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Subject: Two down... Two to go |
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It has been a few months since the last news, despite that a lot has happened in our Vanguard guild.
For raiders in Vanguard year 2008 wasn't terribly exciting, despite the numerous promises from the dev team it seemed that there would be no new content in sight for the entire year apart from the few overland mob additions. However, in december people were positively surprised in hearing that the dev team is about to populate 2 areas ingame. Bridge of Destiny, tuned for 2 groups and the Island of Garuzamut, aimed for 24 people. A new raid area, in an island where the "eater of worlds" is supposed to be imprisoned, sounds good?
But how did it all go? Read more to find out...
Where should I start then? For someone who enjoys ingame lore a lot, an addition like this couldn't have sounded more exciting than it did. The Island of Garuzamut, a place where the Jharru imprisoned Garuzamut the "world eater" 4000 years ago in a final attempt to stop it from destroying the continent of Qalia.
However... [Warning: Next portion of the news contains excessive ranting]
When the Island of Garuzamut finally got pushed live, much like many other raid guilds we headed straight towards the island to check out the new content. Upon arrival, the first thing we noticed was a lot of copy & paste creatures in different colors which seemed to be randomly placed around the island, not only that but the creatures seemed to be lacking an aggro range. Ignoring the small design flaw, we started to search for the new bosses or minibosses.
It didn't take a long time to figure out that there is a Jharru summoner in each of the tower bridges that are overlooking the giant prison in the middle of the island.
At first we headed to Summoner Rinipin and oddly enough he seemed to be rather easy, perhaps this could be some form of event to kill the 4 summoners in order to bring up the Garuzamut? However, those theories were soon crushed by the discovery that upon his death Summoner Rinipin dropped loots - in fact the summoner had been an actual raid boss. Not long after, a dev appeared on Halgar to check out how the two evil european guilds had killed a summoner on the isle. Only to throw a fit at seeing his precious creations being bashed down, of course in Vanguard the players are ones to be blamed for the mistakes of the dev team. So our loot got taken under the excuse of "not bug reporting" the mob (oddly enough, despite no matter how many bug reports are filed in cases such as the Magicborn Abomination they never seem to reach the dev team...).
For the next month or so, pretty much each time some guild killed one of the bosses on the Garuzamut their success was shot down under the "Not working as intended" statement. At the time we more or less gave up the idea of even doing anything at the IoG as the content seemed either broken, poorly design or both. A few weeks later, IoG got the fixes the place desperately needed and the encounters started to work as they were supposed to.
First of our targets after the fixes was Summoner Physik, a summoner that loves to play around with lightning based attacks. The core design of this fight seems rather fun and different compared to the usual raid encounters in VG. However, the design fails in the encounter lenght - currently with a normal raid setup Physik is an encounter that takes almost an hour to beat. While this could be seen as a test of endurance, it just loses the fun factor after the first 15-20mins.
After some tries Physik was down and it certainly gave the needed motivation boost for the guild.
Next up on our list was Summoner Yerkj, a summoner that focuses on ice attacks. Much like Summoner Physik, Yerkj encounter tries to introduce something new to the game. To some degree the encounter manages to bring something new to the game, however personally I did not find the encounter to be fun but instead it felt somewhat weird and certainly not as rewarding as beating a raid mob should.
With some efforts we managed to bring down Yerkj for a server first kill.
This leaves us with two summoners to go, Nimaa and Rinipin. No doubt we will bring them down soon enough...
All in all though, Island of Garuzamut and Bridge of Destiny leaves us with so many questions... and no answers. Where is the Garuzamut? Why is no-one concerned that Jharru are trying summon the world eater? How hard it can be to spell Garuzamut correctly (Garuzumat Sage, Garuzumut Forge etc.)? In their infinite wisdom, why did the Jharru build the bridge if they want to prevent people from getting to the island... Why is the bridge area guarded by JAWS? (lvl 100 sharks that one shot you). Why didn't the Jharru bring in more sharks and rent a missle defense system from the gnomes? (yes, we have already seen that one in VG too to prevent people from flying to certain area).
Personally I think the BoD & IoG have been the worst content additions I've seen to any pay to play MMO so far, in terms of being bugged or the quality/fun factor of the content. I know some might disagree on this and many might be eager to bring up how this all was developed by a single person on his sparetime. That being said, our hopes are on Pantheon of the Ancients now. Which is supposed to be next group dungeon and also eventually will include a raid portion - for Vanguards sake lets hope the quality will be much better than this. In the meanwhile, expect to hear news of other summoners being killed soon.
But as usual... Quote time!
Speaking from experience?
Too much info
And what would a news be without a "you know who" quote.
[ Last modified by Ayame 2009-02-25 12:00 (Full Log)]
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