Say Goodbye to New Zealand (Part 3)

I am loving Australia, I really am and to be honest I cant see us going back to New Zealand in the foreseeable future. Its possible that Sydney may not remain home forever, but I think Australia will be. Don't get me wrong, I love NZ, its a beautiful country and has a lot of really good things going for it, but at the moment we just cant afford to live there. I'm not pointing the finger at any one political party or politician as the blame needs to be laid across all of them.

For the last 20 years, pretty much as long as I have been working full time, all I have heard from NZ politicians is that we need to keep wages low to compete with Asia/keep inflation down and that the "Trickle down" theory will work, we just have to let corporations make even bigger profits. Now like me you can probably see the holes in this argument.

1. Corporations don't pass profits down to workers. They just don't work that way.
2. Even if corporations wanted to raise the workers wages (this will occur when the snouted ones become airborne) the government has a policy of keeping wages low. Corporations cant raise wages as it will lower profits and raise inflation.

To make a long story short, this has led to en extended period of New Zealand workers getting the shaft. If you are getting a wage rise which simple grants you cost of living increases you are doing really well. On top of the wages issue is the problem of massive immigration and a large immigrant student population fuelling a house prices boom. So the NZ worker is making very little money to allow NZ to compete with Asia. Meanwhile the Asians are moving into NZ in huge numbers and bringing all their money with them.

So now NZ workers, whose real wages have risen something like 20% in the last 15 years cannot afford to buy property in their own country as property prices have increased on average by 200%. Meanwhile corporate profits have increased 300% and politicians salaries by 100%. The cost of living in NZ is massive. They have screwed up, they have created a system whereby they cannot raise workers wages, but if they don't raise wages they will lose all their educated, experienced and skilled workers to other countries.

Ignore all the politicians and accountants and what they will tell you; this is my experience as a New Zealand worker.

1. The cost of living in Sydney (one of the most expensive places in Australia) is lower than it is in Auckland. I pay less for food, power, transport, petrol, gas, water, clothing, shoes and going out.
2. I get more money in my pocket at the end of the month in Sydney than in NZ. I pay less tax, and what tax I do pay I can claim back and end up with a cash bonus at the end of the year.
3. I make 30% more NET in Sydney than I was making in NZ.
4. One of the politicians arguments for staying in NZ is that its a beautiful country. I can assure you that Australia is also beautiful. we have done a lot of driving in NSW and I can assure you there are some fantastic places to see.
5. The weather. You don't realise just how much it rains in NZ until you don't live there. I hate rain, I love warmth.

I saw a statistic recently that 40,000 New Zealanders a year are leaving the country. I cant believe that the Politicians don't look at numbers like that and ask themselves where they went wrong.

Having said all of that, there is a place in NZ that is my little piece of Heaven. If I had my choice this is where I would love to be.

Manganui Harbour.
'Manganui' is a Maori word meaning "Big Fish"

The view south from the deck at Coopers beach

2 minutes from Manganui.

The view North from the deck at Coopers beach
2 minutes from Manganui.

Coopers beach is my little piece of Paradise and always will be. In order to ever be able to afford to live there, I will have to spend the next 20 years working in Australia. There is something wrong with that.

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 (tm) 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.