Level 36

29 March, 2008 (02:09) | All, Vanguard

Well I’ve managed to get my cleric in Vanguard to level 36, mostly thanks to groups in Thelaseen, and it’s starting to become a grind. Forget soloing, at least for a cleric. I don’t even notice my XP bar move. Grouping is still the best way to gain XP by far, but even hours of that doesn’t get me a level.

Level 35 was the worst for me to date. There always seems to be those levels that you just get stuck on. I died seven times in the latter part of level 35 so I wasn’t getting any closer to 36. Thankfully I’m about halfway through 36 now.

So I’ve been spending nearly all my time grouped in Thel and trying to get the parts I need to make my Ancient Armour. I won’t go into detail as to what this entails but you can find some information here. It’s all about faction though, so be prepared to grind for it. I will relay my experience of creating my helm though.

After finally collecting all the items I needed I headed to the place where you combine the items and create your helm. This area, a glowing alter type thing, is guarded by three level 36 four dot golems. Think of a four dot being like a heroic in EQ2. So after some failed attempts at lulling, rooting, and sneaking (they see invisible) I came up with a strategy. I lulled the furthest golem, rooted the next furthest with my 60 second root, and stunned the closest with my 6 second stun, ran in, successfully created my helm, then was summarily pulverised to death by the nearest golem. Needless to say, I’ll need to rethink this strategy for any future armour creations.

Game Update # 4 came out not that long ago, fixing some issues and creating new ones. Fortunately a small patch followed shortly after and this seemed to fix those newly created problems. I’m experiencing fewer and fewer crashes and graphics glitches, though I do still suffer occasional crashes to desktop. Not good if you happen to be healing your group at the time. I can’t imagine what the game must have been like at release and my hat goes off to those stubborn gamers that had the tenacity to persevere with it.