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.
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.
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.
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.
