Isle of Dawn
As I said a few posts back, I’ve started playing Vanguard again. I’d logged in on my 43 Cleric and did Graystone and enjoyed it. So I decided I was going to use VG as my alt game as a break from Warhammer. I also convinced Kyrana to give it a try. Actually, I didn’t do anything. She wanted to try it and I said I’d roll an alt and we could level up together. VG currently has a 14 day free trial so it’s easy to get started if you want to try it.
So the next thing was to decide what classes we would play. We decided early on to go the Tank/Healer combination, this way we could more easily get a full group together, only needing DPS and support classes. One thing that is very true with VG, if you don’t have the tank and the healer you can’t do the dungeon, and the calls you usual hear in the regional channel are the “looking for tank/healer” variety.
I’m a career healer from way back and while I do try other classes, the healer is always my main. I already have a Cleric (43) and a Bloodmage (12) so I decided for a change to roll a tank. I’d tried the Warrior and Deathknight to level 5 so decided to try the Paladin. Kyrana wanted to try her hand at healing so she tested all four healers and settled on the Cleric. So we had our tank/healer duo sorted.
VG recently introduced a starter island, the Isle of Dawn (IoD), and that’s where we headed with our new toons. The IoD is incredibly huge, looks amazing, and has plenty to do. It makes the starter area in EQ2 seem like a joke. We did almost all of the quests they had there bar two or three and dabbled in a bit of Diplomacy. The quests are quite good quality and one of the quests has you going to the Temple, a dungeon on the Isle, to kill a boss. But you can’t just get into this Temple because it’s on a plateau and you have no way of getting to it. So you have to do another quest to hire a Pegasus, a flying mount, to take you to the Temple. It was a good quest and opened up other quests once you got there, and the two of us, Paladin and Cleric, worked well. At these low levels you kill things reasonably quickly, but it’s not going to stay that way for long. At level 10 we did the Riftway quest and headed to Thestra, the mainland, and the game proper. That’s where we are at the moment.
One thing I noticed about the game that was pleasing were the number of new players that were running around, brand new to the game and asking lots of questions. I hope the game gains some new players. Vanguard’s Isle of Dawn is a great introduction to the game and the 14 day free trial provides a good opportunity to try it.
Comments
Comment from Brendan
Time: December 9, 2008, 11:04 am
It’s much, much better than it was when I first tried it at release, that’s for sure. While I’m a bit torn about the island (it is well done indeed, but one of the things I liked about the game was the starting areas for races, which are now scotched I suppose), the new player experience is much better than it was. I find myself actually staying there to level my dip and crafting spheres to 10 as well before rifting onward.
VG will always be a bit of a niche game, which is kind of how it was initially designed. Now that the game works much better and is much more polished, it can play like a kind of Everquest 2 (as opposed to EQII), because the game definitely *feels* a lot like Everquest in terms of tone and difficulty. It’s very good to see that the game has been worked on over the past two years and that it’s now quite entertaining. The sad part is that even though more people are trying it now, it seems likely (to me at least) that it’s a bit late for the game to really pick up a substantial population. That’s too bad, because it’s now quite a good game, I think.
caliga
Comment from Kyrana
Time: December 8, 2008, 7:00 pm
I was shocked at how good this game has gotten. I played (very) briefly during the beta and was so turned off by what I saw then that I was glad I’d preordered and was only out the $5 I put down on the game. However, a year has certainly made a world of difference. The world is lovely, the quests well done, and the diplomacy sphere is frankly addictive. I found myself saying to Cal more than once, “This isn’t the same game.”
WAR is still my baby, but this is a nice change of pace when a break is needed. Color me impressed.