing an Alpha Gnoll the quest gave 80 copper and 158 experience. It also had a selectable reward and I chose the Ghostclaw Greatstaff.
There were many other quests in the area that I completed, but I won’t go into detail on them here. They were all easy to do solo and gave various quest rewards. One quest of importance, however, came from a piece of parchment that dropped off of the Alpha gnoll. It is named Bloodhowler Plans and I have to take the parchment to a Vulmane in the next town I am to visit – Dahknarg. This is another quest hub for the low level adventurer. I will detail some of the happenings there in another post.
I personally prefer the Vulmane starting area over the Kojani area. I like the look and feel much more. It could be because it is more of a wooded, country-type area instead of the open, island area of Kojan. I also liked the quests better and I think the quest rewards were much better, especially for quests giving armor.
–Wolfen
Read MoreVanguard: Time To Rewind
Ever since I started up this blog I have been chronicling my adventures as a Kojani Druid on the Seradon server. I reached level 17 and was looking forward to seeing what was in store for me in the higher levels. Things changed the other day that has made me switch servers and start over again.
I frequent a very popular gaming message board. Many of the members there decided to start up a Vanguard guild on the Xeth server. I was asked several times to make the switch so I finally gave in and jumped from Seradon to Xeth. Since Vanguard doesn’t have a character transfer service, I had no choice but to start over from scratch. I decided to do things a little differently this time around.
I loved playing the druid, so that stayed the same. What changed was the race I played and the continent that I started on. This time I chose to play a Vulmane druid. Vulmane’s are wolf-like creatures that basically look like humans with wolf heads. I have to say that the Asian “spirit” theme on Kojan was starting to wear a bit thin, so I felt that switching races and continents would be a nice change. As you will see in forthcoming posts, I greatly enjoy Thestra over Kojan. That surprised me because I always hear great things about the lands of Kojan. For me personally, however, I enjoy the quests and the scenery much better in the Vulmane starting areas.
Some things will obviously be a re-hash of what my druid did before. The spells will be the same, but the quests and the lands I do them in will be vastly different. This will allow me to report on the differences between the two starting areas so that others have a better idea of where they might want to start. I thought about trying a different class, but I was having too much fun with the druid.
So a new chapter begins. Let’s see how well it goes.
Read MoreVanguard: A Noob’s First Impressions
I have been playing Vanguard: Saga of Heroes for awhile now and I felt it time to give my overall impression of the game so far. I have chronicled on these pages my Druid’s adventures up to his current level of 17. During this time, I have seen and experienced many great things in this game, and I have also seen areas that need improvement. Has Vanguard picked itself up off the floor from being solidly knocked flat during its horrible launch? Read on and see it through the eyes of a low level noob.
I first played Vanguard when it was still in beta. The game was so rough and unfinished that I could immediately tell that it would not be anywhere near finished before it launched to the public. History shows that I couldn’t have been more correct. The game ran so poorly and had such a great number of game-breaking bugs that it is a wonder that it is still available on the market today. I quickly cancelled my account with the thought of never turning to the world of Telon.
Time moves on and it has now been about a year since Vanguard launched. I began to hear some good things about a game that couldn’t pay anyone to give it a good review when it was new. Intrigued (and because I had the Station Pass), I decided to check it out again and see what all the talk was about. Turns out that a near miracle has been performed.
The game runs about 200% better than it did at launch. Where it was barely playable then, it now runs acceptably well on my computer (AMD X2 6000+, 3GB, Nvidia 8800GT). Make no mistake, however, that Sony still needs to do a ton of enhancements to the game engine in order for it to run as it should. The game still hitches and there is still a delay when you move from one land chunk to another. The developers say they have found a fix for that and it should be coming soon, so keep an eye out for it. I still can’t come close to running it on maximum settings. I keep it at the High setting and customize things from there.
The game world is incredibly huge. The sheer landmass of this game can be a bit overwhelming and this started to become a problem with most players. If you wanted to adventure with friends, chances are that you would have to run for half an hour or more to get where they were. But, Sony listened, and this is another area that they improved upon. The riftway system was expanded, allowing immediate travel to most major areas, which allowed people to group up much more quickly.
The game world is also a sight to behold. In my experience, it is beyond a doubt the most beautiful looking game world I have ever played in. Granted, it takes a high-end computer to get the most out of it, but I’m always in awe of the graphics. I am constantly stopping to take a screenshot of the scenery for use as my desktop wallpaper.
The game play is where Vanguard gets a mixed review from me. The character animations really need some work. They are jerky and not fluid at all and it breaks the immersion factor. Sometimes game textures will not render correctly, making things look strange and out of place. When I first used my Wolfshape spell, I thought that I was turning into a cool looking white wolf. Instead, the texture wasn’t showing and the next time I used that spell I was the normal shade of brown. I also found an infamous old Everquest bug that seems to have found its way here. It seems fish have no problem swimming onto land and attacking you.
As a Druid, my combat usually starts with rooting the creature I want to kill. For some reason, even though I am standing a good distance away, the creature will sometimes hit me with its fist or weapon. I am not sure what causes this. Is the game client not catching up fast enough to accurately show me what is happening? Sometimes I will root a moving target. I get the text message that it is rooted but the creature still walks up to me and starts whacking on my head. My in-game network meter always shows green, so I don’t know what the problem is.
I have only played a Druid, so I can’t speak to how well the other classes play. I do know that I hear nothing but great things about all the classes and I think it is almost unanimous that all the classes are designed very well. Each class steps out of the standard mold and offers something unique that you may not have seen before. That said, there are some problems that need ironed out and a few classes are slated to see revamps.
As for the Druid, it can hardly be compared to the Everquest druid of old. Yes, I can heal a little bit, and yes, I have some damage over time spells, but what makes it interesting is that some spells can do two different things. Some spells have a direct damage component mixed with an additional damage over time feature. Doing two different types of damage at once is nice.
What makes the druid most unique is how the class uses what is called Phenomena points. Certain spells can use these points instead of using mana. The neatest one I have seen so far is called Starfall. If I have enough phenomena points available, the spell calls a star down from the sky and smites my enemy. This does massive amounts of direct damage. I can easily kill same-level creatures in one shot with this spell and it doesn’t use a drop of mana. The number of phenomena points is limited and they regenerate back over time, so you can’t chain cast these things, but it sure makes you feel powerful at a low level.
Questing is a very large part of Vanguard. My quest book has never been empty and there is always something interesting to do. Sure, many quests are of the “go kill X number of Y,” but there are also many that have neat stories attached to them. Also, as a new player starting out, I like how the quests move you from area to area. I am only level 17 and I have already travelled a very long way from my starting spot. It helps keep me interested in the game because I am always seeing new things.
Vanguard has always had a reputation of being a group-oriented game. This may be true at higher levels (I don’t know), but I have been able to solo every step of the way with my druid so far. In fact, it has been almost too easy to solo. As I said above, some of the mechanics of the druid class really make me feel powerful, and that is a great draw for me. I am told that the druid is one of the least played classes and I was shocked to hear that. I haven’t played a more fun class in ages. I think it may suffer from the druid’s reputation from Everquest and that keeps people away.
Despite its flaws, Vanguard has come a very long way. I wish things would get fixed more quickly, but Sony has decided to put only a small development team on it. Be that as it may, they have worked wonders on what was once a completely awful game. I can now honestly say that Vanguard is worth a try. If you played it at launch and hated it, come back and see what has changed. You might be surprised at what you find. The game is far from perfect, but it’s not a complete stinker anymore, either.
–Wolfen
Read MoreVanguard: Nakai Dojo
Behind Lau Mung, the man who made the hangover cure for the recruit, is a teleporter that had not noticed before. I stepped into it and I was whisked away to the Nakai Dojo. The first person I came across was Commander Kato Chikage. Commander Kato doesn’t like to be bothered, so he sent me to find Lieutenant Mito so that I could prove my worthiness. Just how many times do I have to prove my worthiness in this game?
Mito says I need to prove myself before he will let me take care of some “special situations.” He sends me off to get him a new tiger pelt covering, which apparently takes 10 tiger pelts to make. Killing 10 tigers sound easy enough until you find out that they are not very plentiful. The tigers share spawn points with other creatures and it took a very long time for me to find enough tigers to acquire the 10 pelts. Had this been a busy area, it would have taken many hours to get this done.
After returning the pelts to Mito and completing the “Prove My Worth” quest, he still thinks I am next to useless, so he sends me off to find Lieutenant Oda, who may have something for me to do. Oda gives me the “Cleaning Up” quest that requires me to go out and kill 10 goretusk boars and 10 fleet ostra birds. The boar and birds are found in the same area as the tigers, so I didn’t have far to go in order to find them. Upon completing this quest I received 1 silver, 20 copper, and 2431 experience points.
Oda next gave me the “Pride of the Army” quest. He wants me to visit four different patrol points and slay any orcs I find along the way. He suggests that I take a friend along because the orcs seem to travel in pairs. I saved this quest for another time.
I made level 14 while completing the “Cleaning Up” quest, so I needed to train up my new spells. Nakai Dojo has a building that contains all the class trainers inside, which was very handy indeed. It also has a general goods vendor to sell your loot to. My level 14 Druid spells are: Barkskin 1, Speed of the Wolf (30% run speed increase), Stormcallers Fury II, Nature’s Calm 1, and Soothe II (288-298 heal). Nature’s Calm looks to be useful for my next quest because it keeps a creature from attacking. If the orcs roam in pairs, I can cast Soothe on one and pull the other singly. We shall see.
–Wolfen
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