An Evening Stroll
stargrace 
Level 14 Blood Mage, Satia – Taking her Evening corpse walk
A huge thank you to Raskolnikov, 18 Monk who is a good friend of mine (both from EQ2 and WoW) who helped me out this weekend with my blood mage. Beside a few random people sending me group and guild invites I don’t know a whole lot of the community yet (which is fine by me). We had a lot of fun smushing things and working together while I learned how to group. Yes, I say learned how to group because Vanguard is unlike any of the other MMO’s I’ve played in that aspect. You basically get to keep two targets at once. One, is your defensive target. This could be you if you’re solo, or it could be your tank, or whomever is getting hit. I have the F keys to target my group members for this target, as well as the Q key to shuffle through the nearest allies incase someone is dying close by.
Then you also have your target that you’re killing. You can also change this target throughout the fight and not lose your defensive target. So where’s the issues come into play? Well you have to remember to constantly change that defensive target if there’s more then just you around. If you’re a blood mage especially, you have to make sure you always have a defensive target (other wise you’ll heal yourself by default) and then you also need a mob targeted — because the majority of your heals come from some sort of siphon effect on the mob. I have two pure heals, one small and one large. The rest are all siphons or heals that require me to have blood points saved up.
I managed to get my blood mage from 10-14 (and almost 15) all yesterday. Kojan is a pretty awful place to quest, as I keep hearing about. The quests run out at about level 20 or so, and even then they’re sparse. So it’s suggested I head to Qualia or Thestra to do my leveling. Soon as I figure out how / where to go to travel around I’ll do that. Level 14 meant a whole lot of new skills and spells, 10 in fact. I rip living organs out of creatures. Brains and hearts so far. Then I use these into symbiotic particles for two new spells, one is a 15 second charm and the other is a 15 minute cure for poisons and diseases. Another interesting concept that I enjoy a lot. Gives the healer class a lot of dynamism.
I also decided to drop outfitting, after getting my reaping and skinning to 120 or so, I decided it wasn’t for me. Mainly because I never make my own gear anyhow (the exception being EQ2 and mastercrafted gear) the only reason I liked the idea was because of bags, which are going for 2-3s on the broker and are just easier to buy.
So I switched to artificing. We’ll see how that goes. I got my lumber jacking and quarrying to 100 so I’m at least on the next tier. I’ll do work orders to grind the levels I need (or so I keep telling myself). The bugs are still everywhere, but the game is still enjoyable at least from my perspective. My EQ2 account is open incase I get the urge to play, I’ve shut down my WoW account for now though, I enjoy that game, a lot, but only in short little bursts before something with a little more depth to it catches my attention.
Which reminds me, I really need to work on some more diplomacy, sitting at 50 and haven’t budged.