Dipped into Vanguard yesterday for a brief bit before real life tugged me away (which it’s been doing a whole lot lately) and got in an hour or two on my monk. Vanguard is one of those wonderful games where you can pop in for an hour or two (as long as you’ve logged out around your quest area) and get something done. Even without logging in at a quest area, the riftways make it quite easy to get around. Everything is relatively close by.
So it was that I glanced at my quest journal – and again was so impressed with the changes that they’ve made to the interface over the year. Being able to sort the quests by chunk and have it plainly say whether it’s solo or not, and have it colour coded, is just so very helpful.
Looking through it, I noticed I had quite a few quests in the CIS area – aside from the cloak which I’d already done a while ago. Before too long I was headed to a crevice in the mountains to battle spiders who were under the ruling of Nerachnia – a powerful spider queen. The spiders were all two dots, and fell easily enough. It also helped that I cam armed with a giant supply of raid and fly swatters and rolled up newspaper.
I ran into quite a few people while I was wandering about. Once those quests were cleared I continued on, and came across adventurers every which way. Those who think Telon is dead, are sorely mistaken. There are even guide events running these days.
Disciple is one of the more unique healers I’ve seen – but remember, I’m not exactly the most knowledgeable of mmo players, I’ve played EQ1/EQ2/VG/WoW and that’s the extent of my experience (adding WAR to the list later of course). Basically you’re a combination of monk and healer. Your attacks done in a specific order (or as I like to call it.. 6-7-8-9 on my keyboard) set off heals to your defensive target. One of your kicks has a HoT attached to it, you get feign death but it doesn’t always fool the mobs (much like EQ2’s FD can fail) and you’re a medium armor wearing class. The stats you want to go for are not wis and vit so much as other healers, but dex,str, and vit. The best part is you can practically scream out as you do cool ninja moves and fly through the air smashing your opponent to bits. It’s great. The moves and graphics of attacks for the disciple are top notch.
Where blood mages can’t heal if they can’t hit the mob with spell attacks, disciple are a lot alike in that they can’t heal without meleeing. If you like to be up close where the action is – and heal, this class is perfect for you. Disciples also use endurance, and mana. There are a few direct heals that use mana, and most of the melee attacks and specials use endurance. So far my disciple is lacking a little on the buff side of things, I only have two – and my stance, where as my blood mage has a whole slew of buffs plus symbiotes. Maybe the disciple gets them later, I’m only half way through 23 right now.
One thing that really strikes me as interesting about Vanguard and my play style specifically – is that I have yet to find a class that I find ‘boring’ or that I ‘don’t like’ and this includes the tank classes. I have 6 characters in Vanguard and I’m content to keep the count at that – but it would be very easy to make another alt and have a blast with it. That’s almost unheard of for me. In both EQ2 and WoW I refused to play tanks, I’m just not a tank person. In EQ1 I reluctantly play my tank (a shadowknight) and I’m not really interested in wizards. There’s one main reason I think why I enjoy Vanguards selections of characters so much more, and it’s simply because as they fight, they will (based on an action accomplished like a critical strike, or a parry) have a chain go off – hit the response to that chain, and in some cases (ie: disciple) another chain will go off, doing massive amounts of damage (or a heal, etc) and there are also counters, and spell checks, and all the rest. It makes the actual fighting a lot more interesting to me.
Anyhow. Hopefully Telon will be seeing more of me today. We’ll see how it goes!
A Pixel Nomad 