A partial screen shot from http://www.vgplayers.com
One thing I loved about eq2 (when they finally implemented it) was their leader boards. I like to keep track of my characters, see where they’ve been, where they got their levels, where they are in comparison to everyone else on their server and even world wide. It’s fun, and gives me little baby goals.
So I was very happy to see it carried over to Vanguard, and done so very well. I looked up my character Tashina just to see what things looked like. The blog, is an awesome idea. It auto-updates every time your character does something of significance, such as hitting level 5, or 10, discovering an item. The portraits are a neat feature that let you update from in game as well. It would be great to see more of these sorts of forums set up for other MMO’s, I’m pretty sure WoW doesn’t have anything at all like that.
I started a new bloodmage, level 5 so far and I may have stumbled into my new favorite class. They use blood points, basically every offensive attack you do has a reward of blood points. When you cast a heal after accumulating some of these points, the base heal gains a bonus. It strikes me as a combination between healer and necromancer. I eat some of my health to cast a dot, then heat the mobs health and regain some of my own as a heal. Very fun to say the least. They also wear cloth, making them slightly weaker then the other healer types who mainly wear leather chain or plate, but their abilities more then compensate for this.
Yeah I wish all games implemented something like this.