The MMO Notebook

Posts Tagged ‘saga of heroes’

After receiving that response from a Vanguard community representative, I had hoped that they would fix the  quest Harvesting The Parts in a timely fashion.  Unfortunately, nothing had changed as of the last time I logged in.  But, I was not going to let a screwed up quest defeat me, so I decided to work it until it was finished.

I needed five broken hand bones from my undead friends, so off I went to the nearby hilltop to kill a few of them.  As I mentioned before, due to the problems with this quest, once two hand bones drop, you won’t get another one until you run to town and put them in the bank.  A hand bone dropped on each of the first two undead that I killed.  I killed several more to see if the quest had been fixed.  It wasn’t, so I ran to town, dropped them in the bank, and ran back.  I did this until I had the required ten that the quest called for.  What a pain.

Helave Verelore, the NPC that I need to turn this quest into, is located in Misthaven.  Since it is a long run to get there, I flew a griffon north until I reached Misthaven and turned in the quest.  She then gave me the quest “Soul and Brain Power,” which is the next task in this URT quest line.  It seems she needs a good brain and strong torso for this undead envoy they are building, so I must go to a monastery and kill some minions there in order to aquire what she needs.  I am also to use a device to absorb the essence of a spirit that wanders the graveyard there.

I dinged level 20 after completing the Harvesting the Parts quest.  The druid spells I received were:

• Thunderclap 1: 810 to 855 arcane damage
• Venomous Thorns 3
• Sooth 3: 578 heal and 1206 heal over 16 seconds
• Tranquility 1: Invulnerability for 20 seconds
• Okeli’s Shield 1: Reduces damage taken by 100% for two hits or 30 seconds
• Ire 3

I have so many quests in my journal that I don’t know which ones to go after.  Many are lower level quests that I never got around to.  I am assuming that the URT quests are more important because they give nice equipment upgrades for the level.

As earlier mentioned, I bought an Alienware M17 gaming laptop.  A quick listing of the specs shows a 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb of RAM, and most importantly, two ATI 3870 graphics cards in SLI Crossfire mode.  I was interested to find out how this beast of a machine handles Vanguard.  To be honest, I am a little disappointed in the performance it gives in this game.  Turns out, there is a good reason why.

First, I don’t want to give the impression that the M17 is not a good gaming machine.  It is a great one.  The 3DMark ’06 score is well over 12,000 and it plows through World of Warcraft at max settings while running at 1920×1200 resolution.  WoW has a very refined graphics engine, however, while Vanguard falls far short in this cateogry.  It also plays Crysis and other games extremely well.

I expected to be able to run Vanguard at Very High settings while keeping to my screens native resolution of 1920×1200.  In reality, the best I could do and still get a smooth experience was set it to High and tweaking it from there.  One of the biggest performance killers are shadows, and I had to set them to low quality.  I wanted to use full drawing distance but I had to set it at around 70%.  Turning on HDR made the game flicker like crazy, so I had to keep that turned off.  I also had to lower tree detail at long range.

I am not a FPS numbers kind of guy, so I don’t have that for you.  What I find important is how the game feels and flows as I play it.  If it hitches or stutters, that is all I need to know that the game isn’t running well at the current settings.  With the above modifications to the High graphical settings, the game runs very well while I am out in the field adventuring.  Things get much worse when I go into a town.  The game struggles to load NPC’s and buildings, which causes major stuttering until all the objects are loaded.

I had read that Sony had made some improvements to the graphics engine that they claimed would improve performance and reduce the “chunking” effect.  The Vanguard world is cut into many squares of land, or chunks, and when you pass from one chunk of land to another, the game freezes and churns away while it loads the contents of the new land area.  My experience since returning to the game is that there has been no improvement whatsoever.  My character still freezes in mid-stride and I have to wait a few seconds before he moves again.  Many times my character will start moving again but his legs are stuck in place, which makes him float over the terrain instead of running over it.

Keep in mind that all of this is happing at a high screen resolution.  Sure, I could lower it down to 1650×1080 or even lower, but I bought this computer in order to run games at high rez.  Other games are not a problem, but it is painfully obvious that Vanguard still has a long way to go before it will run well, even on high-end computers.

Now here is the kicker.  After being disappointed in the performance of this game on the M17, I did some research and discovered that SLI in Vanguard is not supported if you are using two separate video cards.  Bingo.  This is the reason for my troubles.  It boggles my mind that it doesn’t.  Here we have a game with extremely high hardware requirements and yet it doesn’t support SLI.  Fah!

So, the fault isn’t with the M17, it is with the game itself.  With this information in mind, the M17 plays Vanguard amazingly well.  I am not so disappointed after all.

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

I decided to head over to Lotus Hold, which is southeast of Nakai Dojo.  Nao Tak said I should go there and find a man named Bautali.  It seems they need some help over there.  On the way over, I found a Pegasus Trainer just west of Lotus Hold who will rent you a flying pegasus at the rate of 25 copper for five minutes.  I also found a Riftway right next to Lotus Hold.

I found Bautali inside the Hold and he had a bunch of quests to give.  Standing next to him is Hai Tang who also has many quests to hand out.  I picked a few from Bautali and got started on them.  I had to go kill a bunch of tigers, ostra’s, varana’s, and others.  The varana and ostra were easy to find, but just like back in the starting areas, the tigers were extremely rare.  I got so tired of running around looking for the tigers that I put that one on hold and worked on some other quests.

Located on the beach which is down the hill from Lotus Hold is a bunch of burned out houses that the orcs have taken over.  The quest Orc Assault: Martok Deadbringer wanted me to go kill a few of the Deadbringers, so down to the beach I went.  The beach is crawling with orcs, so it was easy to quickly find what I needed.  The quest netted me 1 silver, 40 copper, and 3220 experience points.

Back at Lotus Hold, I discovered that the stress and fear of constant orc attacks have caused some of the villagers to go crazy.  Some guy named Mung decided to take a group of them away from Lotus Hold to find some other place to live.  It seems that the crazed villagers took Tao’s Idol of Focus with them when they left and they didn’t ask permission to do so.  I was tasked with getting the idol back.

The crazed villagers are found up on a high hill that is a ways south of the Nakai Dojo.  They stand close to each other, so I had to use Nature’s Calm in order to pull a single.  The very first one I pulled had the idol.  Nice luck.  Returning the idol to Tao resulted in me receiving 1 silver, 40 copper, and 3220 experience points.

I then started a quest that tasked me with retrieving some treasure boxes that the orcs had stolen from Lotus Hold.  These boxes are located around the burned out houses down on the beach.  I had to clear the way of orcs in order to get to some of them, but I also found that I could sneak in behind the houses and get to some of the treasure boxes with minimal combat.  There is a wooden wall behind the houses that has gaps in it and I found a couple gaps that I could squeeze through.

I ran back to Lotus Hold and turned in the treasure box quest and the kill animals quests.  They all gave about a silver each and 3220 experience points each.  I dinged level 16 while doing these quests and here is a list of spells that my Druid received:

- Barbwood Talisman III: AC 60, HP 120, 17 damage shield

- Wild Growth I: 935 to 986 damage over 24 seconds

- Solar Flare II: 297 to 319 fire damage & 107 to 118 over 4 seconds

- Restore II: 503 point heal

- Summon Earth Elemental II: Summons a pet for 3 minutes

- Quelling Wind I:  Lowers hate by 3%

Did I say that Lieutenant Oda was a prick?  Yeah, well, I absolutely meant it.  After insulting my prowess, he then gives me a new quest that frustrated me to no end.  I don’t think I will ever forgive him.

The quest is called the Short Handed Nakai.  It seems that his army is so busy that they allowed some orcs to steal some supply crates.  He wants me to go recover three of the crates.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Well, there is one little problem.  The quest text makes no mention at all as to where I must go to find the crates.  None at all.  This is actually the first quest I have found that does this.

I wasted 2 HOURS of my life looking for those damn crates.  I ran down the road all the way to Lotus Hold and found none.  I searched every inch of Thrakos Island (which is full of orcs) and found none.  I searched and searched with no luck.  I even asked in region chat and had no luck.

I finally had to break down and visit the VG Curse website to find the answer.  I searched the database and a commenter gave me the clue I needed.  If you ever need to do the Short Handed Nakai quest, here is what you need to know:  You will find the orcs and crates by traveling south of the Nakai Dojo.  They will be on and near the beach in that area.

I can’t tell if it is bad game design or if I am just a dumbass.  I think it is the former, while I would imagine that most of you readers would think the latter.

Anyway, I had to return the crates to Commander Kato.  My reward was 2788 experience and 1 silver, 30 copper in coin.  Kato then gives me the Kill The Coward quest.  This is a group quest that requires you to go kill the traitor Hanji Kotoawa.

Here is a picture of me after trying out the Wolf Shape spell.

After completing The Menace Grows, Ju Ming gives me one last task to perform.  This one is called The Head of the Beast.  I am to go find gremlin Augurs and wrest something called a Pulsating Portal Shard from their grubby little claws.  I must obtain enough shards to combine them into an Orb of Calling.  This Orb will summon the Kojuko General who, not surprisingly, needs killed.

As I mentioned in my last post, if you keep going along the coast, you’ll find more and tougher types of gremlins.  So, I ran past the first two camps that I attacked earlier and found the third camp.  This one had the Augurs.  I dispatched some Augurs and found some portal shards, but I didn’t combine them.  This quest is a group quest, so I’ll need to wait until I can find some help before finishing this one.

Speaking of finding a group, in all my time spent in this gremlin area, I only saw one other player the entire time.  Even after SOE merged some servers, the player population is very low.  It may be better at the higher levels, but as a low level player, it is rather disheartening.

Just a few steps away from Ju Ming, there is a fellow named Nao Tak.  He also gives out some quests.  One of them is called Otherwordly Artifacts.  He wants me to kill gremlins and recover 5 inert portal shards and 5 fiendish portal shards.  Gremlin killing seems to be common pasttime around these parts.

I ran around and killed random gremlins until I had enough of the shards.  I returned them to Nao Tak and I received 2431 experience and a measly 60 copper.  Are Ju Ming and Nao Tak related or something? Nao gives one last quest called To Lotus Hold.  I sat that one aside and worked on a few other quests first.

Back at the Nakai Dojo, Lieutenant Oda has some tasks for me.  I get from him the Pride of the Army quest.  I am to patrol the road leading out of the Dojo and look for invading Martok orcs.  I have to visit 4 patrol points and clean out any orcs I find.

The way it worked out is that you simply run down the road and wait for an invisible Martok Ambusher to jump you.  Kill the orc, run down the road some more, and wait to be jumped again.  You do this until you have reached all four patrol points.

I returned to Oda after completing my patrol and I discovered that he didn’t seem to have much confidence in my abilities.

Prick.

–Wolfen

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.

So I’m finally back to playing and blogging.  I started up Vanguard from right where I left off, so here is the continuation of my gaming experiences.

I had been running some quests that Ju Ming had given me, so I looked in my quest journal and started from there.  I began with The Gremlin Menace quest.  It seems Ju Ming wants a few gremlins dead, so he tasks me with going out and killing some Kojuko Despoilers and Ravagers.

The gremlins are found along the coast not far from Ju Ming’s house.  The first gremlin camp I encountered had the gremlins I was looking for.  They were guarding a portal that they were using for nefarious reasons.  Naturally, I did my duty and dispatched the required number of gremlins.  The gremlins were numerous but I could easily pull them all solo.

I returned to Ju Ming and told him of my good deeds.  He rewarded me with 1905 experience and 1 silver, 10 copper cash money.  If you ask me, he’s a little stingy with the coin.

The next quest he gives is called The Menace Grows.  This time I am tasked with killing gremlin Disrupters and Razorclaws.  You can find these gremlins by traveling past the first gremlin camp.  The camp is right next to the first.  In fact, if you keep traveling along the coast, you will come across camp after camp of gremlins.  The further you go the tougher the gremlin you find.  Once again, I did my duty and slew many o’ gremlin.

Ju Ming was pleased with my progress, but once again he was stingy with the coin.  I received 1 silver, 20 copper for my efforts.  Experience rewarded: 2341

–Wolfen