Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Six

Monday 11.02.08
Monday night prior to the raid we flagged a few more people. My regular group of players all needed a flagging (A flagging!, a flagging!) so we headed to Jharru Flats and killed Lord Fumbeso in one clean encounter. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that lord Fumbeso is an easy, one group encounter. While its not particularly difficult for experienced raiders, you are definitely going to need a minimum of 2 full groups to take him down. 3 would definitely be better.

Lord Fumbeso

One of my old gripes in EQ was Green things aggro-ing me. I couldn’t get XP from them, they didn’t have a hope in hell of killing me, so why in the hell did green mobs like goblins insist on the Suicide option and throw themselves at me. Its annoying, all they do is get in the way and slow you down. Unfortunately VG has followed the same path and little grey things insists on my providing them with the assisted suicide option. Hell in EQ we were regularly killing Gods, Goblins didn’t have a snowballs chance. Here’s a little grey bug annoying the hell out of me just outside APW.

Kill me Please!

Initially I thought we were going to jump past the entrance and straight to one of the Hub points. Instead we headed in via the entrance wing.

Dead X77

One of the more interesting graphical bugs I have seen so far. The facial effect is from a de-buff that a Warehouse Firesoul casts on anyone in range. For some reason Zarthaz has retained the effect, but only on his face. I actually think it looks awesome, I would love a face mask with that effect!. A word here about Zarthaz, he has been pulling raid mobs for SA since the early days of EQ and was a core member of the legendary EQ pull team. He is currently the only member of the SA Vanguard pull team. If he doesn’t show up one day, we are going to have some serious problems. At the moment we have 2-3 people in each role who can fill in in the event of someone being away, tanks priests etc. The only exception to that rule is Zarth and the pull team. Raid pulling is an art and is different in each game. Zarthaz has been learning APW for the last 6 weeks, he has no substitute person to train up or to learn with. Without another Monk or other puller in place there will come a day when we are going to have serious issues…

We got our asses handed to us big time. We simply could not get past Enraged X83. We were actually tracking really well for a shot at Vicus. We made it to X83’s spot at about 10:00pm and set up for him.
First Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe
Second Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe
Third Pull: Aggro comes off the tanks, wipe

I think you can see where this is going. For some reason we just could not get him down. He kept smacking us down and smacking us hard. This sort of thing happens to SA occasionally and I don’t really know why. We know the encounter, we know what the mob is going to do, we know how to kill him but we just cannot get it together to drop him. He died in the end but he certainly took all the fun out of the kill by repeatedly wiping the floor with us and delaying us past a point where we had time to drop Vicus.

Enraged X83 beating us up (again)

Thursday 14.02.08
We sneaked in the back way and headed straight to the Hub. We were there for about a half hour to sort out armour quests and get those who were capable of it, set up in Class specific Quest arms. I was lucky enough to be one of three people to be in a position to finish mine. They are rather hard to see unfortunately as they sit between the large shoulders and huge gloves, but I get the feeling the full suit is going to look awesome!.

Once we were done with questing we headed in the back way to go and see Archon Travix. I cant remember this being a difficult fight. I’m fairly sure he died clean with no faults.

I don’t have a lot more for this raid as it went quite late on Thursday night and I had to be up early the next day. We went up to the Hunter Valley to go and see the Raggamuffin Concert at the Wyndam Estate Winery. We had an absolutely awesome weekend and will definitely be going back for next year!.

However it did put the kybosh on the regular note taking I normally do for these blogs. I would normally sit down the next day and make notes of what happened and when, how the raid went, sort out and edit the pics etc. As I was sitting in a pub in Raymonds Terrace getting pissed on Friday night, I missed out on doing all of that. So bugger it, its a short post 🙂

Next time come with me to Raggamuffin!

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Five

Monday 04.02.08
Short and Sweet.
Some of the models that Sigil have developed (actually these are probably built by SOE) are just awesome. This is one of the guard Mobs outside APW, giant mixtures of beetles and lizards. One thing I have noted is that screen shots simply don’t do these models justice. You have to be in game to appreciate how well put together the models really are. VG is definitely one of the prettiest MMO’s on the market.

R5, Vicus. Fell down and went splat.

Unfortunately we only got two runs at Archon Travix. He isn’t hard, he is a simple fight, we just seem to be rushing him a bit. We are definitely getting better at this, our fifth week into the zone, our Ninth raid, our 33rd-37th hours, Travix will die soon and we are traveling well for a push into the Hub. I think next Thursday we will definitely make it, as there won’t be a lot up for us we will try and push on for the Hub just so we don’t have to grind through the trash night after night.

Archon Travix Waiting

Southern Armada would also like to thank whoever made Lisani’s boobies. Due to a bug (one of the many) Lisani was shown stripped back to her base model, and what a base it is!. The entire guild took great delight in running over to have a look before the bug was fixed. Well done I say!.

Lisani, what an Elf!

Thursday 06.02.08
Formed up and straight in. It takes us about 1.5 hours to grind through all the trash to get to Travix. Its not that the place is swarming with trash, its not. But each trash fight has different nuances, each fight has different needs and we are learning new things about each fight as we repeat them. We are getting better and faster with each push but it would be nice not to have to do this grind every night, lets get to the Hub!. At the start of the fight we had a hitch hiker with us, a Knight from another Guild who for some reason decided to tag along on our little jaunt. At the beginning he was spouting out all sorts of useful things like “/say this mob has a knock back so only fight him with ranged”. Yes, thanks, very helpful. We will use what works for us. He stopped and seemed to disappear after the boss asked him oh so politely to shut up. So we fought on without the benefit of all that knowledgeable advice and made it to Travix in very good time.

R5 Kindly dropped the Greatsword he has been holding on to for the last 4 weeks and as there don’t seem to be any other 2H wielders in the Guild at the moment I won the roll!. Now if only Vicus would drop his Spear I would be in Dread Knight heaven!.

Travix waiting for a spanking

This time we took him down slow but steady. This becomes a very boring fight for the non main tank unfortunately. I switched to my 2H, I went into evade mode, I didn’t hit any specials, no damage or aggro attacks. I simply stood there, did white damage and watched for the Curse. Thats it, takes about 5 mins to kill him and I cant do squat apart from base damage *Yawn*. I also got yelled at, naughty naughty Dread Knight!. The Boss called for DPS off and as I was just doing base damage (I mean really, I couldn’t be generating less aggro if I was offering him a cup of tea and a lie down) I just let the damage run. The boss very correctly and forcefully reminded me that when he calls for DPS off it means everybody!. So with my ass red and feeling much chastened, we moved on past Travix and into unexplored territory.

Travix being spanked by a naked Pink Tank

We continued to fight on through, deeper into APW. There was some new and different trash and some new scenery until we reached the Warehouse. Now you have to remember we have NFI where we are going. We have no spoilers. no maps and we are learning by doing, so basically we are just wandering aimlessly while looking for the Hub. Its lucky that the dungeon is fairly linear or we could be lost for weeks!.

Just as we had engaged two mobs, the Wednesday lag hit us. Its amazing, whatever the process is thats occurring on the servers, it happens at 11PM AEST on the dot and lasts 2-3 minutes. This time, to make it extra special fun, it not only lagged us out on the pull, the zone then crashed and the whole raid was booted to desktop. We were dreading having to log back in to a fully populated zone, this time we were lucky and it seems the zone didn’t re-pop on us the way it did last week.

It was getting late at this point, around 11pm and I think, like me, people were beginning to get tired and their feet were dragging. As we made our way deeper into the warehouse we ran straight into Zaraax. Now this is one huge ass mob and he hits like a Mac Truck. Even though we ended up with him more or less accidentally, we still managed to get him under control and in position. He was at about 90% when we started to get adds. We don’t know if they were roamers, he summoned them or they just popped in the wrong spot, I guess we will learn next time. We elected to take the wipe and bypass Zaraax for a further push towards the Hub. Awesome Model, kudos on the design of this guy.

Skulls for hands!

Once we reformed we headed in again towards where we could see a faint blue glow, the hub maybe!. As we were pulling trash we also ran into Akym the Assassin. He hits hard but seemed like a fairly straight forward Tank and Spank.

Once he was out of the way we made it to the Warehouse hub and we were going to log it out there. For various reasons unrelated to APW raiding, one of our Clerics had managed to get bonded to the Hub portal, so he ported back to the Hub just so we could check how far away the Hub was from where we were. Surprise, surprise it turned out he was only about 150 yards from where we were standing. So taking his direction we pushed on. It was after midnight at this point and everyone was getting damn tired. But we cleared through some more trash and voila!, we made it to the Hub! Everyone attuned to the two portals and we are now in a good position to pick up the hub quests and to explore into the surrounding wings.

First things first however, Zaraax must die!.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raids Week Four

29.01.08

I was late again dammit. I was all sorted out to be at the raid by 7:30 and for some reason my ADSL link dropped for about 15 minutes, repeated reboots of the router and NIC didn’t help so it was after 8:00pm before I made it to the raid. We formed up quick and moved in even quicker. It was easily the best start so far. We were almost at the x83 before we lost anyone at all. The timers weren’t up on X83 or X77 so we didn’t get a shot at them. R5 died in the usual fashion and we headed straight for the General. R5 has an awesome sword. I have seen another Dreadknight carrying one and the Graphic is fantastic. He just doesnt seem to want to drop it for us.

We formed up and I was designated Main Tank for this fight. Ive revised my reasons for that, I think I’m main tank because the Warriors have better snap aggro and its them we have to rely on to maneuver the Adds as they pop. Who cares, MT’ing this guy is an absolute blast, in fact MT’ing anything is huge fun, I’m so glad I decided to switch back to tanking from being a caster. In this fight all I have to do is stay concentrated on pumping out as much aggro as I can generate and watching my HP for the occasional use of a Rune.

The first run against Vicus was really a tester, getting out feet wet to see how we would handle the fight. He went down to 56% and we wiped when I died and Vicus got loose in the healers. Once the healers go down its a dead raid. This fight got a bit exciting as someone aggroed him off me and I had to do some fast taunting and maneuvering to hold him and get him back in place.

The second run was a lot closer. We re-set and pulled quickly after the first wipe. This one just felt better from first aggro for some reason. It got lumpy in parts, especially when the Adds dropped two healers due to unfortunate positioning. However we got the bastard down to about 36%.

You know the saying third times the charm?. We set up and pulled. Mezzers had the adds as soon as they popped, the off tanks put the adds exactly where we wanted them and the DPS laid the serious smack on Vicus. We got through the first wave, Vicus is down to 50%, lost two healers, its all good, battle rez and keep going. Sort the adds and lay the big bang down on him again. At the end of the second wave he is at about 10%. So with a pet, me , dots and nukes from everyone else we stay on him as they deal with the third wave. The raid drops the first add and its decided that we would lay the smack on him and just keep the add mezzed.

At 3% I finally took a screenie, he seemed to have been hanging there forever, healing was really good and DPS was beginning to chop into him. I knew we had him. Its a weird feeling, I had been so concentrated on holding him in place and maintaining aggro for so long that when he finally dropped I had a massive surge of adrenalin. What A Buzz!.

Dead Vicus.

One of the two best 2h weapons in the game drops from Vicus. The Spear of Devotion is what all well dressed Dreads are wearing, unfortunately much like the R5 Greatsword we didnt see it on this run. The heal team did a superb job in this fight with at least 2 of them going down during the fight. they managed to keep the bulk of the raid (and me!) alive all the way through. Ive been a raid healer, it sucks. I bow down to anyone who can do it well and consistantly. All of us are learning our jobs and all of us recognise that. By the time I made it to Prexus in EQ I had already been playing a Necromancer for close to 5 years. I knew that class inside and out solo, what I really had to learn fast was grouping and raiding skills, but they were just changes in methods I had been using for a very long time. Most of us have only been playing Vanguard for a year at this point so we all have a long way to go before those reactions, those things that became close to “inherent” in our reactions within EQ start to happen in this new game.

Since we had about an hour to kill at this point we decided to push further in to the zone and see what we could see. We made it up to Archon Travix and stopped there to set up to engage. He has a tricky pull to clear the entrance to his lair. I think we were all getting tired at this point and we couldnt quite co-ordinate the effort effectively. We wiped twice and at that point it was time for me to turn into a pumpkin and head for beddy byes.

One of two Quotes of the week:
” That was so much fun I let a little bit of pee out”
Aegis after the death of Vicus

Thursday 30.01.08

We formed up quickly (I had parked myself outside so I didnt have to run for miles). The devs have stated that in GU4 they are planning on re-arranging the Riftways to make them more useful. I so hope they put one down near APW. The run all the way from the northern elf Village everytime for raids is a pain. I can understand wanting to make the world seem bigger, absolutely, I’m against insta ports everywhere. But having to run down there 2 days a week is making me want to stay there and not log on for general play. So Ulaa stays parked outside the APW Gates all the time. X83 , X77 and R5 died easy and fast. We lost one person on X83 apart from that they were all perfect kills.

Enraged X83, being enragey

So with Vicus still on lockout we headed up to Archon Travix again. This time clearing his guards was flawless and we very quickly had him standing alone.

So with no idea how this fight goes, I lie, we had one idea, we engaged and started to smack him down. We had him postioned, DPS was on and all was going well until the first add. Even then we handeled it and he was under control. We got him down to under 80% first run and we only lost it when I died. His damage is really spikey, I had been throwing in Runes to stay up and mitigate as much of his damage as possible. Unfortunately he spiked when I had no runes refreshed and down I went. After that he was in amongst the raid and it was all over. So we formed up again and headed back in.

This time I died almost instantly. I had over 11500 HP fully buffed, max mitigation and I snuffed it anyway. I have been called recently on criticisim of Healers. I’ve gone back and read over my old stuff and I haven’t criticised anybody. What I have done is tried to be honest about what I see happening within an engagement. The heal team is shaping up to be really good. We have gone through encounters where they have worked their butts off, throwing out fast heals to save dress wearers and keeping the MT’s up at the same time. In this case that didnt happen. Nym picked up the fight and held Travix in place. Kuurgen went down.

Standing outside a zone, waiting to see what happens in an engagement sucks. You cant see whats going on or how everything is going, you can hear whats happening in the voice channel but cant contribute. I imagine its like listening to sport on the raidio, its a very poor subsititute to actually being there. We had an add, it was offtanked, Nymeria went down. Garbar is now tanking named and add.

Quote of the Week Two:
“Get a Tank on that add”
Xardan, not seeming to realise 3 of his 4 tanks were standing at zone in…

It didnt matter, we had the skinny bastard, he was going down. He was at 20% when we had back spawn adds pop and take out our heals within seconds. That was that. It doesnt matter, we know we can take him and hopefully once he is down we are fairly close to the hub!.

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 3

22.01.08

A new week and a new raid. Until we get to the APW Hub there isn’t going to be a whole lot of variance in what to say. Ooo look we killed Enraged X83 and Malfunctioning X77 again!. Ah well, they are still fun fights.

Monday we didn’t have a lot to do as the X83 and X77 don’t spawn till tomorrow so we cleared through and headed straight for General Vicus. It took us about 2 hours to get to him so we knew we were going to have time to have several runs at him. Nymeria the Pink Power Ranger had been tanking all the trash and mini named’s all the way into the zone till we reached Vicus. Its actually harder to off tank than to main tank in this game. You want to stay on the aggro list, but you don’t want to get into the habit of stealing aggro. This presents a conundrum as you can take aggro simply by pumping out damage and you cant really tell what the MT’s current aggro level is like. So all you can do is hit the occasional aggro inducer and your specials and wait for him to turn. If he turns to you, all you can do is go defensive and wait for the other tank to take it back, or if he turns to someone squishy, you hit your rescue and start to pump out aggro.

Warehouse Firesoul hits us with an AOE

We caught the Guardian R5 on the way into Vicus. He was extremely nice to us and dropped a whole lot of goodies, rather than the 2 or three he usually does.

Guardian R5 on the way in

The boss man put me front and center for the fight against Vicus, mainly I think cause I had done it before and he has a nasty knock forward. I describe it as a reverse Punt. Basically whatever direction you are facing is the direction you are going to go flying about 50 feet every 30 seconds to a minute. So you have to tank him facing a wall and be prepared to be running back a lot to try and keep him in position. I think that at a particular percentage he also switches the punt to another direction and you start to fly to his left, instead of straight forward, so there are some interesting tanking mechanics to cope with.

On top of that he has several adds. He spawns two 53 6 dots to help him out which you also have to have a strat for. So we setup for the first run. We’ve got the room cleared, we have a strat worked out and communicated, everyone knows what they are doing and we are good to go. Inbound.

Engage!

We got him positioned and started in on him, gentle to start with as we need his adds and we don’t want to pull aggro onto the casters. So the adds pop and we have them dealt with. This is where we start to see some new effects on him. The casters are getting massive damage against him, huge crits, the mezzers have the adds under control so we lay into him. I’m holding aggro fairly well, I’m throwing everything including the kitchen sink at him to keep him focused on me. He is a tough bugger as on top of everything else he is life tapping me for a 2k heal every round. Using this strat we got him down to (I was concentrating so I think) about 60% before we got overwhelmed by his adds.

Bugger, close but no cigar but its all good as we have now learned a couple more things about him. We refine the strat and set up for another go. Unfortunately we weren’t 100% sure on the timing of his adds so we stopped for a bit to wait for his room pop. It turned out to be quite a long wait as his room guards seem to be on longer timers than most of the rest of APW so far. We had just cleared the room when everybody lagged out. Really, really lagged out. The the whole raid gets dropped and we are all sitting at the logon screen. Zarthaz logs in to check it out and we have a full zone reset, with a full pop. Damn it, now we have to clear the whole damn thing again in the face of active opposition from roamers. I thought we had the log on timed really well. We avoided most of the roamers and got everyone back in and in place to start the event again.

So we hit the roamers and get them out of the way. We start to clear his guards. The last bodyguard is inc and we are set to have another go.

errrr, suddenly I’m dead with the guard at about 3% down, the guard is rampaging, Nym picks him up, then hes dead. It all went horribly wrong and we have a Guard inside the raid beating on casters. I think the healers were asleep or possibly afk, all the tanks died so damn fast. So that was it for Monday. It was after 11pm and there was no way we were going to get in and get set again before midnight.

Wednesday
We formed up at 8:00pm and headed in. We blitzed through the early parts of the dungeon clearing our way though the trash almost like it wasn’t there. The Guardian R5 stood in our way for about a minute before he fell down (he?/she?/it?). Once again he failed to drop the Greatsword.

Guardian R5 from an elevated perspective

Apart from the usual suspects cough*sorcerers*cough we hadn’t lost anyone by the time we reached Malfunctioning X77. The X77 dropped easily and smoothly, we didn’t even lose a tank during the transitions.

Waiting to die

We smashed him down without even pausing for breath and headed on for the Enraged X83.

Enraged X83 inc for a bitch slappin

We dropped the X83, looted up and moved on to General Vicus. Now I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail but the strat is definitely coming together. This time we had Vicus at under 40% and he id definitely killable by us. Its not the fight against Vicus we are losing, its the fight against game mechanics and bugs. If everything in the game worked the way we expected it to with no faults and no bugs, he would have died, unfortunately a few things didn’t quite fall into place and we failed on him.

This is where the night turned to complete shit. We didn’t have any one in place with a rezz stone. The only person to survive the encounter had no stone at all. This isn’t the first time and this is really basic shit everyone should have learned in grouping. Every FD class should always have a rezz stone from every single priest class. So now we are a 2 hour grind away from another shot at General Vicus and naked. Basically at this point we got rattled. this is where we should have dug deep, said ‘ we can do this’ and headed on back in. Instead people just seemed to lose confidence or simply stopped paying attention I don’t know.

Basically the next two hours sucked. in the first run in we cleared every encounter like a knife through butter. In the second run in we were rattled, people were dieing, over aggroing and generally running around like idiots. We didn’t even get back to X83′ death spot. We wiped for the second time in very quick succession about 3/4s of the way back in and it was declared over. Vicus would have to wait for another week

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 2

17/01/08

What a complete turn around from our last raid. We went through the opening stages of Ancient Port Warehouse like a knife through butter. There was no raid wipe after every mob and only a very few people pulled aggro off the main tanks.

I was late due to being told by the wife that as there was a raid break, there was also a play break, so I haven’t been online at all since late December. I logged on to find myself in Martok on Kojan where I had been practicing Diplomacy. So to reach the Southern Swamps, especially now that Rudolph no longer flies, was going to be a long run!.

I was so excited I forgot to get pics of the first Boss!. Never mind I will pick some up next week as we will have a full pop next week for Wednesday. This was only a very short week as we really only came back on the Wednesday night. We cleared through the early part of the zone extremely quickly. The only deaths we had were from the usual suspects *cough* sorcerers*cough* who weren’t keeping an eye on their aggro.

One thing I think people don’t quite understand is that each tank has an extremely different way of gaining and holding aggro. Warriors have a lot of snap aggro, Paladins have a lot of powerful rescues and Dread Knights take some time to build rage. Each tank classes aggro abilities need to be handled differently by the raid. Once I have good aggro it becomes very hard to take it off me, but it does take me some time to build it up to a level at which the DPS classes can unleash.

Our first target of the night was x77 (which I forgot to get photo’s of) he dropped as clean as a whistle. Next up was an enraged x83. Now I really like this fight, theres a tank rotation and you get bounced about 40 feet in to the air. Its a fairly straight tank fight with a twist. Hell I’m just loving the tanking. Raid tanking really is everything I thought it would be. I get butterflies every time we engage and a huge buzz when the target goes down.

Enraged X83

After some more clearing of trash we got to General Vicus. We haven’t killed him yet but we get closer with every try. I suspect that we will find when we finally get to the central Hub of APW that there will be a shortcut to most of these mobs and we will be able to avoid a lot of the trash. However we haven’t raided together, in some cases for years, so all the trash clearing and general raid discipline is very good practice. We are definitely getting better at it and its getting a lot easier to clear through the crap. Everybody is learning their classes a little bit better and what they can and cannot do. We are learning about aggro control in APW (very different than WoW and EQ) , how the game handles different scenarios and where the bugs are.

We will get there, its all good practice and its all good fun!.

General Vicus in the dim distance

Vanguard Southern Armada Raid Week 1

Monday 17.12.07
Finally its here!.
Vanguard Game Update 3.2 and 3.3 were delayed so long they were ultimately released simultaneously as a single patch. The whole of SA was absolutely chomping at the bit to get into the zone and get killing. Its been a hell of a long wait, for me its been nearly 3 years since I last raided with SA, but everything that I have read about the APW raid game says that its a lot of fun.

Before you can zone into the Ancient Port Warehouse you have to find and defeat a wandering named, this guy is up simultaneously in 3 different zones across each of the 3 continents. They dont seem to be too hard to find. Once you have the quest for the gateway you are given a little vial of poison. Now here is an Southern Armada super sekret strat ™ for ya. Use the little vial on the named BEFORE you attack him. This weakens him and turns him into a new mob type which is eminently killable. If you don’t, much like a silly pink Warrior of my acquaintance, you will find out that he does about 95,000 damage per hit. Thats not even a one shot!, even fully raid buffed thats like a 0.1 shot!.

To make a long story much shorter, we found heem we keeled heem. Actually we killed him with 15 people and only 2 healers as we were a bit short of people that night.

So after the hand in and clutching our shiny, newly minted keys, we rolled into the much vaunted, long awaited Ancient Port Warehouse. Would it be as good as our anticipation?, would it be horribly buggy and lagged out beyond playability the way the VG boards had been claiming? would it be full of hundreds of yard trash to pull?. Well first off you zone into a kind of entry room with 2 Gnomes and a large metallic statue. The Statue is named Cerulean and hands you a number of quests which can only be completed by killing named’s deeper into APW and then finding an NPC even further into the Zone.

One of the Gnomes does sod all and just gives you some text, but the second Gnome serves a vital purpose. He lets you repair armor and weapons right at the spawn point. Now this is a well placed Gnome, without this guy Raiding and learning in the zone would be a hell of a lot harder. So a good layout to start with. At this point in time we didn’t have anywhere near the people we needed online to start a raid so its good bye for now and we will see you real soon…

Cerulean

So, its a couple of days later and we are formed up for the first raid on Monday night. I had run down and parked myself right outside the gateway on Saturday, knowing I wouldn’t be online for several days and wanting to be there well and truly on time. Note to self, don’t fall into the damn harbor. There is quite literally no way out of the damn harbor once you get wet. You cant climb out of the water anywhere, I spent an hour swimming around the edges of the damn pool trying to find a ramp or ladder, or some way out of the water before I gated out and ran back.

Anyway, we formed up, buffed up and headed down the elevator. The first mob we saw died pretty cleanly. A Guardian B27 stands at the entrance to the zone, we saw, we pulled, he fell over.

Now its not all that easy and I have to admit we wiped several times on the way to our first named. So far, I have to say huge Kudos to SOE for this zone. Even the trash is challenging. If you are an experienced raid guild this wont cause you too much pain, but its going to throw you some serious curve balls as you learn. If you are a Guild new to raiding, this is going to be a hell of a lot of fun and a huge challenge!.

Little things like Fire mobs which, if you cast fire spells on them, the fire actually heals them for the damage dealt. These are only small things but they add some nice twists to the genre and as almost every mob has some twist like that, it adds up to a challenge on each fight and makes each fight different. Rather than every single fight being simply pull and clear the trash till you get to the next boss, each fight has its own unique signature and needs to be planned for.

So finally we get to the first Boss. His name is “A Malfunctioning X77” and he stands alone in a huge hall, the X77 himself is actually in a small alcove surrounded on three sides by archways, this should have been a hint. So we clear around him and then have a wee conversation about how he is going to die. The brains in the guild make the call, and we move in. (I’m not the brains, I’m a tank, I stand where I’m told to and get hit a lot!)

Now I don’t want to actually talk a lot about the specifics of this fight. This is still a really new experience for almost everyone and I don’t want to provide any spoilers for future people coming through this zone. Suffice it to say this guy has a surprise in store for you!.

Engaged with A Malfunctioning X77

The first attempt we wiped early when he sprung his trap, second attempt he went down to 13% and 3rd attempt he died smooth, if not easy.

Our first dead APW Boss!

I got loots!. X77 was kind enough to drop a quest piece for my Dread Knight armor set. I am determined to get a complete Armor set out of APW. I have seen a couple of links of some awesome two handers which drop in APW as well. With the changes coming down the pipe which will make Dreads 2H tankers I am looking forward to getting to play with some of those. One of the images Ive seen was a sword which looked like a flaming version of the swords issued to the Uruk Hai in the movie Lord of the Rings. As a 2h sword it looked damn impressive.

We continued onwards after dropping X77 and made our way further into the zone. We have no idea where we are going so we were really just exploring and trying to get our bearings. We came across a mob that looked like it might be a named, called Guardian R5. The raid stopped, we rebuffed, made sure the engagement instructions were clear, carefully positioned tanks and healers and pulled. We were very careful with our aggro and the raid leaders were extra cautious on engagement and damage. We had no idea what this guy was going to do or what he was possibly capable of. In the end he did nothing and we dropped him like an orc pawn. I didn’t even take screenies, I didn’t think he was important!.

We then wiped on the very first trash pull after R5!.

Its all good. I’m thoroughly enjoying APW so far and if this is a taste of things to come I can see us enjoying the zone all the way through!. We will be raiding Wednesday and Thursday this week so there will be lots more update goodness and dead bosses!.

Wednesday 19.12.07
One thing I would like to say first off is a HUGE thank you to my own personal Tank Crack dealer. Zarthaz has been making me awesome weapons since my mid 20’s, every time I am ready for an upgrade he is there with one already made or asking me what Procs I would like on the one he is about to make. 2 thumbs up for the mighty Monk Weaponsmith!.

Second raid, we formed up pretty quickly, buffed up and headed straight in. We knew that the Malfunctioning X77 was going to be dead to us but the zone so far seems pretty linear so we basically headed in the same direction. We were definitely moving better than we were on Monday night and we had the strat for the trash mobs down pretty tight.

Quote of the Night
Aegis: “We are moving a lot faster tonight folks, after learning a bit about the zone last night I plan to treat this place with a little less respect”

And we did!. It only took about 15 minutes to reach the Malfunctioning X77 room and clear past it. We dropped the Guardian R5 again easy peasy and learned a bit about how to split multiple mobs. The Fire and Ice guardians are Evil if pulled together. Basically a Fire Guardian hits you with an AOE fire DOT which is also a debuff for Ice damage. So if you pull them simultaneously you get debuffed for both the types of damage you are about to take and wipe quickly. Trust me we know this. (Does that explanation make any sense?, I hope it did) So we figured out a quick and easy method of getting the two types separated and happily smashed our way through.

I think one of our major weaknesses as a Guild at the moment is having only one Monk. If Zarthaz cant be available for a night we are going to find this zone a lot harder to deal with. So we finally made our way to an “Enraged X83”. There are a couple of really cool looking traps along the way and at least 2 levels to the zone that we could see, at least one of which was partially submerged. I guess we will go back and explore downstairs at a later date. So we form up around the X83. He is standing in a doorway with several roamers on fast pops, both in the room beyond him and in the room you have to kill him in.

Enraged X83 waiting to die

Now we haven’t read any spoilers on these encounters, in fact information on this encounter was offered and was turned down repeatedly. We are here to learn it for ourselves and beat it on our own merits. Garbar and myself were nominated as Main Tanks and set ourselves up in the corner for the pull. We had no idea what was coming but pulling this guy was going to be fun!.

So Garb pulls and has aggro. I’m sitting there, got my debuffs on him, hitting him a little bit, ramping up the aggro slowly. I want to be on his aggro list but not take it off Garb. This can be a bit of a balancing act with various abilities and types of attacks but is really a lot of fun. We are kind of expecting something to happen at 80% and it does. POP he hits me and Garb with a massive push back which pops me about 20 feet up the wall and does a complete aggro wipe. I’m still hitting him and I grab aggro. The tank swap goes fairly smoothly, I blow both my Runes to compensate for healing spikes and stay up. Ok, if thats all hes got we have this motherfucker.

Steady and smooth he drops to 20%. At that point it all goes horribly wrong. Garb and I drop to 30K damage hits and he proceeds to smash his way through the entire Guild roster. Bugger.

We form up and try again. We engage and POP a Chaotic Spark appears in the room and aggros the healers at about 90%. That one didn’t count, we didn’t have a chance to even do any serious damage. So we wipe, form up, clear the re pops and off we go. The Brains of the outfit have a theory that this is all about the speed at which we drop the mob. He has to die inside of (I think?) 10 minutes or he goes on a massive damage rampage.

Waiting to Pull

Being a Raid Tank in VG is very different to both Soloing and Grouping. I am learning little bits about how to use various abilities that get very few usages during normal play. For example, to make it easier for Garb to take aggro off me as we go into Tank transition I pop my Bleak Foeman ability which stops me attacking completely and blocks all attacks for about 10 seconds. I am still on the aggro list, but as soon as he does his wipe its so much easier for Garb to get the aggro he needs. Another ability set is are my two Runes. I have 2 of them, a 25% all incoming block and a 100% all incoming block. I’m learning to use them to smooth out damage/healing spikes during fights. There are other things I’m figuring out uses for as well, its all a huge learning process as I have never MT’d Raid mobs before. I get butterflies before each boss pull!.

Everybody is learning tho and I think Southern Armada are going to become a raid force to be reckoned with.

A Tanks view of the Enraged X83 fight. Smack those knees!

This time it went perfectly. We sped up the damage and he never had a chance to Rampage. One dead X83.

Even the corpse shows the lockout timer

We actually had roamers pop as we were looting and almost wiped again to stupid Guardians and Sparks. But we gritted our teeth, put out some damage and survived. We continued on through the zone clearing away the trash until we finally came across General Vicus. Now Im not 100% sure on this but I think this guy has an extremely good 2 Handed Sword drop. The one he was holding certainly looked extremely cool but whether its something he drops or a model I don’t know. I’m trying to find an image I saw a couple of weeks back to the sword I described earlier to see if its the same one.

We cleared his Guards and formed up to have a go. It was getting really late at this point but we were determined to have at least one crack at him. I don’t know what went wrong here. He seemed to pop 2 adds at about 86%, so maybe they are on timers. We tried various tactics of Mezzing, off tanking, kiting etc but in the end we wiped with him at about 80%. Its all good, its all learning for the next time we meet.

General Vicus proceeding to eat SA

Thursday 20.12.2007
There are days when Southern Armada is superb. There are days when everybody does their job perfectly and the mobs fall before us like wheat before our scythe. This was not one of those days, in fact I would more aptly describe Thursday night like one long suicide run. The night went something like this:
Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill one mob, Wipe, Kill 3 mobs, Wipe. You get the idea. I don’t really know what it was, maybe it was that several classes were missing due to the Xmas schedule, maybe it was people being asleep ( and I was guilty of this as well) maybe it was a lot of things I dont know.

All I know was that it was just damn hard work. We basically took 4 hours to reach exactly the same place it had taken us 2 hours ( and a boss mob kill) to reach the night before. Thus there are no pics and no points to make, other than TS can be a really good tool and a bane at the same time. Having officers argue over a proposed strategy for 30 minutes just left me confused about what it was we were supposed to do.

Vanguard Month 7

I found some old pics of some of the Skawlra Rock mobs which I thought I would share. These models are brilliant. Multi colored, up right bird men walking around a series of platforms within a giant water filled crater. Its a brilliant spot and the Hunters League is a really cool series of quests. I’m seeing LOTS of people with “of the Hunters league” titles around so I’m guessing its pretty popular. I think possibly the rewards are a little over powered for the level you can complete the quests, you can start the quests in your early 20’s and you will wear some of this gear up into your late 30’s.

Some more old pics, this time of Trengal Keep Mobs. TK was a lot of fun and really well designed. I remember in Beta it was horribly bugged and the level 50 flying drakes would swoop down on you from miles away and promptly slaughter the entire group. My regular group is thinking of starting an Alt group once we get our mains to 50, so we can go back and experience some of the content we missed as there is just so damn much of it. As an alt group we will try and go through some of the non-standard dungeons and avoid places that we have already been through, like TK. There is SO much content in this game, we think we have at least one solid groups worth of content to experience without going anywhere near places we did the first time round. The pics below are of a named, “Deranjir The Gulthergor Stormlord” dieing just outside the entrance to “TK4”.

One thing I did wish I had known the first time through TK, you can harvest the big floaty stone guys for Minerals and skill ups, DOH!. TK is where we tried to get Kez to come in and group with us. We kept a spot open for him for a really long time before we filled it permanently with Elvin the Blood Mage. Elvin had been playing with us for several levels already by the time we out leveled Kez and he is a really good bloke. He lives down in Melbourne with the rest of the group, I am the only Sydney based member of the regular team. Originally Elvin was a member of a guild called The Burning Legion. Nice people apparently, but all in American time zones, so we persuaded Elvin to apply to join us and we got him accepted so he is now a full fledged member of SA!.

While we were looking for places to go after we had out leveled TK, we were told about a place to the North called Dargun’s Tomb. The shot below is taken from up on the hill as you approach the Tomb. Like many of the premium dungeons of VG, this place is massive and very imposing. The doorway you can see below is about 60 feet tall when you are standing in front of it.

Darguns Tomb is full of dog like humanoids who appear to have taken over the place. Lower down you also find a lot of Ogres. The models for both Dogs and Oggies are fantastic. I don’t have any screenies of the Oggies, so heres a doggie, isn’t he cute!. The first time we entered DT we were there at the same time as another regular SA group, Red and Nyms group. They are a bit further ahead in levels than us and they were just there to clear to some named’s to finish some quests. Unfortunately we managed to pull most of the entrance mobs onto them just as they were buffing and thoroughly wiped them out. Sorry guys. It was a hell of a train tho!.

We were really in DT several levels too early however and the first time we tried it we struggled with some of the deeper Mobs. The content throughout VG I have found to be extremely well balanced and you can tell pretty quickly ether you have attempted a mob a level or two out of your range. Sure there is the odd glitch in tuning here and there, but for the sheer volume of content I think its been well done. We were only 2-3 levels outside of the range for DT and we could do it, but it was a lot harder than it possibly should have been. We went back a few levels later and found it much more agreeable.

The great thing about VG is that if DungeonA is to hard, go to DungeonB, or C or D. There is no shortage of content for low to mid upper levels. Below is a screen shot of me on my quest Doggie in the harbour at Khal. The quest is a painful grind when done solo but well worth the effort!. The feelthy pallies I group with did the Unicorn quest together, to me that just proves the old adage about Pallies and their need to hang out with other (male) Pallies. /nod

As you fly around Vanguard on your way to various places you will come across architecture such as you can see in the image below. I have no idea what this is or what it does. Its a beautiful building in the middle of a mountain valley surrounded by idyllic gardens. Is it live and usable?, is it something placed there for use later?, is it reachable by land or only by air?. I have no idea, I just think its cool that there are places like this in game, even if they are for use later.

The Wardship. This is a series of quests and dungeons that you begin in your mid 30’s. The rewards are awesome but they are essentially based around one thing, faction. Now I have been told that the upper levels of Vanguard are all about the faction grind and that this, in comparison is easy. However as an evil race I had to start at a very substantial -9000 faction to the Wardship. In order to get the serious rewards you have to grind to positive 2000, 5000 and then 11000. The Good races start at neutral or Zero faction and so they get there a lot quicker. Each faction level is a tier and you receive substantial rewards at each level.

What we as a group found, was that by the time the goods in our group had reached 5000+ we had out leveled the entire area. Only one of the evils had even reached +2000 faction and that was me, only because I did a ridiculous amount of faction grinding against grey Mobs (no XP) in order to build my faction up. This seriously sucks, the evils should be equal with the goods or only slightly less, otherwise this is a a perfectly good dungeon set wasted. This is one of the few places I have found so far where the game play pacing could do with a bit of tweaking.

The Dungeons surrounding the Wardship, however are extremely visually impressive. There are 3 of them all tied together with Lore about the destruction of the Elven Kingdom many thousands of years ago. There is the Temple of Vol Tuniel, Vi’Rak and Thesaleen. The two main Dungeons are the Temple and Thesaleen. The Vi’Rak lair is the lower part of the Temple and is reached by a portal in an area called the scar. Vi’Rak is populated with fantastic looking Salamanders. By the time you get to the bottom of the Dungeon they are getting quite tough. Its an awesome dungeon and a really fun quest series. I think it needs a loot pass though as no matter how far into the Dungeons you go, there isn’t a lot of loot. Maybe its because they are providing such fantastic quest items once you complete the series.

The lower parts of Vi’Rak are superb, the architecture is absolutely fantastic. When you enter the huge throne room with its flowing water, sweeping staircases and patrolling Salamanders its really impressive. Its worth the fight down just to see the rooms. I tried to get screen shots several times, but they just didn’t do the place justice, you will just have to go and see for yourself.

Greystone. A massive finger of Granite reaching up into the sky. Surrounded by undead and with an aura of menace as you delve deeper and deeper into it. What a place. This is one of my favorite dungeons in VG so far. The quests are interesting and fun and they all tie together into one huge over all quest which delivers some really cool rewards. Initially the architecture looks confusing and you feel like you are going to be lost forever, but slowly you get used to it and begin to learn your way around.

The undead theme is carried through really well with the mobs getting both more powerful and the models more interesting the further in you go. There are several named’s and one Uber named scattered throughout the Dungeon. The Lord of the Castle seems to be a rare por, we only saw him once in the whole 2-3 weeks we were in Greystone and I think he could be tuned to be tougher. Apart from that the whole place is well balanced and a lot of fun. I can highly recommend it in your early 40s.

The High Guardian Auroc’Yor (Isnt an Auroch a bull in Spanish?) guards the entrance to the Lords throne room.

The Greystone Throne definitely looks like the seat of a nasty undead Knight.

The major quest line for Greystone involves picking up Bloody Insignias as random drops. Once you have enough of them you hand them in to summon a series of Mobs. Each Mob requires X number of Insignias and you need about 130 to complete the series. Hint: don’t start the summoning till you have the major quest line in your book or you are wasting a LOT of insignias you will have to grind out again. In the end we bought about 23 insignias cause the dungeon is greying out for us and the grind is beginning to be boring. The major quest line that you really want to finish is the Purification of Greystone. I don’t have screenies of all of the summoned named but here is a few. The final rewards are WELL worth the effort.

Epo’Wroj the Depraved

Sir Patro the Loyal
Unknown but cool looking named. I think this is Phorean the Fallen.

Although the group is only 2 insignias short and still in Greystone, I have been looking for new and interesting places to quest and solo. After much dieing and trying to kill mobs I didn’t have a hope in hell against, I found the Deadbog and the nearby town of Elani.

The Deadbog

Every now and again in MMO’s you run into a truly unpleasant person. It doesn’t happen a lot thankfully but when you do they can significantly impact your enjoyment of the game. One such person is Grendul Wildfire, the Guild Leader of Silent Redemption. Now I don’t know the rest of the guild, but the actions of the GL certainly reflect very badly upon them. In order to explain this I am going to have to explain a little bit about Swamp Armour.

For the high level raid game there is basically two ways to gear up. One is to have a high level armor crafter make Tier 5 amour, this is time consuming and expensive. The other is to choose one of 3 factions and then kill your way through 3 different cities associated with that faction. Once you have enough parts dropped you can create some seriously Uber Armour for all classes. So I choose my faction and form up a group of Guildies and we head into Flordiel. Now this amour chasing is not easy, its going to take days of grinding in Flordiel to get the amour I will need to raid.

We are happily killing our way through the township when we run into Grendul. We are in the process of killing a named Tree when he rocks up and says “Ive been here for hours and now you guys think you are going to take all my Mobs?”. Huh? His mobs?, when did this become a single player game?. We were all a bit stunned so we didn’t say anything, killed our tree and just kept going. An hour or so later we have found the named ring (remember this is our first time here) and we are preparing to pull one of the named amour droppers when he turns up again. This time the comment is “Do you guys think you are going to be able to race me?”. Again we are all a bit stunned at this comment, to be a smartarse I said something like “No speek da englis” but in the end we basically said ‘No we aren’t racing you we are just playing the game’.

He stayed around watching us and trying to interfere with our pulls until we left. Ok so hes an idiot and an asshole but we ignored him.

The reason he and his guild are on my shit list, he is also a cheat. The named Tree Lord who drops the BP’s multi hits for 2.5K, there is no way he is solo able if you are playing the game fair and square. Grendul pulled the Tree Lord out from under us last night. We were almost GTG waiting on the Cleric to arrive, who was literally 50 meters away, and he pulled the Lord. Now I don’t have an issue with him getting the pull. He got ready first and got the pull fair and square. What I do have an issue with is he used a positioning exploit to be able to solo the Lord. I have now seen Grendul and his guildies soloing the named Tree Lord, The Grove Queen and the named Human Lord. A few days after this incident there was a thread that popped up on the Official Vanguard forums about exactly this issue.

I don’t know that SR is all like him, but as he is the Guild Leader I have to make the assumption that if he cheats, he condones his Guild members cheating. So, Silent Redemption, welcome to my shit list. I look forward to beating you assholes to a LOT of spawns.

My favorite quote from that Thread is from the chief cheat himself.
“Also, he only hits me for ~740 fully self-buffed. See, there is a stat called Mitigation, which is a component of our defense, it allows all us tanks to take less damage than other classes when it is maxed out. Now hush, your stupid is showing.”

Yes dick brain I know what mitigation is. The next time that I see you soloing the Tree Lord, I expect that you will be doing it on his spawn spot instead of pulling him to the rocks behind the throne circle which is a known point of exploit.
Now hush, your lieing and cheating is showing.

I went to the SA AGM this year and had a blast. It was really good to put a lot of old names to new faces. Even Caniella flew in from SA which was just awesome. We drank a lot and had some really good food thanks to the organizational skills and drive of the mighty Redwynne. We are bloody lucky to have her in the guild. To be honest I was hoping for a big announcement from Kez that he would be returning to the game and leading us into the future of raiding. Unfortunately it was not to be. Kezlar is really really busy with his job and 2 kids and just doesn’t have time to game. I understand and respect that, but I do miss him. Ahh well.

So while we were on downtime (Trikkie and Keepr went to the beach for a week) I tried to organize a few runs into the swamp for amour farming. There are several people in the guild who have maxed everything and have all the toys, but there are a large number who haven’t. When we reach APW and start true raiding, everything I have read says that having a few people in high end gear will not be good enough to beat the events. You will need a well geared guild with everyone in the best amour and resist gear you can provide. As an example, I currently have a mitigation of 36%. In full Tier 2 insect swamp amour at level 50 I would expect to have a mitigation of 80% plus and double my current HP’s.

Its my understanding that the events have been tuned with the expectation that tanks will have that sort of mitigation. As a Guild we have a LOT of gearing up to do to be able to successfully raid APW. Its a bit like farming Time to be able to survive in Gates Of Discord. The only other way to get the kind of gear the Tanks would need would be to have it made. Thats not only very expensive, but our only Tier5 armorer with the rare recipes we need to be able to make the amour doesn’t play anymore.

So I did a few runs into Icky and got a couple of drops for myself and for a number of people who signed up for the runs. I now know that zone and where to look. The problem is the rarity of some of the drops means repeated farming runs into all of the zones. As a tank you cant just get what you need in one Zone. Pieces drop in one of 4 different locations and some of them are insanely rare. Ive been told of one piece needed for the BP which is a 1 in 1000 drop, off a named who spawns every 4 hours and is locked down by every Guild who knows how. Having said that, its possible that with the introducttion of overland raid Bosses coming in game update 2 and taking the Trikkie group into Rahz Inkur for some questing and named killing, we may be able to gear up enough to be able to survive. One thing that I think has been done relatively well in VG is that there is no ‘One’ path you must take in order to get to the higher level gear. You can quest for it in RI, farm for it in Swamps or get a crafter to make it. There is almost always an alternative. Tho the AOE aggro hat in RI seems like it will be a must have for every tank.

We also did a run into Gorgalok. AOEing, its a blast in VG! You can see 20 mobs coming at you behind the puller, they get snared and BOOM the Sorcerer and Bloodmage let loose. Half of them die in the first round. XP and faction is scrolling up my screen faster than I can read. While we were there we headed up to see if the Gorgalok Bloodpriest was up. You have to go round and round, higher and higher up a huge stone spire (the views are incredible) until you reach his inner chamber. Unfortunately the event that you need to trigger him was bugged, so we could see him but we couldn’t see the third one of his guards that we needed to kill to be able to release him. So I took some screen shots instead. The screens are not very good as the lighting in the temple is terrible.

The first raid. Finally!. I am including this here because until the raid interface goes in and we start to hit the over land raid mobs, its not raiding its just extended grouping. Xardan organized a run against the temple complexes on Monday night. These are fun events and can be done with a single group, but we took 3. The point was not to get loot and stuff, tho we did get a bit of that and some people got some upgrades I think, the point was to get us all working together again and see how the game went with 18-20 people in on the screen.

I took the screen below and deliberately included the FPS meter. This is a pic of one of the platforms in the center of the temple. The entire raid force of about 21 people is in front of me as well as a full room of Mobs and I still have 14-20 FPS. Now at 14fps I noticed no discernible change in the quality of the game, no hitching or glitching. I had the graphics set at medium balanced and all names turned off. Raidng is going to be a blast if this is the quality we can expect.

Once we cleared the room of mobs we activated the big glowing orb in the middle of the room and approached Commander Abtu who provided us with a quest. Basically once you accept the quest the entire Pyramid respawns but everything is now friendly to you.

You have to run outside and protect the Pyramid against waves of attacking Mobs. Below is the last named Mob in the last wave. Once you have this guy dead you can do the hand in for the quest which nets you 7 medallions. With 25 medallions you can hand them in to get rewards of pieces of Lucent Jewelery. This jewelery is the best in the game and is another thing required for survival in APW. The fun part is that only one group gets the quest completion, so only one group gets the 7 medallions. You need 6 pieces of jewelery x25 medallions. Thats a LOT of farming. It was a hell of a lot of fun tho and really good to be in an SA raid again. I think I am going to really enjoy playing an SA raid tank and I am really looking forward to tanking against the Overland raid mobs when they are first released in game update 3.2

The first raid post should be up in a week or two hopefully. Whenever it is that GU 3.2 is released.

Vanguard Month 6

28.06.07 Vanguard Month 6

Well its been a hell of a ride for the last 6 months. The game we had all been eagerly anticipating, Vanguard:Saga of Heroes was released. Unfortunately even by its own developers admission it was released 3-4 months too early. The developers, Sigil, had run out of money and they needed the cash to flow. It all went swimmingly to start with, then the numbers started to drop and people began to realize that they were going to need a seriously high end PC to be able to play VG at even mid range settings. The game world felt empty, bugs were abundant, quests couldn’t be completed and crashes were a constant feature of game life.

Something had gone seriously wrong.

Then came the big news, Sigil was effectively folding.

The old enemy, SOE would be buying the game and half the staff were going to get fired. After 5 years of development the whole damn thing imploded with a welter of words from Brad which were largely self serving. I spent 5 years following the development of the game. I poured hundreds of hours into supporting web sites, creating communities, monitoring message boards, working with Sigil staff behind the scenes and encouraging friends to give the game a go. I logged a butt load of bug reports, wrote up ideas when asked for them and participated in in-game feed back sessions.

Suddenly it was all gone. The game was still there but all the work was toast. I tried very hard to be angry, back in the old days of EQ I would have been, I would have poured forth invective like a waterfall. I would have dragged into my anger even people who didn’t know what a computer was, let alone a virtual world.

However, I guess I’m older, uglier and at the end of the day I got what I wanted. Vanguard is fun. Its a lot more challenging than most of the games out there, its prettier than almost anything else on the market and if SOE think they can make money out of it, then it has a hell of a lot of long term potential.

Southern Armada left WoW to move to Vanguard, so I have all my old raiding mates to play with again, in other words to a large extent I have found a Home, a World we can spend years exploring.

When you have cities like New Taraganor to explore what more could you want?

So I created my Dread Knight, logged in and started killing. I had been playing a Dread since the class was introduced in Beta2, nearly 2 years. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure (even after becoming an Elder) if I was going to continue to enjoy playing the class long term, I needn’t have worried. A Shadow Knight was my first class in Everquest and so far I’m still loving the Vanguard version of the class.

I did have a log of where I was when all of these screens were taken but somewhere along the line they got misplaced. The Mutated Rekk is from quite early on in my leveling career, I think I was based around Renton Keep and spending a lot of time dying while trying to complete quests which were meant to be completed by groups. Even this early in the game groups were very hard to find and the LFG tool was composed pretty much of running around zones spamming “12 Dread LFG“.

This shot of the named turtle Gordaukar is also from around the same time. I was completing a quest line and he was the final Mob. This fight is held entirely underwater and to be honest he was incredibly underpowered. I think he took me about 45 seconds to kill, loot and run back to the quest giver. An impressive model tho considering this is the sort of thing that you see at the very early levels of the game. To me this sort of thing is what makes VG feel empty. Its not empty plains that don’t have a mob every 3 feet (Drive across the center of Aussie, you wont see anything for 1000 miles.) its mobs with no loot table.

It makes the world feel incomplete somehow, like they haven’t quite gotten around to finishing it.

Another MOB from around Renton Keep. This is a Stonemaster Ettercap. There are a whole range of different types of Ettercap. This is where I began to feel the difference of Vanguard as a world from any of the previous games I had played. Each different type of Ettercap is a different class and unlike most games where that doesn’t mean a lot, in Vanguard this means different tactics to fight and beat each type. Ettercaps don’t just stand there and hit you, they will cast class based spells and attempt different ways to beat you, a lot like a player would.

At the end of the first 20 levels, this is Ulaa Elfbrother of Southern Armada. He is wearing amour almost entirely from the Universal Races of Thestra quests. These are quests which can be entirely soloed and I was really enjoying doing them. The rewards are great and the XP is well worth it. They were great right up until I ran into a bug which made then impossible to complete. Sigh, another bug report submitted.

At this point something happened that completely changed my game play. I got a regular group!. I was soloing in and around Renton Keep doing various quests when I teamed up with a Pally called Rocks. We hung out a bit and chatted and after a while he told me he was part of a regular Wednesday group and would I like to join them. I went into the usual, “you realize I am in Aussie”, time zones speech and it turns out that half the Wednesday group were other members of SA and Rocks is applied to join, he was Cuddles the Mage when SA were playing WoW!.

At the time I joined the group we were all in the 15-20 range and thus we christened ourselves “The Teens”. Initially the group was Pally, Dread, Druid, Cleric, Cleric, so we had tons of Healing but our DPS was not fantastic. Apart from off-tanking we had no CC.

The group was formed with the idea of meeting up regularly on Wednesday nights so we could run through all the quests everyone had and do some of the premiere dungeons. We started off doing Hillsbury Manor in Thestra. I thought the map of the dungeon area was really cool (although I would see it repeated later in other dungeons) . We ran through HM several times and completed every quest that wasn’t broken by bugs.

Once we were finished there we moved on to the nearby Crystal Caverns, killing our way down to the lower ant caves trying to get to the Queen. We never had a problem killing anything in that area but for various reasons (namely repeated server crashes) we never did quite make it to the Queen. The Crystalline servitors and the Crystal Warders did manage to make our lives a bit difficult at times. Having 2-3 of the Servitors pop on you at the same time can make it tough with out any CC.

In between Wednesday nights I’m still doing a bit of soloing. I quite like the game balance in the late teens early 20’s, with Solo quests and small group or duet quests both giving solid xp. In the downtime you can still get stuff done without having to get a full group up and running. About 40 of the Vultrix Stalkers shown below had to die in order to make the quest gods happy.

Once we began to out level the Ant Caves, we decided to hit The Tomb of Lord Tsang. Its a hell of a run from Hillsbury Manor, being that its on Kojan, but its the perfect level and we had heard there were some nice weapons to be had. The design of the place was awesome with elevators going up and down, areas where you had to jump on and off and a really well done Asian theme throughout. It feels like you might be walking through the Kyoto palace in Japan with sliding screens and beautifully painted wall hangings. Kudos to whoever designed the place.

The Mobs were pretty cool with an undead theme all the way through. I think its really at this point that we started to get our groove on as a group. The second of third run through and we are starting to figure out how each of us works and the strengths and abilities of each class. It is also at this point that Rocks (our resident Pally) also decided to swap and become Lulla, our new resident Psionicist. This was a great move as it gave us lull and CC type abilities as well as adding to our DPS considerably.

A Roaming Phantasm

At sometime during the nights of smashing our way through the undead hordes, Lulla mentioned to me that he had started the Hunters League quests north of the Gnome city of Mekalia. So, in between group nights I ran myself across to Khal and started to do the early quest lines. Initially the quests are an easy solo quest. Then you run into the undead flesh quest and that’s where it all starts to get a lot harder.

At this point I suggested to the whole group that we head over to the Upside garrison region and start to do the quests. they were into it as we didn’t really have any thing else on the cards and needed to level up a bit before tackling Trengal Keep. So we farmed our way through the early quests and killed lots and lots of Gauthek on the way through.

The final parts of the quests are fantastic. This whole series not only delivers some awesome gear and a fantastic weapon, its also a hell of a lot of fun. Fighting up into the Bird skull cave, killing off the council members and then pulling the named, is going to go down as one of my most fun moments in gaming. Again Kudos to whoever designed both the quest series and the Skawlra Rock chunk.

A birdie dies on the way to the Skull cave.

Once we were through the quests I took Screenies to show all the guys fully kitted out in Hunters League class amour.

Naoru Shii Cleric

Benzine Cleric

Lulla Psionicist

Zeckl Druid

Once we completed the Hunters league quests we headed up to The ruins of Trengal Keep. Its interesting how acronyms evolve. There seems to be a split between people who use TK as the short version and some who use RoTK. I seem to use both depending on how I’m feeling at the time.

Trengal Keep is a huge quest hub to the north of Renton Keep. If you are a tight group in your mid to late 20s, or in an early 30’s group, I can highly recommend it. The zone itself is really fun with lots of fallen ruins, undead Orcs and huge Drakes flying all over the place. The quests lead you deeper and deeper into the Keep with really cool rambles through underground caverns and dungeons. There are several named’s on the way through, from whom we have managed to get some nice upgrades and at least one awesome set of Panties for Lulla.

Named Fatboy in the courtyard

Watching the Pally pull, and Die!

Oddly enough writing all of the above has been really hard for some reason, it hasnt flowed. I guess a whole lot has gone on in my life during this period, moving countries, quitting a very long term job and then finding a new one, renting my house out and then trying to find a new place to rent myself. Its been a hell of a year so far.

I’ve had a number of interesting conversations with various people about VG and where it will go. One that seems to have stuck in my head was a conversation with a chap who was helping to run Ausguard.com when I was involved with that project.

We were talking about raiding and he was boasting about his Guilds uberness and how they were going to be the best Aussie raiders on his server. This was a newly formed Guild mind you, with leaders with no experience of either leading a guild or raiding. So I said the three best Aussie raid guilds that I knew about were Southern Armada, Cold Fury and Aurora Noctum. I was also thinking of including Guilds with large Aussie populations like The Hand and some of the sub guilds that have spawned from the bigger guilds into new games, like Veni Vedi Vici, but I thought that would only confuse the issue so I left it out.

Anyway, this young chap went off, he started going on about how his guild had done more content, they were further along in high level dungeons, there were more of them, they were more dedicated and played more hours yada yada yada.

I tried to point out several issues to him.
Raiding is different. Working with, behaving in, and turning up to raids week after week is simply a different proposition to logging on to play in a group. Managing and running multi group raids is completely different to being in a single group and progressing through high level content. The Guilds I had named all had history. They had all been around since early EQ and had evolved into tight, efficient, well led, dedicated raiding crews, over years of banging against high level raid encounters.

Just killing stuff in groups for the first few months simply didn’t get you into the “uber guild” rating in my books.

He couldn’t see it and went off again. Oddly enough not only does his guild no longer exist in Vanguard, they disbanded about 3 weeks after this conversation and he no longer plays. A classic example of uber guild burn out I guess.

I have a confession.
I have been playing with the teens group for about 8 weeks or so, we have been happily making our way through the middle level dungeon progressions and I have been having a blast!. However shortly after I started with the teens I also hooked up for a couple of dungeon runs with some very old Guildies.

Keepr, Trikkie, Sanfy and Phaithful are also playing regularly 2 nights a week, Monday and Thursday. After a couple of runs I was asked if I wanted to join them regularly. Now I don’t think I have ever made any secret of the fact that I wanted to get to raid level (Raiding is coming yay!) and I wanted to be able to play a whole lot more than I have been able to up to now. Having a group is pretty much a must have for play as a tank, Soloing is possible but not a whole lot of fun.

I am now at the point in game play that I have pretty much out -levelled the teens group and Trikkies group is beginning to delve into some parts of the game that are going to require some serious dedication. (Vol Tuniel and the Swamp Quests) I really don’t think I am going to be able to play with the Teens group anymore.

I don’t have an alt at the right level to continue to play with them and I have been their primary tank, so I’m feeling pretty crap about it. I am trying to level a Sorceror to be able to join them but it means Lulla the Psi will have to go back to being Rocks the Pally.

Its possible the Teens may just break up, I don’t know. The feeling within the group is it was always a casual group to begin with. A couple of the lads within it arent really interested in VG and would rather be playing something else (see rose colored glasses comments later) whereas the Trikkie group is a little more dedicated and I can get to raid level a lot faster.

Where will SA go at the moment? that too is a good question. A lot of people have strayed off to other games like Lord of the Rings Online. Whether they are gone permanently or they will come back once raids go live is an unknown. Unfortunately I don’t think that raiding as we have known it will ever exist in a game again.

Even a lot of the old SA people have the “this game must be perfect at launch and if its not I will go elsewhere” mentality which is a real pity. I think a lot of people look back with deeply rose coloured glasses at past games and hold them up as examples of shining perfection. I have seen people comparing VG with EQ as to how “finished” they are. Ignoring the fact that EQ was 6 years old when we left, when that game came out it was horribly bugged, the servers wouldn’t stay up and huge parts of the game didn’t evolve till years later. World of Warcraft was the same.

I think the closest example to what could potentially happen with Vanguard is EQ2. When that game was launched it was a POS. Major surgery occurred over the next two years and by everyone’s accounts it is now a very good game. In the process of managing that game to the state it is in today, SOE has evolved a series of standards and methods for the management of an MMO and for communication with their fan base. If those same standards and methods can now be applied to VG then there is an excellent chance the game will evolve into something very powerful. Will SA stay that long?. I really do not know. I certainly hope they will, everything else that’s coming out in the next 12 months or so is just a WoW clone from what I have been able to ascertain.

I actually have another update ready to go as I have been playing a whole lot more recently and have a whole lot more to write about so once this goes live the next one shouldn’t take much longer and I will talk about some Guild stuff then.

I will also be making the screenies a lot bigger and I’m going to stop screwing with them to reduce file sizes. If you don’t have broadband by now, go and bloody get it. So hopefull the pics will be a lot clearer. Vanguard is a beautiful game and some of the Mobs and Dungeons are fantastic, I would really like to show that off.

Southern Armada Vanguard Week One

I just re read the previous post and it probably came off a little more harsh than intended. In fact it came off way more harsh than intended. The important point was that I trust the leadership of SA to do the right thing. I have been following you guys for the last 5 years. I’m not going to stop now.

*note*
I just had a chat in game with Kez and I had to explain that last post. Halfway through the conversation my PC rebooted (of course, my 5 minutes online was up). Now I have a policy, I dont re write stuff once its live. I do spend a lot of time re thinking what I am about to post and often I will put something into draft and look at it again a few days later. But once I have put it live it doesn’t change. There are a lot of reasons for this, but for me it comes down to you have to stand by what you say and going back and editing something constantly just feels wishy washy to me.

However, that last post does leave me feeling like it needs a re-write. I’m not going to but I am going to add a caveat. My intention with that post was simply to make the point that there are potential issues with the new system as it stands. I stand by the examples that I wrote, I can see them being possibly divisive and possibly causing issues for some players. What I didn’t emphasis strongly enough is that the Guild leadership are a great bunch of guys. they have been doing this for a long time, and in the case of Kez since pretty much day one.

I have worked my ass off to help get Ausguard.com off the ground and a large part of that was because I wanted this guild, its officers and leadership to play VG with me. I wanted you guys back in a game that I knew you would enjoy and would challenge you. I wanted to help create a community where SA could both be a part of the community and stand out from it as an example of what an Aussie guild can do, what we can achieve without having to turn into 7 day a week hard core assholes. I didn’t do all that work over 18 months to turn around and screw with the leadership before the game goes live.

I have said this before but I believe that its worth saying again. The leadership in SA is easily the best of any guild I have ever heard of, worked with, been a member of or even heard rumors of. They are guys and girls who put aside their own precious free time in order to do work for the greater good of the guild as a whole. I absolutely trust the guild leadership to do the right thing. They didn’t create this system to make it work just for them. Much like the Sigil decision to do away with the Official forums, I may not agree with every point they put forward for doing so, BUT I am willing to step back and give the new system support and give it a try.

I trust that if there are some things in the new Guild system that don’t work, they will be looked at, examined for the best thing for the Guild over all, and if they don’t work, they will be modified or done away with.

So, thats been said.

The first week of Vanguard and goddamn it I am cursed. The gaming gods appear to look down on me and whenever a new MMO is released they reach down and put the whammy on my PC. This happened last time with WoW. I moved house about 3 days after WoW was released and then had to wait for about 3 weeks before Telecom (may a curse be on them forever) could supply me with a DSL connection. Its possible that may have contributed to my feeling of disconnection from WoW in general.

This time, even tho I have been playing this game for the last year in Beta, I have developed a severe problem with reboots. I have had this random reboot problem for about 2 years. Some days its really bad and I boot every 30 minutes. Some weeks it doesn’t happen at all. However with the release of VanGuard to live I have started to lock up and then reboot roughly every 7-9 minutes. I am currently spending more time waiting for my PC to finish the boot, and then logging into VanGuard than I am actually playing the game. On top of that about roughly 1 in 2 reboots results in a death for me.

60 divided by 9 = 6.6 boots an hour
4 hours of play time 26.6 boots a night
26.6 divided by 2 = 13 deaths a night, no wonder I have no cash

I am at the point where I need to start grouping to progress and with my machine in this state I simply cant. It would not be fair to a group to have me disappear every 7 minutes and then take 3 minutes to get back into the game. I have replaced every bit of hardware on my PC with the exception of the disks (I’ve never come across a disk failure that will cause a full hard reboot), the mother board and the CPU. I am replacing the motherboard this week and I am desperately hoping that this will cause the whole reboot problem to go away. If it doesn’t I’m stuffed until I reach Sydney. I cant afford to replace the CPU as well, so I will just have to live with it. Its also possible that the fan that was supplied with the CPU is horribly underpowered and I may have a heat issue. Again cant afford a custom heat solution to experiment with to try and fix the problem.

However, having said all that this is the box I have sitting next to me desk. All in pieces all still in original packing. I am shipping this to Sydney and this will be my new PC:
Intel E6600 Dual Core 2.4GhZ (I’m going to Overclock this to at least 3GhZ, more if I can)
Zalman 9500 Custom Fan
8800GTX 720
Gigabyte DS3 Mobo
2 Gigs PC 6400 RAM
2x 200GB SATA 2
1x 160GB SATA 1
Creative Wireless keyboard and mouse.

With a few other bits and pieces that is going to be my new PC. Unfortunately I will have to wait for that to get shipped, then wait to find a new apartment, then build it, then wait to get broadband connected then patch before I can play again so I will be off-line for, at a conservative estimate, at least a month. I haven’t been disconnected from the web for that long in about a decade.

Now there really isn’t a lot of new stuff here. I’m only level 10. I haven’t managed to get to any dungeons or really get deeply into the game yet. I would be playing a lot more if it wasn’t for the reboots. As I cant really do a lot in the way of XP’ing I’m working on crafting as much as I can. Apart from losing the credit for the work order you are doing when you crash, at least I’m not affecting anyone else.

I wandered though the first 10 levels and ran into the Giant Gargoyles again. For the life of me I cant remember what these guys are called. They are funky looking beats when you are fighting them tho, they way they fly up into the sky and pounce on you from the air!.

I have probably died more at the hands of the Forest Stalkers than any other MOB due to the huge amount of reboots I have had in this zone. Not the zones fault. My POS computers fault. Where oh where is that damn motherboard.

Spiders, really really big spiders, they freak the GF out. I keep telling her that there are bigger spiders than that in Sydney, she hits me a lot 🙂

Finally after about 100+ deaths this is Ulaa just after he dinged level 10. Its early days for the game and for me but this is the beginning!.

Southern Armada Vanguard Week One Minus 16hours

Well its not long now. Vanguard will be released to the early purchaser crowd (of whom I am one) at 7am New Zealand time Saturday January 27th.

Southern Armada will be forming up on the Thunder Axe server not on the unofficial Oceanic server which has been organized by the affiliate site http://www.ausguard.com. There are many reasons for this but the primary one is contention. We don’t want to be on a server with multiple other Aussie raiding Guilds, although it does make it easier to recruit it may very well make raiding a lot harder as we will be racing for raid targets against other Aussie guilds. Its a lot easier to raid if your competition is in bed. Of course this can work against us in a lot of ways as well. If the hard core US guilds have completely cleared the server ( and this did happen to us in EQ) we can end up on a raid night with no targets up to hit. Now obviously its all a bit speculative at the moment as we have little or no idea about the raid game in VG. Lots of people have thrown around a number of 24 raiders and this number has become accepted as fact. I have yet to see a post from anyone official which has said anything beyond vague references about a raid total “less than EQ” , the only rough number I have seen is 24-36. I guess we will see.

SA had an online meeting in Team Speak and Kez outlined the Officers new view for SA going into VG. It sounds to me like there is some serious discontent about the behavior of some of the membership from the WoW era. SA will now have two ranks within the membership.

Elders are those who have shown commitment to the Guild and to helping others within the Guild. These are people who show up to raid, who help out in gathering stuff for guild made components etc. They will get precedence in Raid slots and for gear.

Members are the more casual player members who don’t want to or cant commit to time online and cant raid as often.

The other change is that we are having our classes picked for us. In the past the Guild has required an even spread of classes in order to progress. Often this even spread of people aren’t there and you get raids with 12 tanks and 3 healers. Kez wants to sort this out to start with, so everyone has had to apply for their SA VG membership, state their 2 favored classes and the type of member they want to be (elder or member) The officers will decide who gets to be what.
Now I have been playing a Dread Knight since the class was released into the game last year. I am sure that there is a strong possibility I wont get this class as I’m sure there is at least one officer who will want to play a Dread. My secondary class choice is Monk and to be quite honest i would be quite happy with that. I played a Goblin Monk in Beta till about 15 and really enjoyed the experience. I would honestly be happy to play either class.

To be honest in my head this whole class choice and splitting of the membership feels a little premature. I can understand the officers wanting to get this sort of stuff sorted early on in the piece but I also think we really don’t know enough about the game, especially the game at later levels, to even begin to make this sort of division clear and concise. I have a point to make here. Lets say that I don’t get chosen to be an Elder, disappointing but fair enough, there are too many people and not enough slots. Now this means that I am free to choose my class. In that case I will more than likely choose a Dread or a Monk anyway. So I create my Dread, I level up, I join in with mini raids, I help with farming, I build myself up as a Weapon crafter, I join in the life of the guild as I would normally. I write this blog, I keep doing SA PR in and out of game etc

We get to raid level. No one has stepped down from the Elder role and I am still not an Elder despite all the effort I have put in. This means that I pretty much wont get to raid. Now raiding is why I play these games. Its what makes these games fun for me. If I am not an Elder ( and I am using the royal ‘I’ here, this can apply to anyone in the members position ) and I don’t get raiding slots. I have one choice if I want to raid and that is to leave SA. THAT is what I don’t like about this system. I don’t think we will end up with a have/have not problem between Elders and Members, I do think we will end up with a potential of a lot of resentment from established long term members.

Second issue.
I have chosen my Dread, leveled him up etc and an Elder steps down. I get picked to join the ranks of the Elders ( again royal “I” ) but there is already a Dread in the Elders and it was a Cleric that stepped down. Do I HAVE to start and PL a Cleric in order to join the Elders?. I hate playing bloody Clerics, after WoW I said never again. If I can join as a Dread doesn’t that blow the whole carefully laid class balance sheet out the window? and given that I can join as a Dread couldn’t everybody just have chosen their classes to begin with?

Third issue.
A Cleric steps down, I have worked really hard to join the Elders but I am playing a Dread. The Guild needs a Cleric and goes outside the Guild for recruitment. Someone comes in and steps right over me from the outside, despite all my hard work. Instant resentment and I’m back to only having the choice to leave.

There was a list of Classes people were wanting to play as their Choice posted to the SA Forum and it was pretty evenly split with about 6-8 people choosing classes within each archetype. I thought it was a pretty good spread and I think that trying to come up with the ‘perfect’ class spread just isn’t going to work.

I was talking with Anobis today and one of the things we both fondly remember from EQ and from Prexus was the SA ability of getting things done despite having completely the wrong class mix. I got asked once how many Wizzies for fast DPS we had when we beat Coirnav for the first time. The answer was only one, but we had 11 Necros. I really do understand that Kez and the Officers had a really bad experience with many of the WoW membership. But sitting at my desk listening to the TS chat the other day, I was reading the names of the people logged in and it struck me: This was the core of the old EQ raiding crew. These were the people who turned up to every raid and who worked with each other to help make the guild the best it could be for all its members. This wasn’t a bunch of 14 year old wankers only out for themselves.

I’m guessing that the system will stay flexible and the officers will do their best for the whole of the Guild. I have faith in the guys leading SA and I know if a system doesn’t work they will be flexible enough to rethink it.

I guess we will see what VG brings us.

Now normally I would have pictures to post but as there isn’t any game to take screen shots of I will have to leave you with a picture of a Pohutakawa, the NZ Xmas tree instead.

New Zealand Christmas Tree

Week One Minus 8 hours
I’m a Dread!