Vanguard: SoH

[Raditzu]

Yeah, you have to pay to play, Turles.

Vanguard doesn't do a whole that's "omgz soo new11" but it does it all really well. You pick your race (there are something like 14) then your class (there are 15 to choose from). Some classes can only be chosen by certain races, but all races are equipped with unique racial abilities. Some of them are seriously amazing. For example, the race that waff chose (one of the human races) can turn on the ability to dodge almost all attack for, like, 30 seconds. My race can summon a drake that gives buffs and can attack and stuff.

Here are some of personal favorite things VG did. Instead of only having one target, you can now keep a defensive target and an offensive target. Lets say you have a heal and an attack spell. The attack spell will automatically hit your offensive target, while your heal will just shoot over to whoever your defensive target is (its makes you your defensive target if you dont have one). This makes trying to heal during a fight much easier (or so I'm told, I'm playing a nuke). The Caravan feature is really neat too. So someone invites you to caravan. You accept and then log out. The person who invited you (the caravan leader, rather) runs to a "bind stone" and sets the caravan point. If you've been logged out for 3 hours you can then choose to log back in where you were when you left, or where the caravan point was set.

Fellowships are probably one of the coolest things ever. You form a fellowship with other people. Then you go out adventuring and killing stuff. After gaining adventuring experience 25% of it goes to your fellowship, with everyone who's offline gaining that much experience. The same thing happens while you're offline. While your fellows go out adventuring you gain 25% of the XP they earn. It'll be incredibly useful for keeping a group of friends or guildmates around the same level.

Speaking of levels, they have an attribute system. For each level after 10 you gain 12 attribute points per level (16, I think, if you're a human) and you gain an automatic bonus to certain stats (unless you're human). The great thing is that you don't get them all at once. You gain 2 point when you level (6 for humans) and then 2 points every 20% of your experience bar you fill. You stop caring about hitting the level and instead just think about hitting those attribute points. It really takes away most of the grind.

There are three "spheres" of experience every character gets. One is adventuring, and this encompasses the basics: questing, grinding, farming, raiding, all that good stuff. The second is crafting, which is also pretty self-explanatory. You gain crafting experience by taking work-orders from cities and completing them. You gain more experience/better payment by filling work orders with higher level goods. As you gain crafting levels, you gain access to better crafting techniques (so you can create items of higher quality with greater ease) you can more effectively utilize table space (letting you bring more resources into your crafting sessions) and you can learn more advanced recipes.

The third sphere, and my personal favorite, is the Diplomacy sphere. Diplomacy is a way of interacting with NPCs in hopes of convincing them to act towards your own personal goals. You can get Diplomacy quests, where you need to follow through a story-line by lying, coniving, and smooth-talking a series of people into carrying out a storyline. Its actually pretty cool. The best part, however, is how these diplomacy sessions are carried out. Each "parley" is played out as a card game. You bring five expressions (in the form of cards) into the game and play them to gain influence and move the dialogue in your favor. You can get special items, more cards, buffs, and experience from completing diplomacy. You can also partake in "Civil Diplomacy" which gives buffs to everyone in the city. Stuff like increased accuracy, increased damage, a bonus to harvesting skills, or damage resistance. That kind of stuff.

There were a few other things I was going to mention, but typing all of that out kinda made me lose my train of thought. Aaaaanyway, if anyone is looking for any more information, feel free to ask.