[Xanadu/Xanadu Community: Public Boards/News] Vanguard News

The Chamber of Life

Phyre — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:51:22 UTC

A few months ago the news from Vanguard told the story of the "Pantheon of the Ancients". The revamp of the existing dungeon, introducing group and raid content scaled to players at the new level cap. It may have been quiet around our progression inside the Pantheon of the Ancients, but since it's release we have made a steady effort and worked hard to unravel the story behind the Pantheon and to earn the favour and respect of the Gods. We have come a long way since we first arrived at the Pantheon of the Ancients and our efforts finally led us to the first two raid encounters inside the Pantheon. Zaseh the Wise, Protector of the Halls of Order and Ataraxis the Devourer, Protector of the Halls of Chaos.

Two worldwide first kills for Xanadu.

Want to know exactly how our progression fared? Read more to find out...

Earning the favour and respect of those inside the Pantheon of the Ancients is not an easy thing. Our journey into the Pantheon started with having to prove we were worthy enough to even enter this building from which the Gods speak. Once inside the Pantheon we first had to pass the 12 trials set by the avatars of the Gods. After each avatar had given us their blessing, we were granted access to the 2nd floor of the first Halls. Soon it become apparent that each of us had an important choice to make, we had to align ourselves with either Chaos or Order. As each made their decision, we all found ourselves presented with the same goal: proving ourselves worthy to the alignment of our choice. We ventured to the places where we were able to obtain the Souls of our enemies, which earned us faction with our own alignment upon hand in. The total sum of faction necessary to be considered worthy enough is 28k, so as you can imagine it was not something finished in a short period of time.

While we were busy proving our worth to our alignment, the avatars of the Gods also started to give us something back. Bits and pieces of the history of the Pantheon of the Ancients. Artera Vandalay, the architect of the Pantheon, was chosen by the Gods to build the Pantheon for her unique ability to imbue structures with magic. She was one of the Ancients, a race of scholars, sages and masters of sorcery, who helped her build the Pantheon. They survived Telon's Cataclysm by hiding in the very structure they were building, while much else outside was destroyed. After the Cataclysm, Artera was instructed to finish the building of the Pantheon, she was also instructed in the creation of the Criminous. Beings that are perfect humanoids, building off the imperfections of all existing races. And she was given the directive to create an all-powerful leader of the Criminous, the Narkanous.

For a time the Ancients worked hard towards the completion of the Pantheon and Artera worked in secret on the Criminous, together with Ini-Herat, the powerful leader of the Ancients and her lover. When the Criminous were activated upon their completion, they were introduced to the other Ancients resulting in mixed responses. Those who welcomed them, however, were starting to teach them various things and as their knowledge increased it became time to activate the Narkanous, who fed on his followers' knowledge. Everything went well at first, until a change of events led the Narkanous to become out of control. It corrupted the other Criminous and the creatures started to devourer the Ancients. Artera and Ini-Herat were the only two who managed to escape out of the Pantheon, which they sealed off, locking all the Criminous inside. The avatars of the Gods informed us that this all happened in the first Pantheon of the Ancients, the one we were standing in was a second version.

With effort and (lots of) time, we were finally nearing the end of the 28k faction grind needed to prove our worth to our alignment. As we completed this enormous task, we were again put before an important choice. We had already chosen our alignment, now we had to choose which of the 6 Gods of our own alignment we wanted to align ourselves with. As each again made their decision, you could almost hear the grunts escaping everyone when we found out our next task was to prove ourselves worthy to the avatar of our chosen God with another 28k faction grind. We learned that after the first Pantheon was sealed off, Artera had been instructed to build another, a second, Pantheon of the Ancients. This Pantheon would be a testing grounds to form warriors strong enough to break the seal of the first Pantheon and defeat the creatures that were still inside. That was to be our fate, if we could prove we were strong enough. And we sure wanted to, as we believe the first Pantheon has been renamed "Halls of the Shattered Souls", which will be the upcoming new raid dungeon.

So we set off to prove this, through daily quests where we were instructed to kill significant enemies, as well as through obtained Offerings that we could hand in for faction. Time and effort are the main underlyings of progressing through the Pantheon and with time and effort we proved ourselves worthy and were finally granted access to the next Halls. In these Halls another quest awaited us. To prove we had the potential to become God Warriors, we first had to defeat the reflections of 4 former God Warriors. We were provided with a single lined hint to each warriors' locations and finding them was as much a challenge as defeating them. Though imposant by name, the actual God Warriors did not quite live up to our expectations and soon we had defeated all 4 former God Warriors. We had proven ourselves potential God Warrior material and were instructed with a final task that would grant us access to the Chamber of Life. The Chamber where the Halls of Chaos and Order come together at the Sisters Caia (The Shepherd) and Mara (The Fetid Reaper) and where we would be further instructed about our path towards becoming God Warriors.

Gaining access to the Chamber of Life involved harvesting the hearts and blood of our enemies, as well as defeating the Protector of the opposite Halls. The first two raid encounters inside the Pantheon of the Ancients. Those aligned with Order were instructed to obtain the head of Ataraxis the Devourer and those aligned with Chaos were instructed to obtain the head of Zaseh the Wise. And this we set out to achieve. Admittingly the birds were extremely bugged for a long time, they'd crash the chunk or their event would bug every single time, making them unkillable. Vanguard's developers have recently paid them some attention however and even though other guilds still claimed them unkillable we had to see this for ourselves. Although their encounters are not entirely bug free even now, we proved them very killable.

Even though we were plagued by a lot of crashes, some during very inconvenient moments, we managed to figure the encounter out after some time. Last Friday Ataraxis the Devourer was the first to bite dust, resulting in Xanadu's first worldwide kill of a Pantheon raid encounter. The screenshots won't win any awards, but everything was quite hectic due to a very fast corpse decay timer toppled with repops, so we were lucky to have some at all.

Now we had killed Ataraxis and our Order aligned players had obtained their long awaited quest updates, we could not let Zaseh the Wise get away. Sadly, he was giving us more trouble than he should have. Due to a not completely resolved bug in the event we were forced to abandon and restart the encounter multiple times until an engage that was completely bug free. Last Saturday we managed to get lucky with a bug free encounter and even though almost everyone in the raid crashed at least once during the fight, Zaseh went down, one day after Ataraxis, resulting in another worldwide first kill for Xanadu.

These kills were all that was left before finishing our quest that would grant us access to the Chamber of Life and we were anxious to enter the Chamber and see what the Gods had in store for us next. However, when we turned in our quests, it became apparent that we were not setting foot into the Chamber of Life just yet. This time not because of something the Gods required, but because there simply isn't anything beyond this point in game at the moment. Although our quests were finished, we were unable to breach the barrier towards the Chamber of Life and nowhere does there appear to be any follow up quest. This is the life of a gamer in Vanguard and albeit disappointing we have all learned the hard way that these things are unavoidable when you're on top of the content.

Hopefully we will soon see the next step go live so we can continue to pursue our path towards becoming God Warriors. Until then, we will stay behind the barriers protecting the Chamber of Life, longing we could breach it, but also knowing we should be able to. And with that knowledge and our two worldwide first kills, that will be enough to keep our spirits up while eagerly awaiting the moment we can continue the story of the Pantheon of the Ancients.

Nimaa down!

Sondrax — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:26:09 UTC

Raiding guilds in Vanguard unfortunately dont have a whole lot to say, farming the same old content for years, while most of the equipment even upgrades from group content by now.
So despite the devs trying hard to make us quit (/salute and good bye to so many raiders and raiding guilds across all servers by now), Xanadu does still raid and enjoys killing the Overland bosses every week.
Once in a while we even give those odd bosses Karax and Nimaa, that have been bugged/annoying for oh so long, a shot.

While Nimaa was exploited by some guilds in the past, we never touched the mob at that time. Since the fix for that we rarely had the proper class setup online to give it many serious attempts, so it was actually a bit surprising to finally see this mob going down after only few attempts, on Monday Oct 5th! w00t :charge:

Afaik it was the WW 2nd legit kill of this mob... and Halgar's first :bananadance:

The loot actually did change a bit since it got added to our DB. Nimaa dropped:

That used to have +7 on the stats and some more spell accuracy and strikethrough.

The sword used to have 147-222 dmg, and some more of all stats (141 instead of 118 melee accuracy e.g.)

And the BMG gloves didn't change:

It's sad to see loot from a mob like this go to the bank, but the sword only found an owner because people wanted to see what it looked like :(

Talking about our loot DB btw, I wanna say big thx to all the helpers! We already got over 1.100 items there now. And its still being updated almost daily (new links, screenshot updates etc). If you see something wrong, pls make sure to file a report there! You just gotta be logged in to do that.

Ok.. so far so good.. what's next? Well, due to Karax still being bugged, I guess Sparkles is the next thing on our list. It does seem to be a cool fight, although I've got to say that crits/flurries and everything else that adds to the luck factor is not fun! :p
And I hope the rumours aren't true that it only drops enhancements! :susp:

Oh and also: since so many people's endurance has come to an end while waiting for meaningful raid content, I additionally want to raise your attention for our recruitment :D
We can still use a few people to help us with Sparkles and upcoming content! :pompom:

Still alive

Ayame — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:53:44 UTC

Well well... It is that time again, time for news from Vanguard. Although our last news update from VG was almost 5 months ago, as usual a lot has happened in VG and in Xanadu since then.

Early 2009 passed by while waiting for the next Game Update and the new content it would introduce. However, the update kept getting postponed time after another and no one was really sure when we should expect it to go live. Until suddenly without any warning on May 19th, after nearly an 8 months wait Vanguard had its seventh "Game Update". This patch introduced the much anticipated dungeon revamp of the "Pantheon of the Ancients" and also brought us the level cap increase from level 50 to 55.

After such a lenghty period with only minor updates, the expectations for GU#7 were high among the Vanguard community. Some liked what the patch introduced, some who had their hopes high up in the sky witnessed them coming crashing down. Several people left the game and a few guilds disbanded as a result - but how has Xanadu survived through the new challenges that the level cap increase brought? Read more to find out...

When the patch finally went live people were more than eager to find out what would await them inside the Halls of Pantheon. However, before the halls could be entered an access quest needed to be completed - due to the difficulty of the access quest at level 50 the amount of people focusing on it turned out to be surprisingly low and we were able to complete it with relatively little contest on any of the mobs or tasks. After breaching the barries protecting the halls, we found ourselves in a strangely familiar looking dungeon which had been re-textured and revamped to look a little more epic.

Although Xanadu had several people with the dungeon access, pretty soon it became clear that the pantheon was far too deadly for the level 50 characters and more levels would be needed before we could uncover the story of the great architect Artera and get our chance to prove to the gods of Telon that we are worthy of their blessings.

Being a hardcore raiding guild, we wanted to set up some sort of schedule for us to reach 55. However, the task turned out to be a lot more time consuming that anyone had anticipated. With pretty much no new content to level on, we had to turn out attention to the old areas and attempt to find an optimal route of leveling. Soon it became clear that simply AOE-grinding mobs at the Old Targonor would be the ideal source of xp from 50-51 and the guild proceeded to spend hours and hours at OT to grind XP which moved roughly at a 5% per hour of nonstop mob slaying without quests in a well built group.

After the first people had reached 51 level and were on their way to 52, things at Telon started to take strange turns. Old Targonor would shut down without a warning and come back online with every mob turned in to solo mobs in order to stop the AOE grinding, people moved to new spots in the old areas to grind and soon after a GM would appear, the chunk would shut down and come back with either the mobs buffed up or somehow the XP gain nerfed. Eventually people progressed through the levels and at 53 we decided to give the Pantheon another try.

Pantheon itself turned out to be very similar to what the dungeon had been back closer to the launch, in order to progress further you would face the trials set by the avatars of the gods.

During the phase when Pantheon was on the Test server, the dev team wrote that the dungeon would be balanced around a group which was geared in "Swamp Armor" which at the time was some of the nicer quality equipment you could obtain from single group content. After tackling on some trials it was clear that somewhere between the Test server and going live that idea had changed and some of the trials were challenging, some even borderline impossible for a non-raid geared group under level 55. In a way this was nice news for us raiders, as this meant the content would also prove challenging for us.

Some time after the first few from Xanadu reached the 2nd floor of the Pantheon of the Ancients and we finally found out the specifics of the content at PotA. We would first need to make a choice between Order and Chaos, whichever side you picked you would then become KOS for the other side thus making adventuring inside PotA a little more dangerous. However, to progress further at the Pantheon we also found out that we will need to grind almost 28k faction for the side you chose by donating souls of the fallen foes at a 10 faction per soul rate. These souls would only drop at certain locations and they were not guaranteed drops.

The grind to level 55 continued and after a bit over 3 weeks since the patch the first few people in guild had dinged level 55, after grinding it purely with mobs and repeatable quests in the old content areas. A little further on people kept working on both PotA and their levels and eventually majority of the guild had reached 55 level within our planned schedule. This allowed us to start raiding again, although currently there is only 1 contested overland mob that is aimed for level 55 raiders but most of the old content is still viable in terms of getting some nice loots.

Thus we have been busy killing the usual mobs such as Fengrot, Guar, Varking, Slimjim, Nerksawl and the IoG summoners in order to get back to the raiding routine after the grind phase where we had our raids on the hold and also working on progressing even further in the Pantheon by overcoming the faction grinds awaiting us. In general I suppose you could say that determination and dedication to the game are the keys to tackle on Vanguard after this level cap increase, even though as of late it seems the dev team has also noticed that perhaps they went a little overboard with some of the things they introduced in the GU#7 and are now changing them a little in various minor patches.

For close future, we hope to give some serious attempts on Karax Foulfeather, the overland mob that was boosted to level 59 after being unbeatable for ~1 year. In long term we are waiting for the dev team to push the "mysterious" turtle overland mob & Garuzamut overland mob to live. As well as releasing the raid portion of the Pantheon of the Ancients, called Halls of the Shattered Souls where the Pantheon story arc is supposed to continue and the players will be able to uncover the truth behind the gods of Telon and their years of silence. Although the next large raid dungeon "Nexus" was shelved due to lack of resources, it will be interesting to see what sort of challenges the dev team will be able to come up with for the Vanguard community.

Last but not least, heres some quotes from the past few months... And some of these quotes were so shocking that even the most brave paladin would go pale (or something) when noticing them in the guildchat:

Even though raiding can be awfully exciting, people should calm down every now and then... :ahh:

Time to start stacking that +int gear. ;)

Oh dear... Grinding for hours does funny things to your head :rollingeyes:

If there would be a best typo of the year contest, this would win the grand prize... :notsaying:

And a few hours later... They're at it again :ymca:

Two down... Two to go

Ayame — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:38:48 UTC

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! :P

Speaking from experience?

Too much info :eek2:

And what would a news be without a "you know who" quote. :P

Neither alive, nor dead?

Ayame — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:25:00 UTC

Among the four new overland encounters that went live late october is Varking the Accursed.

From all of the new overland mobs, Varking is probably the name that raiders in Vanguard have seen mentioned more than a few times, as originally Varking was supposed to be introduced in the same game update that would bring the next raid dungeon. Naturally with all the talk about Varking, expectations for the encounter were high and we were curious how it would turn out to be after the disapoinment with Guar. With the pesky little earthern spirit cleared out of the way we focused our attention on Varking.

So how did it all go? Read more to find out.

Previous news update by Sondrax mentioned a patch that went live late october and introduced four new overland encounters for us to play with. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity for new content, it was nice to see something actually getting added instead of the endless amount of promises and marketting speeches about raid content that hasn't arrived up to this date. A few months ago there were great plans for the end of the year, we were already supposed to be raiding Pantheon of the Ancients and even places like Nexus and Stiirhad should have been close to the release if we were to believe some of the dev posts on the official Vanguard forums.

However, as everyone knows you rarely get what you want and instead, you just need to settle for whats given. In this case the four new overland encounters, with Guar proving to be utter disapointment for the first 24 person encounter in Vanguard. We hoped that Varking, who was the most hyped of the new encounters would prove to be more than just a simple gear check encounter. So we headed towards Ruin Falls and challenged Varking...

Unfortunately the encounter proved to be bugged and while we did put a good amount of effort to practising the encounter - it simply was not doable in the state the encounter was. However, today was yet another patch day and while we hadn't seen any patch notes yet we decided to give Varking yet another try in hopes of the encounter being fixed. Our gamble paid off and indeed the encounter breaking issue with Varking had been fixed.

Now it would be the time to fulfill our promise to Torkald Who Mourns, who had requested us to put an end to the Varking's life along with his vile rituals of sacrifice at Ruin Falls. While taking part in a giant's crusade to kill his own brothers - the corrupted Sons of Torsheim, may sound a little crazy but it seemed like a good idea at the time. As after all, we had already killed Jagund the Wavebreaker and Fengrot Foulbreath so one more giant definitely wouldn't hurt and this time we would even be rewarded by Torkald...

With some knowledge from our previous encounters with Varking we started working on a proper plan to finish up the giant. It didn't take too long to come up with something. We decided to put our ideas on a test and approached the giant...

"More of Torkald's lackeys? Come then mortals, come taste death!", Varking shouted at us and we were more than eager to answer his challenge.

As usual giants never seem to play fair and Varking as not an exception to the rule either... He unleashed all the unholy power he had gained from his rituals in an attempt to stop us.

Unfortunately for Varking it was a valiant effort, but a futile one...

"No. NO! This cannot be!" Varking cried out for help, just before the final blow landed.

"Neither alive, nor dead...", the words Torkald used to describe Varking to us. At least now he wouldn't need to be unsure anymore...

That being said, with Varking down I believe that was the 2nd World Wide First kill for us out of those 4 new overland encounters (unless I have missed some information from the US servers). As for the encounter itself, while it was much better than Guar personally I still found it disapointing to some degree, as there is so much more that could have been done with the script and the location. But without more ranting, that leaves Karax Woefeather (still undefeated on all servers) and Si'Imr-Li the Harbinger (grats Trinity for ww first and Twilight on halgar first kill) left for us, rest assured though - you will see the news of their demise soon.

In the meanwhile, heres a couple quotes again.

Nothing to be said here... :eek2:

I hope it isn't banana at least... :help:

"Oh good, Aya is not in this group - lets discuss something embarrasing!" :idea: :hide:

GUAR?!!

Sondrax — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:42:45 UTC

Its been march since the last raid content (Fengrot and Dresla) was added to the world of Telon, but with todays Game Update, the long wait finally came to an end!
4 new overland mobs were added, the Core Processor (jeezes i still carry that lame trash with me that he dropped on the first kill - btw, its icon also got changed! :p) has gotten a loot table, and also Fengrot's loot table was adjusted!
So it seems like we will have some exciting weeks ahead :banana:

After having a quick look around, we decided to dedicate our first few hours to Guar the Earthen Destroyer.

it didnt take too long to figure him out.. actually we spent most of the time sorting the raid :(
on half the attempts some ppl couldnt engage, crashed, or were otherwise screwed. i guess upping the raid size to 24ppl wasnt that easy after all :apple:

well at least that gave Ayame some time to run around and take these wonderful screenshots you can see here hehe

:ahh:

after spending about 3,5 hours there however, im proud to now copy/paste this line here from my logs!
[22:24:15] GUAR has been slain by Mikiy Spellsinger!

i think this was our first and hopefully not last WW-first kill in VG :D

the loot was actually pretty good too, as you can see on our loot db.
theres even a quest for him, which rewards ppl with a weapon. although for healers theres no reward listed (yet?) :/

quite frankly im not sure yet what i should think about getting loot thats superior to the best APW stuff so easily, but on the other hand we have been farming APW for almost a year now, so if this mob is the beginning of a new tier in the progression (pls let there be one!!), it may be ok that he aint that big a deal for us. so im looking forward to hear other guild's comments about this mob!

oh and also: now with the first content beeing live thats designed for 24ppl, we are still looking for some more ppl to fill our ranks, so check out our recruitment thread!

Fall of the Foulbreath

Ayame — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:39:40 UTC

It has been quite a while since the last news I wrote... Over 4 months in fact, so I would say it is about the time Vanguard gets some space on the news page as well. During the summer we have been sticking to the usual routine of farming the Ancient Port Warehouse and some of the overland raid encounters in order to equip the raid force and of course as expected things were going a little slower during the summer. But now that the summer vacations are over, what better way to get the things going than to challenge Fengrot Foulbreath - a terrible giant that to our knowledge only 2 guilds world wide had defeated.

So what happened to Fengrot? Read more to find out

As a part of the Game Update #4 Fengrot Foulbreath emerged from his slumber beneath the stagnant waters of Thelaseen, initial impression of the fight back then a long time ago was that the encounter simply felt impossible or bugged. Which allowed Fengrot to terrorize the swamp region around Thelaseen almost unchallenged, it took a while before news of Fengrots defeat arrived the first time and a lot of guilds suspected foul play was involved. Some months after another news of Fengrot being defeated arrived on the boards and as expected the similar scenario occured as with the first time. However, the dust settled and people were ready to admit that it was a legit kill and give credit where it was due. Of course at that point we decided pay Fengrot a visit as soon as the summer vacations would be over and people would be back from a well earned break from raids.

We headed back to the swamp region around Thelaseen, well prepared for the battle:

Fengrot had made a pact with Krigus, a spirit of disease and decay and it was obvious that a part of the deal was that Fengrot would not take any baths. By following the horrible stench at the swamp region It didn't take long until we found Fengrot...

Despite the stench that makes it difficult for you to catch breath, a battle occured and while Fengrot did not fall that day it was clear that the encounter was doable and Fengrot would fall very soon.

However, things never go as planned. The dev team messed up, from what we have read in an attempt to turn Nerksawl (an overland encounter) into a contested mob they removed the lockout from Fengrot and made him instant respawn as a side effect. Of course instead of hotfixing the lockout timer, the dev team simply decided to remove Fengrot from the game for a period of time. So it was time for us to go back to the usual routine...

Some time after Fengrot was returned to the game, it didn't take that long until we decided to return to the swamp region of Thelaseen to seek out the giant...

It was obvious that Fengrot was roaming around somewhere, you could smell it...

The same day we made quite an impressive progress on the encounter and it was certain, the next day Fengrot would fall. Another raid day arrived and everyone was more than eager beat Fengrot, after working out the last details of the strat we charged at the terrible giant...

With the help of Krigus, Fengrot pulled off every nasty trick you can think of including even things so foul as covering the raid with his puke. It was obvious the that the giant was trying to delay the inevitable...

Final blow landed...

And the gigantic corpse fell lifeless to the ground.

While the loot itself from the encounter was more than disapointing, better than any loot however was the feeling of finally beating this encounter (thumbs up for the design of this encounter btw). With Fengrot down we have beaten all of the proper overland encounters and the Ancient Port Warehouse, so the only thing left for us now is to wait for the dev team to fix the Magicborn Abomination which is a raid related to the Griffon quest. But the event itself has been riddled with bugs for over 5 months now so more than likely we will see new raid content before the event is fixed and is actually worth wasting time on.

Speaking of new raid content, many of us expected to see the revamped Pantheon of the Ancients in the GU#6 but sadly the current word is that Pantheon has been delayed. Although along with Pantheon of the Ancients, Game Update #6 was supposed to include another overland encounter, a giant called Varking but there hasn't been much of information regarding his status. However, rest assured we are looking forward to sending yet another of Sons of Torsheim to join Jagund & Fengrot in grave and of course we are eager to see what kind of challenges will be thrown against us at the Pantheon of the Ancients. Lore wise Pantheon of the Ancients is related to the gods of Telon and perhaps we will finally see some answers to questions such as where did the gods go? Or learn more information about Kheolim "The Unifier" - an alien god that attempted to unify all the gods within himself. The lore says the attempt lead to a god war where Moraj the peacebringer, the head of the good deities of the pantheon rallied the other deities behind himself and fought Kheolim to a standstill. In the death struggle with Moraj, both gods were destroyed. The result was the cataclysm which destroyed vast portions of Telon, sinking half of Thestra beneath the ocean and pulverizing large swaths of the continent of Kojan... Perhaps some entity is attempting to restore "The Unifier" or perhaps not, we will see whats the storyline behind disturbances occuring at the Pantheon once the dungeon gets released but until that, we will wait and continue with the usual farming routine to prepare for the new content.

As usual, a news update needs some quotes so here we go:

Uh huh... Ready checks eh? Wonder whats next, AOE calls, stop dps or even tank swaps? :eek2:

Adventures of Don Juan - Episode 1: "Accident" with the reply button

Adventures of Don Juan - Episode 2: Revenge of the reply button... I think they paid the wrong person.

During one of the raids someone brings up the topic that too much smoking makes you impotent... :bananadance:

News?

Sondrax — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:32:32 UTC

Due to the lack of new content, quite a while has passed since our last news. However, we are now eagerly awaiting GU6 which is supposed to finally bring us some new raid content again!
In order to be prepared for this new content, which will at least partly support 24man raid content, uncle Sondrax and aunt Ayame are looking for people who share our interest in beeing and remaining Halgar's #1 raiding Guild!

in order to not let anymore stuff rot on our weekly APW runs, make sure to check out our recruitment thread and apply! :D

:pinkelephant:

The First Wyvern

Ayame — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:06:45 UTC

As the previous news update sparked quite a bit of questions regarding the outlooks of both griffon and wyvern flying mounts I thought it would be a good time to write up small news entry about the wyvern mount and also update the previous news entry with a griffon screenshot. In the meanwhile we can say big grats to Illamay as her black wyvern egg hatched today and she is now a proud owner of her new flying mount, Ivy - the first wyvern at Halgar. =)

About Wyverns, Cyclops and Griffons...

Ayame — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:50:06 UTC

Last month has been quite a busy time for us as Game Update #4 delivered more raid content than it was supposed to in addition to the much anticipated flying mount quests. Most of our raid time has gone to farming up equipment at APW in order to gear up for the new mobs, of course we also killed 2 of the 3 new overland bosses as well. Dresla, the wyvern queen and Nerksawl the ancient cyclops and outside the raid times several people have been working hard on the griffon questline.

So how did Dresla and Nerksawl meet their demise? And how are we doing on the flying mount quests? Read more to find out.

So where to begin then... Game Update #4 patch notes lead people to believe that there would be only 1 new raid encounter Frengrot Foulbreath. However, the dev team didn't mention that they also had added Nerksawl and Dresla to provide people some additional fun. Of course it didn't take long for news to start spreading around that Frengrot isn't the only new mob.

So we quickly set out to search for Nerksawl the ancient cyclops at the Temple of Dailuk and didn't take a long time to find him, unfortunately Nerksawl pulled off some miraculous disapearing act and went in to hiding. For some time Nerksawl remained hiding and only sent out his placeholder minions to obvious death that awaited at the 18 raiders... On another day we sent out a few scouts to see if the mighty cyclops would have come out of his hideout and it did not take long to notice such was the case.

Nerksawl was busy bullying people around level ranges of 15 to 20 and taunting the whole zone with his one liners, such as "Stick and stones, I eat your bones!!!" or "Nerksawl da mighty was here!". Our raid force formed up quickly and even though we had only 12 people we decided to give the cyclops a go... Nerksawl noticed our plan and simply roared "RAWRRR!!!". Our first attempt ended up with Nerksawl on 30% with 12 people, this bought enough time for the rest 6 people to show and I could have sworn to hear "GULP!!" from Nerksawl as he saw the full raid force approaching.

As expected the cyclops fell easily and provided some fancy new loots, which were perhaps even a little bit too good for such an easy encounter. But either way it was yet another addition to our collection of server first kills which was a nice thing.

Next up on the list was Dresla, the wyvern queen. While Dresla is a regular overland raid encounter she also serves a special purpose as she drops wyvern eggs that can be incubated which results in a wyvern flying mount. As expected Dresla is not very eager to give up such a special flying mounts, not only finding Dresla proved to be bit tricky at start but beating her was also a nice challenge, without spoiling the fight I would say it was certainly a fun battle.

After taking quite some attempts we had our plan down and succesfully executed it which resulted in another server first kill.

In addition to some fancy legendary loots Dresla also dropped a Black Wyvern Egg which Illamay won for quite a hefty XRP sum, so big grats to Illamay as soon she will be flying around with her Black Wyvern mount. =)

Now as for the flying mounts, as you might have noticed already (unless you were just checking the screenshots and not reading at all) there is a way to obtain a flying mount via raiding which results in a Wyvern flying mount. But in addition to that there is a challenging group content quest which results in a Griffon flying mount quest, which can also be upgraded to a "Spectral" griffon via raiding.

Griffon quest was promised to be a challenge which would also involve some stuff that had not been seen before in group content, with the rarity of the Wyvern (one per Dresla kill and 6 day lockout) a lot of us decided to start the griffon questline. Some for fun and challenge, some for the mount and some for the absolutely killer necklace that is the reward in the questline or perhaps even for all of those. What personally surprised me was that griffon quest did not really include any tedious grinding Vanguard has become so famous of, rather a lot of things were challenging, creative, fun and in general something that required you to use your brain instead of mind numbing grinding.

Of course the quest does involve some bottlenecks such as killing 6 nameds at Old Targonor and some of them requiring a specific group builds and later on some rather difficult boss fights, with exception of the last boss - Strife McCloud who in its current state will most likely be impossible for any non-raid geared group. So hopefully it gets tuned down a bit, as after all the griffon quest was supposed to be challenging group content which should take approx a month for a non-raid geared group to complete.

As for the griffons themselves, a few Xanadu members have completed the quest and got server firsts for Xanadu in that department as well and several more are in progress of working through the questline whenever our raid schedule permits and group builds allow it.

I don't think I need to say it but our goal is to progress every member who wants to complete the quest to the raiding part and then see what awaits us within this mysterious energy sphere that has appeared at Sorrow's Heart...

But that is all for now, no doubt there will be more news soon about griffons, wyverns and even about Frengrot Foulbreath at some point, who at the moment still remains undefeated across all Vanguard servers.

As usual, there has been plenty of good quote material in the guildchat, groupchat and on channels.

Sometimes our sorcerers aren't feeling so smart and keep asking for INT buffs in most curious ways...

And keep asking about the INT buffs...

Kinda like the Duracell bunny, that keeps going... and going. :rabbit:

And going, had to remove few quotes in between the hours there.

Proper usage of reply is recommended, especially in cases like this.

And especially in like this... :notsaying:

Sometimes when you read the guildchat and go like :idea: , it might be better to think twice before writing up what you thought... Especially on subject like this, as you can bet it is on the news. :D

Wrapping Up APW

Ayame — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:15:58 UTC

Oh my, for a moment the front page looked as if it was missing some Vanguard news. But worry not! Last night we defeated Zaygius and I am happy to say that now we are done with all of the current raid content Vanguard has to offer. It has been quite a trip to get to this point and for the first raid dungeon in the game, the Ancient Port Warehouse did a wonderful job.

So what happened to Zaygius and what are our future plans? Read more to find out.

Originally we made a decision that Zaygius kill would happen after Kotasoth due to the encounter feeling quite tricky when we tried it about a month and a half ago on our basement wing exploration trip and in general because Zaygius is only there for the loot while Kotasoth is the nasty end boss of the dungeon and has much higher priority in progression. Yesterday this decision started to feel a litle bit silly, you might wonder why - well to sum up the events leading to Zaygius' death:

Last night we made our way back to the ventilation exchange section of the Basement Wing at the Ancient Port Warehouse. We unleashed our secret weapon, the carnivorous camels against the
poor beholders that were roaming all over the room.

Zaygius watched in terror as his minions fell...

Soon after the only thing left was Zaygius and our raid force, the battle started and we noticed something strange... Instead of actually making much of progress on killing us, Zaygius obviously had mistaken this for a diplomacy parley as the gigantic beholder kept talking, talking and talking. As a little unexpected turn of events proved, this so called "guardian of Kotasoth" was more of just a simple loud mouth promoting how tough his master was.

On our first pull last night we were planning to figure out some stuff about the encounter, but instead we ended up killing Zaygius.

So unfortunately there is not much of an epic story to be told about this mob.

More importantly though, with Zaygius' death we have now cleared all of the current raid content and have moved to farming status while waiting for the next batch of raid content to arrive. Of course this is a shame as our EQ2 wing will no doubt take over the front page for a while with the Avatar kills and the news from them :D , but with the release of GU#4 you can expect to see news about the demise of Fengrot Foulbreath if nothing else. ;)

But of course, what would a news update be without the quotes at the end.

Sounds like a fun place to live... :banana:

Taken out of context this quote really shines. :D

If thats healthy... Makes me wonder what it means when a man is claiming to be a vegetarian :eek2:

Sometimes I really wish I could ignore the groupchat... :slap:

But then again, if I did... Then I would miss fun things like this: :notsaying: :naughty:

Death of the Dragon

Ayame — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:14:25 UTC

It's been a little over two months since the Ancient Port Warehouse went live. During that time we have been working towards this very moment and I am happy to announce that
Kotasoth, the end boss of APW has fallen to Xanadu as a server first kill.

So what did it take to bring this dragon down? Read more to find out.

Where to begin then... The Ancient Port Warehouse went live a bit before christmas and as you can imagine that wasn't exactly the best possible timing. Regardless we progressed through the first wing quite quickly and made some progress at the 2nd wing as well before the year changed. For this I want to thank our christmas time reinforcements from Xanadu Community; we definitely appreciated your help during this time. Thanks once more for the help there! =)

It didn't take long to crack down the 2nd wing of the APW and we were done with it by the first week of January and of course we managed to down one boss at the 3rd wing as well before the week was over. Soon after that, both of the overland encounters fell and a little bit further on we started to down bosses from the 4th wing as well. By the early February we had 4 bosses left at the APW...

A bit more raiding ensued and we defeated 2 bosses out of those 4 and were in the situation that we had only 2 bosses remaining at the final wing of APW. At this point we made a decision that instead of focusing on Zaygius, we would set our eyes on Kotasoth, the sleeping dragon at the depths of the warehouse.

We made our way through the Basement wing and finally arrived at the dragon's lair.

We planned to ambush the dragon while it was still sleeping, but unfortunately Kotasoth woke up and was a "little bit" cranky about us disturbing its centuries long slumber.

As expected Kotasoth proved to be a worthy foe and definitely lives up to being the end boss of the first raiding dungeon in Vanguard.

After being served as a breakfast for the dragon quite a few times we started to figure out what the encounter was about. Eventually we had the strategy totally down and then it was just a matter of pulling the encounter off, unfortunately Halgar managed to have an extended server down on that same day which of course ate our raid time a bit. As frustrating as it was we had to call it a night after bringing the dragon down to 13% health.

With nearly killing it yesterday our resolve to bring this beast down was stronger than ever before.

We gave our best and the dragon fought back with everything it had in store for us...

One last blow landed and Kotasoth fell..

We emerged victorious, Kotasoth was defeated and the feeling of victory was the sweetest part of this achievement. This is what I'd consider the most important kill at the Ancient Port Warehouse and we are happy to add it to our list of server first kills. =)

Since Kotasoth had kept us busy at the lair for a few days, we decided that just a simple defeat wouldn't be enough of a punishment for the nasty dragon... Of course someone had the bright idea of emptying our guildbank of plats and removing the dragons head in order to create a trophy. This seemed like a bright idea at the moment and displaying almost good taste, we decided to stick the drooling head of the dragon next to the fireplace in the mainhall of our castle.

With the dragon killed, the only thing left for us to kill is Zaygius and you can expect to see a news about its defeat soon enough. In the meanwhile we will continue to keep gearing up and waiting for GU#4 and the new raid encounter Fengrot Foulbreath. Oh and last but not least, we were also featured in this weeks Guild Spotlight at VGplayers, the article you can find at http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=445&section=News

But of course, a great kill requires great bunch of quotes - so here they are.

The dragon strat...

Yeah... Umm... Well hope he had fun at least.

Special valentines day planning... Although it sounded like a nice plan, trying to kill the dragon proved to be more important

The AFK messages you aren't supposed to see...

There are things you shouldn't admit in guildchat... :notsaying:

Only two to go...

Ayame — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:27:19 UTC

As the title suggests we have been quite busy at the Ancient Port Warehouse in the past week. In fact it has been quite a busy week in general so this news update is a little bit late as well. To sum it all up, we killed Shylosia at the Marina wing and the Core Processor at the Vault wing of APW. In other words we have now fully cleared four out of five wings, which leaves only Zaygius and Kotasoth to go at the Basement wing.

For the lengthier report of the events, click below to read more.

First of the two kills was Shylosia, the spider queen at the Marina Wing. We had some attempts on this encounter prior to the APW lag fix and Halgar server fixes, sadly during those times the encounter was more about luck than actually pulling off any tactics due to insane lag spikes we were suffering from. After a lenghty pause, we decided that now would be a good time to actually go and kill Shylosia.

Shylosia was one of those rather weird encounters, initially she seemed like a tough opponent but in reality she proved out to be much easier than we expected. After a few tries we had the whole thing worked out and it did not take long to bring Shylosia down. Unfortunately I didn't manage to get any good screenshots of Shylosia and even managed to accidentally remove the bad screenshots. Regardless, Shylosia was yet another server first to add to our list.

2nd of the kills was the Core Processor. While Shylosia is there only for the loots, Core Processor could be considered as sort of a milestone when measuring the progress at the Ancient Port Warehouse. Killing Core Processor is required in order to obtain the protective blessing needed to have any chances of survival against Kotasoth.

It probably comes as no surprise that an encounter so important is also quite a challenge, while I don't wish to comment much about the script itself. But I would say this is certainly something we expected from raiding in Vanguard and hopefully the next raid dungeon has just as fun boss fights as this one was.

Core Processor was also yet another server first kill for us.

By defeating the Core Processor we were able to reconnect the control matrix that Professor Vercel had disconnected, this restored the spirit of Professor Hopton back to control of the Core. Hopton's spirit manifested in front of us and had the core send instructions to the warehouse guardians to stand down against the gnomes. He also revealed that he is sad to see that his allies from ages past, the Cartheons, had become undead and quite evil. Without much pointless chatter he told us to take the protective items and go to face Kotasoth and recover the Argent Coil from the sleeping dragon.

While this news update was a little bit on the short side, expect a lenghtier update once we will defeat the bosses at the Basement Wing.

And a few traditional quotes at the end.

A cure for baldness?

Dum di dum :D

Clear instructions for raiding...

If it bleeds, we can kill it.

Ayame — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:19:23 UTC

If it doesn't? Well... We will kill it anyway. It has been nearly a couple weeks since the last news update but much has happened during that time. Our main focus has been on both gearing up the raid whenever our lockout timers from the previous wings allow it and also to progress at the Vault Wing of the Ancient Port Warehouse. In the past few days all the effort has started to pay out and we had a couple new mob kills to add to our list.

What happened at the Vault Wing? Read more to find out.

Vault Wing is the 4th wing of the Ancient Port Warehouse and I suppose it could be said that this is the place where everything you have learned from the previous 3 wings is put to a test and whatever equipment you have gathered for the raid will come in handy. Vault Wing is full of guardian constructs both elemental and non-elemental. Their main purpose is to prevent unauthorized entry to the Vault of Hopton where the Core Processor of the warehouse awaits.

I think it comes as no surprise that even the basic mobs aren't very easy, in fact I think it is not entirely out of place to say that some of them are tougher than the bosses in the Entrance Wing of APW.

After making our way through a horde of warehouse guardians, we arrived at a weird looking crystal node. It seemed as if suddenly there was this strange chill in the air around the crystal node... Soon we found out why.

I-99 Shiver, the strongest elemental construct in the warehouse was guarding this place. Shiver was certainly an opponent not to be messed around with, we kept attacking the guardian and soon figured out just a perfect plan to take the construct down.

Shiver and its bodyguards proved to be a challenging and fun opponents and definitely amongst the best fights in VG raiding this far. Eventually Shiver collapsed and the chill in the air dispersed... Unfortunately the sudden return of warmth would turn to steaming hot rage soon enough, as the server instability kicked in at this point. During our bidding, the APW shard crashed and all the loots from Shiver were gone.

Even though Shiver was a server first kill, somehow the shard crash felt extremely depressing at this point. Fortunately the GM's were able to reimburse the lost items so no permanent damage was done.

It was time to start to search for the Vault of Hopton, after killing more of the trash mobs we soon found the Vault doorway. However, there was one obstacle between us and the Vault...Exalted X-99. While Shiver was the strongest elemental guardian, Exalted preferred the old fashioned way of hitting stuff with sharp objects... And hitting them hard. Sworn to protect the Core Processor we knew Exalted would not let us pass easily.

We threw ourselves at Exalted attempt after another, nothing seemed to work at the start... Even the server seemed against us as Halgar kept lagging and shards kept crashing. Eventually we started to make progress. Not long after we had the fight figured out... Even Exalted was curious to see what sort of tricks we had in store for him this time, but as they say...

'Curiosity killed the cat' - Exalted crashed down to the ground and a voice echoed "Valus, until my vow is fulfilled I will stay"... Everyone started to cheer, after such a frustrating mob and all the issues Halgar was having, the victory felt really good and added one more server first to our list as well.

This leaves us to the situation where we have only 4 major mobs left to defeat at the Ancient Port Warehouse... Shylosia the queen spider at Marina Wing, The Core Processor at Vault Wing and at the Basement Wing Zaygius and finally the ancient dragon Kotasoth.

But thats all for now.

Apart from the traditional quotes. =)

This joke never seems to die... Sadly enough. :beathorse:

Seems some people get little too excited... :slap:

All I can say is... :help:

Motivational speech... :rabbit:

A field trip...

Ayame — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 10:58:50 UTC

This week we focused on progressing further at the Ancient Port Warehouse. Fortunately the boss encounters further on are a lot tougher stuff so they might require some additional gearing and a lot more trial & error attempts to get the strats down. So there's definitely some challenging and fun fights waiting for us. With gearing in mind we thought that it would be a good time to pay a visit to the couple of overland raid bosses that went live at the same time as APW.

What happened to Jagund the Wavebreaker and the Prime Warden of Nusibe? Read more to find out...

First up was Jagund the Wavebreaker, as some of our fellow Vanguard players might remember this guy used to spawn at The Deebs and looked like a tattooed giant weirdo in underwear. Then he just suddenly disapeared from The Deebs... A while later he was introduced as an overland raid boss, during his absence Jagund took the opportunity to make his outlook a little scarier for the adventurers, replacing his "tattooed weirdo in underwear" look with "tattooed weirdo with giant moustache" look, fortunately at least this time he uses some more clothing and weapons as well.

So what's this Jagund guy then? Well for almost a thousand years Jagund the Wavebreaker has ruled the northern sea of Thestra. Ships have not passed without his permission and they either paid their dues or they were offered as a sacrifice to the depths. Along with Jagund, sirens are also a danger in the northern sea. While they are more interested in the crew members of the ships they lull to the rocks, they offer the treasures from the wreckages as tribute to Jagund in exchange for his protection... One of the ships that fell to the sirens contained a powerful relic, Vaisa's Horn.

It has been said that 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely'. Such was the case with Jagund the Wavebreaker. Finding the powerful relic, Jagund realized it was he who controlled the sea now and not Sihari. With mastery over the seas and with the growing army of the deep at his command, Jagund had become a threat to Thestra... A threat that needed to be eliminated.

Luckily for people of Thestra, a giant that had hoarded treasures for nearly a thousand years sounds like a perfect target for adventurers. Scouting across the northern coast and islands it was easy to tell we had arrived at Jagund's lair... The Wavebreaker island. Jagund patrolled all over the island and we picked up just the perfect spot to ambush him. Finding himself cornered by 18 adventurers Jagund tried to pull off all sorts of dirty tricks to defeat us.

Far more easily than we had expected, the nearly thousand year old menace fell down and Thestra was saved yet again, at least for another 6 days, when Jagund dies again.

After Jagund was defeated we decided to head to Nusibe Necropolis as we had heard of another powerful creature lurking around in that area. Soon we found Soleq Su'Baht, the last of the Prime Wardens. Soleq was surprised that we did not run away at the first sight of him and wanted to tell us his story...

A long time ago the Tehatamani empire flourished between the dark elves of Stiirhad and the Aghramun empire. Tehatamani were ruled by pharaohs that guided their people with wisdom and compassion. To safeguard their pharaoh the priesthood chose the most faithful and devout from their ranks to fulfil a role of a prime warden of the Tehatamani.

The soul of the chosen one would be bound within the vessel of the prime warden and his service would last for one-hundred years which would be the lifetime of the pharaoh. After this their soul would be released to the afterlife and the next Prime Warden would be chosen. Soleq accepted the honor without hesitation. Much to his horror, Pharaoh Nusibe was a troubled boy given the responsibility of an empire. Despite Soleq's attemps to guide him along the path of righteouness, Nusibe embraced the shadowed path of evil. He used the Prime Warden as a tool to hammer his people into submission and sent him out on a path of mayhem and carnage.

Nusibe had sent the Prime Warden on an errand of death. In the absence of the prime warden, assassins struck and slew Nusibe. Soleq was returned to the peaceful afterlife and the Tehatamani abolished the ritual of the Prime Warden and abandoned the title of pharaoh to put an end to Nusibe's reign of terror.

But unfortunately for Soleq, Pharaoh Nusibe would not die so easily - the Prime Warden couldn't help but wonder if this was all part of Nusibe's plan. With the Ark of Ages in the possession of Nusibe, his soul cannot leave the realm of Telon and the Prime Warden would be trapped as his Slave for an eternity.

Bent on conquest and destruction, Nusibe is manipulating the both Xakrin (the seekers of the artifact) and Tehatamani to prolong the war and strife between the sides. Meanwhile the Lucent Circle continues their useless attemps on vanquishing the evil at the Tehatamani Empire area. Acting as the puppet master behind the scenes, Nusibe is secretly gathering his power for some currently unknown purpose.

After speaking to Soleq we undertood his story and knew what was needed to be done...

The Prime Warden of the Nusibe had one of the best fight scripts in VG this far, although some could claim the difficulty of the battle could have been little higher I found it extremely fun at least. After a few attempts we had the thing nailed down and Soleq was granted peace for a brief moment, until Nusibe would pull his soul back to the realm of Telon again. Nicely enough killing the Prime Warden was a server first as well.

But thats all for now again... Except for the traditional quotes.

Too much info...

Hmm...

Alright... Now thats getting scary. :(

On to the next wing...

Ayame — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:09:47 UTC

Last week was quite a busy time for us, plenty of mobs waiting to be defeated and a nice amount of new applications received. I think it would be a good time to say that the holiday season is finally properly over and the mob hunting season has just begun. As the title of this news entry might suggest, we have made quite nice progress at the Ancient Port Warehouse and now have the 2nd Wing of APW on farming status as well. So it is time to move on to the next wing...

What did we kill last week, where are we going now? Read more to find out.

Cartheon Wing only had 2 more challenges remaining for us from the regular bosses. These were Admiral Chrykalis and Senator Demetrius. Out of these two we decided to focus on the Admiral first.

As I mentioned in the previous news entry, the zeppelin room at the Cartheon wing is crawling with the Sky Pirates who are trying to get the zeppelin operational. Pirate leader Admiral Chrykalis accepted the job from the Cartheon Empire in trade for immortality should he succeed in figuring out the zeppelins secrets. Of course, being a pirate Chrykalis also had his own plans to double cross the Senator and reap all the rewards from his work.

Unfortunately for the vulmane, his plans would come to an unexpected end. As soon as we arrived at the zeppelin, Chrykalis was ready to fight us. As expected the Admiral turned out to be quite a formidable opponent, until that point he was perhaps the toughest encounter in the APW.

After several attempts Chrykalis fell and raid was able to move to the one final battle at the Cartheon Wing... Senator Demetrius.

Senator had made great plans for the warehouse, unfortunately his plans had far too many variables to control. Having failed in being able to find powerful enough troops to hold the adventurers at bay, not being able to get the zeppelin operational within the planned schedule and finally he would also need to retrieve the powerful relic, Argent Coil which is guarded by the ancient dragon Kotasoth. I suppose saying his plan turned out to be a catastrophic failure would be quite accurate.

After making short work of the bodyguards that Senator Demetrius had between him and the raid, it was time to put an end to the Senator's schemes.

Senator Demetrius proved to be a tough opponent but for the end boss of the wing, he turned out to be slightly disappointing. After a few tries we had learned all of the tricks Senator had and he fell rather easily.

Regardless of that, it felt good to finally wrap up the 2nd wing of the APW.

Next we decided to head to the Marina Wing. Marina Wing acts as the base of operations for the evil gnome Professor Vercel and his followers and also as a lair to the spider queen Shylosia and her brood of crystal spiders. Opponents in Marina wing consist mainly of gnomes, gnomes in mecha suits and the crystal spider. As expected from the 3rd wing at the Ancient Port Warehouse, even the trash encounters are very deadly if done wrong and many of them have quite nasty tricks to wreck havoc with.

After fighting through a bunch of mobs, we finally reached a strange looking room... The place looked like as if it was another hangar. The guess did not go too far from the truth, in fact the room was a launch bay. It seems while the good professor Telpon had built a zeppelin, Professor Vercel had constructed a submarine.

After a quick look we noticed something of interest to us, Commander Cobaris one of the minibosses in this wing. As usual, the miniboss fights are simple encounters and quick sources of half decent loots. After killing Cobaris we were sure this was the right way to find professor vercel. The gnomish resistance kept increasing and they threw everything they had to protect something further on...

And our guess was not wrong, soon after we saw Professor Vercel in his custom built Vercel Omni-Buster Mk XVII mecha suit. Vercel had the typical bad guy syndrome, he just loved his own voice and couldn't stop talking about what he had done for the warehouse, of how he now owns the warehouse and how we couldn't stop him. Unfortunately for Vercel, he soon realized that even with his pathetic mecha suit he would not be able to stop us...

Fight kept going on and Vercel started to became even more desperate... He kept shouting on about how he controlled everything in the warehouse and allowed the Cartheon Empire to get past the warehouse guardians, of how he controls Shylosia and how he is the one who keeps Kotasoth and its minions at bay.

Once the final blow landed and Professor Vercel let loose a bloodcurdling scream, "This is not the end of Ver... cel!". Sorry professor, but it is - at least for next 6 days. Then again on the next time it will be over for Vercel even quicker.

But thats about all what happened last week, hopefully this week brings up more challenges and some more boss kills.

And as usual, what would the news be without some weird quotes at the end.

At least you can't go wrong with this type of raid orders... :riding:

You really don't want to know how this conversation started... :crazyeye::whip:

Desperate measures... :eek2:

Back in business...

Ayame — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:57:50 UTC

New year, new challenges... Now that the holiday time is over we are back in business which means you can expect to see these news bit more regularly. With people being extremely busy over the Christmas we decided to have a bit longer Christmas break than we would normally have but that didn't stop us from adding a few more kills to our list before the end of 2007, which was a great way to wrap up the year. Our main focus was on getting the Entrance Wing on full farm status and progress further at the Cartheon wing.

So what did we do at the two wings? Read more to find out.

With the nicely timed Christmas break in between the raids, our lockouts from previous visit to the Entrance wing were gone. What better way to start the raids again than to clear the Entrance wing and equip the raid more with easy loots? All the bosses we had killed this far from the Entrance wing fell easily and we reached up Zaraax the entry wing boss quite fast.

Previously we had to let it live because of the lag issues APW has been suffering from and simply from being out of time when we reached the end of the wing. But this time its luck had run out, the cartheon war construct gave its best and took a few tries, but eventually it fell. That being said, we cleared the whole Entrance wing in a single night and we can finally say it is fully on farm status.

With Entrance wing being fully cleared, it was time to progress further at the Cartheon wing. Once again we killed a horde of undead, some minibosses and the wrinkly little gnome that was trying to block our route. Soon we reached a room with a strange looking relic in the middle of it...

It was this place where Athriss Essal, the grand enchantress of the Cartheon assault force was waiting for us. Athriss was responsible for crushing the will of gnomes when the Cartheon first attacked the warehouse and made them walk directly to their deaths, it was clear she wouldn't play fair. During the encounter she tried to talk her way out of the fight. Tempting the raid with the possibility of immortality she could grant us and various other things...

Quite a decision eh? Immortality would definetly have some benefits, but then again if it comes at a cost of becoming a pale skinned lady that wears weird bondage clothing, has glowing white hair, floats in air and shrieks every few seconds... or becoming a raincoat wearing wrinkly weirdo with claws that would put even Freddy Krueger to shame. Well... Uh... Thanks, but no thanks. Raid agreed that it wouldn't be worth it. So we decided to kill her instead...

Athriss tried to pull off all sort of tricks she could conjure up with the help of the Taqmir's Box ( the chained cube from the earlier screenshot) but she was no match for us. With Athriss dead, we decided to head further to the next area. This turned out to be a huge hangar that had a curious looking ship in middle of it, in fact it turned out to be a zeppelin.

Soon we realized that the place was crawling with sky pirates who were trying to get the Zeppelin operational, but also a greater threat was lurking in the room. Senator Demetrius, the last boss of the Cartheon wing. Listening the conversation between the senator and his trusted ally Dread Lord Malazath it was obvious that the senator was not happy about the pirates progress on getting the zeppelin operational and worse yet, he had heard reports of powerful adverturers making a mess of his plans concerning the warehouse. He ordered Dread Lord Malazath to see to it personally that the adventurers would be wiped out.

After killing some pirates we noticed that Dread Lord Malazath did not take long to find the source of the problems and he was already waiting for us. Unlike Athriss he would not waste any time to pointless talking...

Dread Lord turned out to be quite an interesting opponent but eventually even he did fall.

Dread Lord Malazath was a server first kill which was quite a nice way to end the year, but also killing him left us to a nice situation as we only have Admiral Chrykalis and Senator Demetrius left from the normal Cartheon Wing bosses (not counting the summoned Portal Nexus ones) before we have cleared the 2nd wing fully.

And as usual, a few quotes at the end again. =)

Uh oh...

Perfect example of the superior planning prior to a fight...

WTS: Observation skills.

Return of the living dead...

Ayame — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:27:15 UTC

After progressing through the Entrance wing of the Ancient Port Warehouse, we decided it was time to move on to the next wing. Even if there were three choices available, decision was easy and we headed to the Cartheon wing. Unlike the title might suggest we did not face zombies that repeat "braaaaiiiiinssss... must eat braaaainns" but instead an army of undead invaders.

While the Entrance wing of APW acts as sort of an introduction to raiding and gets slightly tougher the further you get at the wing. The Cartheon Wing is where the actual challenge starts, many normal encounters are deadly if handled wrong and even progressing through some of the rooms might require some extra planning and tactics. Cartheon wing, as the name might hint is mainly populated by the invaders from the undead Cartheon empire and those who have chosen to follow them. Wing itself consists of several library areas and a huge tunnel network leading to different rooms.

So how did our trip to Cartheon wing go and what else did we do during this week? Read more to find out.

I have to admit this week left a bit mixed feelings about APW... Not because of the dungeon itself but due to the ongoing lag issue that has been around stronger than ever due to popularity of APW. There was some good days and some bad days, as you might imagine the bad days were related to the lag issue - as it is awfully difficult to kill stuff when you are suddenly playing a turn based game instead of what it should be. But despite that, we had good days and fun time at APW too and managed to do some progress as well. Anyhow, to the point then: This week we set our eyes on the Cartheon wing, which turned out to be the ideal choice when it comes to difficulty and fun factor.

After fighting through a horde of undead and killing a couple minibosses in the progress, we arrived at a huge library room. It was obvious that there would be a boss encounter lurking somewhere nearby...

And so there was, Palpenipe the Mastermind. An evil gnome who had fell to the darkside.

Somehow he seemed oddly familiar. Wrinkly outlook? Check, Weird arm pose? Check, Force Lighting? Check.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Oh damn, wrong place. Sadly for Palpenipe, lightsabers aren't invented at Telon yet and mini crossbow designed for gnomes isn't as destructive weapon. After couple of tries, the mini version of Palpatine and his bodyguards fell. Beating the encounter felt quite good as the design was superb and of course, collecting fancy loots is always fun - not to mention it is always a pleasure to see the following text to pop up:

Next up was a room that looked like a nexus of summoning or something similar and that initial impression proved to be right... The area was called Portal Nexus, in this room you can summon several boss encounters which of some are easy and some of them are a lot tougher.

Out of these boss encounters we killed Megafluxer X-88 which was a server first kill as well... Sadly X-88 refused to pose in a screenshot, so the above screenie is from another boss called Mecha Vercel. Unfortunately after reaching this point, the extremely laggy days turned up - call it the typical Xanadu luck. As it was next to impossible to defeat any more bosses with constant 4-7k ping, we decided head to the Entrance wing for a farming run now that our lockouts were gone.

Entrance wing turned out to be quite a fly through when it comes to the bosses we had already killed before and funnily enough, even General Vicus dropped on the first pull now that we tried him (as we had to skip him without trying the encounter on the first day).

Unfortunately Zaraax still managed to avoid death this time, but I am sure we will return to fix the situation soon enough. But we are happy to have the rest of the Entrance wing apart from the last boss encounter there on farm status.

But I think that is it for this news report, traditional quotes can be found at the end as usual. As for the next news update, expect that sometime after Christmas.

On behalf of the Xanadu Vanguard department: We wish you a merry Christmas! =)

Yeah, big barbarians shouldnt try to sneak around...

Dum di dum :D

Hmm...

Oops! :notsaying:

A Call for Heroes

Ayame — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:58:59 UTC

What was once thought to be destroyed in the cataclysm has now been rediscovered. Nestled beneath the Port of Innovus, the Ancient Port Warehouse awaits for adventurers brave enough to face the challenges within. An ancient dungeon, relic of unimaginable power guarded by an ancient beast at the lowest depths of the dungeon, a fate of an entire continent at stake should the relic fall into wrong hands... A cliché maybe, but that is a very rough version of the storyline of the first raid dungeon in Vanguard.

In other words, it has finally happened - raiding in Vanguard has gone live... A moment that many Xanadians have been waiting for almost a year now.

Now what happens when a bunch of raid hungry adventurers are let loose in the ancient dungeon? Read more to find out.

Things start to die and raid collects fancy loots... Quite a surprise eh? :D

Well I suppose a little more detailed news wouldn't hurt, but for those who prefer just watching screenshots and skipping the wall of text - the above should cut the long story short. As all of the loots we have obtained this far are found in our loot database they can be seen there.

So where to begin then, at the time I'm writing this we have spent about bit less than 2 weeks at APW. While the dungeon has been on live just for 2 days, it has been available for public testing on Test Server since the start of december. Obviously being able to contribute to the dungeon testing by bug reporting, giving general feedback about the area and also being able to experience the dungeon was just too good offer to pass up. So we spent quite some time on test prior to the actual live release.

Now that APW is finally on live, it seemed like a good time to write about the first couple days and our progress there.

First day of APW going live was quite a hassle to be honest, first goal was to flag a full raid for the access quest. Which itself is a rather simple task, for the quest you need to hunt down & slay a Mnalus lord that is scouting few areas around the world. Consider it a test to see if your raid can handle the mobs in APW, of course the Mnalus lord did not like the sight of the bloodthirstry crowd that was approaching him... So he tried to run away.

Sadly for him, but good for us... The run away plan didn't work and he died and we gained access to APW. During the fight we did notice one disturbing thing, it was obvious that the lag issue that had not been present on test server was not fixed on live servers yet.

Heading inside APW finally confirmed our fears to be true, it was not long until APW reached the status of unplayable. With insane pings and tons of people inside the place, it was just too much for many raids and several left APW and headed to do other things. However being too stubborn to give up, we pushed further on and eventually when enough of people left APW the pings returned to somewhat playable levels.

As for the dungeon itself, Ancient Port Warehouse is divided to 5 wings: first of these wings is called the Entrance wing. This might sound as small dungeon, but in fact even the entrance wing alone is larger than some of the proper instances I saw in EQ2 during my time there for example.

While entrance wing has many different types of mobs in it, they could be divided in to two main categories: warehouse guardians that have gone haywire and to the undead invaders from Cartheon Legion. First half of the entrance wing is mainly filled with various guardian constructs that have gone haywire for some mysterious reason and are now considering everyone as intruders that must be exterminated.

After fighting through a bunch of haywire guardians we came up to the first actual boss encounter, Malfunctioning X-77. An experimental guardian that should have never been made...

Being the first boss encounter at the Entrance Wing, X-77 fell easily and we had some loots to collect. After distributing the loots, we moved further on... After fighting more of various haywire guardians we eventually reached the 2nd boss of the entrance wing, Enraged X-83. Sadly Enrage X-83 didn't want to pose in a screenshot so there is not one from him. Despite the lag, Enraged X-83 faced the same fate as X-77 did on the first pull...

After more loots we thought to progress further, until we simply noticed that we had to find a safe spot to continue on the next day. With all the hassle of the extended server down, access quest and the general lag, our first day did fell a little short of expectations and where we had hope to be. Even if we had 2 server first kills of main bosses and 1 miniboss.

A new day, new challenges... Now that we were aware of the lag issue. We decided that it was best to try to make our way to the central hub and the gnome city as fast as possible. Due to this we unfortunately had to let General Vicus live for now, but hopefully we can fix that little issue sometime soon.

While the haywire guardians are sort of a more basic "trash" mob encounters and occupy the first half of the entrance wing. The cartheon invaders at the later half of the entrance wing already start to use slightly more complicated tricks.

Regardles of those, it wasn't long until we got to Archon Travix. As with X-77 & X-83, Archon died on the first pull - even though the encounter had been boosted slightly from what it was at the test server.

Progressing further, we reached the storehouse riftway and were steadily progressing towards the hub. But as we were afraid of, even with 3 different shards of APW - first shard was getting too crowded again and ping bounced to sky high. With 9999 ping it seemed as if Vanguard has suddenly turn in to a turn based RPG...

Funnily enough before that happened we were 1h ahead of our planned schedule, unfortunately the ping issue forced us to skip Zaarax (final boss of entrance wing) as well and we decided to head for the central hub & the gnome camp.

After reaching out the gnome city, it was time to call it a night. Despite the problems with the lag at the end of the day, it was pretty smooth all the way. First kills on 1 more boss encounter and 4 minibosses. In general our progress has been good this far and we are almost done with setting the entrance wing to farming status (2 bosses to defeat till that though), but also we are ready to progress to wings further on.

Now what comes to the Ancient Port Warehouse itself, I think this far most of the people in the guild can agree that it was worth all the waiting & preparing for. As an experience it is quite something and we are definetly looking forward to progressing there even further...

But that is all for the 2 days at APW report for now, more news coming soon. =)

Of course, since it has been quite a while since our last news... Our quote material box is absolutely overflowing, heres a few silly things that have popped up in the chat:

Darn... Now that sounds like an ideal group build.

Hmm... :D

Uh... You don't want to know how this conversation started.

Too much information... definetly.

Dum di dum...

Rule #1: Never annoy your girlfriend in the guildchat...

A new hope?

Ayame — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 06:29:53 UTC

It has been quite a while already since our previous news update but that does not mean that nothing has happened ingame. With the guild hall construction being finished over a month ago already, things are returning back to normal. However normal stuff is not always boring as there are plenty of choices of things to do in Vanguard, be it still improving your main characters gear or such for upcoming raids, playing various alts or most importantly taking part in guild events.

So what are these guild events then? Read more to find out.

As there is no finished raid content in Vanguard yet, it is often up to guilds themselves to think up some sort of events to stay busy while waiting for the first actual raid dungeon. We arrange these events in order to practise the usual raid routines, in some cases for gearing up and most importantly to have some fun. As some might remember from our past news updates, we have been doing stuff like Lucent medal farming, killing giants at Thestra etc.

This time we decided that we could something different, to try to reach up the Isle of Garuzamut.

Now there were 2 choices of how this could have been done: We could simply to cross the few hundred meters of water by boat, levitation or such and spend a couple minutes of getting there from
the mainland. Or we could cross the Bridge of Destiny which is filled with placeholder raid mobs and spend a few hours on clearing the place...

The choice here is pretty easy isn't it?

Well of course we headed up to the Bridge of Destiny and prepared to face up the small army of Ancient Guardians located on the bridge.

For their size, the guardians packed quite a punch but unfortunately for them that wasn't enough to hold us back, one guardian after another fell and we continued to progress towards our goal of reaching the Isle of Garuzamut which we eventually achieved.

Unfortunately this event did turn out to be quite a stress test for some members of the guild - mainly due to the absolutely terrible performance and stability experienced there. People dropped out constantly due to crashes, fps barely reached any decent figures and hitching was horrible. At this time, it did not really look good for raiding in Vanguard - but the Dev team had promised that the upcoming Game Update #3 would bring in some performance boosts.

Hoping up that they would keep their promises about the performance fixes, we decided that the next event should be held out after the game update in order to ensure at least somewhat reasonable performance. As expected there were some delays about the update and all sorts of other unexpected things.

Then it was time for GU#3 Phase 1 to finally go live... After the update it was very easy to notice something good had happened. Game performance and stability seemed to have changed a lot - this time for the positive.

After a few days of playing and experiencing the changes for performance with single group content, everyone were starting to get curious that how the game would hold out with multiple group stuff.

For testing that out there was only 1 possible choice, Stiirhad... The huge Volcano at Qalia which is formed by a several chunks full of raid placeholder mobs and impressive dark elven architecture. Stiirhad offered quite a collection of mobs to fight against, some were extremely easy but had quite a lot of hitpoints, some on the otherhand had tons of hitpoints and extremely nasty dps output.

We made quite a nice progress through one of the larger fortress structures within the volcano, but we simply ran out of time due to size of the dungeon. Despite that the whole trip to Stiirhad was quite some awesome experience.

So what about the performance then? In bit less than a six hours only one member had a crash and the performance itself was very impressive, even with very high details and particle effects on the game was able to maintain a constant but reasonable fps rate. Not to mention during the fights there was not sign of hitching... In general I would say this was a very good change for Vanguard and for once the future of VG seems a little brighter as we can hope to see more of these changes.

That being said, there are still more optimizations coming up to increase the performance and also the actual raids should be getting pretty close to the release as well. Starting from 2 overland contested mobs and soon after the first raid dungeon Ancient Port Warehouse which we are very much looking forward to.

But what would a news update be without some embarrasing or funny quotes. =)

Speak of the devil... or something.

Best advise ever on grinding crafter classes...

I don't know which is worse, trying out if there is such command or accidentally putting the attempt to guildchat...

I'm not sure I want to know where this "cheerful" conversation is leading to...

Usually these quotes only include what is being said within the guild... This case on the Thestran continental channel just begged to be an exception. At least the person did good job of avoiding using any naughty words... :laugh2:

Our home is our castle

Ayame — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 19:18:25 UTC

Before the launch of Vanguard we were setting up certain milestones we would want to achieve as a guild, a set of goals to aim for and from which to measure our progress as a guild. One of these milestones was to build a big fancy castle once the guild halls would become available ingame...

Now we are happy to announce that we have reached that milestone and have finished construction of a large guild hall at Lost Shores at Thestra.

So how did all the work towards the guildhall go? Read more to find out.

After finding out that the guild hall recipes would go live in game update #2 it didn't take long for the first details of what is actually needed resource wise to surface up on various boards, at the time the amount of materials required felt absolutely insane. But we were up for a good challenge and started planning out how we would manage to gather all the required components in time.

Not long after we already had several members working on the diplomacy components for the King's Commission and weekly harvesting groups arranged in order to get suitable amount of granite and various other resources.

Then game update #2 finally hit live, although it was announced that the guild halls were pushed back to after server merges the update did bring up some new important things for the guild halls. Everything from final amount of resources needed to components being mysteries before were now getting revealed. It also introduced the adventure component required for guildhalls, which was soon found out. It wasn't much of a surprise that it was yet again another terrible timesink, 50 components from a single mob with several different spawn spots in a medium sized dungeon, 2 hour spawn timer and 1-3 component drops per kill.

Soon after GU#2 it was time for the server merges and after the succesful merge the guild hall plots were scheduled to go live. Of course, as usual when something is planned and you make people log in for that the infamous 50/50/90 law goes in effect... Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong. In this case surprise surprise - something went wrong. But at least the dev team was able to sort out the issues within a few hours and the plots were actually unlocked to be available.

After a huge amount of work & effort to gather resources and the money needed we were getting closer to the milestone we had set for ourselves. We were able to purchase the plot we wanted from the Lost Shores at Thestra. At this time we were able to almost finish up the guildhall construction, but still there was some components missing.

As can be seen from the screenshot above, we have also begun building our outpost project; Xanadu Prime in that corner of the island just nearby the guild hall and plan to expand it bit more once our members recover from the grinding & farming required for the guild hall.

Just a bit more of hard work and we had reached the moment where the last granite brick was put down to the construction...

Then... it was finally done. After all the effort that had gone to the guildhall in past few weeks it was so awesome to see the result of all that work and it was truly worth all the trouble. =)

With all that behind, now it is time to focus on decorating the guildhall and prepare for the raids which are now supposed hit live in game update #3. Although with all the delays the raids have gone through it wouldn't be much of surprise to see them getting pushed back yet again, but hopefully that is not the case. In the meanwhile we will just have to wait and hope that once GU#3 goes live we will see the Ancient Port Warehouse and whatever might lurk inside there.

Giant problems...

Ayame — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 08:47:14 UTC

With the proper raid encounters getting even closer to being released, it was time to have a little practise for the usual raid routine and what better target than the current raid
placeholder bosses. After hearing about all the problems those nasty giants had been causing at Thestra we decided to go and take a look what all the fuss was about...

So what happened?

The first Thestran giant we came across was Tharridon the Mighty, he is known to be quite a meanie that terrorizes the region around Renton Keep... :barbarian:

Unfortunately it turned out Tharridon had a little problem, during one of his latest rampages he managed to stomp one of the fields with such a force that his foot actually
got stuck in the ground and he was unable to move! Instead of giving us a fair battle, he kept shouting "Eek, don't come any closer!" and kept reseting the encounter... So
we had to leave him alone for now. :(

Being a little disapointed how the evening started we set out to search for more giants... But it didn't take too much of searching before finding our next target, we headed
towards the coastal region of Thestra when we suddenly started hearing loud roars "Lobsterrrsss!" and soon we discovered the source of them...

:shocked:

A gigantic tattooed guy wearing only his underpants was roaming the coast! The horrible sight alone was enough to cause terror & fear... So we had to kill him.

The fight itself took quite a while but eventually Jagund the Wavebreaker fell and actually gave us something to loot:

Next on the list we had Torkald Who Mourns, the battle with Torkald started out nicely and his hitpoints were dropping at a decent rate until we found out that the
giant doesn't play fair and likes to spam mini & full heals. After fighting Torkald for about an hour, it became obvious that he was not going to die tonight and we
would simply need more people than what we had there. I guess that is why he mourns, because no-one wants to fight such a cheater as him... Bad giant!

At this point the situation for the evening was not looking good Xanadu 1 - Giants 2... Then someone from the raid pointed out, hey there is one more giant
at one of the ruined dwarf strongholds. After a while of exploring the ruins we finally came up to the hall where Akaran Dwarfsbane roamed around - now
it was time to even the score.

The battle with Akaran was quite a lenghty one and he even had a simple trick that made the encounter last much longer. Eventually the giant fell and everyone
was curious if he had any loot... Well he did drop a trash loot item that sold for a few silver, so I guess thats something.

So in the end, Xanadu 2 - Giants 2. Perhaps the score will change once Tharridon will get his foot removed from the field and possibly when we encounter
Torkald with a larger force. But thats all the giant problems for now and it is time for the quotes again. =)

Galenia, Gelania, Genelia... Aargh! It seems to be hard to spell Gelenia correctly, even for their own exployees... Time to pick up an easier server name
when the merges happen eh?

Uh oh...

Wonder what happens when missing a rez because of afk... Frying pan perhaps?

Use caution... Right, anyone selling parachutes? GM advices rock at times...

Preparing for the raids...

Ayame — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 11:52:30 UTC

Now that the majority of the guild have already hit the level cap and several more members are about to reach lvl 50, it has been a good time to actually start gearing up the guild in preparation for the upcoming raid encounters. According to some official statements the raid encounters should be incoming in the "next 2 months", even though the estimates of raid content arrival have been more than unreliable in the past... Hopefully this time it will prove to be more accurate.

So what have we actually been doing to gear up people? Well, click below to read more =)

Vanguard offers a few different ways to get some high level gear currently, from crafting to adventuring. From the current 3 high level areas we have focused on 2 as a guild and that approach has been quite nice start in gearing up. Those areas are the Rahz Inkur region and Tehatamani empire area...

Since Rahz Inkur (a medium sized efreeti stronghold for those not familiar with the place) seems to be the place for getting some fancy gear, it probably comes as no surprise that there has been several guild groups working on the quests there and just simply farming some gear.

While the legendary helmet that comes as a reward from the questline at Rahz Inkur is somewhat decent, the quest itself could be added as a defition of the word tedious. But even as horrible as the farming required for the quest is, the efreeti at Rahz inkur have proven to be extremely generous by donating some fancy rare & heroic equipment - of course in order to bring out that generosity you might need to smash their head couple times with some blunt object, poke them with sharp objects or cast some spell that... Well I'm sure you get the picture.

Of course apart from the helmet quest there have been other activities which include things such as Afrit weapon quest, Searing stone farming... Or things such as Lucent circle faction farming and Lucent Medal farming. Well to sum it up... a lot of farming, but in some cases farming can be somewhat fun and such would be the case with the lucent medal farming.

So what exactly is the lucent medal farming then? Well to put it short, your groups must defend a pyramid filled with members of Lucent Circle (the typical cliché do-goodies in shiny bright armor with a plan to vanquish the evil in the area) from several waves of Tehatamani or Xax'rin forces (the evil in the area). Based on your performance in the event you get some medals as reward and those can be traded to some fancy rare or heroic items.

While it is not exactly something you could call raid content, it still proves to be quite some fun to do it as a guild with 3 or 4 groups.

With all that and many other activities going on, we should be well prepared for whatever challenges the raid encounters will throw at us... While the environments in the raid areas look truly wonderful, such as the mount stiirhad or the isle of garuzamut... Hopefully the raid encounters too shall be fun, challenging and above all else worth all the waiting.

But thats all for this news update, other things such as how our guild HQ and housing plans are progressing will be another story for another news update.

So only thing thats left now are the traditional quotes. :D

Hunting various bugs as mobs seems to be pretty common hobby for the MMO characters, unfortunately crashing 1 minute after taking the screenshot it became obvious that someone in the dev team misunderstood "add more bugs" in their to do list...

Emergency! Someone call Sherlock Holmes!!! :idea:

Even the simple topic such as shopping for food can take quite surprising turns in the guildchat... At least when someone starts to enlighten others about the wonders of online shopping

Uh huh.. Accidents happen?

You know when someone has been playing Vanguard too much...

Vanguard Item Database

FunGuy — Fri, 04 May 2007 23:33:17 UTC

Whilst waiting for there to be some raid content added to the game we have decided to release our item database. The basecode has had a serious revamp allowing the database to be expanded at our will rather than being restricted just to loot content. We have added the ability for registered members to be able to add items to the database which will allow all our site visitors to contribute directly and more freely. We have also added a more comprehenisive structure which allows for whole new sections to be added quickly by the administrators rather than needing to be hard-coded into the database.

While Raid content as always will be our focus, as there currently is none you will find the sections for adding crafted items into the database. As the current input is from xanadu's own crafters at the moment it is lacking in a few major areas. If there is sections which need to be added please contact myself and the other admins by posting what you are requesting on the item discussion forum.

Enjoy

The saga begins

Ayame — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:21:14 UTC

It has been roughly 2 months now since the Vanguard release and as expected the first couple months have been quite busy time for most of the guild. Getting to know the new game, new adventuring spots and of course meeting up new guildies has been fun.

Our current Vanguard crew is a mixture of ex-Everquest II, other Xanadu Community members, people who joined our guild during VG beta and also some new recruits that have decided to join us during these first couple months - all in all, there has been quite many new people to meet up.

As for the other stuff that has been going on... Click below to find out. =)

As usual with any MMO launch there has been some frustrating issues, be it not always finding a group to level with, to some annoying ingame bugs or design issues. Despite the usual problems at the start, Vanguard has proven to be quite some journey through the levels this far. Although the higher levels are bit lacking at the moment content wise and the raid gameplay has not made it live yet, there should be enough things to keep us busy until that happens sometime soon.

But enough of that Vanguard advertising speech, after all this is the guild news section... What comes to the progress of the guild then? Or should I rather say guilds, as currently we have taken the approach
of having 2 guilds from Xanadu Community in Vanguard. Those 2 guilds are:

Xanadu : Aims for the end-game raiding & gameplay and takes more of a core / hardcore gamer approach to the game.
Brotherhood of Xanadu : Concentrates more on family guild type of gameplay and their own goals.

Anyway, people are progressing through the content at a steady speed and currently majority of the guild is in their mid thirties/fourties and some are almost at lvl 50 already. So in general it is going pretty well this far. =)

As for the future, there should be a littlebit more activity in sight for this news page - after all this "first" news post was already long overdue. But hey, what can you do when it's too fun ingame - surely not spend too much time on writing the news... Thats what the patch times are for. :rollingeyes:

What comes to those embarrasing and funny guildchat screencaptures that were introduced in the EQ2 news section, I'm afraid it is littlebit quiet on that department at the moment... Perhaps people have become too careful not to slip anything silly there anymore (riiiight....).

Twinks are super fun... Especially if you create one for the server you don't play on with your main character. :bash:

Maybe this was the reason for the above mistake though...

There are several good ways to get a crafter to create something for you...I don't think this belongs to the list though, but a good try still.

Umm... No comments :eek2: