March 2007

Where to go from here..

stargrace March 5, 2007 2 Comments

Level 23, Satia staring at.. well.. what IS that?

My blood mage finally hit 23 last night, and I’ve got another small complaint (of course I do!) about Vanguard, but it’s something a lot of people probably like about the game. There’s no real indication of where you should go to leve. Especially coming from other continents. So while I finished almost all of the quests between Misthaven’s Crossing and Stormwynd and Ulla’s Tower and that general area, I have no idea where to head to next, the quests don’t send me anywhere else. I’ve done the vampire slayer quests and if I continue randomly to the next marked outpost on my map, the area is crawling with level 27-28-29 mobs, which are a little bit out of my league right now.

Moving to another continent provides me with the same issue, no idea where I should be. So I’ve been using the /who all command to figure out where a good area may be to level up. /Who all 19 25 for example. The majority of people were in the areas that I’d already been to. Small wonder. Then there’s the groups who are constantly working on the Infineum chain, those who are working on the Tsang weapons, there’s the Hilsbury Manor area, and numerous other dungeon type places. This game really is centered around having a static group (or at least a bunch of willing people to group with) so if you’re used to solo’ing (like I am) after the 14-15 level range, you’ll find it difficult to get much accomplished. Now, that’s not always a bad thing, this is an MMO after all, why play it just to spend time alone. But anything that requires a group also typically takes a lot of time to finish as well. So if you don’t quite have the hours of game play you need, or are simply in one of those moods where you’d rather be alone, then the game at times could seem a little stale for you.

I did splurge and finally buy myself a blue dress (in skill range, not in colour) last night, the green one was looking a little rough around the edges. I also found a neck piece upgrade, and a new belt, and new gloves. It’s interesting playing a blood mage, I typically try to balance out my + spell damage focus gear, with my + healing focus gear. It’s typically better for me to have + healing on, because when I’m in my dps stance, my spells already do 25% more, add some sizeable heals to that, and I’m pretty set. I can’t typically play in DPS mode in a group though. Every 5 seconds my health drops by 5% to give me blood points. It means I’m constantly healing not only myself, but whomever is tanking (or ganking). Though I can siphon health away from mobs quite nicely, it still means I’m using power to heal two people instead of just one, and with only one group heal that requires a lot of power to cast, it’s not exactly the best way to conserve energy.

Also got to uh, level 6 outfitter. Yes, I know, slacking big time. But I was an outfitter, then switched to artificer, then switched back to outfitter. With the double exp weekend in, I haven’t crafted hardly at all. Plus we all know how much of a grind crafting is (in pretty much every MMO I know, except WoW where it’s as easy as clicking one button for instant no-fail combines so long as you have the required materials). Hoping to work that a little bit more, and perhaps find my way to 24. We’ll see how it goes.

Strange things are Afoot

stargrace March 4, 2007 3 Comments

Hey Rasko, no time to dance with the ladies, back to the quest!

Yesterday was quite a day. My blood mage hit level 22, the double kill exp weekend seems to be living up to its name, people everywhere. At least where I was. Even the crafters pulled themselves away from the tables long enough to see some sunshine. While there’s no double exp for quest turn ins, if you find quests that require killing and not just a whole lot of running around, the experience is quite nice. Especially if you’re in a group like I was for the better portion of the day (even with all the corpse runs.. oh my goodness, while the corpse runs bring back some pretty awsome memories of EQ1, consenting monks to drag / feign death their way into safer ground, it’s… just.. painful some times).

So how did I spend my day, besides hunting down various group members corpses?

Working on the infineum cloak quest, strange things are afoot. You’ve probably seen one or two people wearing it, it’s dark grey with a white stripe along the edges (I think, I’m tired now so maybe I don’t remember it properly). You can get the quest starting at level 19, but it’s a difficult one. Unless you have a bunch of very nice higher level people to help you out, I’d say wait until 23-24 before attempting it.

Name: Strange Things Are Afoot

Location: Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, Donovan’s Roost

Quest NPC: Scholar Donovan (( A little gnome, standing on the upper portion of Donovan’s Roost, which is South West of Khal — he will NOT have a quest icon over his head, but if you hail him and talk to him a little bit, his text will eventually offer you the quest ))

Required Level to Start: 19

Go north once you’ve hit the entrance of the mines, you will see some golem rock mobs in the mines. You need to find the wanderer named Warden Pondar, the quest gives you the general location, hail him to get the next update in the quest.The Warden will tell you to find a slave. The slave is hidden behind a crystal outcrop near the mine’s entrance. Follow the right wall to the first crop of crystals. The slave gives you another quest called “Helping a Runaway slave”. You must kill a captain and get the key to unlock the slaves girdle.

Continue the wall you and you will move through a crystal maze that takes you to a camp up on a hill. Captain Fubared is at the back of the camp. You can go around the camp to the pavilion and kill the mobs there and inside the tent. If you fail, be sure to wait for respawns, or else they’ll spawn as you’re fighting the captain (and his spawned adds, more about that in a minute).

Take the key to the slave and update your quest to find the mob Infineum Thrall near that area. You have to kill them and loot the pick axes. After you have all the pick axes you have to harvest 5 rock nodes. They’re semi rare in the same area, they’ll have a ! indicating you can harvest them. Return the quest to Donovan, who’ll in turn reward you with the cloak.

Tricks of the Trade

The Captain fight is the first fight I’ve encountered that required a strategy to succeed. There are numerous ways to killing him. The method a majority of groups on the server use is the following:Bring two groups into the tent (once it’s cleared) and wait for the Captain to spawn. He will be non-aggressive. Have someone with the quest hail him, and he will turn and attack. Have the group SLOWLY DPS him down to 80% (He is a four dot by the way), he will spawn TWO Three-dot (they used to be four dot, be happy) adds, one will be a healer. Have the SECOND group, take care of these adds, as well as everyone from the first group, EXCEPT the main tank and one dps, who stays on the Captain. Once the two adds are dead (kill the healer first, and have a bard or other crowd control person handle the add until people can get to it) turn back to the Captain. Kill him to 60%, he’ll spawn more adds. Rinse and repeat. He spawns adds every 20%, and they have to be killed (while he gets killed, slowly, or else you’ll be swamped with adds). Be sure those healers get taken down first, or else they’ll heal him. The good part to that is at least he won’t spawn adds if he was already below 20% and he heals to 60%, so long as he already spawned the ones at 20%.

The issue with this method, is that every 20% he resets into non-aggressive mode, so he turns yellow. If the second group out dps’s you at those moments, or aoe’s in any way, they can (easily, and by mistake) KS (Kill steal) your Captain, and you can end up getting them the update, instead of yourselves. I should know, this happened yesterday for four separate groups who happened to be wandering through working on their quests. Two of them were kind enough to stay and try to help us complete our quests once they’d gotten their updates. So 6 hours later, we finally got ours. The group consisted of a 23 paladin, a 21 bard, a 22 monk, a 23 shaman, myself as the 22 blood mage.. and another class that I forget.. perhaps a dreadknight of some sort. I’d suggest you make friends with a psionicist. Those people are awsome. The power regen buffs they have is just, very very nice and probably saved my butt more times then I could count, especially in the beginning of the quest when I was the only healer.

If you’re going to one group it, be decked out in the best gear, and bring two tanks, two healers, and one CC plus one pure DPS. Be a few levels higher (23-24) and you should be able to accomplish it, or bring some higher level friends with you to run you through it. I know Stormhaven is one guild that brings their guild mates through it quite frequently, to help them out (those who have done it already).

The infineum quest chain involves more then just this cloak, there is also a ring apparently. Not sure if I’m so keen on doing all that over (again) and probably harder, but we’ll see how it goes. It certainly made for an interesting day.

Crafting and Diplomacy

stargrace March 3, 2007 1 Comment

Chi Sau Lotusfield, located in a building next to the harvesting trainer

Ok. Not sure what’s up but I’ve tried to write this article three times now to no avail. So here’s try number four. I did diplomacy. I finally beat the above npc and it was annoying as hell. It took me forever to figure out the key to beating him, but once I did it was so refreshing to have that quest completed. I hate the way the quest journal can not be organized by area, or level, or anything for that matter. How do I remember if one quest was gotten in Tanvu vs. another quest gotten in a random outpost on the way to Khal. Really wish they’d fix that. Picked up the infineum cloak quest with Rasklnikov, hopefully we can work on that some this weekend. Would be nice to be wearing a cloak. Think of it like a heritage quest from Eq2.

Switched my crafting around (again). For once I don’t care about housing, or furniture, so there was no desire to remain as an artificer. I switched for outfitting, since a majority of my characters wear cloth (or medium) and bags are never a bad thing. I hate spending money on gear, I’m always fairly broke. I’ll figure out how to make money later.

The bane of my exhistance, frenzied dreadwing venom, finally, FINALLY completed yesterday, I needed 10 of the things, for Ulla, NW of her tower. Only one or two ever seem to spawn though, and with others hunting for them, yeah. Not a fun quest. It took me about four hours to complete that one portion I think.

I’d post longer, as I had that nice long post already typed out I’m feeling cranky so I think I’ll just leave it at that for now. Happy hunting, with double exp (adventure / kill only) this weekend, it’ll be interesting to see how populated it is in game.