After playing my psionicist for some time, I decided that I actually missed healing, That, or I suffered suddenly from sever alt-itus, which is always a possibility in my case. I had tried the shaman and not enjoyed it, I’ve played a cleric and also not enjoyed it. I love my bloodmage but they’re too high level to adventure with my friends- so all that was left was a disciple. Which I’ve actually never tried before.
A disciple is a cross between a monk and a healer. Most of their moves either create Jin, or use Jin. If you do a combination of moves, you perform an instant heal that costs no energy, which is always nice. Most of your attacks use endurance, and you can wear bladed staffs and other monk-type things. Fistwraps and the like.
I decided to go with dark elf, because I actually like how they look in game. However, out of all the starter cities, as far as quests go (minus diplomacy quests which I’ll get into more later) I think they also lack the most. It always seems to take me twice as long to level my dark elf to any particular level then it does any other character of mine. Which is why I’ll move her to Thestra now that she’s level 10.
As far as diplomacy goes, I got hit by the bug and I got hit bad. I loved it. I spent most of my time yesterday split between taking care of my other half who’s exceptionally sick right now, and doing diplomacy in between adventuring. One quest line made me crack up laughing I just couldn’t help it.
It began with a long series of assassinations of which I was no part of I swear. Well, ok maybe just a little part of. After I’d taken care of a bunch of people (hiring others to do it, in true dark elf form) my teacher informed me I had ‘a loose end’ and I needed to take care of her too before she started talking. No problem, what was one more.
Her: Shew, about time you got here, is everyone else dead?
Me: Yes, everyone’s dead.
Her: Here, change before the guards find us, I brought us shirts!
Me: Oh good, I brought assassins!
Her: Dead.
I hit level 7 in diplomacy and managed to get some gear, not enough to progress my quests any further though, they require a lot of presence. I haven’t quite figured out how to get presence without gear yet, but I’m working on it. I did also get a yellow outfitter recipe, which is apparently to make your own player crafted cards, interesting.
So I’ll be moving the dark elf out of her Qalia home and over to Thestra (thank goodness for recall to house, so I don’t have to walk it) and attempting the quests there instead. When Vanguard first released you almost never wanted to play a dark elf – they were KoS to everyone out there, and had to grind LOTS of faction work. If you take pride in your character enough that it doesn’t bother you to work faction then it was great, here was a race to do that with, and everyone understood the sacrifices you’d made. However, with GU3 they removed the KoS portion to races in player areas. So dark elves, gnomes, goblins and the like are no longer KoS in other starter areas (or other towns at all, I can walk into Leth Nurae just fine, the high elf city). That’s actually one change I wish had not been implemented. It’s part of ‘making the game easier’ for people that I like to stay away from and thus far Vanguard has done a pretty good job. Tweaks here and there though, of course. There’s also talk of them removing the starter towns completely- you’ll start on an island much like you do in Qeynos and Freeport for EQII and then migrate to a town afterwards, they’ll bump up the starter towns to 5+ instead of 1-5, or so rumor says. Not looking forward to that at all, though I do understand their reasoning. If you play a dark elf and your friend decides to be a vulmane for example, you start on different continents. Not only that you start at opposite ends of those continents so there’s pretty much 0 chance of brand new people playing together unless you 1. Have someone in game who can show you the way 2. Start out as the same race. 3. Plot out the whole travel first before hand with online maps such as the ones you can find here. Is it possible? Sure of course it is, it’s just unlikely.
I’d rather not see an ‘island’ like in EverQuestII (who have migrated past that to include Neriak, Kelethin, and Gorowyn) but I can see how it would be pleasing to some customers.
I may have to try a different race. The halfling starting town is just so generic that it pushes me from the game. It’s likely a better starting town would draw me in more.