Mentoring, Crafting, and just Exploring
stargrace 
Instead of wandering around wizard city, or questing in Norrath, I decided to spend most of my evening yesterday (once power was restored) exploring Telon again, getting familiar with my characters in the hopes that I’d spend more time in Vanguard over the next little while then anything else. I’ve played off and on since release and while it’s never exactly been my ‘main’ game, I’ve always had fun. A huge factor of this is of course my guild, Safe Haven. Every time I log in there are no less then 10 people around and in the evenings that expands to 30-40 people. We’re not even the largest guild on the server (Seradon) I believe the Platinum Order is the largest.
Kanad from Shattered decided to play as well, and we met up in Thestra (Renton Keep) to test out the mentor system. He was playing his 14 shaman and I decided to play my 19 psionicist (enchanter). In Vanguard mentoring has a level range of 5, and there seem to be a few bugs. The instructions claimed I could still use my spells, but I would get unknown error messages if I tried to cast a spell that I had not already gotten one version of by level 14 (my mentor level). Once I was unmentored the spells worked fine. Once he leveled to 15 I was no longer able to mentor him until I hit level 20, granting the 5 level range again.
We worked on URT (United Races of Thestra) quest chains. By the end of the evening we had completed both the gloves and the shoes, then we decided to break and mend, get our new spells, etc.
It had been a LONG time since I crafted anything for anyone, but I still remember the click frenzy known as Vanguard crafting. I spent hours upon hours working on orders in order to farm sigils. One feature Vanguard has that I really enjoy is the vgplayers web site, where the achievements of your characters are auto-blogged. You can find the blog I have for Faydai (my 44 blood mage) here. Of course the main reason I mention crafting is that a guild mate requested an upgrade to five pieces of jewelery and I actually disco’d two of the five pieces (granted, only one shows up on that blog atm). I believe discoveries re-set every time the server re-sets but perhaps it doesn’t any more.
In any case, I was pleased to be the first person to make those particular pieces, and happy that I hadn’t forgotten how to craft. I delivered the bits and decided to call it a night, I may not have done a whole lot of leveling, but it was still fun. I’m looking forward to getting a lot more Vanguard time in the future (especially since this happens to be a long holiday weekend, Monday is Thanksgiving here in Canada).
Until then, happy gaming and I’ll see you in Norrath Telon!