Nino...One of the upsides of VG.

[JulesDrools]

Dargun's makes me want to cry. Its an awesome dungeon design, think Mines Of Moria, with so much potential. However, I started at level 31, still yet to complete the quest line at 39, along with many guildies and friends which i've dragged out there over the past two weeks.

The major problems are:
1. Travel times in Thestra suck. It takes 30+ minutes to run from the closest teleporter (NT) to Dargun's. Good luck getting people to show up.

2. Long quest chains suck. The quest chains should be seperated out into seperate quests, each with a worthy reward. The Dargun's quest chain is 4 really grindy quests with no reward until the 5th. And if you add a new person, you might have to redo the quest chain from the beginning for them to catch up.

3. Rare mob spawns should not be required as part of a quest chain. Most people don't have a static group for multiple days at a time. Therefore, I need to have the rare ogres re-camped for additional people, which makes it that much more work beyond the original group.

4. The spawn rate of the named ogres is ridiculous. Graok or Toxil can easily be 3 hours of constant clearing between spawns.

5. The items in this dungeon mostly suck. The greens are more useful than most of the yellows. I have yet to upgrade a single piece of CiS Infineum gear with Dargun's loot.

Fix This Shit.

[Senen]

Originally Posted by Elsebet

This is especially true if you want to complete the Dargun's Tomb questline. Basically once I travelled there, I didn't want to leave until it was over due to the trek. Just to give you an idea about this quest, it involves a rare spawn called Toxil. People have reported killing his PH over 50 times before giving up. Others are lucky and get it much sooner. We had to kill it about 35 times (on a ~15 minute timer, only about 4 chances an hour) over the course of several days of playtime before he finally spawned. The shards also take a rather long time to drop, probably a 1:25 ratio of shard to kills, and you need 7. That took us a few days of multi-hour blocks of farming the ghosts for our entire group to get all of them, not as bad as Toxil though since the named down there can actually drop nice items.

Now, we did this with guildies. Can you imagine trying to field a pick-up group in a remote region of Thestra to do what could be a potential multi-day camp? Maybe it happened in EQ, but as the gunslinger says, the world has moved on. The entire time we were there we only saw 1 other guild group and perhaps 2 people actually in the zone looking for a group. 95% of the time we were there, we were the only ones in the chunk.

We started the quest, having to kill 100 gnolls, at level 35. We are now halfway through level 39 and are finally on the last step of the quest. We have discovered, after a frustrating wipe or two, that if multiple people are on the quest it can easily bug out and spawn multiple events which easily wipe your group. I have to say, Dargun's is the first experience in Vanguard where I feel like I just want it to be over. I won't feel that sense of accomplishment when I get the orange weapon, I will simply feel relief that I can get out of that place and do something else.

This is true of many area in VG, I took my grp through DT a month or so back now and we had the same issues with shards and Toxil. You have alot more of this shit to look forward to. Right now were stuck in Graystone trying to finish up farming the 135 blood insignia's needed for the heroic weapons. I've been in the zone now 7 lvls the entry area mobs will be grey on my next ding and were looking at atleast 1 or 2 more days in here to finish up. Not to mention the zones so damn crowded that it crashes every night. The shitty part is where starting to see alot of people on our server quit even my guild is bleeding members. Honestly not sure how much longer I can make myself hang in there.

I Recently started poking around in Rahz and Tehm and its more of the same the faction grind for the necklace line is crazy shit with very few rewards so far. The xennu item grind is easily equal/beyond the time needed to do the MoP/Wardship questlines, and there only yellow. We pretty much abandonded the Xennu area until it gets straightened out. Right now it honestly feels like the devs are just slapping half assed content in to try and hold the walls up, everythings grind x faction x drops for shitty rewards. Rarely seeing any good scripting or story line to draw you in sucks, very hard to love the game when its become so disjointed.

[Neric]

Pained Soul anyone?

[Lyenae]

Originally Posted by Neric

Pained Soul anyone?

90 minutes for me~

[Aphextwin]

Originally Posted by Senen

This is true of many area in VG, I took my grp through DT a month or so back now and we had the same issues with shards and Toxil. You have alot more of this shit to look forward to. Right now were stuck in Graystone trying to finish up farming the 135 blood insignia's needed for the heroic weapons...... /snip

I spent this past weekend there and completed the heroic weapon quest. I was lucky enough to join another guilds group of 4 that already had about 35 insignia's. The 5 of us played from 1pm until around 2am Saturday pretty much straight through and ended the evening about 40 insignia's short. We grouped again Sunday and played for another few hours before I got a guild mate of mine to join who was on the final quest and had 20 insignia's on him, we where then able to summon all the name's and complete the quest.

I definitely see a trend, way too much emphasis on grinding factions, collecting runes, shards or whatever item to complete these quest lines, I realize these types of quest requirements are in other MMO's but in my experience with VG thus far thats all there is at the mid to high levels.

I am all for challenging quest lines and mobs that make you feel you accomplished something to be proud of but these endless grinds do taint that feeling and so far all the bosses I have encountered seem to be of the tank and spank variety and not much more.

[Sunder]

Originally Posted by JulesDrools

The major problems are:
1. Travel times in Thestra suck. It takes 30+ minutes to run from the closest teleporter (NT) to Dargun's. Good luck getting people to show up.

2. Long quest chains suck. The quest chains should be seperated out into seperate quests, each with a worthy reward. The Dargun's quest chain is 4 really grindy quests with no reward until the 5th. And if you add a new person, you might have to redo the quest chain from the beginning for them to catch up.

3. Rare mob spawns should not be required as part of a quest chain. Most people don't have a static group for multiple days at a time. Therefore, I need to have the rare ogres re-camped for additional people, which makes it that much more work beyond the original group.

4. The spawn rate of the named ogres is ridiculous. Graok or Toxil can easily be 3 hours of constant clearing between spawns.

5. The items in this dungeon mostly suck. The greens are more useful than most of the yellows. I have yet to upgrade a single piece of CiS Infineum gear with Dargun's loot.

Fix This Shit.

You play a game by the original master-mind of Everquest, who made it perfectly clear that this game was going to build upon that game's design elements. Then you complain about the things that are almost signature to that very design? Now, I'm not saying go play WoW or anything like that, but come on. What really did you expect? I fully expected Vangaurd to be McQuaid's version of "What EQ2 Should Have Been".

[Kreugen]

3 trips into Trengal's Keep now and I still haven't gotten any progress on the first quest of the series of 5 or 6, because groups are all beyond that.

Sugguestion: Allow getting all the quests at once, and reward the player with a bonus item when all are completed. This should be true of ALL dungeon quests.

Christ, having to deal with people porting out to turn in quests at every turn is PITA enough - if you are lucky enough that they stick around afterwards.

[Bizanich]

So, thinking longterm, how does a reroll's prospects look, or someone who comes in a few months after the game has been out?

[Daelos]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

So, thinking longterm, how does a reroll's prospects look, or someone who comes in a few months after the game has been out?

Well, the game has arguably more content at lower levels than any other MMOG out there, and plenty of it is soloable. I can easily see levelling up 4-5 different characters taking different paths until 25-30.

[Elsebet]

My guess is the quest drop rarity is still based on the old much lower experience values. It would make sense to have quest items drop very rarely if you gained experience very slowly, so perhaps with the old values you might have gained a reasonable 1-2 levels doing the entire Dargun's series instead of the almost 4.5 levels I did. I have no research to back that up, pure speculation here folks.

If they would tune that in accordance to how fast people level now then perhaps we may have been out of Dargun's and feeling much less burned out several levels ago.

Sugguestion: Allow getting all the quests at once, and reward the player with a bonus item when all are completed. This should be true of ALL dungeon quests.

Ironically, the Dargun's tomb series works somewhat like this. You can pick up the shards and hilt/handle/head before you are on that step as long as someone in your group has completed the named ogres section and can open the rock cave-in blocking the lower area.

I wholly agree, I would much rather receive a grocery list quest and tick off the requirements in any order I choose. If there is a must to add a hardcore element to series quests, make it so that completing the requirements in the original intended order makes for a slightly better reward.

[Aphextwin]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

So, thinking longterm, how does a reroll's prospects look, or someone who comes in a few months after the game has been out?

To echo a post or two above, there is bags more content for lower levels now than when I rolled at release. I have rolled a few alts to the low 20's high 30's since that time and the difference is night and day.

[tad10]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

3 trips into Trengal's Keep now and I still haven't gotten any progress on the first quest of the series of 5 or 6, because groups are all beyond that.

Sugguestion: Allow getting all the quests at once, and reward the player with a bonus item when all are completed. This should be true of ALL dungeon quests.

Christ, having to deal with people porting out to turn in quests at every turn is PITA enough - if you are lucky enough that they stick around afterwards.

Yep this is a big problem with some quest lines. For the Tehatamani Harbor/Temple of quests my formerly static group is now split into three -- two who have completed the first two tiers of quests (acolyte & apprentice), one who has completed teh first tier (acolyte) and two who haven't finished acolyte quests. The problem is that if you finish a tier you can't retake the previous tiers quests and since its a grind to each tier (unlike say the CIS quests which tend to be kill X guy and are much easier to backflag with a semi-static group) its a huge pain to backflag people.

I much prefer the Tsang/Xenn type of grind -- there at least everyone can stay on the same page grinding the same mobs -- whether or not they've completed one (or more) of the quests.

Fundamentally the problem for me isn't the grind -- the problem is there isn't much of an alternative to the grind -- where are the very tough dungeons with the very tough mobs and the boss mob that drop loot equivalent to these questlines? Currently while there are some mobs that drop (as a rare) heroic loot (Drillz: Greatsword, Focus; Assarageus: Shield, Titan Lord in KH: Dagger, etc) Hrukstraz (18 hr spawn) is the only mob we've seen so far that drops 1 piece of heroic loot as part of the normal drop table (I'd be happy to learn of any other 40+ boss that drops a static heroic). It's because of Hruk that Karrus remains my favorite dungeon in the game to date.

P.S. We skipped ROTK for CIS for the legendary weapon rewards.

[JulesDrools]

Originally Posted by Sunder

You play a game by the original master-mind of Everquest, who made it perfectly clear that this game was going to build upon that game's design elements. Then you complain about the things that are almost signature to that very design? Now, I'm not saying go play WoW or anything like that, but come on. What really did you expect? I fully expected Vangaurd to be McQuaid's version of "What EQ2 Should Have Been".

I don't know if you played EQ1, but you could run Freeport to Queynos in less time than that, and no dungeons had any quests in them. Any joe could come and help out in the Ghoul Lord or Frenzy camp, without needing to first kill the Squire and Ancient Croc in Upper Guk...

[Bizanich]

Originally Posted by Aphextwin

To echo a post or two above, there is bags more content for lower levels now than when I rolled at release. I have rolled a few alts to the low 20's high 30's since that time and the difference is night and day.

I guess what I mean is that, down the road, are newbs going to be able to complete these involved questlines, or is it going to be a straight grind to max level and all this will be for naught?

[tad10]

Originally Posted by Bizanich

I guess what I mean is that, down the road, are newbs going to be able to complete these involved questlines, or is it going to be a straight grind to max level and all this will be for naught?

Depends on the server you roll on and whether there have been server mergers. Some servers have very decent pops a few not so much -- there are 2-3 more servers than there should be and the low and medium pop servers are unlikely to have sufficient low level pop to run some of the quests via PUGS.

To be completely safe -- if server mergers haven't occured prior to you trying the game -- roll on one of the three most populated servers and you're probably going to be okay Galenia (if EU) or Florendyl or Flamehammer (Everywhere Else) -- and yeah I know that some of those are spelled wrong. Simply too lazy to check right now.

If you prefer a little room the medium pop servers (Shidreth, etc.) will probably be good for the popular quests (e.g. CIS/Pantheon) but you may issues with some of the less popular quest lines (e.g. DT).

Edit: May = Will.

But yeah avoid the low pop servers.